Michael Totten, on the looming danger of ISIS to Lebanon:

A serious invasion of Lebanon by ISIS could unleash a bloodbath that makes the civil war in Syria look like a bar fight with pool sticks and beer mugs. It would be tantamount to a Nazi invasion. Every family in Lebanon is armed to the gills thanks to the state being too weak and divided to provide basic security, but people anywhere in the world facing psychopathic mass-murderers will fight with kitchen knives and even their fingernails and teeth if they have to.

The only good thing that might emerge from an attempted ISIS invasion is that the eternally fractious Lebanese might finally realize they have enough in common with each other to band together for survival and kindle something that resembles a national identity for the first time in their history.

…and they had better, because the absolute last thing we need right now is a nascent Dark Empire* with reliable access to the Mediterranean.  Southern European military strategists from the Ancient Romans on have either dreaded, or scrambled to counter, such a scenario; what fun that we may see it in our lifetimes, if not the current election cycle. And if you think that I am talking about this problem in archaic terms, well… funny thing about that. Apparently, nobody thought to mention that ‘the end of history’ apparently meant that we’d just have to go back to the beginning and start over.

The next step in all of this, by the way, is to lock down when the West is going to wholeheartedly intervene in rescuing our allies in the region… and we’re going to have to. If we don’t intervene to rescue Lebanon, we’ll just have to do it for Jordan. If we don’t do it for Jordan, we will have to do it for Saudi Arabia, because Saudi Arabia has all that oil that we definitely don’t want under the control of a death cult running a Dark Empire. The sooner we do it, the fewer people will die because of it. So it would behoove the President to start the process now.

It’s amazing, really: after listening to the most unhinged elements of the Left incoherently rant for most of a decade about how Bush was trying to start a Crusade, we’re actually going to end up doing one (although Robert Tracinski was really careful not to use that particular word, there). And we’re probably going to be fighting in generally the same areas where the Crusader states were.  I really, really wish that Barack Obama, his staff, or even his sycophants had ever read some Medieval history…

H/T: Instapundit.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: The people hyperventilating at the sight of the word ‘Crusade’ right now are the exact same people who got us into this mess in the first place when they encouraged this administration to run pell-mell out of Iraq, just in time for a death cult to move in. So I really don’t care if those people are upset. In fact, I kind of hope that they are.

*’Empire,’ for the benefit of anitwar progressive Democrats and other functional illiterates, classically refers to a geopolitical situation where a core area controls a number of distinct but subservient outer areas.  This would pretty much describe any situation where ISIS conquers a cosmopolitan state like Lebanon, or even Jordan. Or both.  As for ‘Dark’… look, I don’t want you reading this if you’re prepared to contest that ISIS isn’t evil to the core.