Chapter 3

We were finally ready to turn on the TV as we ate, and sure enough, it was pandemonium out there. Just a few blocks away, a full-on street battle had commenced, with the local authorities more than a little overwhelmed now. Whoever these asshats were that ruined my dinner date (though it turned out for the best for me and my ladies at least), they weren’t ready to give up without a fight. Even the news reporters felt a bit terrified, especially since they were just local news crews, not embedded war correspondents. What the hell was actually going on?

The sight of so many cops and deputies being gunned down by these insurgents was more than a little unnerving. It reminded me of that damn Chuck Norris movie, Invasion USA, where Soviet sponsored foreign terrorists begin attacking civilians in everyday, suburban neighborhoods. In this certain part of Virginia ... this could get very chilling for a lot of the population, to put it rather mildly. I was no Chuck Norris, though hardly a coward. I was just in no mood to get caught in the crossfire between the Sheriff’s Department, state troopers, etc. and this dangerous rogue militia or whatever it was.

“Bloodthirsty bastards, whoever they are, wouldn’t you say?” I snorted while drinking my Samuel Adams and eating my supper.

“To attack total strangers and now cops, yeah, I’d say so,” Becca groused, “I’m no fan of a lot of cops, at least the kind who stop me for being black in a cul-de-sac, but still ... I don’t think that they deserve to be mowed down with machine gun fire.”

“It’s just like how it was in Syria ... when ISIS emerged ... they claimed to be liberators from Assad, but my father was no fool. He knew who they were. Bloody executioners, working for the Crown Prince, Netanyahu, and Erdogan, all because Assad turned down the pipeline that both men wanted so badly to go through Syria. People in the West ... they don’t get it.

“The guns that ISIS used ... they came from America, Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, and Israel ... they were guns from the West. The West armed ISIS and then stayed to fight the very same people they had armed,” Taslima broke down as she related her own anecdotes of life in a war-torn Syria that the West had wrecked.

“But why? I always heard that ISIS and Assad were both bad guys and that the ‘moderate rebels’ were fighting for freedom in Syria,” Becca related what she knew.

“That’s the lie that they told you, babe. It’s not your fault or mine. That’s what the CIA wanted you to believe, so, of course, that’s what the press told you. That smarmy bastard, Evan fucking McMullin, the Mormon spook in Utah, his whole job was to recruit ISIS and Al Qaeda/Al Nusrah to topple Assad.

“Yes, Assad is a dictator. So was Saddam Hussein, and is Iraq really better off since he was toppled? Qaddafi wasn’t going to win a Nobel Peace Prize, either, but is Libya better now that it has open-air slave markets in Benghazi and Tripoli? Yes, Qaddafi and Assad ... and Saddam were friends with Putin. Duh! That’s no excuse to invade a sovereign nation and destabilize a relatively stable and prosperous country,” I explained my objection.

“But ... the chemical weapons!” Becca objected.

“Saddam used those, too. Bad motherfucker, no doubt of that. But again, is Iraq better off now? Is Syria? Is Libya? Is Afghanistan? We should have wasted bin Laden and his confederates and then bailed, not stuck around in the graveyard of empires. Surgical strikes. Get in. Get out. Not this nation-building crap. If the British and Soviets couldn’t conquer the Afghans, how could we? It wasn’t like the Northern Alliance was any prize, either. And Karzai proved to be such a crook, too,” I shook my head.