How to Retake Ramadi?

Get the C-5M Super Galaxy, that’s the largest plane in the Air Force’s arsenal and load it up with the two rival motorcycle gangs, the Bandidos and the Cossacks. Their recent flare up in a Waco  shopping mall, The Central Texas Marketplace, at a restaurant recalling the David Lynch TV series, Twin Peaks not far from a Men’s Warehouse, Best Buy and Kohl’s resulted in 9 deaths (“170 Bikers Charged in Waco, in a Rivalry Rooted in the l960’s," NYT, 5/18/15) The C5M will easily accommodate their Harleys, even the choppers with the extended front ends. These gangs undoubtedly  frighten even the fearsome Texas Rangers and according to news reports are  highly organized paramilitary organizations that have their own pecking order and even surveillance capacities (“Bandidos vs. Cossacks:Was the Texas biker shootout over territory, “ CNN, 5/19/15) Let’s see how they do against ISIS. From the news footage, these guys appear to have thick necks. Their heads are not likely to roll. As backup we should load another plane up with the most dangerous prisoners, the kind of guys who have been doing solitary in notorious maximum security prisons like the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola—whose methods of rehabilitation resemble the raising of fighting dogs. Put ISIS up against the Aryan Brotherhood, the Crips and the Bloods, an alliance we might call today’s Axis powers to the extent that they’re off their rockers. You won’t have to worry about outfitting this new battalion of bikers. Due to our current gun laws, they’re all well taken care of. They’ll be a whole new set of execution videos coming out of the Caliphate, only the new executioners are likely to look like ZZ Top, though CNN and Fox will still likely be arguing over the propriety of showing the footage.

Boots on the Ground

mugshot of Whitey Bulger

Sounds like a plan? Let’s take every hardened criminal in a maximum security prison and dump them on ISIS. Let’s plunk the Crips and Bloods down on the Iraq Syria border. We’ll kill two birds with one stone. We’ll empty out our prisons and have a worthy opponent for ISIS. What would be in it for the criminals? Obviously in one scenario they would emerge as heroes who would be freed from of the first law of criminal thermodynamics: if you can’t be good at being good, be good at being bad. All these bad guys could rehabilitate themselves and finally have the chance to become heroes by society’s standards (as opposed to being heroes of the underworld). It may sound like an outlandish idea, but your average hardened criminal is like that strain of bacteria which resists all antibiotics. He’s the true survivor of the fittest having endured not only the brutal life of the streets, but numerous incarcerations in maximum security prisons. If you can survive in a Texas prison, you are going to find ISIS strongholds no more threatening than a jump in the lake. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, has been talked as a charismatic leader and organizer, but let’s see how he does when Lieutenant Colonel Whitey Bulger and his organized crime confederates become our boots on the ground. This could well turn out to be the new Ultimate Fighting contest, the new mixed martial art or cage fight to end all fights. The Mob v. ISIS--with the prize being the conquest of the world.