The New Guys On The Mesopotamian Block

"Large swaths of North-Eastern Iraq taken over by ISIS."  Remember that news from a few week ago?

ISIS being the "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria."  Or was.  These guys are very sophisticated in many ways, it's clear.  They do a good job with the social media and public relations in general.  But they missed the boat when they changed their name.  Repeatedly, I might add.

ISIS was a great name.  It sounds great, and the association with the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis didn't hurt.  These guys didn't feel that way.

First, they started to quibble about he entire historical validity of Syria.  They have a major hair across their collective asses about the Sykes-Picot map, created in 1916 by England and France.  That map created the countries of Iraq and Syria out of what was, up until World War I, the Ottoman entity called the Levant.  So the ISIS crowd changed their name to "The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant," ISIL for short.

At that point somebody must have remembered that they'd forgotten to jettison the colonial entity of Iraq as well.  So they did.  The name was changed to "The Islamic State."

"The Islamic State" has a certain elegance to it, undoubtedly.  I still prefer ISIS though.  Charm still means something in Fred World.