Saladin As the post-WWII American Pax Americana unravels at differential rates of speed everywhere from Mosul to the Mexican border—resuming and accelerating a process that began under Jimmy Carter but was arrested for a while by Ronald Reagan—it is nice to know that Hollywood is riding to the rescue of the values of global decency and liberal civilization. Soon, on the wide screen with surround sound, we will see the world at last “made safe for democracy” by Seth Rogen and James Franco, cast as TV interviewers sent under cover by the CIA to North Korea to assassinate that little mighty mite of rights abusing tyrants: Kim Jung Un. Whether or not Rogen and Franco succeed on the screen in killing Kim, we can be reasonably sure that a large enough dose of American pop cultural decadence—somehow injected into the North Korean stream of consciousness, perhaps by nanobots—would certainly, sooner or later, cause the disintegration of the world’s worst regime. Iraq appears too far gone already even for Hollywood’s high tech triage. The recriminatory debate, not corresponding to neat right-left lines, about “Who Lost Iraq” is already raging about whether George Bush is chiefly responsible for causing the U.S. to bite off more than it could chew or Barack Obama is chiefly responsible for allowing the U.S. to choke on it while ineptly applying the Heimlich Maneuver. Perhaps Hollywood will ultimately do an honest retrospective film—modeled on Costa-Gravas’ political thrillers from the 1960s—about the crackup of the twenty-first century American presidency, entitled “From Disaster to Catastrophe.” As to Iraq—where Obama’s last gasp strategy may be to rely on a benevolent Iranian invasion—there may be a silver lining: oil-rich Kurdistan. A Kurd-Israeli alliance—with the Zionist nuclear deterrent surreptitiously positioned on Iran’s borders—may be the region’s last best hope. Historically, one should remember that the peerless, tolerant leader of medieval Islam against fanatics of all kinds was Saladin, a Kurd.