Ebola, ISIS, what I don't understand.

There are things I just don't understand. Not because I'm liberal as opposed to conservative. Not because I'm secular as opposed to religious. Not because I generally, at first blush anyway, prefer cats to dogs. And it's got nothing to do with the fact that I once owned gerbils and then a Burmese python.

What I'm getting to, first off, is I don't understand Ebola.

I don't understand how, on the one hand, Ebola is not so terribly contagious (not airborne, thank you Zeus), and supposedly you can hardly get it except under rare and specific circumstances, and how, on the other hand, it manages to slip through maximal hazmat precautions.

Ebola generates cognitive dissonance. I hear two narratives about it and can't make them cohere.

The other thing I don't understand is American policy toward ISIS. We want to destroy this hideous Islamist entity that has arisen so swiftly out of the muddle of the Middle East (which the United States, with its incomprehensibly stupid and irresponsible invasion of Iraq helped generate, but, OK, OK, I know, enough history already, let's not got there.)

The Kurds are the natural born opponents of ISIS. They are exactly the kind of Muslims — not even Arabs — ISIS would like to ground down. But we don't arm the Kurds sufficiently. (In my opinion, we arm the Kurds somewhat the way Stalin armed the Republic during the Spanish Civil War, which is to say, enough to stay in the field for a while against Hitler's better armed proxies, but never enough to beat them.)

We don't arm the Kurds as they should be armed and assisted because we can't come to grips with the ineluctable circumstance that Iraq, as a unified state of Sunnis, Shiah, and Kurds, presided over by a tyrant like Saddam Hussein, is over and done with forever.

What comes next?

My view is that since the United States helped destroy the status quo, we should get on up there about what should replace it.

We should acknowledge the end of Iraq and a new arrangement that involves an independent Kurdistan.

This is tough stuff, I know. Lots of intelligence will be required.

Put on your hazmats.