By the time you read this, we may already be at war with Syria. That’s how bad this is getting. On Friday, John Kerry laid out the administration’s case for intervention. It’s basically one of credibility – has a strange sound coming from the mouth of John Kerry, I must say, for a couple of reasons. First: that the Vietnam War, which he fought in and ultimately became a vocal opponent of, was often justified on the same grounds. Second: that we have no credibility in any meaningful sense. Whatever chimera of that was lost with the invasion of Iraq.
Obama drew a red line. That is what we are defending. Our action will do nothing to protect civilians in Syria. It will do nothing to tamp down the flames of civil war. Far from it, in fact … it will pour gasoline on the conflict, quite probably enabling it to spread dramatically beyond that sorry nation’s borders. All across the media, there’s this tiresome meme about how we have to do something, something to punish the Assad regime. If we allow them to get away with this, the story goes, it will embolden them to go further and embolden others to follow suit. Obama seems to think it’s just two days of bombing and then off to Switzerland. What’s wrong with this picture?
The notion that it is incumbent upon us to launch a military attack when someone kills scores of people is cracked. If that were the case, we should invade ourselves. We used white phosphorus in Falujah, but even beyond that, we killed thousands there alone in the two battles. Has anyone been held to account? Has anyone been held accountable for anything we’ve done in Iraq … or elsewhere in the world, for that matter? What kind of precedent does that impunity set? Haven’t we emboldened every tin-pot president on Earth to unilaterally attack any country at any time for any reason?
To behave as if there’s a different standard for us than there is for everyone else is just old-fashioned imperialism. That’s what this impending war is … aside from being just plain stupid.
Sure, he’s Simon the Likeable. I think of it as the liberal equivalent of conservatives seeing W. Bush as someone they would like to have a beer with. Obama has an appealing persona to people like me, mostly because he’s the first president in my lifetime that shares our experience. Of course, those considerations are an empty category, politically speaking. It doesn’t matter at all whether or not I “like” this man I don’t know. What matters is how he handles driving the enormous killing machine that is the American Presidency.
What was the crime again? Oh, yes. Exposing the sprawling criminality of our foreign policy, namely the Iraq war and the Afghan war, plus releasing a raft of diplomatic cables relating to prosecution of the global war on tactics … I mean, terror. Heinous indeed. Perhaps someone needs to remind me again why the man who informed us of the war’s true impact is going to jail while the men who started the war are living a comfortable – and loudly opinionated – retirement. Rank has its privileges, to be sure.