“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail)
We’re supposed to start bombing the crap out of Damascus sometime soon, because President Obama has managed to make this imperative to U.S. credibility, and you know Dear Leader has gotten himself into a bad spot when Alan Colmes goes on Fox News and denounces the president in such strong terms that if any Republican had said it, they’d be the subject of a special alert from Media Matters.
Does anybody remember “The War of Monica’s Thong“?
In 1999, a few weeks after the Senate voted to acquit President Clinton for “high crimes and misdemeanors” — of which he was clearly guilty — Clinton suddenly decided that he’d had it up to here with Slobodan Milosevich. So NATO started bombing the crap out of the Serbs.
This was arguably the worst use of U.S. military force since the Spanish-American War, with “genocide” replacing “Remember the Maine” as the battle cry. Of course, the civil war in the former Yugoslavia had been raging for years, Milosevich’s brutality wasn’t exactly a recent development and we were, objectively, fighting in defense of a Muslim insurgency, with the Kosovo Liberation Army as al-Qaeda’s Balkan front. Because the Serbs had traditionally been Russia’s allies, the bombing campaign against Belgrade also had the effect of alienating Russia, which had been a potential ally in the post-Soviet era.
Our involvement was directly contrary to our own national interest, but because Clinton was eager to regain the prestige he had lost in the year-long Lewinsky ordeal, this “humanitarian” intervention was suddenly deemed necessary by the Commander-in-Chief.
Bad wars fought by bad presidents for bad reasons are not exactly a novelty in American history, and the long-term consequences of these spasms of politically motivated militarism are never good. While Clinton was bombing Serbs on behalf of Kosovar Muslims, their terrorist allies were already planning what became 9/11, but good luck getting Alan Colmes to admit that Clinton’s “Wag the Dog” distractions and other errors made America vulnerable to al-Qaeda.
However, Alan Colmes has had the wisdom to condemn the upcoming Syrian intervention in advance, and we should be grateful for that, rather than complaining about past errors.
The Assad regime is a murderous totalitarian nightmare, supported openly by Iran and supported tacitly by Russia and China. However, the Assad regime’s insurgent enemies are Islamic extremists with connections to al-Qaeda, and if these Syrian insurgents aren’t committing genocide, it’s only because they’re too busy trying to overthrow the current genocidal regime. Does any honest person doubt that Assad’s enemies would be as bad as (or worse than) Assad if they were to succeed in overthrowing him? Which is not to say anything in favor of a dictator using nerve gas against civilians, but at least now we know what happened to Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, eh?
Still, enlisting the United States as al-Qaeda’s de facto air force is bad policy, and it will predictably have bad consequences.
The specific consequences may be impossible to predict, but we know for sure the consequences will be bad.
My hunch is that Iran will respond to U.S. attacks on Syria by launching its own attacks against Israel. Probably rocket attacks from Gaza, but maybe also a wave of suicide bombings. Israel will feel the need to retaliate, so I’ll go out on a limb here and bet that the IDF decides it’s finally time to destroy the Iranian nuclear threat.
Remember, our president is a Nobel Peace Prize winner, which means World War III is always a distinct possibility.
Place your bets, gentlemen. My money’s on “Biblical Apocalypse.”
