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‘Bush lied and people died,’ went the ultimate protest against the USA wars in the Middle East.
We went to Iraq to liberate the people from a dictator that played with weapons of mass destruction. We went there because our nation had been attacked by terror, and we were doing something about it – wherever we could, whenever we could in however many secret ways we could and people would thank us for it. We would extract democracy from anarchy by destroying terror.
But Bush lied and people died. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction.
And so three years spent pulling forces out of Iraq left President Obama in a similar situation; position a supporting force to aid in the maintenance of law and order or just leave rather than force alien intelligence onto our hosts.
The Commander-in-Chief didn’t want to police somewhere he didn’t belong. He left.
As Carl von Clausewitz said, ‘War is a continuation of politics by other means,’ and once the war was over, we would not share in the politics of a sovereign nation.
It would be a full year before the Administration would refer to global police work again. In December of 2012, the Pentagon’s top lawyer, Jeh Johnson, announced the War on Terror’s shift to a Police Action as troops continued to leave Afghanistan in preparation for the 2014 departure that would maintain only a representative force in the fledgling democracy. The lawyer decried war to be extraordinary and finite. But American war ships in the Mediterranean buzzed Syria in between Russian cruises and announced an intention to investigate aiding rebels fighting in the civil war there.
The cynical Russians knew the tale of the tape, and Russia Today made a prediction. The Americans would look for weapons of mass destruction and frame the government to jump in on the side of the rebels.
Much to everyone’s horror, Reuter’s soon reported that the rebels may or may not already be in possession of lethal-gas (December 12th).
So the small but lethal late-December gas leak went unconfirmed, and the President’s summer threat to intervene if Bashar al-Assad’s army ‘crossed a red line,’ hung in the air through the spring until a mid-March report raised the possibility in the press in May.
Senator John McCain traveled to Syria and Secretary of State John Kerry fielded Israeli intelligence reports believing that Bashar al-Asaad was testing gas to acclimate the world to the idea.
In late June the President announced a billion dollars of military aid to Syrian rebels before G8 meetings force confrontation with al-Assad’s military partner: Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Though Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper blasted Russia, calling the summit the G7 plus one, many in the media quietly questioned the President’s decision to arm rebels with terrorist affiliations.
Weren’t we victims of terror?
Though the West sided with Obama, and believed in his grass-roots intelligence, it found it hard to accept that rebels had to be encouraged to further peace negotiations with a billion dollars in arms as some pundits claimed.
President Putin avoided politicizing the matter, referring to gruesome internet footage released from rebel fighters to state that his government would not side with cannibalistic factions.
But Obama assured the public that this was the right decision, that the rebels were normal working people who also deserved to be free from the terror of weapons of mass destruction.
But then disaster struck. American peace talks with the ousted Afghani regime of the Taliban went down in flames. In Afghanistan, the Presidential Palace was bombed. And the Administration’s projection of foreign policy strength dimmed in Qatar where the Taliban had posted an embassy to leak the trade of a kidnapped American soldier for five so-called terrorists in USA custody.
And just then over the Independence Day weekend, massive Egyptian protests received military support to oust the first democratically elected Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi. The military that famously anticipated hundreds of tanks, squadrons of F-16s and hundreds of thousands of 9mm pistols from the USA made it happen.
Egypt rejected the idea of a coup and promoted their leader Adly Mansour to be a secular technocrat: a man capable of giving voice to all Egyptians unlike his hardline predecessor.
While Europe panned the ouster as a radical coup, the world waited for Obama to pass judgment. Leading from behind, the Executive refused to discredit what had became known as the People’s Coup. He called for patience and restraint, unwilling to lead in a democracy that was not his.
Anticipating a backlash, President Putin warned against civil war.
A day later Muslim cleric Sheik Ahmed el-Tayeb took up the warning to encourage the outraged to stay home and resist revolt against the military. The pan-arabic network Aljazeera was raided and banned and even jeered out of a military press conference, and then deserted by some twenty odd reporters for stirring strife and promoting violence.
In the meantime, talks between the technocratic Obama and Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai stalled when the American suggested the possibility that no USA military force would remain in Afghanistan.
Russia Today announced that Russians have discovered evidence of the rebel usage of weapons of mass destruction and that the proof has passed UN criteria for corroboration.
The American press immediately released stories denying the full shipment of arms to Syria’s rebels.
Surely technocration – fair and balanced analysis of all information followed by swift, harmonious democracy – but isn’t it anarchy?
Perhaps that’s why almost twice as many American soldiers have died under this President in four years as under President Bush II in seven?
The monarchies of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have pledged some 12 billion dollars to Egyptian stability.
Taliban officials have gone into hiding to protest the removal of their flag at a Qatari base.
We can only hope Syrian weapons of mass destruction have been secured and separated from anyone who would care to use them.
Image Courtesy of Ewan McIntosh
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