....The campaign against Assad had to feed into Iraq across the common border. It had to. Had to. By failing to grasp events in Syria by the horns and opting instead to ”lead from behind” Obama essentially ‘let it happen’. He let someone else — al Qaeda — drive. And what happened is now plain for all to see.
Somehow officials in the administration imagined that the legal line between “Syria” and “Iraq” had some physical meaning; that you could build up an enormous pressure in Syria without consequences. Well whoever imagined that never operated an expresso machine. The coffee flowed and now Obama is shocked at the result.
Slaughter argues that Obama could not see the connection between maintaining the Pax Americana and the “humanitarian” concerns he so loves to tout. “This is where the White House is most blind. It sees the world on two planes: the humanitarian world of individual suffering, where no matter how heart-rending the pictures and how horrific the crimes, American vital interests are not engaged because it is just people; and the strategic world of government interests, where what matters is the chess game of one leader against another, and stopping both state and nonstate actors who are able to harm the United States.”
Thus, Obama cannot see that he is at least partially responsible for headlines like: “Iraq’s beleaguered Christians make final stand on the Mosul frontline” or “More Than 50 Million People Are Displaced, the Highest Number Ever Recorded” — the highest number, in fact, since World War 2.
Refugee levels are not independent of Obama’s policy failures. The refugees in Syria are the direct result of his geopolitical screw-ups. The flood of “migrants” besieging the southern US border did not occur independently of the administration’s immigration policy. They were caused by it. Breitbart notes that “White House Admits ‘Rumors’ of Amnesty Motivating Illegal Border Crossings”.
The humanitarian crisis is a function of the collapse of foreign policy. Even UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had to point out the obvious. “Suddenly, the cohesion and integrity of two major countries, [Syria and Iraq] not just one, is in question,” he said, as the war has spread into Iraq. “Regional powers became involved. Radical groups gained a foothold. Syria today is increasingly a failed state.”
Bubble, bubble, bubble.
As Slaughter points out, Obama, in the process of dispensing his fine humanitarianism and exquisite moral judgment has more or less blown up the Middle East. The Guardian notes that Iranian forces are already rushing into Iraq. Like a firestorm it's sucking more and more combatants in.
Its enemies are already responding – on both sides of the frontier. According to reports from Lebanon, Iraqi Shia fighters who have been fighting in Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad are heading home again to bolster Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, in his war against Isis and a wider Sunni insurgency.
Iraq Shia militiamen deployed to Damascus to guard the revered Sayyida Zeinab shrine — along with Iranian revolutionary guards – are soon likely to be protecting the Shia holy places of Najaf and Karbala from Isis and other Sunni groups seeking to ignite a sectarian civil war. Many are with the Iraqi militia Asaib Ahl al-Haq, (League of the Righteous), an Iranian-backed force that is expected to spearhead the fightback against Isis. Men from the Lebanese Shia movement Hezbollah are filling the vacuum in Syria.
In another twist in the fast-moving situation, last weekend the Syrian air force staged its first raids on Isis bases in Raqqa, Hassakeh and Deir al-Zor. That was noteworthy because Assad’s enemies have often accused him of tolerating Isis or tacitly cooperating with it in order to split rebel ranks and present himself as a secular bulwark against al-Qaida and jihadi fanaticism.
Will the fighting become general? Perhaps the better question is to ask why it should not become general for the same reasons that Slaughter already described. Whether in Eastern Europe or Asia, the same practice of neglect can be observed. In each place Obama has lit a pressure chamber and the steam has to go somewhere. In he Middle East, Syria/Iraq has now become the steam chamber, and if there is any obvious reason why the high-pressure coffee won’t flow into lower conflict areas it does not readily present itself to the observer.
http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/06/21/stovetop-expresso/#more-37563 |
