Stay Tuned
"The Defence Department has a responsibility to provide the president with options for contingencies, and that requires positioning our forces, positioning our assets, to be able to carry out different options -- whatever options the president might choose."
U.S. Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel
In response to the nervous tics coming out of Washington and specifically the White House, the U.S. Navy moved a fourth warship into the Mediterranean, capable of launching ballistic missiles. As messages go, its additional presence there is a powerful enough one. Of course the Kremlin too is given to nervous tics and it sent along its own Black Sea fleet to its Syrian port in Tartus. Counteracting the U.S. move. Standoff, anyone?
If this is a game of chicken, no one is audibly squawking. Although a Tomahawk missile strike would provide quite a squawk. Something that could have been handily accomplished by any of the three vessels already in place off shore the Syrian coast. The fourth, it could be said, without a chuckle, represents overkill. Or simply another nervous tic.
"If the U.S. goes in and attacks another country without a UN mandate and without clear evidence that can be presented, then there are questions in terms of whether international law supports it -- do we have the coalition to make it work? Those are considerations that we have to take into account", stated President Barack Obama. Another nervous tic.
The United States has been stung time and again through its various interventions in the Middle East. Its first invasion of Iraq had a UN mandate; its second had not. But each time its military enters a Muslim country it can be assured of acquiring a deeper reputation for conspiring to attack Muslims, in a larger conspiracy for ownership of the natural resources of Muslim countries.
A deep and simmering accusation and hatred seems to satisfy the Arab street. Afghans greeted the UN-mandated intervention led by NATO and the United States to unseat the brutal Taliban and put al-Qaeda on the run. Now, though Western lives have been lost, huge troves of national treasury expended, Afghanistan like Iraq before it, can hardly wait for the West and the U.S. to leave. With the proviso that it commit to continue spending hugely there for 'reconstruction'.
It isn't quite clear whether hatred for Israel runs deeper and more violent than that for the United States; whether the common view is that the United States does everything it can to disparage and attack the Arab world on Israel's behalf, or whether the Jews are so powerful that they are capable of ongoing manipulation of all American administrations to force them to protect Israel against all comers; an evil alliance whose malign intent knows no limits.
The seeming exception appears to have been the first Iraqi invasion when Arab countries pleaded with, then supported the United States in freeing Kuwait from Saddam Hussein's military occupation, and years later when Libyan protests in their version of the Arab Spring led the West to a NATO closed-sky initiative and NATO bombing missions seconded by some Arab countries to aid the rebels overthrow the Ghaddafi regime.
Now the Obama administration is weighing its options, having put its foot in the door of intervention in Syria by harrumphing loudly about 'red lines' that must not be crossed, and which have been before and now more recently on a larger scale through nerve gas attacks on two suburbs of Damascus killing at least 500 civilians and injuring thousands more.
Any large-scale chemical weapons attack would affect "core national interests" of the United States as well as its allies, warns President Obama. An unctuous statement under the newest circumstances, and opaque in its outcome. Will he or won't he? The world would like to know. Above all the millions of Syrian refugees languishing in refugee camps both within and outside of Syria yearn to know, and soon.
Beyond which, it remains a mystery to deep thought that it must be the United States which is expected by the waiting world and the desperate Syrian civilians to ride to their rescue. Granted, the U.S. remains the world's sole super-power, but there are quite a few emergency fires lit by the lightning strikes of human behaviour and they cannot all be snuffed by the U.S. cavalry.
There are times when it is fair enough to ask: what of the responsibilities of Syria's neighbours? Turkey whose belligerence against Syria has been well enough documented has a large standing army. Saudi Arabia has purchased the most up-to-date military armaments, and it too has armed forces that can be called upon to act speedily; some of its forces protecting Bahrain from its irate Shia population could be re-directed toward aiding Sunni Syrians from the brutality of their government.
The wealth of the Gulf States, of Qatar with its billions to burn, so much that billions were treated like pocket money in the aid of Hamas, could be lavished instead on the rescue of fellow Sunnis. What of the utter incompetence, indecision and hesitant dissembling obfuscation of the Arab League? They seek refuge from responsibility by awaiting the entry through moral outrage, of the United States, France and Britain.
Pathetic emasculation. Once the U.S. enters yet another costly, lengthy war in yet another Arab country its reputation as a 21st-Century version of 18th Century colonial power will be cemented in stone for years to come.
Labels: Atrocities, Chemical Weapons, Conflict, Controversy, Middle East, Syria, United States
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, August 25, 2013
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