Obama’s Poisonous ISIS Moment and The Snare of Remote-Controlled War

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/pierre-tristam/58272/obama-s-poisonous-isis-moment-and-the-snare-of-remote-controlled-war

Obama’s Poisonous ISIS Moment and The Snare of Remote-Controlled War
Barack Obama | Middle East
by Pierre Tristam | September 12, 2014 - 11:53am

You’ve heard by now of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s latest impersonation of his more hysterical half. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), he told an interviewer last Sunday, is “right now crucifying Christians in Iraq, literally nailing Christians to trees.” It’s a lie of course. It’s also an old plagiarism of bogus atrocities meant to whip up the home front into a frenzy for war. It dates back to the early days of World War I, when the British press, to hurry up enlistments, was inventing claims of German soldiers crucifying Belgians. Variations on the theme applied to the Vietcong. By 1991 the first George Bush was inventing claims of Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of incubators in Kuwait. Not enough crucifixion-ready trees in Kuwait, evidently. At the time Bush was incubating congressional votes for the first gulf war and siring the second. By the time of the second Bush the inventions about Saddam Hussein were so outlandish that they could be reduced to shorthand: WMDs. Or the irreplaceable image of Colin Powell dangling his vial of fiction at a UN Security Council meeting.

Not to worry: our freely feckless media believed them every time, and in the case of such house organs as the New York Times and the reliably hawkish Washington Post, did their best to lend the lies the legitimacy of their mastheads. War has since become the reflex of this unimaginative republic, where enthusiasm for war is matched only by massive ignorance of its realities. That’s the cynical luxury of outsourcing wars to foreign lands, at the hands of a professional military no different than a segregated if worshipped minority. (If you doubt that for a moment, remember how the injured are treated, and maltreated, once the military is done with them.)

It’s not enough to be fighting a losing war in Afghanistan and another against “terror” in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and wherever else the Pentagon and the White House wish to play centurion to the world. It’s not enough to have invaded Iraq on false pretenses, destabilized the entire region and granted Iran’s totalitarian mullahs a new lease on repression while abetting Iraq’s authoritarian Shiites against its Sunnis, to the point of sending too many Sunnis into the seemingly defensive arms of the madmen of ISIS.

Give this to Obama, that closeted Cesar who’s pretended to be ending wars while raining Hellfire missiles from every available drone from one end of the Middle East to another. He’s got audacity enough to skip the Kissinger-Nixon method and carry out his illegal bombings in the open. All he has to do is say that his lawyers approve. That’s the position he’s taking regarding bombing Syria. (It’s how Iran’s mullahs and al-Qaeda’s nut jobs justify their mad acts, too: they concoct bogus Koranic edicts the way the White House concocts legal cover. It reminds me of Solzhenitsyn’s line in The Gulag Archipelago: “Whatever the law is, crime can be found.”) That wouldn’t make the United States any less of an international outlaw.