Thursday, June 13, 2013

Will Syria Be Obama's Fools Errand?





The cretinous George W. Bush, egged on by Emperor Palpatine Cheney, took America to war in Afghanistan and Iraq and the result was thousands of squandered American lives and trillions of dollars waste just as if they had been formed in a huge pile and lighted afire.  Worse yet, all that wasted money was borrowed form China.  Now, Barack Obama may be about to start down the road in his own fool's errand although hopefully he is not justifying his actions with out right deliberate lies like Bush/Cheney.  Politico looks at Obama's decision to take a first step down the road in Syria.  Here are excerpts:


President Barack Obama has crossed a red line of his own on Syria — spurred by the fast flood of bad news on the ground and a spirited internal debate about national prestige under his own roof.

The Obama administration’s decision Thursday to provide military and political aid to anti-Assad fighters wasn’t merely a result of confirmation the Syrian regime used sarin gas on rebels — but a decision prompted by the realization that Syrian President Bashar Assad was on the cusp of gaining a permanent advantage over rebel groups and the fear of imminent sectarian bloodshed further spilling into neighboring Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon.

“The decision was ultimately driven by the discovery Assad used [chemical weapons] but there were a number of other factors in place that were also important,” conceded an administration official with direct knowledge of the deliberations.

For weeks, Obama — chastened by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — deferred passing judgment on the regime’s use of the deadly nerve gas, even as U.N. and European officials publicly reported the use of chemical weapons against hundreds of rebels and civilians.

But the chorus of calls for action had been rising in recent days, from European capitals, administration officials and Hill hawks in both parties who called for a halt to a recent Assad counter-offensive aided by a surge in attacks by Iran-backed Hezbollah units.

The highest-profile spur for action came on Tuesday: Former President Bill Clinton, speaking in New York, cast Syria in road-not-taken terms, implying that Obama faced a moral crossroads comparable to the one he faced when he decided to not to intervene during the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s.

The one thing all of Obama’s aides were concerned about, sources said, was the perception that world’s sole superpower was standing by while European allies shouldered the burden of trying to stop a dictator from murdering thousands of his own people.
The president himself, people close to the situation said, has been agonizing over the decision, torn between his desire to do the right thing — and his bone-deep aversion to the kind of quick-trigger military intervention in Iraq that sidetracked his predecessor George W. Bush and resulted in the thousands of U.S. casualties.

I understand the desire to intervene.  But at the same time, I cannot forget the nightmares in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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