August 31, 2013
JUST AS THE WAR IS IDENTICAL, SO IS THE REASON FOR IT:
An Accidental War : Perfunctory and ineffectual war-making in Syria is worse than nothing. (Mark Steyn, 8/30/13, National Review)
I see the Obama "reset" is going so swimmingly that the president is now threatening to go to war against a dictator who gassed his own people. Don't worry, this isn't anything like the dictator who gassed his own people that the discredited warmonger Bush spent 2002 and early 2003 staggering ever more punchily around the country inveighing against. The 2003 dictator who gassed his own people was the leader of the Baath Party of Iraq. The 2013 dictator who gassed his own people is the leader of the Baath Party of Syria. Whole other ball of wax. [...]Oh, well. If the British won't be along for the ride, the French are apparently still in. What was the old gag from a decade ago during those interminable U.N. resolutions with Chirac saying "Non!" every time? Ah, yes: "Going to war without the French is like going hunting without an accordion." Oddly enough, the worst setback for the Islamic imperialists in recent years has been President Hollande's intervention in Mali, where, unlike the money-no-object Pentagon, the French troops had such undernourished supply lines that they had to hitch a ride to the war on C-17 transports from the Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force. And yet they won -- insofar as anyone ever really wins on that benighted sod.Meanwhile, the hyperpower is going to war because Obama wandered off prompter and accidentally made a threat. So he has to make good on it, or America will lose its credibility. But he only wants to make good on it in a perfunctory and ineffectual way. So America will lose its credibility anyway.
The Chemical Evidence (WSJ, 8/30/13)
"If we choose to live in a world where a thug and a murderer like Bashar al-Assad can gas thousands of his own people with impunity, even after the United States and our allies said no, and then the world does nothing about it, there will be no end to the test of our resolve and the dangers that will flow from those others who believe that they can do as they will, "Mr. Kerry declared.George W. Bush and Tony Blair couldn't have said it better
Just as this is a "gotcha" moment for the UR and the Cabana Boy, so is it one for the opposite reason for Friend Steyn. We're going to war because a Ba'athist dictator oppresses the religious majority of his country. It's what the Crusader State does.
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 31, 2013 8:54 AM
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