Assad Regime's Latest Taunting Tease of Obama

As I mentioned yesterday, Syrian Tyrant Bashar al-Assad's deputy prime minister actually declared a stalemate in the civil war/insurrection there, and called for a ceasefire.

That ploy lasted all of one day, it would seem. Today the BBC had a regime apparatchik on to explain how a deputy PM could be calling for a truce, and declaring a stalemate in the civil war, when that flies in the face of the dictator Assad's position. True to form for Assad regime gang members, what he said was absurd. It was that the deputy PM wasn't speaking for the government, he was speaking as a member of his party. You see, Syria isn't a dictatorship, it's a multiparty democracy! Who knew?

I'll bet nobody realized that before, since the deputy PM neglected to mention it when he pulled this latest pathetic, time-wasting, mind-fucking ploy of the regime he serves.

The Assad regime is going to jerk Obama's chain every day now, for however many months or years Obama wants to play along with Assad's transparent artifice. (Given how the sleazy con man and rip-off artist Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has kept the U.S. gravy train going for over a decade now, playing the Americans for saps, I'm not very optimistic about a quick end to the Syrian charade.) Actually Obama wants the Syrians to stall, the better for people to gradually forget or lose interest in the chemical weapon slaughter and Obama's “red line.”

Truth be told, Obama has some of the blood of those gassed children he professes such concern for on his hands. (We can gauge how much he really cares by what he's done about it so far- nothing. He let his Secretary of State [John Kerry] make a fool of himself by threatening an imminent attack, and then pulled the rug out from under him, announcing he'd get a Congressional authorization first, and now he's even abandoned that, in favor of letting the Russians jerk the U.S. around for the next six months or a year or however long, by which time the “issue” will be “old.”) Had he not in effect dared Assad to use gas by drawing a “red line,” Assad may never have used the gas. A dictator has to appear strong to his followers, or risk a coup. Assad was practically compelled to test Obama when Obama ordered him not to use chemical weapons. So he started with a small test attack. Obama pretended he didn't know Assad did it- talking as if he needed proof beyond a reasonable doubt to enforce his “red line”! (If only such proof, or any evidence at all, was required for the thousands in the U.S. military gulag.) [1]

By the way, Obama now has the brass to claim that it's “not my red line.” It's “the world's.” Oh. Except it was Obama who declared it, and Obama who pretended he was going to finally act, (sending the hapless Kerry on a very public fool's errand) after his previous inaction emboldened Assad to kill another 1,429 people (by the U.S.' count). And for good measure, firebomb some schoolkids a couple of days later, with one of his jets, which Obama should have destroyed by now. (If indeed the U.S. is “a force for good,” as its high-ranking apparatchiks and nomenklatura members are so fond of declaring.)

Well, I guess we shouldn't allow our hopes to rise when it looks like the U.S. might use its power for good. That only happens once in a blue moon. [I.e. rarely.] To be fair, Obama did fake us out this time. Who could have guessed that after making it seem that he was going to order a strike, he'd just slink off into some political miasma. And the U.S. did use air assets to save the Libyan uprising from being smashed by Qaddafi. (Much to the chagrin of various leftists, some of whom positively pine for the days of Qaddafi. I'm not exaggerating.)

Of course Obama was reluctantly pushed into that one- remember “leading from behind”? How does he come up with those flippant, fatuous slogans to camouflage and dignify his awkward, oddball behavior? Does he invent them himself or does his staff brainstorm them?

Obama seems to think he can outsmart his political opponents, domestic and foreign, whether it's Bashar al-Assad, Hamid Karzai, or Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, with not much more than verbiage. (He'd be great at academic politics.) His record is mixed at best, at least in power. (He certainly proved adept at getting elected, however, handily out-manipulating Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Mitt Romney on that particular playing field, the one of U.S. electoral politics.) But I don't think his intellectual intelligence is the right kind of intelligence for the foes he's faced in power. And if you look at the assets and positions of those first four foes I named, you'd think a clever President of the United States, one with a great deal of popular support, could get the better of them, rather than vice versa.

So as compensation, he personally picks people to die by drone, and increases the domestic repression in the U.S., spying on journalists and treating them as criminals and constructing the most nightmarishly all-encompassing secret police hyper-surveillance state anywhere, ever, by far.

Well, where does that leave us? Another decade, another mini-holocaust, this time in Syria, while the rest of the world's population looks on as spectators. What is wrong with this species? That is the deeper question, a question that is deeper than mere politics. It's a psychological, an ontological, an existential, a biological, and a meta-political question, which also has profound social and cultural dimensions that must be analyzed. Such a question requires more than a brief essay to do justice to it.

1] Speaking personally, gassed children- adults too, for that matter- bothers me enough that if I had the power to do something about it to punish, weaken, and deter the perpetrators, I would. Like the kind of power the President of the United States has.

But then we get the deeply disingenuous argument from the “anti-war” crowd (by the way, isn't there a war in Syria right now? Why don't these clowns demonstrate outside the Syrian embassies and consulates in protest? Just asking) that “what difference does it make how someone is killed?” Isn't that as much- if not more- an argument for intervention as for standing off to the side with one's hands in one's pockets and bleating for “dialogue” and “negotiations”? (Yes, it is. There, I answered my own rhetorical question.) And I think Assad has shown what he thinks of dialogue and negotiations when he answered unarmed protesters by gunning them down in the streets, when he dealt with teenagers writing graffiti against him by having them tortured, murdered, and handing their mutilated bodies to their families with gangster threats to keep quiet about it. Or when he gave not one, but two UN mediators in a row the runaround, blowing his insulting lies in their faces. Or when he's spent the past two and a half years reducing cities to rubble, targeting hospitals, clinics, and medical workers, sniping at civilians, and using the heavy weaponry of a military designed to fight other nations against a trapped civilian population, all in order to cling to power at all costs. Doesn't look like he's interested in that “negotiated solution,” the heirs of Neville Chamberlain keep blathering on about.

Speaking of “war,” Syria has shot down a Turkish jet, and has shelled Turkish towns, killing Turkish citizens. It's also set off car bombs at the border. I don't hear the “no war!” crowd (careful you don't shout yourselves horse, dearies) saying Syria is “at war” with Turkey. (And Turkey just shot down a Syria helicopter it claimed was over its airspace.) Is firing a single bullet, say, a “war”? A limited military strike is not a “war.” It can be construed as an act of war, if the target nation so chooses.

This is a semantical game, a rather dishonest one, with double standards aplenty deployed by its advocates. There are two types of characters involved in it: 1) Assad agents, and 2) people allergic to Western, especially U.S., power, but who have no problem with the worst tyrants and despots and aggressors provided they aren't allied with the U.S. bloc.

Real principled.

If the latter group were actually motivated by humanitarian principles, they would not manifest this double standard. They should try being consistent. (Something they demand from the U.S.)

And it's not that most of them are pacifists, either. Most apparently regard fighting fascism in World War II as a righteous cause, for example, and romanticize the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War against the traitor Franco's fascist uprising. (An exception is the late Howard Zinn, who went around late in life lecturing that neither the American Civil War nor World War II should have been fought by the U.S. His People's History of the United States still stands as an important, clarifying work, but he sure had his head far up his ass later on.)

I just think it is a sign of having an ideological cement block for a brain if you think the U.S. is ALWAYS wrong in EVERY situation, and whoever it happens to be opposing is in the right. (That seems to be in practice the Noam Chomsky view of the world these days, at least the first half, although he would deny it.)

Yes, the U.S. is an imperialist power. So is Russia (for centuries), so was Iraq under Saddam Hussein (a failed one, to be sure), so are or have been lots of nations. It is simplistic, black and white thinking, and intellectually lazy (and morally feckless, if not worse) to just put a black hat on the U.S. and see all conflicts in that light. I take a backseat to no one in denouncing U.S. crimes, but that doesn't make everything the U.S. does criminal, and the U.S. is not the sole source of evil in the world. Far from it. (But it's so much easier to act as if it is. You don't have to think and deal with complexities that way!)