I sometimes forget how Bill Clinton turned my parents into hawks. In these troubled times, it’s worth remembering the degree to which people’s political affiliation determines their worldview. If George W. Bush dropped bombs on Serbia, mom and dad would have been against it, but Bill Clinton … he must have had a reason.
We’re seeing some of the same effect with Obama. His new policy on Iraq and Syria differs from George W. Bush’s Iraq policy mostly in its implementation. Bush trumpeted his intention to go in strong, drop a bunch of bombs, “shock and awe” them. Obama is incrementalist – we’ll do A but not B, then a week later, we’re doing B and C with promises (soon broken) that we won’t move on to D. Ultimately this ends up with regime change, as it did in Libya with disastrous results. What’s the difference? Psychology. Obama knows marketing. He knows that we’ll only eat one or two of those big cookies, but a boat load of those little ones.
The media, as always, is in the tank for this war. On the morning after bombing began in Syria, the first voice you heard on NPR’s 6:00 a.m. newscast was that of a retired general who had “crafted” America’s bombing campaign during the Gulf War – a man who thought we weren’t bombing Syria hard enough. That’s NPR, no surprise, but don’t expect any better from the liberal media. Rachel Maddow, while a war skeptic, gave a thumbnail recent history of the Iraqi Kurds and the Gulf War that might have been torn out of a Bush campaign media release. Our only role in that saga, according to this telling, was liberating freedom-loving Kuwait and helping the Kurds preserve evidence of Saddam’s pogrom against them.
Maddow left out the small detail that the U.S. helped Saddam to the hilt throughout the 1980s, including during the campaign against the Kurds, then looked the other way when Saddam attacked them again after the Gulf War (until Bush I was shamed into establishing a no-fly zone in northern Iraq). I suppose I should excuse this level of ignorance due to her relative youth – she probably doesn’t remember the events very clearly. I sure as hell do. It was the genesis of the conflict we are entering now, just as our Afghan war was the birth of Al Qaeda.
We go through this cycle of attack repeatedly, and the results are always the same – a bigger mess, more people hating us, more misery in the region. The fact that people like Maddow, who should know better, don’t understand that makes it that much harder to stop this from happening yet again.
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