PJMEDIA.COM6 Hours Ago

The Single Best Article I Have Read on Syria

by Roger Kimball

Where by "Syria" I mean our response to the civil war in Syria, i.e., efforts by terrorist thugs (the "rebels," freedom fighters, etc.) to topple an establishment thug (the rogue ophthalmologist, B. al-Assad). That article is Andy McCarthy's "Drawing an Al-Qaeda Red Line" over at NRO. What's so good about it? Several things.

Item: Andy calls attention to the enormous hypocrisy on the part of the Obama administration about Assad.

Or maybe it's not "hypocrisy," but bumbling inconsistently, which when translated to the stage of world diplomacy equals stunning incompetence. Remember, this is an administration that just a few short years ago

– reopened diplomatic ties with Syria.

– Hillary Clinton called Assad a "reformer" (no where near as dangerous as that hapless chap who made the anti-Muslim internet video and who was sent to federal prison for . . . for what? Jay-walking? Failing to abate a smoking chimney? Violating the terms of his parole? Something that for people who do not attract the ire of the president merits a stern talking-to?)

– John "reporting for duty" Kerry and his wife were photographed having an intimate dinner with Dr. & Mrs. Assad, the "wildly democratic" couple Vogue celebrated in a puff piece just a couple of years ago.

It was all part of Obama's love-thy-Muslim-brother initiative. Bang! Burka Burka Mohammed Jihad blows up another church, mows down 13 fellow soldiers, wounding another 30, at a Texas army base, detonates homemade IEDs at a road race in Boston, murders a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans at a U.S. diplomatic mission in some African hellhole, etcetera, very much etcetera. Who's to blame? "Violent extremists," the president's favorite bad guys. Not "Muslim violent extremists," just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill extremist — please let it be a white, male, Christian, gun-toting, tea-party extremist.

Bottom line: what's happening in Syria is the latest assault — the salt in the fields, as it were — on the establishment narrative about the Muslim world.

Here's the thing: from a certain distance and in a certain light Obama looks like an Important Person, the president of the United States, leader of the free (or at least formerly free) world, just as John Kerry looks (well, sort of looks) like something more than an insufferable prig and blowhard.

But take a closer look. You see that they are both completely out of their depth. Obama jets around on Air Force One. He spends tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money on an African adventure for himself and his family while closing the White House to school tours because of the sequester. He swaggers just like he's a big deal, but here's the rub: the least-experienced president in the the history of the republic, the man whom nobody knew, the guy whose college transcripts we can't see, whose legislative record was one long evasive "Present," whose repellent racialist pandering has set race relations back decades in this country, whose Alinskyite demonize-your-opponents radicalism has further poisoned the character of American politics: this mountebank has succeeded mightily in fulling his promise of "fundamentally transforming the United States of America," making us poorer, less secure, less free, and less influential than we were when he came to office. He was the man who was supposed to repair the damage done to U.S. prestige by that evil cowboy George W. Bush=Hitler (that's just fine, calling Bush Hitler, but just try wearing an Obama mask if you're a clown and see what happens). How's that working out? Obama was also the fellow who, when not making the oceans recede and healing the plant, was going to work miracles in the U.S. economy, take care of Julia cradle-to-grave, and help enact a 2000-page monstrosity that will go down in infamy, before it goes down to repeal, as ObamaCare. It's all in shambles now, isn't it? You can tell how serious the damage is by this first: Obama actually cancelled a fund-raising event the other day — yes, really. Why? Because his support in Congress for an attack on Syria had gone wobbly. When Ambassador Chris Stevens and three men from his security detail were murdered last September 11 (September 11, mind you), the first thing Obama did was fly to Las Vegas for a fund-raiser. That's what he means by "leading from behind." It's what you or I call "abdicating responsibility." One of the great things about Andy's column is that it highlights the discrepancy between the confused reality of the Obama administration and its well-oiled public face.

Here's an interesting question: if Obama does not bomb Syria, will John Kerry survive as secretary of State? As Andy points out, in his congressional testimony, "Kerry was desperately trying to portray the 'rebels' as predominantly 'moderate.'" What's his definition of "moderate"? He didn't actually say, but here's the reality:

[T]he Obama Left and the GOP's McCain wing are applying Washington's lunatic definition of "moderate." By this thinking, the Islamic ummah is divided into two camps: an al-Qaeda fringe in one, and in the other the teeming millions of "moderate," tolerant, peace-loving "democracy" activists. In this fantasy, the Muslim Brotherhood — whose name the Beltway strains to avoid uttering in discussions of Syria — is moderate . . . and never you mind the bloody catastrophe the Brothers have wrought in nearby Egypt over the last few weeks and months.

In truth, the Brotherhood is an implacably Islamic-supremacist organization that is "moderate" only by comparison with al-Qaeda, and, even then, only if we are talking about al-Qaeda's methodology of full-time savagery — the Brothers are part-timers who, unlike al-Qaeda, think violent jihad is just one item on the sharia-installation menu. As far as ideology goes — i.e., the imperative that sharia be installed — the two are on exactly the same page. If anything, the Brotherhood's influence over the "oppositionists" is even greater than al-Qaeda's. The Brothers are the antithesis of moderate. They are anti-American (though they'll happily take our help before using it against us), anti-democratic (though they'll happily hold popular elections in Muslim-majority countries), and rabidly anti-Semitic.

So here's the question: just whom are we fighting for?

The Single Best Article I Have Read on Syria
http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2013/09/07/the-single-best-article-i-have-read-on-syria/

John Hames