Image of the Day

eminds us. But for a decade or so now, things have been heating up, as if
to coincide with climate change and fears of declining petroleum reserves.
Fuelled by 9/11 and inspired by material avarice, the West has been
proudly shouldering its “White Man’s Burden” across the Middle East and
has now dipped into the Maghreb. Under the rippling flag of “democracy
promotion,” the West has attempted to install prefabricated democracies in
regional populations already steeped in decades of interventions—mostly
at the hands of noble Anglo-Saxon tribes. So anxious is the West to impart
its “values” to demented Asian nomads, it is apt to shrug off diplomacy,
international law, global consensus, and other minor impediments that
might slow its efforts to give thankless Arabs a crash course in
enlightenment values.
The Belly for Belligerence?
In the post-election haze, as smoke from liberal fireworks settled over
our metastasizing urban ghettos, we were entertained by erudite
speculation among the punditry whether President re-elect Obama had the
“stomach” for more “humanitarian interventions” abroad. The question
loomed over beltway intelligentsia like an ephemeral Gordian knot. Then
two weeks ago, threatening to violate the War Powers Act all by himself,
our stalwart Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta posted two Patriot missile
batteries and 400 soldiers to Turkey. This nicely complements the 150member
“task force” Obama quietly dispatched to Jordan in October,
supposedly to help “process” the flow of immigrants streaming out of
Syria. Amman must have been clamoring for assistance from our worldrenowned
border control experts. Perhaps it would have been wiser to
simply hire IDF construction crews to build a replica of the West Bank
apartheid wall? In either case, we’ve actually been busy in Jordan since
the summer, when we staged a training “mission” – note the ecumenical
undertone – suitably entitled “Eager Lion.”
We have now bookended Syria, that fearsome new addition to a
revanchist Axis of Evil. Panetta noted the cause for these postings: the
grave threat of chemical weapons use posed by the Assad government.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, still baffled by the Benghazi bombing,
has lately been worried that the “increasingly desperate” Assad might