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deploy chemical stores against rebel forces. A serious threat, as any of the
thousands of U.S. soldiers indiscriminately exposed to our own
radioactive depleted uranium bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan could attest.
Still, the presence of our troops on Syrian borders should answer the
beltway question of Obama’s ability to stomach another war. If that
question wasn’t already answered by the clandestine arms support we’ve
provided to the Free Syrian Army and its Islamist fanatics—a worrisome
confection of genuine Syrian rebels and flanks of disgruntled Islamists
from around the region.
We’re All Hawks Now
What disturbs the distant observer is the memory of Wesley Clark’s
revelatory aside in a speech last December when he distinctly recalled
Donald Rumsfeld mapping out multiple regime changes across the Middle
East—seven countries in five years. Nominated “regimes” included those
of Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Syria, and Iran. (Afghanistan
was a side project.) Notice the last three on the list? Our Democratic
administration has already toppled Gaddafi and left a humanitarian
catastrophe to sort itself out in Libya. We are now banging the drums for a
confrontation with the Syrians. And, as always, the imaginary specter of
an Iranian bomb looms menacingly on the horizon.
Is Obama executing the neoconservative’s original plan? After
making a fuss about the foolishness of the Iraq war during his inaugural
Presidential campaign? After depositing a small river of American blood
into Afghan soil and a mountain of American treasure into the pockets of
corrupt “government” functionaries?
If true, then the Democrats have only made a couple of tweaks to the
plan. One being semantic—the substitution of the liberal incantation,
“humanitarian intervention” for the conservative mantra of “regime
change.” The former is no improvement on the latter. The Libyan
intervention generated social chaos, when instead of enforcing the no-fly
zone the UN had mandated it to ensure, NATO bombed government forces
to tip the civil conflict in favor of the rebels. This precipitated the turmoil
that UN resolution 1973 was intended to prevent. It also produced the
epiphenomenon—unremarkable to American hawks—of a multi-party