So, it seems that the United States of America is finally about to enter the Syrian civil war—fighting against both sides, of course (because that makes sense!). An enemy of an enemy might be a friend, but nobody wants to be friends with the world’s most famous ophthalmologist: Bashar al‑Assad. What is an enemy of an enemy of an enemy of an enemy, and what if it’s not even friendly? Do we merely find a double-negative, or a triple-negative, or quadruple, and so on and so forth? Just count them up and see if the number is even or odd? Or is it the negation of the negation, as the Master himself would have it? No, definitely not that last option. ISIS is not world-historical, in spite of the fact that it is led by the first caliph to ever have a “social media strategy” (as the kids are calling it these days).
The most truly baffling aspect of the foreign policy charade coming these days from Washington is the insistence by every American politician and major media outlet that there does indeed exist something called the “moderate opposition” in Syria. In fact, it exists so much that Saudi Arabia has agreed to host a “training program” for this “moderate opposition” that exists and exists a lot. Perhaps Obama, McCain, Kerry, and the whole gang (including the editors of the New York Times) are still listening to the foreign policy “expertise” of the infamous Elizabeth O’Bagy.
At least it’s always amusing to see American diplomats’ cowardly diffidence toward the Arab oil monarchies:
Quite frankly, the scientific editors of Selecting Stones are starting to grow weary of covering the Middle East beat. We’ll just stick by our main position: China should at least consider invading Iraq.
Other than that, we’ll just make this bold statement: Everything went to hell in 1990 because Saddam Hussein was too much of a coward. Had he kept going after taking Kuwait, and marched all the way to the Arabian Sea, then he could have been the Arab Napoleon (which, of course, Napoleon Bonaparte himself tried to do, but failed). Had he acted with more courage and strength, Saddam could have quickly eliminated all those petty feudal states on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf that America loves so much.
But, alas, instead we got Operation Desert Shield and everything since.
