Mr. Obama has now got his Arab alibi. He has got the Arab, actually GCC, cosmetics he thinks he needs to expand the war into Syria:
The rulers of tiny Bahrain, which need foreign mercenaries and Saudi troops to keep their own rebellious people at bay and repressed, are allegedly bombing the Hollywood Caliphate of ISIS.
The United Arab Emirates, a country so full of foreign military bases it looks like Persian Gulf Swiss cheese, is also doing likewise. No news yet if their Blackwater-modeled mercenary army of Colombians and Australians and other foreigners will be involved.
Ditto for the rulers of Qatar, who don’t have enough troops to fill two World Cup stadiums in 2022. Let alone wage war on anybody.
Apparently Saudi Arabia is also involved, somehow although it is not clear how and in what capacity are the oily slippery princes involved.
So, Mr. Obama has got his “Arab” alibi, his GCC fig leaf, although we all know the ‘real’ war will be American, with some French huffing and puffing. But at what price this GCC alibi? He must have promised a deeper American involvement in Syria, well beyond attacking the Wahhabi Jihadist cutthroats of ISIS. He must have promised something beyond ISIS and Al Qaeda: something like a repeat of NATO’s Libyan adventure in 2011. The results of which we are now enjoying from Tripoli to Benghazi. The temptation and the push by the Wahhabi camp for Mr. Obama to get deeper into the Syrian “civil war” will be strong.
Yes, there is something about cosmetics nagging at the back of my mind. I recall what Mr. Obama famously said during the 2008 campaign for president. Something about “a pig with lipstick is still a pig“. Even if we call it a coalition.
President Obama is expected to go on television (and other media) Wednesday to explain his strategy for dealing with the Wahhabi Islamic State of ISIS (he calls it ISIL). He will explain what he has in mind (most of it) to the American people, to the world, and to the terrorist Jihadis of ISIS. Including one Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi who has appointed himself the Caliph (follower or heir of the Prophet) of the Islamic State. In its more modern incarnation, any Caliphate would not be anything like the those of the early one: Abu Bakr (the First), Omar (the First), Othman, or Ali. He would probably be more like something between one of the mad early Ottoman sultans and Kim Jong-Un (there goes my never-planned trip to Pyongyang down the drain). He has also decided to attach Al Husseini Al Quraishi to his nom de guerre, but don’t let it fool you: his real name is Ibrahim Al Samarrai. This Al Samarrai dude (a k a Abu Bakr the Second) has his own plans for later this week. My incredible ISIS source claims that the Caliph plans to respond to Mr. Obama within hours at most. She claims he will demand equal time from the major networks in order to refute Mr. Obama’s speech point by point. Sort of like Republicans do every time and every Saturday. She swears the Hollywood-ish Caliph will not insist on responding to all Obama’s Saturday radio (and video) addresses, claiming he has better things to do.
In the unlikely event that the networks refuse his request, he plans to file a complaint with the FCC and whatever other appropriate authorities he might think of.
“Take Netanyahu’s appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. The host, Bob Schieffer, permitted the Israeli leader to make a lengthy case for the his military’s ground attack, guiding him along with one sympathetic question after another. Finally, after describing Netanyahu’s position as “very understandable”, Schieffer asked about dead Palestinian civilians – but only to wonder if they presented a public relations problem in “the battle for world opinion”. As if Schieffer’s position wasn’t already blindingly clear, he went on to quote former prime minister Golda Meir’s line that Israelis can never forgive Arabs “for forcing us to kill their children”…………….”
Looks like old Bob Schieffer was in kowtow mode. Most U.S. media types are in that mode when they have Netanyahu on, if they are blessed enough to have him “spread the bull” on their program. Some of them, just like most members of Congress, act like teenage groupies chasing after Justin Bieber. I strongly suspect that many of them delay washing their hands after shaking the hand of Bibi.
Yet how can anyone forget when both Obama and French president Sarkozy correctly called him a liar on an open microphone? Here is how it went:
Sarkozy: ‘Netanyahu, I can’t stand him. He’s a liar.’
Obama: ‘You are sick of him, but I have to deal with him every day.’
Can two august leaders of the free world both be wrong at the same time?
“During his address (at the Iftar dinner) , U.S. President Barack Obama said, “No country can accept rockets fired indiscriminately at citizens,” Obama said. “And so we’ve been very clear that Israel has the right to defend itself against what I consider to be inexcusable attacks from Hamas.”………”We knew it was all bad when we saw this tweet surface a few minutes into the iftar by none other than Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer,” one website, The Thrival Room, wrote. Meanwhile, scholar Tariq Ramadan published a statement describing this year’s dinner as “political instrumentalisation of (voluntarily) trapped Muslim leaders listening to President Obama justify the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians, declaring Israel has the right to defend itself. One wonders what is the relationship between the Iftar celebration and Israel?………”
There was no reason at all to politicize this Ramadan Iftar by focusing on Israel or its Gaza targets. No reason to make it into an almost ‘Israeli’ political rally. But Mr. Obama’s advisers are creatures of habit. Maybe it was force of habit: every time a US politician sees a bunch of Muslim faces he claims that he thinks of a ‘threatened’ Israel. But the Saudi ambassador Mr. Adle Al-Jubair, was there resplendent in his native attire, and he is hardly a threat: he is the envoy of the Likud’s best Arab ally. On the other hand, some of the Muslims attending are also reported to have complained about surveillance of their communities. Funny, I don’t feel ‘surveilled’, but maybe that is the point.
Even the Israeli daily Haaretz has more sense than the groupies and advisers at the White House who put Mr. Obama in this silly position of using an Islamic occasion to justify the Netanyahu war tactics.
