Obama Gets His War

Great Pharaoh, who, in his role as god on earth, was going to reverse the centuries-long rise of the oceans, finally got his divine war in Syria. Just last year President Obama announced he was going to bomb Syria back to the stone age to help rebels oust Syrian President Assad. This was in response to a chemical weapons attack attributed to Assad but which turned out to be a false flag attack carried out by the rebels. War-weary Americans overwhelmingly rose up and overruled Obama. Russian President Putin rescued Obama with a plan for Assad to surrender his chemical weapons to be destroyed, which he did.

But our petulant president wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to attack Syria, and he needed to convince the pesky people to support his war. At that time nobody had heard of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). A search of Google News turns up only one mention of ISIS or ISIL (substitute Levant for Syria) in 2013. Now a day doesn’t go by without government’s propagandists crying hysterically that ISIS is the greatest threat the US has ever faced.

That’s not a coincidence. ISIS roared into prominence because the US and its regional allies funded, armed and trained ISIS fighters to be the highly successful terrorists they are today so they could defeat Assad. ISIS isn’t an enemy of the US. It’s a tool of the US. Obama is using ISIS; ISIS is using Obama; and everybody is suffering as a result.

The US camouflaged its arming of ISIS by supplying, arming and training supposedly moderate rebels. The problem is there are no moderate rebels. The personnel in the rebel militias are fluid. Moderate groups funnel weapons to fierce militias like ISIS. At the same time, ISIS fighters pretend to be moderates to obtain training and weapons. It’s a charade designed to fool the American people, and all parties understand it.

A month ago Obama himself said there were no real moderate rebels. “With ‘respect to Syria,’ said the president, the notion that arming the rebels would have made a difference has ‘always been a fantasy,’” The New York Times reported. “‘This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards.’”

Yet today Obama claims he will defeat both ISIS and Assad by arming those same doctors, farmers and pharmacists to be the boots on the ground supported by US bombs. Pat Buchanan comments, “The strategy that President Obama laid out Wednesday night to ‘degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL,’ is incoherent, inconsistent and, ultimately, non-credible.” No kidding. Nobody, not even Arab countries threatened by ISIS, will send their troops to fight. That’s because Obama’s strategy is a sham.

The key to understanding this is understanding Iran is the ultimate target. Obama doesn’t want to destroy ISIS. He wants to help ISIS topple Assad because toppling Assad will further isolate Iran.

Obama admitted he already used ISIS to oust Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, who was tightly aligned with Iran. The Times reported, “The reason, the president added, ‘that we did not just start taking a bunch of airstrikes all across Iraq as soon as ISIL came in was because that would have taken the pressure off of [Prime Minister Nuri Kamal] al-Maliki.’” This also explains reports that Iraqi troops were mysteriously ordered to retreat instead of fighting ISIS when ISIS first invaded Iraq.

But the advance of ISIS in Iraq still didn’t convince the American people to support Obama’s newest war. He needed more propaganda, so he sent Secretary of Defense Hagel to fearmonger. Reuters reported, “Asked if the hardline Sunni Muslim organization posed a threat to the United States comparable to that of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Hagel said it was ‘as sophisticated and well-funded as any group we have seen.’”

Considering al Qaeda had about 500 fighters in 2001, and ISIS currently has over 20,000, this is a stark admission of the failure of the US policy of perpetual war to make us safer. Clearly, Hagel is saying it has made us less safe. ISIS helped Hagel by shortening its name to Islamic State to make it appear they threatened the US.

But Hagel’s claims still didn’t convince the American people. It took two videos of Americans being beheaded to finally push Americans over the edge and give Obama the support he needed. What went largely unreported was the claim by the family of Steven Sotloff that Obama’s moderate Syrian rebel buddies, who recently signed a non-aggression pact with ISIS, sold him to ISIS and the beheading videos were faked.

Obama’s propaganda campaign worked. It got him his latest war. Joseph Goebbels would be proud.