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McCain would sneak us into another war
The headline and first paragraph of this CBS News story was enough to rouse my ire at the reckless way our political "leaders" threaten and use military powers to impose their will on peoples of the world.
"McCain sneaks across Turkey-Syria border, meets with rebels" begins with these words:
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a proponent of U.S. military action in Syria - and a vocal opponent of President Obama's Syrian policy - sneaked across the Syrian border and met with rebels there, CBS News has learned. The trip was in the works "for weeks, if not months," Mouaz Mustafa, the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force who was with McCain all day, told CBS News' Clarissa Ward. "It's something the senator has wanted to do for quite some time because he's pro-active on the subject of the U.S. being more directly involved in Syria and helping to create the necessary changes on the ground to end the conflict."
It is striking how such hubris grows in the politically powerful, imagining that they can spend a few hours in a region that has suffered from conflict for decades, and come out with a clear notion on how and where and who to support in the civil conflict in Syria. All the more amazing given how the conflict originates in no small part to the colonial partitioning of the Middle East by Britain after World War 1, fully endorsed in years since by the United States.
As for McCain, he is hardly the first to try such a stunt, but I have to imagine that the image of him "sneaking" through a war zone had some appeal to his political handlers, playing up his military credentials as Memorial Day is recognized in the United States.
1 comment
It looks like Obama is proving the bipartisan nature of an interventionist foreign policy, once again:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-fg-us-syria-20130614,0,16123.story
Clearly to provide arms is to take a military position in the civil war underway in Syria. And I don’t siuppose it will do much good to point out that the war in Viet Nam started with similar small steps.