The US is swan-diving into another quagmire. From Ramzy Baroud at antiwar.com:
The Obama Doctrine Is Ravaging the Middle East
Everyone seems to have a theory on how to obliterate ISIS, or “Daesh”. However, two points are rarely raised: one, concerning the origins of the group and the second, on whether there are genuine intentions to defeat it, in the first place.
We must boldly address the first to unravel the enigma behind the rise and growth of “Daesh” – otherwise, how else can the group be dismantled.
We must contend with the second point before engaging in superfluous discussions about the most appropriate war strategy – that if war is, at all, the answer.
The questions are quite urgent yet, somehow, they are frequently overlooked, glossed over through some disingenuous logic or the blame is always placed somewhere else.
Now that the Americans have launched yet another aerial war against Libya, purportedly to target “Daesh” positions there, the discussion is being carefully geared towards how far the US must go to defeat the militant group?
In fact, “can airstrikes alone win a war without ‘boots on the ground’?” has morphed, somehow, to become the crux of the matter, which has engaged a large number of intellectuals on both sides of the debate.
US media gurus, split between two equally warmongering parties, love to jump at such opportunities to discredit one another, as if waging wars in other countries is an exclusively local American affair.
Days are long gone when the US labored to establish coalitions to wage war, as it did in Kuwait and Iraq in 1990-91 and, to a lesser extent, again, in Iraq in 2003. Now, wars are carried out as a matter of course. Many Americans seen to be unaware, or oblivious to the fact, that their country is actually fighting wars on several fronts, and is circuitously involved in others.
With multiple war fronts and conflicts fermenting all around, many are becoming desensitized. Americans particularly have, sadly, swallowed the serum of perpetual war, to the extent that they rarely mobilize in any serious way against it.
In other words, a state of war has become the status quo.
Although the US Administration of President Barack Obama has killed thousands, the majority of whom were civilians, there is no uproar nor mass protests. Aside from the fact that the Obama brand was fashioned to appear as the peaceable contrast to warmongering George W. Bush, there has been no serious change in US foreign policies in the Middle East in any way that could suggest that one president is “better” than the other.
Obama has simply continued the legacy of his predecessor, unhindered. The primary change that has occurred is tactical: instead of resorting to massive troops’ buildup on the ground with an assignment to topple governments, Obama has used airstrikes to target whoever is perceived to be the enemy, while investing in whoever he deemed “moderate” enough to finish the job.
To continue reading: War To ‘Stop’ War: Libya’s ‘Operation Odyssey Lightning’
