I watched the Sunday Talk Shows this morning and nothing was reassuring. Then I read the column from Richard Fernandez.
It makes sense. I have believed for some time that we are headed for a revolution. Maybe not an old fashioned bloody revolution but something is coming.
The anniversary of the U.S. war against the Islamic State passed with little notice. It was August 7 of last year that President Obama authorized the first airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq, a campaign he expanded a month later to include targets in Syria. So far this month, the president has delivered remarks on the Voting Rights Act, his deal with Iran, the budget, clean energy, and Hurricane Katrina. ISIS? Not a peep.
Obama’s quiet because the war is not going well … One of our most gifted generals predicts the conflict will last “10 to 20 years.” And now comes news that the Pentagon is investigating whether intelligence assessments of ISIS have been manipulated for political reasons.
His column today suggests that the Ship of State is drifting. He quotes Niall Ferguson’s article in the Wall Street Journal.
I have spent much of the past seven years trying to work out what Barack Obama’s strategy for the United States truly is. For much of his presidency, as a distinguished general once remarked to me about the commander in chief’s strategy, “we had to infer it from speeches.”
At first, I assumed that the strategy was simply not to be like his predecessor—an approach that was not altogether unreasonable, given the errors of the Bush administration in Iraq and the resulting public disillusionment. I read Mr. Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech—with its Quran quotes and its promise of “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world”—as simply the manifesto of the Anti-Bush.
Fernandez adds a few items.
Things are now so bad the media are now actually talking about the possibility of accidentally stumbling into World War 3. Not seriously yet, but for the first time since 1989 it has become plausible. Fear has made a comeback with the headlines full of stories about the expanding conflict in the Middle, possible civil strife in Turkey, millions of Middle Easterners landing on Europe’s shores, Russian tanks in Eastern Europe and Syra, and a possible collision between China’s fortified islands and the US Navy.
Two suicide bombers infiltrated a peace demonstration in Turkey and blew themselves up.
At least 95 people have been killed and around 250 wounded in the deadliest terror attack in Turkey’s history after two explosions targeted a peace rally in the centre of the capital.
Twin explosions outside Ankara’s main train station on Saturday morning targeted hundreds of people who had gathered to protest against violence between authorities and the Kurdish militant group, the PKK.
Last week Turkey shot down a Russian plane.
It comes amid heightening tensions between Putin and the West just days after another Russian bomber violated Turkish airspace.
F-16 fighters were scrambled after a MIG-29 twin-engined jet locked radar on Turkish planes near the town of Yayladagi, in Hatay province close to the border with Syria.
Turkish jets then escorted the Soviet-era aircraft back into Syrian airspace.
The incursion followed nearly a week of Russia’s devastating bombing campaign in Syria after President Vladimir Putin declared war on Islamic State (ISIS).
Note that both these stories are in British newspapers but are rare or not found in US papers. At least the New York Times called Obama’s strategy in Syria, “incoherent. “
the White House on Friday unveiled a plan that is even more incoherent and fraught with risk.
The Pentagon will stop putting rebel fighters through training in neighboring countries, a program that was designed to ensure that fighters were properly vetted before they could get their hands on American weapons and ammunition. The new plan will simply funnel weapons through rebel leaders who are already in the fight and appear to be making some headway.
What is going on ?
It’s possible events have taken the world beyond anybody’s control, with bad actors still rushing into the fray expecting restraint only to find none and in their surprise becoming engaged beyond their limit. What is certain is a growing number of observers are slowly becoming aware of the rising wind, growing in fury all the time. Ferguson still thinks the system can ride it out. He says if “this president has sown the wind. His successor will reap the whirlwind.” But the necessary question is “how big is this whirlwind”? Otherwise the successor will be in for it.
That is question no one has an answer to.
We are headed into uncharted territory and no one knows where this will end. Meanwhile, the Kardashian generation is ready for another left wing movie that contains little truth in spite of its title.
The film is not so much about Bush’s tarnished record and his uncertain number of days served in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War. Those issues are revisited, of course. But the movie instead focuses on the poignant personal stories of Rather, Mapes and others involved in the 2004 news broadcast. And the film shines an unflatteringly bright light on news media ownership in the Era of Corporate Media Consolidation.
The Huffington Post is preparing its readers for their version of truth.
Flash forward to the Sept. 8, 2004 60 Minutes II report on Bush and the Guard. The report included some memos that added to the overwhelming evidence that Bush had simply walked away from his sworn duties and responsibilities to the Guard in 1972. The memos were immediately attacked as forgeries, first by right-wing bloggers.
The fact that the “memos” could be shown to have been created on Microsoft Word, a word processing program that did not exist in 1972, has no influence on HuffPo’s breathless review of the movie. Are these people ready for what is coming or will it be a complete surprise ?