Golly.Thank goodness for small mercies. It looks as if it's going to be a peaceful long weekend after all.
Apart from the roar of fighter jets flying low over my house on final approach to the nearby air show. Because there's nothing like being woken up by a CF-18 eh?
But at least the big Syrian Air Show has been temporarily grounded. Obama blinked, and that show has been postponed.
After staring deep into his political soul over Syria, Barack Obama blinked. Stunning his advisors, his opponents, and the rest of the world, Obama chose to rein in his own power, and asked Congress to authorize a military intervention he had been set to wage alone.
So Congress can share the burden of this decision, and the blame if things go wrong. Or just bite the car.
"Big move by (Obama). Consistent with his principles. Congress is now the dog that caught the car," said the president's political guru, David Axelrod on Twitter.
And Obama can live up to what he once believed in:
In 2007, Obama, a former constitutional law professor criticized ex-president George W. Bush for endless, unaccountable wars. "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation," he told The Boston Globe.
Which makes him look
But leaves Stephen Harper looking like a warmonger AND a tin pot dictator.
Cheerleading for a missile strike, while refusing to consult Parliament. Even though backing Obama means defying the United Nations, and giving him international legitimacy for a move that could prove DISASTROUS.
By triggering an all-out regional war in the Middle East between the Syrians, the Israelis, the Iranians, the Lebanese, the Turks, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda, the Sunni and the Shia. And with the Russians on Assad's side.
Even lead us to the brink of World War Three.
When there may be better ways to help the Syrian people and bring down a war criminal.
Intervention in the domestic affairs of any sovereign country has to be consistent with international law. This applies to everyone – Arab despots and their sometime western allies, whose moral authority can be just as suspect. There is every reason to take action over murdered children but running the risk of killing even more in a kneejerk military campaign should not be one of them.
I realize many Canadians think this is now an American debate. But the opinions of other countries can influence that debate. Canada still can help slowdown the rush to war.
And just because Obama boxed himself in foolishly, we should not follow him blindly or slavishly. We need to let the American people know what the Canadian people think. And the best way to do that is to demand a free vote in Parliament.
The stakes are too high to be left up to this morally corrupt
Tame the cowboy maniac before he helps leads us all to catastrophe.
Recall Parliament NOW...
Click here to recommend this post at Progressive Bloggers.
3 comments:
And we are asked to pick sides in a civil war between Hezbollah and al-Queda militias in Syria, or to believe that the interventionist impulses of western imperialist powers such as the US, France, Britain or Canada are motivated by humanitarian concerns and not some "regime change" initiative wherein the imperialist allies of yesteryear, Noriega, Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein become today's declared public enemy of humanity . How about simply deciding not to contribute to mass slaughter by opposing Canada's participation in such military adventure, irrespective of the result of a vote in Parliament......
I submitted the following to Warren Kinsella's blog in response to his advocacy of Western military intervention in the ongoing Syrian civil war:
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As pertains to your military interventionist argument with respect to the ongoing Syrian civil war, I would concur with the views expressed by retired Concordia University history professor and former director of Alliance Quebec Graeme Decarie in his blog The Moncton Times@Transcript.
In response to assertions " that Assad of Syria is a brutal monster, and the we have to help the freedom-livng "rebels" to get rid of him and establish a democracy" professor Decarie asserts in his blog on June 17:
"There is no mention that major supporters of the struggle for democracy are the dictators of the two most intolerant dictatorships in the world, Saudi Arabia and Qatar."
"I'm sure Assad is not a nice guy. But he almost certainly has more popular support than the "rebels" do. For openers, the 'rebel' forces are largely made up of people who aren't Syrian. Large numbers are hired mercenaries ... many members of or connected to Al Quaeda and other groups that this paper usually calls extremist and terrorist."
"There is not the slightest chance of a democracy emerging out of this. In fact, the 'rebels' are so divided against each other that there is not the slightest chance of forming a government of any sort. And the US knows that."
"The US is committed to nothing but war for the foreseeable future to establish military dominance so that American business can enjoy world dominance. The purpose of the war in Syria is to destroy Syria as a functioning country. The result has been to plunge the whole region into a chaos that could well draw in Russia and China."
Professor Decarie continues with a further contribution June 19 on the Syrian civil war :
"Obama has taken a giant step to bringing about a confrontation in Syria that could involve a total of at least six nuclear powers facing each other down. The declared reason is that the Syrian government is using poison gas. Obama is almost certainly lying..."
"That whole region is collapsing into chaos, largely the result of the walking disaster we call American foreign policy. Obama is Bush. And both Obama and Bush are puppets of big business in the US."
"The reality is that the disastrous US foreign policy of world dominance has created chaos, deadly suffering, profound chaos in the whole Moslem world as it pits Shiites against Sunnis. The west, with the Arab dictatorships has been supplying the weapons and the money to hire mercenary thugs. Whole nations are being destroyed."
"The geniuses behind this are the same geniuses who planned the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of them tragic failures - the very, very wealthy want the resources and cheap labour of those countries - and damn the consequences. The "victory" in Iraq killed over a million, destroyed the infrastructure, and the country is now collapsing. The war in Afghanistan never had a clear purpose. It has won nothing despite appalling cost."
On June 29 professor Decarie argued :
"Recently, a Christian monastery in Syria was looted and burned by "rebels", the side that we support. The bishop was taken to a public square where he was beheaded. The 'rebels' then announced they intend to kill all Christians in Syria. Counting Catholics, there are some nine million Christians in Syria."
"These are the rebels that the US, Saudi Arabia, Quatar, Turkey, Britain, France have been supporting and supplying since the beginning of the war. In fact, it is those countries that set up the war in the first place. The US is now stepping up the shipment of weapons to the 'rebels' - pretending it has never done so before, and assuring us all that weapons will not be sent to 'bad rebels'. The bad rebels also have close ties with Al Quaeda, the organization that Mr. Obama has declared evil, and the greatest threat to the western world."
"The assurances that the weapons will go only to 'good rebels' are ridiculous. Once those weapons hit Syria, they're up for grabs."
"As well, the 'rebels' almost certainly have acess to chemical weapons, and even nuclear ones. " ....
Professor Decarie continued on July 6 with the assertion:
"And that may explain why American foreign policy has been such a slow-motion train wreck for the last fifty years and more. In the Moslem world, for example, the west, led by the US for the last half-century, has created sectarian wars of the sort that has blown Syria apart, and seems well on the way blowing Africa and much of Asia apart."
"Indeed, the existence of what some people call 'extreme' Islam owes almost everything to the century-old abuse of Moslem countries by western business, then really set aflame by a hatred campaign against all Moslems encouraged by the George Bushes of this world, and by western news media to justfy the indiscriminate killing of Moslems to open the way to profit for big business. That's why we now have civil wars between the 'extreme' Moslems that we have created, and the more moderate Moslems."
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