Posted: 03 Sep 2013 05:38 PM PDT
In 2007, the new
Democratic Majority Leader defied President Bush by sitting down to meet with
a member of the Axis of Evil.
"We came in
friendship, hope, and determined that the road to Damascus is a road to
peace," Pelosi told reporters after her talks with Assad.
Now the road to Damascus is the road to war. And Pelosi and Obama are racing
down it along with everyone else.
Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour are nowhere to be found striding
insouciantly through the desert or hoofing it alongside a camel. This road
movie has an entirely different cast of characters.
It's a race against time. And a race for blood.
Forget the Grand Prix or the Daytona 500, the real race right now is the race
to Damascus. The racers include Syrian rebels in pickup trucks with mounted
machine guns and homemade tanks, toting weapons and equipment supplied and
paid for by Qatar and Turkey, and more covertly by the British and French
intelligence services. Racing along with them are carloads of international
diplomats urging their governments to give the militias more money and more
weapons.
Everyone is on the road to Damascus in this amazing race. Christian refugees
from Aleppo and Alawites packing in behind the tanks of the Syrian army,
Iraqi militias that used to plant IEDs in front of American Humvees who have
found new work blowing up churches and taking over Syrian bases.
There are international activists from around the world, reporters or
citizen-journalists embedded with the rebels, Russian advisers embedded with
Syrian units, Qatari trainers turning children into child soldiers with the
rebels and Turkish officers trying to get the entire rabble moving in the
right direction toward Damascus.
There are photographers with liberal arts degrees and two-thousand dollar
cameras and Flickr accounts working as stringers for some wire service while
keeping a Chomsky in their backpack and there are UK Jihadists who converted
to Islam after a childhood sipping the weak tea of the Church of England and
can't wait to text their Imam and find out which women they can rape in
wartime.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah's militias out of Lebanon are
shooting at Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood militias from across the Middle
East and even Europe in one of those unique displays of family entertainment
that you wish would go on forever, but that won't, because despite the
Hasish-fed bravado, supplemented with meth from Iran's top laboratories, the
whole shooting match only as long as it takes the side with the weakest
bladders to run away, and then both sides brag about their great victory on
YouTube and Facebook.
Imagine the Crips and the Bloods, armed to the teeth by every country from
Mexico to China, fighting over the ruins of California cities, and you get
some idea of the glorious Syrian civil war being fought by the Brave Syrian
People, most of whom at this point are about as Syrian as the Palestinians
are from Palestine, in a conflict that will determine once and for all who
will be ethnically cleansing whom next year.
The Syrian rebels are Sunni. The Syrian regime is Alawite, which is close
enough to Shiite for government work. This isn't some heroic battle between
the people and the dictator; it's a religious war.
America, as befits the nation that Obama described as one of the largest
Muslim countries in the world, is in the Sunni axis, ensconced somewhere
between the fattest child-molesting members of the Saudi and Qatari royals,
the Turkish Islamists, and the Eurocrats looking to score arms deals and win
over their domestic Sunni Muslims populations who have the unfortunate habit
of blowing things up.
On the road to Damascus, the politicians and pundits tell us that we cannot
simply sit things out. Someone is bound to remove Assad and we had better be
in good with whoever does.
The UK, which dragged Obama into Libya the way an elderly lady drags a poodle
into a pub, is frantically urging us to stop just looking the other way while
Qatar and Turkey arm the Syrian rebels, and to get into the rebel-arming
business ourselves. Considering how well that worked out in Libya, not to
mention a certain obscure part of the world, known as Afghanistan that we
never heard from again, we should probably hurry and start arming the Syrian
rebels right now.
The sooner we give them weapons, the less likely they are to use them against
us. Or so the reasoning of the people who brought you September 11 and
September 11 II: The Mohammed Video Diaries goes. And with a track record
like that, how could they possibly be wrong?
If
we give the right Syrian rebels the weapons, then they will win, instead of
the wrong Syrian rebels. But if we don't, then the wrong Syrian rebels will
win, and even the right Syrian rebels will hate us and turn wrong, and before
you know it they'll be shooting at us with the weapons we didn't give them.
Telling apart the right Syrian rebels from the wrong Syrian rebels is tricky.
The Free Syrian Army, once hailed as a moderate secular organization, has
more Al Qaeda in it than the dirt in Tora Bora. The new opposition set up by
Obama and Qatar consists of the Muslim Brotherhood and people with fake
mustaches pretending not to be the Muslim Brotherhood.
No serious thinkers seriously think that not siding with either side is an
option. When confronted with Muslim terrorists, they begin searching for
moderates in the rubbish bin, and with a working definition of a moderate
that includes anyone less extreme than the most extreme of the extreme, they
never have a problem finding moderates. And they keep finding moderate Syrian
rebels who will be our friends tomorrow for a few RPGs today.
Today we have to support the Muslim Brotherhood for fear that Al Qaeda will
take over. Tomorrow we will have to support Al Qaeda for fear that Al-Takfir
Wa Al-Hijra will take over. And then we'll have to support the Takfiris for
fear that Itbach Al-Kul Ulum will take over. And the day after our leaders
will have no choice but to nuke the entire planet for fear that an asteroid
will hit it instead. The radiation will be bad, they tell us, but at least
nuclear weapons are moderate. Asteroids are extreme. And no one, except
skateboarders, wants to be extreme.
It's Black Friday in Syria and just sitting at home, watching the game,
sipping a beer and wondering who's going to score in the third quarter, the
black flag Salafis, the Muslim Brotherhood militias, Hezbollah or a race of
demons erupting unexpectedly from the earth to devour all participants, never
occurs to the bright boys and girls down in D.C. No, they're dragging us into
line at five in the AM in the hopes of scoring a friendly Syria for only 40
billion dollars and maybe only twenty-thousand dead Christians.
The rebels are making their gains, or so the New York Times claims, while
Pravda claims that the Syrian government is beating back the rebels. It's
hard to know whose pravda to believe when all we have to choose from are
propaganda outlets that parrot the talking points of governments. In a Pravda
world, you don't read the news to find out what's going, you read the news to
find out what the government thinks about what is going and then you try to
derive from that what is truly taking place.
In this Plato's Cave version of the news, all that we know is that everyone
is racing to Damascus, and that everyone is winning and everyone is losing
and everyone is dying at the same time. And we're rushing right along with
them, hoping that our guys, who are slightly less murderous than their guys,
will defeat them, despite the murderousness gap, with the help of our
weapons, our planes and maybe a few of our guys, wearing sneakers and long
beards, coordinating operations on the ground.
If the Muslim Brotherhood can't non-violently seize power in Syria through a
violent civil war, there is a risk that they will turn to violence again. And
that means they'll start trying to violently take over countries without
going through the formality of fighting a civil war to take them over first.
Every leader of Al Qaeda was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but since
the Muslim Brotherhood, like the New Left, is willing to non-violently take
us over through front groups, rather than flying planes into buildings,
they're our idea of the good guys, even if they have the same objectives as
Al Qaeda, just a different way of getting there. But you could probably say
the same thing about the people who were running the USSR in 1933 and the
people who are running the United States and the European Union in 2013.
Obama isn't satisfied with wrecking just Libya, Tunisia and Egypt. Russia
isn't satisfied with financing 50 years of war in the region even though it's
on the verge of bankruptcy. President Hollande of France isn't satisfied with
being on the verge of bankruptcy and only wrecking Libya.
And like Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, they're all on the road to
Damascus. Or the road to hell.
And so on we go, all together, rebels and diplomats, throat-slashers and
powdered-hair personalities, embedded into a conflict, racing to Damascus,
eager to raise the flag, report on the historic moment, negotiate deals and
deliver speeches. Obama probably already has his written and it will probably
be the same exact speech he delivered when Mubarak fell and Gaddafi got
sodomized to death. There will be moving sentiments about hope and change,
peace and freedom, the choice of the people and the transition to democracy.
This road picture has the usual participants. The Western
diplomats who fall in love with the region, its culture and its people. The
Western politicians still dreaming that the region is just one more
revolution away from stability. But the lead is the fourth son of some upper
middle class family who grew his scraggly beard long and now dreams of dying
as a martyr for the Caliphate surrounded by white doves and whiter virgins.
There's the Qatari weapons trainer teaching 13-year-olds how to plant IEDs
and the Russian colonel, underpaid and hating the locals more than ever,
trying to get the ragtag Alawite militias to fight. There's the embedded
citizen journalist with fourteen differently colored keffiyahs in his luggage
blogging his experiences on Tumblr and the gang of local thugs who alternate
between taking potshots at Syrian army positions on behalf of the Free Syrian
Army and its Qatari and Turkish paymasters and kidnapping some of the
wealthier Christians for ransom, which pays even better.
There are Sunni and Shiite militia members from neighboring Lebanon and
Syria. There are Salafi Pakistanis fresh from Waziristan and Libyans looking
for a good brawl. There are Scud missiles and chemical weapons and broken
buildings, torn corpses and roads full of refugees fleeing for their lives.
There are tanks and jets and fleets. There are armies and militias,
truckloads of weapons and bodies, fire behind them and death ahead of them.
And they're all hurrying, running and racing to Damascus.
Where the real killing will begin.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger
and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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