Obama linked
Or did he? There is a scene common in most Hollywood B movies. The bad guy has his gun pointed to the good guy’s head. He should have pulled the trigger right then and there. End of story. But as all bad guys feel always the need to gloat, he puts in a line or two instead. It might just be any line at all. But it gives the good guy enough time to reload. The bad guy gets it instead.
Not that Obama is the bad guy here. He just makes it seem that much more ironic. George W. Bush would have pulled the trigger, without thinking, since it seemed not in his nature ever to think. He had the whole disparate US intelligence community to do that for him. But with all that Obama has said and unsaid, it seems now almost academic that an attack against Syria gets farther and farther away from happening. Good or bad? It all depends.
If the target goal is to see to it that Bashar al-Assad never gases his people again, then that target has already been hit, bull’s eye. Is the target to bring Syria to the negotiating table? We still have to see. But it is a good sign that Vladimir Putin is now ready to talk. If these stratagems achieve all these, we may yet see how Obama achieved the historically unprecedented feat of achieving US global interests without firing even a single shot. Of course, he had a lot of help from the American public.
In hindsight, historians might note this as a particular benchmark in contemporary geopolitics. We note immediately how different all these was from the Irag war. George W. Bush brought America into that on the strength of intelligence reports which turned out to be false and grossly exaggerated. Obama on the other hand blinked. Or did he?
The first reports on the gassing of civilians in Syria came from social networks. Assad in an interview noted how this was insufficient evidence for the Americans’ planned air strikes. He was wrong. By now everyone knows his guilt. And yet, this was the same social network which galvanized the American public’s staunch disinclination to war whatever the American intelligence community said or revealed. This proves simply that the American intelligence community has as much credibility with the public as Vladimir Putin, who has himself a history of gassing Chechnyans.
What all these indicates is that ‘intelligence” has come also to be part of the territory of social network. Edward Snowden was hardly saying anything new by revealing how governments were spying on people in the Net. But thanks to Snowden and people like him the opposite is also quite true. We can also see quite clearly what they are doing. The very concept of Spy vs. Spy intelligence has changed.
There is an image which gestalts in the mind from all these. Here is Obama with a very big gun pointed into the crumbling fortresses of Assad’s Syria. George W. Bush would have pulled the trigger bringing America and the world once again to war. Instead, Obama says he likes to fire as soon as possible but is willing to wait while he goes about what seemed at first like the foolish task of asking everybody what they thought. Given the world as it is now, he was not just asking the US Congress, the American public or the community of nations. He was asking everyone on the planet.
Even Pope Francis put in his money’s worth at the correct precise time. He gave the world a message spoken with all the perfect ambiguity of poetry: “Violence and war are never the way to peace! War always marks the failure of peace, it is always a defeat for humanity.”
And yet, while Obama points his gun at Assad, the collective judgement of the planet continues to form in ever clearer terms. Assad will never use his gas again without facing the ultimate consequence. The world is watching.
Perhaps some sort of war machinery may yet drive Obama to pull the trigger. In which case, he would lose entirely the singular advantage he has now. He does not seem that stupid even if some might say eventually that all these were all inadvertent; That Obama was not directing the script; That rather, he is just another player like all of us. But that has always been the genius of cinema. It is never a single person act. Even God it seems plays his appointed role.
And yes, we should all pray for peace. But perhaps it is also a good idea that God keeps Obama pointing his big gun at Assad for as long as it takes.
