Catholic and Enjoying It!
Pope Francis called upon Catholics and people of good will to help the desperate refugees fleeing ISIS and the various horrors of war being visited on their victims (a situation we labored mightily to create both with our war of choice and with our chaotic bi-partisan support of anti-Assad “freedom fighters” who turned out to be ISIS). But that makes the Party of Personal Responsibility look bad, much as Sandy Hook made it look bad.
Solution: blame the victims and paint them as cowards, invaders, terrorists, parasites, and monsters.
Special incoherency bonus points: Just a couple of days ago, the accusation was that cowardly men (like the grieving father of the dead toddler photographed on the beach) were sending wives and children ahead of them into Europe as anchors to ensure their own safe passage. This was supposedly why the father of the drowned boy was a moral monster, making his family go first.
Now the charge is that men are going first and are therefore moral monsters. The point is, it is the victims of war, oppression and ISIS who are somehow to blame, not the Party of Personal Responsibility’s reckless war or feckless nativism.
Not to let Obama off the hook here either. Note the date:
A revealing light on how we got here has now been shone by a recently declassified secret US intelligence report, written in August 2012, which uncannily predicts – and effectively welcomes – the prospect of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria and an al-Qaida-controlled Islamic state in Syria and Iraq. In stark contrast to western claims at the time, the Defense Intelligence Agency document identifies al-Qaida in Iraq (which became Isis) and fellow Salafists as the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” – and states that “western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey” were supporting the opposition’s efforts to take control of eastern Syria.
Raising the “possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality”, the Pentagon report goes on, “this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)”.
Which is pretty well exactly what happened two years later. The report isn’t a policy document. It’s heavily redacted and there are ambiguities in the language. But the implications are clear enough. A year into the Syrian rebellion, the US and its allies weren’t only supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups; they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state” – despite the “grave danger” to Iraq’s unity – as a Sunni buffer to weaken Syria.
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