This is how it happens after years of fighting wars we never should have fought in the first place, after a war in Iraq that was the most corrupt and criminal in all of American history.
This is what it is like after Iraq and Afghanistan, and now that we are faced with an enemy like ISIS: We talk now about a real war, one that needs to be fought. Only we don't want to fight it ourselves.
After all the wasted lives and ruined lives because of George W. Bush's wars, after the insane amount of money that was spent, now we declare war on ISIS. Only we do it with somebody else's troops - we just don't know which ones yet. We form a coalition; we just don't know for sure who its members are going to be. It's not exactly the invasion of Normandy.
When White House chief of staff Denis McDonough was asked on 'Meet the Press' on Sunday which of our allies has pledged to put troops on the ground in Syria, just because no reasonable person actually believes you can wipe out ISIS with air attacks any more than you can cure cancer with them, this is what McDonough said:
'You will hear from Secretary (of State) Kerry that countries are saying that they're ready to do that.'
It will be interesting to see which of our allies does raise a hand and step forward, because they all fear what President Obama fears about ISIS: That once there are troops on the ground, the men in the black masks won't be murdering journalists or British aid workers - they will be murdering soldiers one at a time.
So for now, then, our country's war strategy goes something like this: Let's you and them fight.
When finally faced with an enemy that is an actual danger to the United States of America, something Saddam Hussein never was for five minutes, there is barely enough support for war to fit inside a shot glass. After all the years of dumb wars, we stand on the sidelines and bark out signals for others to fight one now.
We talk tough enough, try to say the right things, and rouse support for troops, even if they're going to be somebody else's troops. The President has done that, so has Vice President Biden, who talked about chasing ISIS to the 'gates of hell.' On Sunday, it was British Prime Minister David Cameron, responding from 10 Downing St. to the murder of one of his own, David Haines.
'David has been murdered in the most callous and brutal way by an organization which is the embodiment of evil,' Cameron said. 'We will hunt down those responsible and bring them to justice, no matter how long it takes.'
Haines was murdered the way an American journalist named James Foley was murdered and the way another American journalist, Steven Sotloff, was murdered. And if our country puts Special Forces on the ground to set the targets for these air attacks that we keep hearing about, then before long it will be a member of U.S. Special Forces kneeling in an orange jumpsuit.
So this is where we are, 13 years after 9/11, when we learned that there was a kind of evil in the world that hijacked airplanes and flew them into the towers of the World Trade Center and into the heart of Washington, D.C. Osama Bin Laden became the face of evil. Only now, the new face of evil is no face at all - it is just these black masks.
Here we are after George W. Bush started a war in Iraq over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that did not exist, after Dick Cheney, that old fool, told us we would be greeted as liberators in that country, trying to decide if we can trust Syria and its own corrupt leader, Bashar Assad, to help us wipe out ISIS. Of course, this after all the years when Syria tried to sabotage this country and its interests in Iraq.
You wonder what all the old war lovers in Washington think now about what they said when Bush took us into Iraq, about the consequences of supporting that war, the cost of that war all this time later. That means John Kerry, who was for the war until he was against it, and Hillary Clinton, who even now sounds like enough of a budding neocon that you think she intends to run for President as the candidate from The Weekly Standard.
There is a war that actually needs to be fought now in the Middle East, against an enemy that beheads innocent people as if making Instagram posts.
This is an Al Qaeda that doesn't come out of the sky but spits right in our eye. We know we have to fight back. We talk big about fighting back. We just don't want to do it with our own troops. Let's you and them fight.
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