At Least, He's Good at Something

"The United States is quietly rushing dozens of Hellfire missiles and low-tech surveillance drones to Iraq to help government forces combat an explosion of violence by a Qaeda-backed insurgency that is gaining territory in both western Iraq and neighboring Syria."

"The new signs of an energized but fragmented jihadist threat, stretching from Mali and Libya in the west to Yemen in the east, have complicated the narrative of a weakened Al Qaeda that President Obama offered in May in a landmark speech heralding the end of the war on terrorism. The leaders of the Senate and House intelligence committees, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California and Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, raised warnings...when they said that Americans were 'not safer' from terrorist attacks than they were in 2011."


 "Baghdad — Radical Sunni militants aligned with Al Qaeda threatened Thursday to seize control of Falluja and Ramadi, two of the most important cities in Iraq, setting fire to police stations, freeing prisoners from jail and occupying mosques, as the government rushed troop reinforcements to the areas."

 "Turns out I'm really good at killing people...Didn't know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine".--Barack Obama

    As the above quotes reveal, Barack Obama’s self-proclaimed “strong suit for killing” hasn’t added much to the empire’s military prospects. A dozen years after we used 9/11 as an excuse to make futuristic war on the feudal tribes of west Asia, it looks like the tribes are surging while we’re scrambling.
   Over this lost decade of faraway fighting, American have learned exotic words like jihad, taliban, Pashtun and al qaeda. But they have forgotten a perfectly common English word named victory.  It’s been all but banished from official discourse. The reason is that our leaders, with their stupid scorn of history, have finally learned the hard way that there is rarely victory when you make war between the Levant and the Hindu Kush. Instead, there are constantly shifting alliances, episodes of advantage and disadvantage, and few scorecards. For example, see the currently kissyface Saudis and Israelis worrying that Obama will cut a deal with evil Iran that leaves them in the dumper. Such gallimaufry is as good as it gets.
     And so neither Dems nor Reps, libs nor cons call for the impossibility of victory in Iraq, Afghanistan, Waziristan, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, etc.  In fact, they don’t say much at all about those places. They just keep signing the  bills for additional billions in arms and aid to keep the conflicts roiling and the Pentagon's gun runners fat and happy.
    Thus here we are a dozen years on, still fighting the same feudal foes with nothing much to show for it--apart, that is, from Barack Obama discovering that he’s far more adept at presiding over real death panels than helping Americans to be healthier