President
Obama’s decision to respond to the horror and conflict in Syria makes me think
of that line in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” where one of the characters says, “This
is as strange a maze as ever men trod.”
How
do you watch children and women and people of all ages being gassed to death,
writhing in convulsions and gasping for air, and not want to immediately do something
about it?
And
yet, how will throwing a few bombs at Assad’s air force do anything to change the
dynamic or stop the carnage?
I
believe President Obama is a man who truly wrestles with all of this. He obviously
is counting the political costs, but I do believe he is a man with a
conscience. I think he wants to do the right thing, but I’m not sure he knows
what is right in this instance. His “red line” comment was careless and not
well thought through. It put him in a spot where he is forced now to back
it up in some way.
But
let’s not pretend the Congress and especially all of the Republican/Tea Party
leaders are not playing politics with this as well. Many on the right are just
using the conflict as another way to attack President Obama and somehow shame
or discredit him.
I
watched some of the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing this week on
President Obama’s request to put together some kind of military response to
Assad’s use of chemical weapons on his people. Some of the questions and
comments by some of the members were just pathetic; nothing but petty attacks
on the President. Just the same old carping on and on about the most useless,
inane stuff that had no relevance to the real issues; it was just mud being thrown at
President Obama.
The
major players in this decision seem to me defeated. Secretary of State John
Kerry, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, and Joint Chiefs of Staff General
Martin Dempsey, are all aging men who seemed in the hearing to be bone weary in
answering the committee’s questions. And the President himself is getting
swaths of gray hair with each passing day. He seems at times drained by the ordeal;
his eyes are often bleary and empty, his voice robotic, his words jaded.
I
have heard nothing yet that sounds like a convincing argument for any kind of
military attack on Syria. At first, when I saw the news videos of those little
children helplessly trying to breathe, trying to stay alive after being
poisoned with gas, I was ready for the U.S. to go over there and level Assad’s
palace, destroy their entire arsenal of weapons, vaporize their planes and air
strips, and just wipe the place clean.
But
after coming out of that trance of anger I then began thinking we have no
business in this fight. Let Syria and the rest of the Middle East settle their
own problems. Yes, there will be bloodshed, and brutality of all kinds, and
senseless destruction. But how is our presence in the conflict going to change
any of that.
And who are the rebels fighting Assad anyway? We still don't know.
The
old TV series M*A*S*H, is a show set in the Vietnam War and showing, with
comedy and drama, the struggles of the men and women fighting it. In one scene where Hawkeye, a surgeon, and
Father Mulcahy, a priest, are talking about war there is this exchange:
Father
Mulcahy: War is Hell.
Hawkeye:
War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot
worse.
Father
Mulcahy: How do you figure, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye:
Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father
Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye:
Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them—little
kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost
everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
The
chance that more children and women, the elderly and other innocent bystanders,
not to mention our own pilots and perhaps our other soldiers, will be
senselessly killed if we get involved in Syria’s conflict is without question.
And for what purpose?
Whether
it’s chemical warfare or conventional warfare or nuclear warfare the result is
always the same. People die. People die horrible deaths. People die in their
homes. People die trying to run away. People die with their children cradled in
their arms. Buildings are flattened. Cities are destroyed. Whole cultures are
disrupted and thrown into chaos.
In
George Orwell’s harrowing novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” the message of “doublespeak,”
where the meaning of words are distorted or even reversed, rules society. And
so the people come to believe: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is
strength.”
If
we want something to fight, that is it.
©
2013 Timothy Moody
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