Monday, March 18, 2013

Obama and Rand Paul's Cylon Wars

The always-thoughtful Charles Krauthammer authors another intelligent gem, this time discussing the rise of drone warfare and Rand Paul's famous filibuster effort. Krauthammer delivers the key to understanding Paul's objections when he notes that his filibuster was "theatrically brilliant and substantively irrelevant." Rand Paul's real issue is that the US is actually fighting back against an enemy, and it is an issue that has hurt libertarian thinking forever. Rand is sneakier than his father Ron Paul, who was maddeningly myopic on American power and America's enemies, but Rand Paul's real objection is to the US actually defending itself.

Krauthammer brilliantly notes the complete and utter hypocrisy of Democrats, who routinely object when Republicans are in power and fight back against America's enemies.   Barack Obama's pious opposition to victory over Saddam Hussein's Iraq illustrates Democratic hypocrisy as Obama uses attack drones for pinprick raids on Islamo-Arab terrorist nests - the only thing missing is the building of Cylon base stars from which to launch these attack drones - and the result has been over 4,000 dead terrorists - as a substitute for actually defeating Islamo-Arab terrorism.

The reality remains that terrorism is state-sanctioned war by proxy - Iraq was its largest sanction state and now Iran and Syria are the largest sanction states.  The myth of rogue terrorist groups - the Osama Bin Elvis ideology or what I call The Ernst Stavro Blofeld Myth of international terrorism - is what has driven US policy and it remains foolish because only the overthrow of the states that sanction  it will bring it to an end.   And the US has had that in Iraq yet is steadily throwing it away because of Obama's obsession with withdrawal from the Middle East.

Drone warfare remains a pathetic pinprick substitute, and no matter what Obama or Rand Paul do to wish it away, it won't leave until the US stops leaving and starts going for real victory.

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