Truest statement of the week

For example, there is now a great deal of liberal handwringing about the "tragedy" of Barack Obama being "sucked back" into the morass of Iraq. "He wanted change, he wanted to lead us away from this kind of thing, but now look! Despite his best intentions, here we are again." In most of these cases, Obama's predecessor gets the blame -- "Bush made a mess of Iraq, and now Obama has to clean it up."
(I don't recall seeing any commentary along these lines noting that Bill Clinton -- the husband of the next president of the United States -- also did yeoman service in making a mess of Iraq, having killed some 500,000 children with his pointless, punitive sanctions. He killed those children because Saddam wouldn't give up his WMD -- you know, the WMD he didn't have. Oh, how we rightfully scorned Bush for "going to war over false pretenses" about that phantom WMD; but the good old Big Dawg killed half a million children for the same knowing lie, and left Iraqi society in chaos.)
Anyway, we are now told that thanks to Bush, Obama is between a rock and a hard place, trying his dee-diddly-darndest to deal with those extremist beheaders of ISIS (with the help of the extremist beheaders of Saudi Arabia) without putting "boots on the ground." He wanted to change the system -- but it looks like the "Deep State" was too much for him. What a tragedy for him -- and for us.

Can we dispense briefly but decisively with this oleaginous bulls**t by making a single observation? A man who hand-picked George Bush's Secretary of Defense to serve as his own Master of War knew exactly what the system is -- and did not have the slightest intention of changing it. In fact, Obama has been phenomenally successful in expanding the system of violence and domination, extending it new areas, with new tools (Oval Office death squads! Assassinating innocent teenagers!) -- and bringing it all back home with hi-tech surveillance, whistleblower persecution and journalist prosecutions his predecessor could only dream of.



--  Chris Floyd, "All Systems Go: The Elite's View of the new Iraq-Syria War" (OpEd News).