Them’s my sentiments precisely
Thank you, Ben Sargent!
Archive of posts filed under the Middle East category.
Lindsey Graham is frightened
“Americans will be ‘killed here at home’ unless he [Obama] sends ground troops into Iraq and Syria to defeat the terrorist threat.” Lindsey, Senator, buddy: should we give you an M-16 or a bazooka and send you over there with the Special Forces? Or do you have someone’s apron to hide behind? Jeebus. Where is …
Nonsense
Israel equating Hamas’s rockets to the IDF’s air strikes is the purest form of sophistry: “a subtle, tricky, superficially plausible, but generally fallacious method of reasoning.” There have been at least 145 Palestinian deaths since this all began on Tuesday. There have been zero Israeli deaths. Who the hell are the Israelis trying to kid? …
No, Egypt, no
There’s not a whole lot of sympathy toward the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe or the United States, but sentencing 683 members of the group to death after a two-day group trial might just raise some. An Egyptian court sentenced the leader of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and 682 supporters to death on Monday, intensifying a …
Iran’s nuclear deal with Europe and the US
I’m cautiously optimistic about this deal; it’s interim, after all, which means its effects can be reversed if Iran doesn’t live up to its terms. Interim also means the United States Senate doesn’t get a chance to whack at it. Ordinarily that wouldn’t worry me, even though nearly every member of that body on either …
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“War-weary? Really?”
I keep hearing commentators say that Americans are “war-weary” and I keep thinking “well, no. Most Americans haven’t been directly affected by the Iraq and Afhanistan wars. Unless they have a service member in their family or on their block or in their workplace, they’ve probably been able to virtually ignore the violence being done …
Syria approval uncertain
President Obama is really gonna have to do a sales job on Tuesday when he speaks to the nation about Syria, and isn’t that ironic? A man who ran in 2008 in part on his not voting for that Middle East disaster called the Iraq War will now try to sell the people who voted …
Congress, do your job
Did President Obama read what Jim Fallows and I wrote? What else can explain his decision to ask Congress for authorization to strike Syria militarily? Okay, probably he didn’t read either of us. Asking this, however, is a great idea. It gets the Congress on record, which I’m sure the President and his aides think …
Syria
Some 140 members of the House (if not more by now) have written to the President demanding that he get written approval from Congress before firing missiles at Syria. Good. I say that for two reasons: one, Congress asserting its power to declare war rather than running and hiding is probably a good thing for …
Return to sender
Military strikes on Syria imminent, senior US officials say. The U.S. could hit Syria with three days of missile strikes, perhaps beginning Thursday, in an attack meant more to send a message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad than to topple him or cripple his military, senior U.S. officials told NBC News on Tuesday. Let me …