this is what sucks about all of this murkiness in the Middle East, while Dems have their own issues with their own leaders, what the R’s have wrought is a stain on our national conscience…. by that I mean….

who caused the US to lose it’s moral compass on the issue of the use of Chemical Weapons in warfare, why it’s the R’s, who use of the CIA to allow Saddam to act as our proxy, encouraged the use of these weapons as we had our pride wounded by the regime change in Iran and were looking for any way to punish the Iranians for the temerity of overthrowing the tyrant that we helped put into power and did so in such a way, that everyone knows we did it. So we ended up trading our own moral compass for the sin of pride. Well done!

Then we get to Gulf War I, where George the First listens to whichever angel on his shoulder, doesn’t take out Saddam setting the stage for his son’s misadventures, completely expending and then bankrupting the global good will that was in the bank post 9/11. No game plan, no intel (or perhaps, more likely, ignored intel) and a general clusterfuck by the numbers. yeah, the bad guys are gone, but no one put away the groceries or has cleaned the dog poop out of the yard and now we’ve moved on and the new owners are left to sort things out on their own, with all of the instructions written in Japanese and no one there reads or writes it.

So now we come to this shit sandwich, which has now put us into the position of being able to watching folks kill each other and allow the old spectre of chemical warfare back onto the table because the last few guys who came by and messed around in here, left it worse off than when they came before….

Can Obama make things better? I can’t say, for the most part the guy has done an admirable job considering the wide away of shit that he’s had to deal with thus far, everything from “gently” guiding the Arab Nationalist movement, doing what he can to encourage Arab self determination where he can without combat troops and measured assistants against tyrants via political pressure and measured military intervention. I prefer to trust him to try and find a tricky path to a better outcome than what currently exists and get those weapons neutralized/confiscated//destroyed. Then allow the combatants to determine their outcome by more conventional means. Do I like it, not really, do I trust the guy in charge… yeah I do. This guy is thinking long term and not just what the possible repercussions are locally if the continued use of these weapons but what precedent is set by their use.

Also, that argument that “well they were used before and nothing has happened”, why do you think that is? Is it because folks didn’t have them or was it because it was the US getting it’s freak on by “plausible deniability” means and everyone knows it. I don’t think that Russia or China had the balls to call us on it and as such, no one stopped us but it wasn’t as if carte blanche was given to the rest of the world because of our own insanity. After all, we are the biggest bully on the block, who had the moral and military juice to challenge us… (and the fact that we put it on the table to begin with, will probably bite us in the ass more long term in this region than anything else).