Everywhere Is War: World Edition

 America is one hell of a schizophrenic bastion of phony democracy.

Depending upon geography, the ethnicity of the target populations, and the politicians being bribed, America the Exceptional either drops proxy bombs on people (Gaza), direct-drones people ("tribal" areas), or drops packages of food, water and medicine on a carefully vetted few (a remote mountaintop in Iraq) as P.R. cover for a bombing campaign that benefits multinational oil companies ("American interests.")

To be fair, if ISIS was attacking the Gaza Strip instead of Northern Iraq, I think President Obama would also be falling all over himself condemning the genocide and defending the right of Palestinian children to live and breathe.... based purely on their physical proximity to Israel. When it's Netanyahu's terror state doing the attacking, there are of course no American planeloads of sustenance arriving to help those embargoed, starved, bombed-out victims.

To the contrary. Since the U.S. Senate has, in fact, just unanimously allocated more money to Israel for its incremental extermination of the petroleum-poor inmates of the world's largest outdoor prison, I think it's obvious to anyone paying attention that the leaky wreck of state known as the USS Hypocrisy sailed a long time ago. And all the expensive propaganda pumps in the world can't keep up with the bilge.

Obama picks and chooses his lucky humanitarian recipients based solely upon their profit potential. The world is taking notice.

 Yet, in what is increasingly looking like World War Three, Obama is portrayed by the stenographic corporate media as either a hopeless wimp (right wing/neocon/Fox/CNN) or as a reluctant warrior bound by his noble moral impulses (right of center/neoliberal/r2p/ {"responsibility to protect"}New York Times/MSNBC).

Here's how the Times' White House insider Peter Baker spins it,  

In sending warplanes back into the skies over Iraq, President Obama on Thursday night found himself exactly where he did not want to be. Hoping to end the war in Iraq, Mr. Obama became the fourth president in a row to order military action in that graveyard of American ambition.

The mandate he gave to the armed forces was more limited than that of his predecessors, focused mainly on dropping food and water. But he also authorized targeted airstrikes “if necessary” against Islamic radicals advancing on the Kurdish capital of Erbil and others threatening to wipe out thousands of non-Muslims stranded on a remote mountaintop.

Notice the immediate emphasis on the rescued being non-Muslims, lest the Islamophobes fret.

As he explained himself to a national television audience, Mr. Obama made a point of reassuring a war-weary public that the president who pulled American forces out of Iraq at the end of 2011 had no intention of fighting another full-scale war there. Yet his presence in the State Dining Room testified to the bleak reality that the tide of events in that ancient land have defied his predictions and aspirations before.

The road to hell is paved with good fake intentions. Baker forgets to mention that Obama very much wanted to keep boots on the ground in Iraq before ostensibly pulling out in 2011. But the Iraqis refused to sign a Status of Forces agreement, which would have given American contractors and troops immunity from prosecution for their imperialistic crimes, misdemeanors and those unfortunate atrocities that crop in every war where testosterone runs wild. And what does Obama's telegenic presence in the State Dining Room (instead of the intimate Oval Office) signify? Baker doesn't explain. Does it mean that Obama is hungrily awaiting his dinner? Somebody please tell me!

Baker continues quoting Obama's televised speech:

“I know that many of you are rightly concerned about any American military action in Iraq, even limited strikes like these,” he said. “I understand that. I ran for this office in part to end our war in Iraq and welcome our troops home, and that’s what we’ve done. As commander in chief, I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq.”

Many of us are rightly concerned about military actions all over the planet. Ukraine. Libya. Yemen. Afghanistan. Pakistan. Africa. Central and South America. The thousand known military bases throughout the globe and the unknown number of CIA/Special ops black sites and outposts. A Pentagon/Surveillance State budget in the stratosphere.

 Sorry, Obama: the United States is the dragon, not the drag-ee.... and the rest of the world is its state dinner flambé.

But let the Times continue spinning its rusty wheels:

Mr. Obama has spent months resisting just that. Even after the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, seized Falluja and other territory in the western part of the country at the beginning of the year and marched through Mosul and toward Baghdad by summer, the president expressed no enthusiasm for American military action.

... in that particular locale, seeing how it evokes so many memories of the "folks" who tortured other folks and lied their way into war and essentially left Iraq in ruins. Obama is more enthusiastic about starting a new cold war against Russia, with his fascist Ukrainian neocon-installed puppets, and waging his myriad secret wars to keep up the pretense that he actually deserved his Nobel Peace Prize. He single-handedly ruined Libya, of course, and was ultimately prevented at the last minute from bombing the hell out of Syria based on what turned out to be trumped-up evidence of sarin attacks by the government.

In June, he sent in 300 special forces troops not to fight but to assess the situation, an assessment that has yet to be completed, and he increased surveillance passes over Iraq. But Mr. Obama rebuffed calls, including those from within his administration, to quickly send in air power to hit ISIS forces.

Aides said his hand was not forced until ISIS won a series of swift and stunning victories last weekend and Wednesday night against the Kurds in the north, who have been a loyal and reliable American ally, especially compared to the Baghdad government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. ISIS threats to wipe out Yazidis and other religious minorities trapped on Mount Sinjar, they said, added to the urgency.

He crept the mission and waited for the necessary crisis. Despite the best efforts of the NSA and the CIA, they never even saw ISIS (their own Frankenstein monster) coming. CNN and the Washington Post are among the bloodthirsty outlets manically reporting that this failure of intelligence is all Edward Snowden's fault. The smell of official desperation is everywhere.

“You don’t have to have a ton of insight to know he feels reluctant,” said Douglas Ollivant, a former Iraq adviser in the White House under Mr. Obama and President George W. Bush. “He wants the Iraq problem not to exist. And that’s exactly what the American people sent him to the White House to do.” But “all these factors may kind of drag him kicking and screaming into some kind of decision.”

Like I said.... the smell of official desperation is everywhere. Poor Barry just wants to go golfing, and reality will not let him. Can it get any more maudlin? I think we can count on it. Read the rest of the article, but be warned: there are gobs of viscous verbal treacle ahead. It's a veritable follow-the-money guide to the seamless transition between the brutal Bush and Obama administrations and how the various players have profited. Ollivant, for example, is a paid war-mongering network shill and venture capitalist whose tentacles extend throughout the media-military-industrial complex.

Meanwhile, ceasefire ended, the Israel-Gaza war has resumed, with another child killed in Gaza by the Netanyahu terror machine as he played near a mosque. With more than one Palestinian faction negotiating, the hellish nightmare seems bound to continue for the foreseeable future.

The fighting in Ukraine rages on.

And closer to Home Sweet Homeland, drug-addled Texas Governor Rick Perry is deploying 1,000 National Guard troops to the Mexican border to battle the "alien invasion." In what sounds uncomfortably close to a genocide precursor, he is even using game wardens to hunt down migrants. Animalization is tantamount to dehumanization.

And now for some perspective.

In other news, a respected climate scientist was so rattled by the recent discovery of vast plumes of methane streaming up from the Arctic sea floor that he sent out this S.O.S. tweet to the whole warring world:

“We’re on a trajectory to an unmanageable heating scenario, and we need to get off it,” he (Jason Box) said. “We’re fucked at a certain point, right? It just becomes unmanageable. The climate dragon is being poked, and eventually the dragon becomes pissed off enough to trash the place.”