According to current Secretary of State Kerry, Assad's gassing of nearly 500 children represents a "moral obscenity." One wonders, however, what Kerry would think of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's assertion that the death of 500,000 children due to sanctions against the Iraqi government were "worth it."
A few months after Albright asserted that half a million dead Iraqi children was "worth it" because it prevented the proliferation of WMDs, she was confirmed to be Bill Clinton's Secretary of State. During her tenure as Secretary of State, Albright asked General Colin Powell: "what’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?" Powell and the Pentagon were hesitant about striking Yugoslavia.
The situation today could not be more different. Back in June, Kerry wanted the Pentagon to begin bombing Syria. In a manner similar to Powell, General Dempsey: "threw a series of brushback pitches at Kerry, demanding to know just exactly what the post-strike plan would be and pointing out that the State Department didn’t fully grasp the complexity of such an operation... There are those in the Pentagon who think that the State Department has romanticized the Syrian opposition. What diplomats see as a civil war featuring bands of poorly armed moderates struggling to free themselves from the grip of an evil dictator, the generals see as a religious war between Hezbollah and al-Qaeda."
Fast forward three months, and Kerry is even more keen for war. According to Stratfor: "Obama might bring down the [Syrian] regime and create a Sunni government of unknown beliefs, or he may opt for a casual cruise missile attack... This could cause Russia to suffer a humiliation similar to the one it [Russia] dealt the United States in 2008 with Georgia... His [Putin] greatest strength has been to create the illusion of Russia as an emerging global power."
Though Putin apparently saved the day by encouraging the Syrians to hand over their chemical weapons, it will not placate Secretary of State Kerry. Kerry doesn't trust the Russians and he doesn't want them to give the world the impression that they are a power that can hold off the might of the US army. Only time will tell if Obama's Nobel peace prize was truly deserved, or if he will like Clinton succumb to the hawkish inclinations of his Secretary of State.
Clinton's Kosovo |
Fears of a nuclear Iran and of Israelis being gassed could just convince Obama to follow Clinton's precedent in bombing Yugoslavia. Obama's decision to bomb Syria may not come down to preventing a war, but to sending a message about American power. If 500,000 children should die, then it will be worth it because Iran didn't go nuclear and Syria's WMDs came under control. In the same way that Kosovo has a statue to Bill Clinton, so may one day there be a statue to Barack Obama.
Henry Kissinger has already proclaimed on Syria: "a dictator is killing his own people and he has to be punished... The Alawites are Shiites... Syria is a historic Sunni country... This is a civil war with sectarian roots... I'm in favor of removing Assad."
Kissinger would later add: "there are three possible outcomes. An Assad victory. A Sunni victory. Or an outcome in which the various nationalities agree to co-exist together but in more or less autonomous regions, so that they can’t oppress each other." Kissinger would later say that he prefers a Balkanized Syria, and you can be sure that the shadow of Clinton's legacy is currently strong over Obama.