“The Obama administration has reached what one might call the ‘Pol Pot Aftermath’ of its Middle Eastern policy,” Richard Fernandez writes, neatly summing up the hell of today’s Iraq and how it was spawned:
The entire map of the Middle East has been transformed into a 21st century version of the European Bloodlands. But the most remarkable thing is this catastrophe was enabled in a fit of moral superiority. Roger Kimball, speaking to an audience in Sydney observed that most striking property of modern political correctness was narcissism. For the ultimate source of leftist legitimacy is the view that they are better simply persons than the rest; able to make moral judgments no one else can. Their self-regard is almost erotic. They’re in love with themselves. Or to paraphrase one the president’s campaign lines: ‘we are the people the world has been waiting for.’
We’re ready for our moral close-ups.
Something of this present tragedy was foreshadowed in the casual way with which the Left regarded the exodus of the boat people from Vietnam and the Cambodian Killing Fields as collateral damage; something ironic in an anti-war movement that finishes up empowering the greatest seaborne exodus in the history of the world and the massacre of millions.
But if there’s irony it escapes them. After all, ‘how could we have known,’ they ask, ‘that the people we supported were murderers? We meant well.’
We meant well. And to make up for the sins of the past, the world is sentencing two two doddering officials of the Khmer Rouge regime (that’s ‘Red Khmer’ to those of us who can’t read French) convicted of ‘crimes against humanity’ to life. And maybe 50 years from now they’ll round up some former ISIS fighters in wheelchairs and walkers and sentence them to life as well. As for the Yahzidis, they’ve been sentenced to death.
Mark Steyn adds that “ISIS are fast-track Nazis:”
No messing about with a few property restrictions and intermarriage laws as a little light warm-up: They’re only in the business of “final solutions”, and they start on Day One and don’t quit until the last Christian and Yazidi is dead or fled. As I’ve often remarked about today’s exhaustively cleansed Maghreb, Levant and Araby, Islam is king on a field of corpses. But pikers like the Muslim Brotherhood, the Baathists, the House of Saud take their time. ISIS are shooting for the Guinness Book of Records.
Fortunately, progressive opinion in the west hates Jews more than it loves Christians or Yazidi or Shia or Kurds, so ISIS can get on with killing everyone they want to kill. George Packer reports in The New Yorker:
Karim couldn’t help expressing bitterness about this. “I don’t see any attention from the rest of the world,” he said. “In one day, they killed more than two thousand Yazidi in Sinjar, and the whole world says, ‘Save Gaza, save Gaza.’ “
Indeed. But you have to pick your causes. To put pressure on Netanyahu, you fly in John Kerry to bore him to death. To put pressure on ISIS would require a commitment the west is not willing to make. So Christians will vanish from the region, and the Yazidi will vanish from the world.
At Hot Air, Allahpundit adds that unlike the original Nazis, ISIS sure loves taking a few selfies of a hard day’s work in the killing fields:
A portrait of America’s new enemy, courtesy of Britain’s Daily Mail. Or rather, a self-portrait: The pics were taken and circulated online by ISIS itself. This is how they want the world to see them. The Einsatzgruppen shied away from photos when it came time to line people up and gun them down (although some pictures did emerge, of course). Over time, even the dregs of humanity within the SS began to feel the psychological weight of blasting defenseless civilians standing right in front of them, which led Himmler to brainstorm a less messy form of mass murder. Scroll through the Mail photos and see if you can find any trace of misgivings. One jihadi is smiling while he saws a man’s head off. However many of these degenerates we end up killing, we’re not killing enough.
Allahpundit concludes that Obama is returning to Iraq purely for selfish reasons:
Now that he’s a lame-duck president and most liberals are willing to defend anything he does, up to and including risking a constitutional crisis by unilaterally rewriting federal immigration law, he’s more worried about his legacy than about an election. If he stands by while ISIS slaughters thousands of people (sorry, thousands more people than they’ve already slaughtered), that’ll be his legacy — the man who won the Nobel Peace Prize, finally got us out of Iraq, and then did jack while jihadi Nazis took over the country. The politics changed, so he did too.
Finally though, to bring this post full-circle with Richard Fernandez’s summation of where things stand in Iraq and the deja-vu feeling of it all, at Ricochet, Jon Gabriel sums up the existential dilemma of Obama and the American left (which is all rather more relaxed that the existential dilemma of ISIS’s victims):
After eight years of dishonest rhetoric about Bush’s greedy war for oil and empire, Obama now must explain why his air strikes are of a superior morality. And if Obama does achieve military success in Iraq, will progressive Democrats ever forgive him?
Oh, of course they will — they wouldn’t be very hip, otherwise, now would they?
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