Toby Helm and
Martin Chulov of the
Guardian an write an article entitled
US 'set to launch air strikes' on senior Isis terror chiefs in Syria, which reports that the U.S. and EU countries are putting pressure on Turkey to stop the movements of jihadists across its border to oppose Assad of Syria.
The United States was said to be considering air strikes aimed at eliminating individual leaders of Islamic State as Turkey came under mounting pressure to stem the flow of jihadists across its border into Syria.
As Washington on Saturday debated extending air strikes into Syria, senior British politicians urged Ankara to act to block recruits from the UK and other countries from entering Syria via Turkey, en route to joining Islamic State (formerly Isis). This weekend large numbers of Isis jihadists were trying to secure greater control of the border area, pushing northwards in armoured trucks looted from abandoned Iraqi military bases.
Isis wants to establish dominance in the area to make it easier for potential recruits to gain safe passage and to allow the movement of vital supplies, including weapons and oil. The route has been used by most of the foreign fighters who have joined the cause, and is believed to have been taken by several hundred of those who have joined Isis from the UK.
I haven't had a chance to carefully study the recent developments in Iraq and the Islamic State but already have mixed feelings due to a concern that neocons will find a way to drag the U.S. back into a major war in this region to continue their long-held plan to 're-engineer' the Middle East. If we could be guaranteed these strikes would be of limited duration with specific finite objectives they may contribute to national security objectives.
The article mentions that we also are considering fighting the Islamic jihadist where ever they appear in what appears to be a creeping backslide into a never ending "war on terrorism" where we will have essentially committed ourselves to World War III on Islamic militants no matter what country they reside in without any congressional debate and as if this is no big deal.
We essentially have already done this and the more I think about it the more I oppose it. This seems to be a self-propagating war and insertion of ourselves into a 1,000 old religious war and other battles that if can gain energy independence are really not of primary interest to us and we would not be a primary target of the Islamist militants if we were not attacking them.
I realize this is an oversimplification but I can not approve of an open ended world wide war, which is ended to go on for decades, which creates enemies of people who otherwise may not really care about us, and and which may violate the sovereign boundaries of perhaps over four dozen countries many of whom might otherwise be our allies.
I no longer trust what any of our political leaders say about matter of foreign policy which seems to have been hijacked once again by neocons.
President Obama's speech at West Point was excellent as a theoretical ambition and framework, however, I am increasing unclear about how our current and recent actual actions, especially the use of a world-wide network of assassination drones is consistent with the espoused aspirations.
Even more sadly, it appears that the Obama administration may represent a "high water mark" of the appearance of any thing remotely like progressive values in our foreign policy which the neocons may be in the process of successfully locking up for he foreseeable decades after the last two years of Obama's administration.
The train is leaving the station on whatever Democratic-progressive foreign policy paradigm we wish to leave and I fear we have not come close to what should have been, and still be our objectives, but time may have already run out.
Damn, I hate it when things like this happen.