It was easy enough for the USA to bomb Libya and eliminate Colonel Gaddafi, who had no foreign friends or allies except a few hundred millions of the most impoverished and brutalized citizens of Black Africa.
Poorer countries such as Liberia, Mali and Niger have relied on Libya for financial support and investment. Libya has won praise for providing humanitarian aid to the Darfuri refugees in Chad, and for helping to forge a ceasefire between Chad and Sudan.
This was Obama's kind of war, more intense but otherwise not much different from the daily drone-slaughter of defenseless Muslims in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and who even knows how many other countries.
BOMB BOMB BOMB the nameless citizens of some of the most miserable countries in the world, and then it's time for a romp and photo-op on the White House lawn with Bo the Wonder Dog!
But bombing Syria may not be such a romp for our carefree President, because Syria has some serious friends and allies, including Russia.
"Russia sends warships to Mediterranean as Syria tension rises," says the headline from Reuters, and this is only the most recent chapter of a major re-deployment of Russian warships in the eastern Mediterranean that began in June.
The navy’s Mediterranean presence, becoming permanent in for first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union more than two decades ago, will be modeled on the Soviet fleet stationed in the region during the Cold War. Russia’s Mediterranean fleet of 16 ships will visit ports in Syria, which hosts the country’s only military base outside the former Soviet Union, during a mission that will include missile practise, commander Yuri Zemskoy told Putin via video link during a news conference in Moscow today.
So it's more like a fleet instead of just a couple of ships, and the
Admiral Kuznetsov is also on the way!
Russia will deploy its only heavy aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, to the Mediterranean Sea by the end of 2013, a Russian military official announced earlier this week. The carrier will join the group of warships deployed to the Mediterranean earlier this year as part of a new permanent task force Russia established in the region largely in response to the ongoing hostilities in Syria, where Russia maintains a naval base.
And the Russians made sure everybody knows that their navy base in Syria is a
very big deal!
Over the last five months, numerous Russian naval officials, along with President Putin himself, have declared that Tartus, the naval base in Syria, is critical to Moscow’s security strategy. This has occurred in conjunction with Russia’s efforts to provide diplomatic cover for the Syrian regime at the UN.
So what could go wrong with our carefree President's latest adventure?
Russia continues to warn that military intervention will have "catastrophic consequences" for the wider region, including a rise in radical Islam. This week Russia's deputy prime minister tweeted that "the West is playing with the Islamic world like a monkey with a grenade".
On Wednesday, one of Russia's most popular tabloids, Komsomolskaya Pravda, warned that Western intervention could spark an East/West standoff akin to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. [I cannot make this link work here, but I also posted it twice in the comments, and it works both times.]
"If optimists in the Pentagon believe that Russia will limit itself to warnings and expressions of anger, like it did over Iraq and Yugoslavia, they may well be mistaken," the paper declared on its website.
Okay! Let's
replay the
Cuban Missile Crisis!
Or maybe instead we should take a deep breath and ask ourselves...
Is it really worth risking nuclear annihilation to replace Assad with a ragtag gang of jihadi nitwits?
Is it worth it to you?