Obama Launches His War, Finally

[unhappycamper]

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2014/09/12/obama-launches-his-war-finally.html

Obama Launches His War, Finally
Melkulangara BHADRAKUMAR | 12.09.2014

The United States President Barack Obama unveiled in a major speech on Wednesday his strategy to «degrade and ultimately destroy» the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The strategy has no timeline and, quintessentially, the US will pit Muslims against Muslims in a grim war through the deployment of ‘smart power’, which would ensure that American casualties are avoided. From all appearance, it will also be a self-financing war funded by the petrodollar Gulf Arab states of the Middle East.

The strategy is built on three pillars – firstly, setting well-defined limits to the actual American intervention in military terms, secondly, resuscitating the ‘regime change’ agenda in Syria and, thirdly, dispensing with any mandate from the United Nations. In essence, it becomes a repackaged version of the crudely unilateralist US intervention in the Middle East by the George W. Bush administration.

Clearly, Obama delayed the unveiling of his strategy until the public opinion in the US ‘matured’. Opinion polls show a high degree of approval rating in America for renewed US military intervention in Iraq and Syria. The gruesome killing of two American journalists by the Islamic State has no doubt inflamed public anger. But the main factor is the fear that has been injected into the American mind through weeks and months of media campaign projecting that the Islamic State posed a direct threat to the US’s ‘homeland security’. The ploy indeed worked, as the opinion polls testify. Obama’s timing is perfect, as he deftly chose the eve of the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to unveil his strategy before the American public.

Curiously, however, with the ‘maturing’ of the public opinion successfully accomplished, Obama also took pains yesterday to scale down the fear psychosis in America by clarifying that the US has «not detected specific plotting against our [American] homeland» by the Islamic State although its leaders have «threatened America and our allies». Instead, he portrayed the Islamic State as posing threat to the «people of Iraq and Syria, and the broader Middle East – including American citizens, personnel and facilities».