‘To the end of history’...

‘social orders will probably destroy themselves in an effort to prove they are indestructible.’ So said mid-20th century Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

So now, we are officially arming al-Qaeda in Syria, and in doing so declaring war against ‘80% of the Syrian people’, including all the Christians. Based on the supposed evidence that Syria’s government has used chemical weapons on its own people. Evidence that Jeffrey Lewis didn’t accept one and a half months ago, and which has not looked more convincing with age. Evidence the Russian government also doesn’t accept, but what do they know? They only warned us about the Boston bombers, so why bother listening to them, right? Oh, and I’ve got Dubya on the line from 2002; he wants his flimsy pretext back.

But who needs Dubya when you’ve got Bill Clinton calling you a wuss and a fool for doing something so cowardly and unmanly as listening to the American electorate when there’s a puny little country on the other side of the Atlantic which needs a good carpet-bombing fuelled by Hitler comparisons and pants-wetting hyperbole of appeasement against naysayers. The road to Damascus leads, apparently, through the blackened, smoking ruins of Belgrade, as if it could ever have come from anywhere else. The other Clinton, along with the usual suspects Power and Rice who precipitated the genocidal debacle in Libya (and by extension Algeria and Mali), have sadly not packed up and gone home yet. And you have John McCain bawling that we aren’t causing nearly enough remote-control destruction. Now there’s one guy I won’t be sad to see go.

It’s a sad, sad day, though, when the sole voice of reason on Syria is Rand freaking Paul.