“The Bullies Emerge from the Bully Pulpit” an essay by Norma Brown

Note from Jim at Asylum Watch:

Today I am pleased to share with you a very special guest post. Special because of the author’s unique perspective and special because I asked her to write this essay on the pending entry of the US/NATO into Syria’s civil war;  she graciously agreed. Norma’s blog handle is Ooobie and her blog is Ooobie on Everything. Norma’s unique perspective comes from her career in the US State Department as a Foreign Service Officer. She was on the ground in Nicaragua during the Iran-Contra affair. She was on the ground in Kosovo during the months leading up to the decision by the US and NATO to use NATO forces for  offensive purposes against Kosovo. She lived for some years in Moscow. Norma knows how the State Department and the CIA work. I think you will be surprised by what she has to say.

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The Bullies Emerge from the Bully Pulpit

We have sat rapt before the bully pulpit of American imperialism, listening for many long months to the blabbermouths and big-shots of the neo-interventionist crowd tell us how urgently the world needs us to bomb Syria and perhaps dismember Bashar al Assad (I’m just assuming here). Yes. it was all we have been hankering after, or so asserts that addled rooster, John McCain. For people of John McCain’s views, it is an absolute moral responsibility of the White Man to shoulder the Brown Man’s burdens and Americans won’t be able to look at ourselves in the mirror, if we don’t flatten Damascus.

Finally, at last, hallelujah! The wait is over. We, the people of the United States, are about to bring more war to the people of Syria and surrounding countries, who apparently don’t have enough (without our help). Thousands of people, in addition to those whose blood is already on our hands, will perish in a mushroom cloud of violence after the US and its stooges in NATO pull the trigger. The President of the United States, an idiot of the first water, glided around talking about red lines no one dared cross, and then the Syrians, one party or another, had the audacity to use them. As if the fools running this country off the cliff of sanity never heard about how if you’ve got something, you’re going to ude something, whether a bigger rock or a nuclear warhead. The genie is out of the bottle. Meanwhile, the late great Mr. Obama’s personal popularity has plummeted and it seems every world leader who cam get away with it is yanking his chain. Never did an US president appear to all and sundry so weak, intellectually adrift and incompetent. Not even W.

I am not at all surprised that some weeks after handing the Syrian war to the CIA to run__ our patron saints of guerilla war __ the world is shocked into tortured outrage by the use of chemical weapons by somebody engaged in Syria’s civil war. That same somebody sniped at a UN convoy (oh, joy!). John Kerry knows that it is the Assad regime, no matter what anyone else says. We have the goods. The US is sure of it. I bet we are.

If you are saying to yourself, ” Is she suggesting that the CIA had something to do with the chemical weapons incidence?’, the answer is yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Of course they would never have personally used them, but plenty of proxies would be willing collaborators.

I mentioned in another post not long ago that the Agency was created for one purpose–running small coherent operations with a plan, a cast of characters, an endgame, and lots of money. But the Agency has developed all kinds of new purposes and resurrected old ones under the past couple of administrations and, also,  in response to terrorism. In the case of Syria and the use of chemical weapons, the operatives running the operation (aka war) are doing exactly what they are compelled to do by their very natures — meet the goal. They are bringing the very qualities for which they are recruited, which includes a knack for chicanery, deceit and manipulation, to a situation that is way, way above their pay grade. I can’t wait to see how it ends.

Here’s how it goes, as an example: If the Congress cuts off any form of military assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras, and you’re the CIA and certain military advisors, you do a dirty deal with another country to get the weapons to the Contra anyway. That would be Iran-Contra. Maybe you recall how well that went.

Here’s another example: If the US president doesn’t want to start a war with Syria that will bury him politically, then you go over the president’s head. Your first attempt is to develop a way to smuggle weapons to your mixed team of Al Qaeda sympathizers and incompetents in Syria. To this end, you use the enthusiastic Turks as middlemen and operate out of a particularly hellacious corner of Libya riddled with radical sects and wannabe terrorist. If and when that falls flat, you need to ignite popular indignation over the cruel use of chemical weapons.The ensuing explosion of humanitarian ferver will swamp the US president, who himself told everybody what would take all the choice out of his hands: the use of chemical weapons. And lots of them. If killing a 100 Syrians doesn’t do it, the ante must be upped: now it will be 300 or 400 victims. Now Obama is going to look even dumber than he does already, if he waits for the attacks to rise to a thousand a pop. Something has to give.

If you don’t believe the above can happen, you are still living in Dream Land, aka the former United States of America. I was the Nicaraguan Desk officer during the Iran-Contra affair and I can assure you that legality is the least of concerns when the Agency is running an operation, which is what this is to them. A really, really big operation, where the assets are NATO and the United States military.

I’ll tell you what I think: I think the White House didn’t want to touch the third rail of war with Syria with a ten foot pole and they thus fobbed off all responsibility for getting things done to the Agency, which has now acted true to form. The only question is what America’s foreign policy buffoons are going to do in Syria that will be a subtile encore to the ineptitude demonstrated throughout the Middle East, and, indeed, the world under Barack Obama.

Gen, Dempsey tells us that merely bombing Syria back into the Stone Age is unlikely to solve the mess over there.  I think what he wants to say is we will have to go in with our troops, if we go in at all. I don’t know if he is urging that route or not. If he is, he needs to be fired or retired.

Kerry is all gung-ho on war now, a changed man. You know, he was against war before he was for it. And that pitiful specimen of manhood, Chuck Hagel, suddenly finds a taste for blasting people out of their shoes. And I don’t need to go into that freakish couple, Lindsay and Johnnie. We all know that for them, a day without warfare waged under the Red, White, and Blue is a day without sunshine.

I think the critical point has passed. Obama is afraid of looking like a 90-pound weakling, having perhaps realized he is not Olympian in nature but a mere mortal; subject to failure and public ridicule.

The bullies are about to emerge from the Bully Pulpit. Yahoo!

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About the author

I graduated from Georgetown University in 1977 with a major in Russian language and a minor in Soviet politics.  Two years later, after a stint at a Beltway Bandit analyzing Soviet military doctrine, I was accepted into the US Foreign Service as a political officer.  In my 21 years with the diplomatic corps I served in some very interesting and sometimes inhospitable places: Leningrad, where I learned first-hand about the virtues of communism (none); the Nicaragua Desk, where I labored mightily to document the grave human rights abuses carried out by Sandinista forces and to support the contra cause; in post-Soviet Georgia, a wondrous place filled with semi-crazed, brilliant and funny people; and in Kosovo, the start of the current and ongoing rage for neo-interventionism and the partitioning of “enemy territory.” After leaving the State Department to spend a little time with my husband, we lived several years in Moscow and in Geneva.  Retirement did not dampen my interest in politics, at home or abroad, and I have continued to write about the issues from time to time.  I am also writing a three-part novel based loosely (there might be a fact or three in there) on my family saga from Spain to Puerto Rico to America.