Guest commentary-All of a sudden, peace has broken out, and the neocons couldn’t be more upset.
Charles Krauthammer of The Washington Post is practically apoplectic.
William Kristol of the Weekly Standard compares President Obama to Neville Chamberlain.
You know when they wheel out their hackneyed Hitler analogies, they’re getting desperate.
And what, exactly, is the problem?
It’s far preferable that the United States and the United Nations have prevailed on Syria to destroy its chemical weapons than for the U.S. to have launched missiles into Syria, which would have widened the civil war there in dangerous directions and strengthened Al Qaeda’s hand.
And it’s far preferable that the United States is talking with Iran about ending any nuclear weapons program instead of scheming with Israel to bomb Iran. A U.S. or Israeli attack would have only delayed such a program by a year or two and would have provoked retaliation by Iran and Hezbollah against Israel and threatened the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf, rattling the world economy.
For too long, the United States has relied on war-making and coup-making to get its way in the world, and under the regime of Bush and Cheney, war was the most overused tool in the shed, while diplomacy rusted.
Barack Obama has now brought diplomacy back, and it’s about time.
(Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine … where this piece was first posted.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 79
Pub: Oct 1, 2013