Peace and War

Crazy, isn't it? Offering a peace prize to a man who campaigned on a promise of escalating a war that his country was already well mired in. And the man proudly accepting that peace prize. As though that recognition was his due. As though he had somehow brought peace to the world. Instead, after the presidential campaign and his investiture as the 41st President of the United States of America, he made good on his promise.

His country was involved in a war that his predecessor had prosecuted when the United States and those of its allies that were 'willing' invaded Iraq, removed its murderous despot and unleashed in the process a heritage of repressed hatred between sects of Islam. The slaughterer of Iraq who had gassed, repressed and murdered his own, then went on to oversee further slaughter in a war against Iran where a million people perished, had kept his own Sunni and Shia from reciprocal murder.

The iron hand of his rule impressively removed by foreign invading troops left his former citizens free to indulge themselves in horrendous secular violence. Which eventually subsided to a degree, leaving an uneasy calm to take the place of nightly onslaughts from one community toward the other. And ten years on the United States prepares itself to release itself from overseeing the peace in Iraq, to its own responsibility.

And the removal of a troop surge that finally pacified the opponents in Islam, made it possible to surge those troops into Afghanistan to pacify resurgent insurgent Taliban in that country which the United States had left precipitately to enable it, after initially overthrowing the Taliban, to pounce on Iraq. And just latterly, the Nobel laureate president sent his warplanes over Libya. But not Syria. So the United States is engaged in war in three Islamic countries.

It is a war to liberate Muslims from their ruling oppressors. The secondary purpose, to bring them freedom and to usher them into the 21st Century, while teaching them on the fly the beauties of democracy and liberty and capitalism and social, political and economic opportunities. But tribal customs and religious dictates, culture and heritage are not so readily given to having modernity superimposed over them.

And the liberators who have enabled spontaneously-entrenched regime opposition to begin to triumph over the old dictatorial regimes are succumbing to the realization that the protesters and the opposition are not, in fact, even while mouthing words like 'freedom' and 'democracy' and 'equality', all that different than those whom they seek to replace.

In fact, the lingering, fearsome impression is that those waiting on the sidelines may represent even more tyrannical and brutal and freedom-sapping, human-rights-abusive regimes-in-waiting.
Odd thing that, how despite the best of intentions, those who seek to interfere and to assist where none is really required, somehow manage to encourage those elements that will one day come back to haunt them, personally.