Obama Ascends Mount Olympus

Dear Mr. President,

You must be feeling like Zeus sitting up on Mount Olympus hurling thunderbolts right now, showing the world who’s got the biggest cojones, a demigod on steroids. Wow! This is way better than Kill List Tuesday! All your assets in place, 180 cruise missiles locked and loaded, ready to go. You’re going to show that sonofabitch Assad who’s boss. You told him a year ago not to do it and he did it. How dare he disobey. Never mind there’s no link from the chemical attack to him; never mind the evidence is thin, just one intercepted phone call between Syrian commanders who appear to have miscalculated, although you dismiss the miscalculation part. Never mind that the UN chemical weapons team hasn’t even said what the stuff was. Never mind that there’s some possibility it might have been the opposition, not the military. You got the Syrians—opposition and pro-government, military and civilians alike, running for cover. You got Ban Ki-moon pleading not to do it. You got Congress saying, Hey, wait a minute, let us play in the sandbox, too. But you got nobody except France and Turkey for a coalition of the willing. Never mind. You got all those thunderbolts, so what the hell, why not, right? Never mind the law of unintended consequences. Never mind the niceties of law, treaties, the Constitution. Might makes right, right? You even admit a military strike won’t really have any effect except to redraw that line in the sand you drew a year ago. That sounds like petulance to me, Mr. President, not to mention arrogant and delusional. What I see here is a replay of 2003 writ small. There’s the supposed intelligence, the WMDs, the UN inspectors’ work unfinished and ignored, the Secretary of State telling us the evidence is solid and the legal justification clear—both “evidence” and “legal justification” too secret to reveal—and the Secretary of Defense saying, We’re ready, boss, the Navy waiting for orders to push the button, and the Syrians, civilians, opposition fighters, soldiers, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons who’ve already suffered 2 years of carnage, waiting for more destruction to rain down on them from Amerika. Pretty heady stuff, right, Mr. President? But this is not right and this is not just. It’s no different than the reckless lawlessness and hubris of your predecessor; what you railed against before you ascended the throne. Peace and the brotherhood of man, Martin Luther King’s vision and hope for the future, is still nothing but a dream.