Where he leads me I will follow,
Where he leads me I will follow,
Where he leads me I will follow;
I’ll go with him, with him all the way.
— “Where He Leads Me,” E.W. Blandy & J.S. Norris
Arthur Silber states a plain if unpleasant truth in the title of his latest piece: Barack Obama, Murderer and War Criminal-in-Chief. But as that great American military leader Jack Nicholson once said — on the witness stand in a military tribunal for crimes committed in Guantanamo Bay, no less — some folks “can’t handle the truth.”
However, looking into the earnest concerns of the latter, I was genuinely enlightened to learn that “the whole purpose of current US strategy” on the Af-Pak front is to prevent nuclear war between Pakistan and India. The whole purpose! This, I must admit, I did not know. I had thought — along with a preponderance of experts whose opinions cry far in the top of mine — that “current US strategy” in the region was actually exacerbating extremism and violent resistance like throwing gasoline on a roaring fire, while destabilizing Pakistan to an unprecedented degree. Killing civilians, cross-border strikes, blunderbuss “counterinsurgency” attacks sending hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing for their lives — I guess it’s all good, as the man says.
What’s more, I also learned that anyone who criticizes “our policy” in Pakistan is actually aiding and abetting the “possible deaths of millions of civilians” in that apparently inevitable nuclear war between India and the “nuclear-armed Taliban” that is apparently a “certainty” if we don’t follow the new Leader. So who’s the “war criminal” now, huh? The man with his hand on the throttle of a voracious war machine killing actual innocent human beings right now in reality — or all of the stupid, crap-peddling, poo-flinging critics who are blithely unconcerned about the “possible deaths of millions of civilians” under far-fetched fantasies spun from Dick Cheney’s paranoiac “One Percent Doctrine“, now adapted to the righteous progressive cause?
I think it’s clear who the real criminals are in this case, don’t you?