In an earlier Times August 31 column, Blow anticipated the triumph of the fear/war mongers over Obama's cautious approach, when he warned...
"...another part of the equation is the tremendous political pressure coming from the screeching of war hawks and an anxious and frightened public, weighted most heavily among Republicans and exacerbated by the right-wing media machine."
In the days leading up to Obama's speech, Blow reported:
"...Republicans are beginning to pull out the big gun -- 9/11 -- to further scare the public into supporting more action. Senator Lindsey Graham has said on Fox News that we must act to 'stop another 9/11,' possibly a larger one, and Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has warned, 'Sadly, we're getting back to a pre-9/11 mentality, and that's very dangerous.'
"Fear is in the air. The president is trying to take a deliberative approach, but he may be drowned out by the drums of war and the chants for blood."
After Obama's speech, chants for blood, not unsurprisingly, came from Israel and its friends in the U.S.
According to the Global Jewish News Service, Israelis love it when the U.S. comes into Israel's neighborhood to wage war against any Arab force that Israel does not consider a friend.
The News Service writes:
"President Obama did not mention Israel or the Palestinians during his national address Wednesday night. But his pledge to lead a U.S.-coordinated effort to destroy ISIS could end up doing more to get Israeli-Palestinian negotiations back on track than anything that Secretary of State Kerry and his team managed to produce with their shuttle diplomacy.
"Reaching a final deal is hard enough when the region is calm. But it becomes significantly more difficult, if not impossible, when Islamic extremism is on the march and U.S. influence is in retreat.
"Good luck convincing Israeli leaders that it is safe to abandon any part of the Golan Heights or the Jordan Valley as ISIS destabilizes the region and moves closer to its borders, especially with a president perceived as being more interested in golf and Asia than confronting the gathering storms in the Middle East.
"History suggests that the most effective thing America can do to encourage Israeli risk-taking is to show that we're serious about reducing regional threats to the Jewish state."
President Obama was elected in 2008, in part. because he rejected that interventionist policy. That was not the message the nation heard in President Obama's Wednesday speech.
There is no question but that the armies of the so-called "Islamic State" are guilty of horrendous war crimes. But ISIS is neither Islamic nor is it a state. It is a "terror" group that has no ideological goal other than to bring power to itself and grief to the world.
What we face today in Syria and Iraq requires counterterrorism, not war.
Norman Solomon points to the wisdom of an earlier New York Times Board editorial which was published more than a year ago:
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