It's not the beheadings that separate the brutality of the Islamic State from the brutality of others near and far, it's the deployment of pictures of beheadings that has upset polite societies well-steeped in their denial. Posting such videos, censored as they are, has achieved a metaphorical beheading: leadership in the U.S. and elsewhere has lost its head over a theatrical provocation as effective emotionally as it is unimportant geo-politically. Some forty countries are now at war against a threat of minimal proportions, largely as a gut reaction to a disturbing movie That's not so much a heart of darkness as a head of darkness.
President Obama speaks from a darker heart when he refers to "Russian aggression" with no meaningful context. Failing to acknowledge the civil war in Ukraine, the U.S. president promises to "support the people of Ukraine," when he means only some of the people of Ukraine:
"We call upon others to join us on the right side of history -- for while small gains can be won at the barrel of a gun, they will ultimately be turned back if enough voices support the freedom of nations and peoples to make their own decisions."
In countries all over the world, from Iran and Cuba to Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as all of Latin America, the United States has consistently opposed and often crushed "the freedom of nations and peoples to make their own decisions." Even when native movements adopted their own versions of American founding documents the U.S. was not assuaged, as the Vietnamese learned at horrendous cost in the face of American brutality that makes the Islamic State look like a bunch of Quakers.
President Obama does not acknowledge this imperial history any more than his government's present imperial imperative. As far as Ukraine goes, the fault is all with Russia, according to the president, who even lies about MH-17 to reinforce his phony bill of particulars. He certainly omits reference to his favored Ukrainians burning opponents alive in Odessa. Nowhere does he acknowledge anything like a western-supported coup in Kiev that established an illegitimate government with a neo-Nazi tinge, whose war crimes in the east are documented by U.N. observors. Nowhere does this Nobel peace laureate acknowledge twenty years of western stealth aggression against Russia, in which his own administration remains active.
With no apparent shame or sense of irony, the president refers to reducing nuclear arsenals and destroying Syria's chemical weapons as "the kind of cooperation we are prepared to pursue again--if Russia changes course."
Actually, these are things worth pursuing for their own sake, and if anyone needs to change course, it's the west, the U.S./NATO/EU/IMF and the rest. The way the president couches it is intellectual fraud and moral blackmail.
The president takes a similar, not-our-fault-and-not-really-our-responsibility approach to various other issues, including poverty and climate change, where the evidence is to the contrary. Long as it is, the speech at the U.N. does not gain in coherence. The president who recently said he doesn't have a strategy apparently still has no strategy, unless casting blame is somehow strategic:
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