After all the twists and turns of our eternal "war on terrorism," the logic of perpetual war has finally caught up with its most ardent advocates. It seems some conservatives – the kind who can usually be counted on to march to the War Party’s tune — are riled up over Mitt Romney’s support for arming Syria’s rebel army. Here‘s Andrew McCarthy, National Review‘s number one "the-Muslims-are-coming-to-get-us" ideologue:
"Congratulations to Mitt Romney. In calling for ‘opposition groups’ to be armed and trained for their ongoing jihad against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, the GOP’s presidential contender has managed to align himself with al-Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri and Muslim Brotherhood icon Yusuf al-Qaradawi."
Now I don’t want to accuse anyone of stealing my ideas without giving me credit, but this sounds awfully similar to what I wrote in my Friday the 13th column, which was entitled: "Al-Qaeda’s Alliance With Washington." In that piece, I recount the history of the WOT, from the neoconservative vision of a regional "transformation" brought on by the Iraq war to the Bush administration’s turn toward the Sunnis as allies against the rising Shi’ite "menace" (i.e. Iran). Right-wing ideologues like McCarthy supported the invasion of Iraq and McCarthy is himself a leading advocate of setting up a veritable police state in order to deal with the alleged threat of Muslim subversion from within. Yet now the McCarthyites – to re-coin a phrase – find themselves in a conundrum, as the Obama administration plays the Sunni card to the hilt, and allies with the Muslim Brotherhood and its more radical offshoots in Libya and Syria in an effort to hijack the "Arab Spring." This has culminated in the latest project undertaken by the US and its Gulf allies: the creation of a "Free Syrian Army" in order to carry out regime change in Damascus.
How do the McCarthyites reconcile their historic support for the War on Terror with the alignment of US and Al-Qaeda on the same side in Syria? The answer is: they can’t.
In Libya, we utilized the local Al-Qaeda affiliate, which supposedly had disavowed bin Laden, to get rid of Gadhafi, and the same scenario is being played out in Syria, albeit to the nth degree. The latest evidence of Al-Qaeda’s key role among Syria’s "opposition activists" is a suicide bomb attack on the central headquarters of Bashar al-Assad’s national security apparatus, killing the defense minister, as well as an inlaw of the Syrian dictator and a number of other top officials.
