Obama Stopped The Snuff Videos
by David Archibald
17 January 2019
As Orwell said “He who controls the present controls the past, he who controls the past controls the future.” How that operates in practice is control of the narrative, which is the explanation of how the world got to be as it is. This is in order to guide us to take the path preferred by the framers of the narrative.
There are historical facts, but our interpretation of them is controlled by those who write about them. People who want to control the future write and write and write about the past. So Obama claims credit for the current economic expansion, the boom in oil production from fracking, and every other good thing that has happened this millennium. He is not doing this from narcissism alone. For the left to keep their base under the control of the narrative, the Obama regime of sacred memory must be held up as a golden age due to a wise and saintly leader.
Thus, Secretary of State Pompeo’s criticism of Obama in Cairo recently is important. In brief, Pompeo said that Obama was a naif who unleashed horrors on the Middle East. Not true, Obama knew exactly what he was doing. He wanted to get rid of secular leaders like President Mubarak of Egypt and replace them with Islamist ones — while diminishing the United States’ standing in the region. Obama knew that a lot of people would die in the process, but as such Leninists say “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”
There is one thing that Obama can take credit for, and that is stopping the ISIS snuff videos. He also facilitated the ISIS snuff videos. The context is that the Gulf states with a lot of oil money and a lot of Islamic piety didn’t like the Assad regime in Syria, so they provided the money to fund ISIS. The State Department coordinated this and ISIS acquired a whole lot of brand new Toyota pickup trucks, funded by Qatar and others. ISIS then went off script and invaded Iraq in June 2014. And started producing snuff videos of killing the Iraqi soldiers who had surrendered, and then of civilians including toddlers and babies who were beheaded for being Christian. Obama’s State Department helped create the ISIS monster that had slipped the leash.
The ISIS snuff videos created an outrage. Globalists who would normally say that we shouldn’t be judgemental about quaint local customs such as female genitial mutilation and dressing women in sacks overcame their aversion for war enough to demand the elimination of ISIS. Suddenly there could be such a thing as a good war. And people so bad that they should be killed.
Obama sat on his hands though. After all, he had created the situation. It just wasn’t going to plan. The clamour became such that he eventually and reluctantly committed to a small operation against ISIS, which was used as a cover to attack the Assad regime. The Kurds took over Syria east of the Euphrates and eliminated ISIS except for a little pocket against the Euphrates near the Iraqi border. The Assad regime were able to get rid of ISIS west of the Euphrates.
Which begs the question: why has a little pocket of ISIS been allowed to continue to exist in the far southeast corner of Syria? When a little bit of bombing and artillery could get rid of it? It can’t be because of concern for civilian casualties — Raqqa and Mosul were both demolished in order to eliminate ISIS control. Could it be that the small ISIS pocket has been allowed to continue in order to justify maintaining a presence in Syria?
Now Turkey has offered to help get rid of the last ISIS pocket in Syria. But to do so Turkish forces would have to cross 160 miles of the area controlled by the Kurds. How do you think that is going to play out? The Turks will be exhausted from killing Kurds before they get to ISIS.
One of the reasons we are still in Afghanistan is because then candidate Obama labelled Afghanistan as the good war, to heighten the contrast with the bad war in Iraq. So during the eight years of the Obama regime we stayed in Afghanistan due to a comparison made on the campaign trail in order to win the 2008 election. As a result, Osama bin Laden was allowed to win strategically. Bin Laden directed the 9/11 attacks so that the United States would get drawn into a major war in the Middle East that would drain it and weaken it. That has happened.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq weren’t all bad. They spurred a lot of new weapons development. Systems have been trialed and improved. In peacetime you don’t know who your good officers are and who are the useless ones. Combat sorts that out. And we are better prepared for the existential war coming with China.
In Syria, Obama stopped the snuff videos. Trump is right in trusting his instincts to pull out.
David Archibald’s latest book is American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare
