When some of my friends asked me last weekend why Barack Obama seemed so, well, they couldn”t quite get the word, but you can bet your life it wasn”t going to be complimentary.
Even though I have long been an admirer of the president, my patience has been tested recently, too. With his parched expressions and the exhaustion behind his eyes, one wondered if he could make it from the helicopter to the White House.
I tried valiantly to explain, because I genuinely like the man.
“You know he”s from Hawaii,” I began. “You can”t omit that influence. The Hawaiian language is a language of peace, of love, of reconciliation. Even his nickname, Barry, has the ring of friendship, companionship and brotherhood.”
Then he lived in Indonesia, another attractive place that”s casual about the bothersome demands of clocks and bells. Back in the United States, his passions were given to the legal profession, but Barack Obama was never a screaming prosecutor (check TV every night). He was instead the peacemaker, the editor of the Law Review at Harvard, who balanced the causes of both sides; he was an arbitrator and a mediator.
Perhaps because of these talents and their limits, he didn”t do well as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. (See his books.) He didn”t have the compelling voice, the energetic spirit or the sure conviction of what could work. Community organizing is part tough talk to the “enemy,” part convincing your people “they can do it,” whatever it is, and part presenting your program to the larger society as something ultimately good for everyone. Barack whispered.
Then came this weekend. Barack Obama, the shy, ever-hopeful boy with the Hawaiian spirit indelibly engraved in his deepest intention, ordered his military to send the most sophisticated bombers in the world — joined, amazingly, by Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain — to bomb ISIS in northern Iraq, in mid-Iraq and even in forbidden Syria!
Do you suppose that …? Oh no, that”s still impossible.
What is unquestionably surprising, however, is how much enthusiasm there was for the strikes. ISIS, now called in its egomaniacal state of mind, the Islamic State, knew how to make an entrance. It would never have captured the horrified attention of the world except for that long, raucous string of trucks and tanks suddenly pouring across the sands of Iraq, when no one even knew it existed.
But the Islamic State is not a state, it is not historically Islamic, and its “warriors” are not really soldiers. They are modern-day Mongols, little boys exercising what Pope Francis so wisely characterizes as the “adoration of evil.” THEY think, of course, that they hold in their juvenile hands an Islam cleansed of all its foreign and pagan elements. They even want to destroy the Kaaba in Mecca, the holiest site in the Muslim world, calling it “pagan.”
So this time, the boy who couldn”t make up his mind about how to act aggressively on the South Side of Chicago is in the process of becoming the overseer of one of the most complex bombing campaigns in human history.
The Vietnam War was the result of smart alecks in the State Department and Pentagon, filled to bursting with pride after World War II. The Afghan War was the result of 9/11 and the idea that the al-Qaida malefactors had been hiding in Afghanistan. The Iraq War was the ego child of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. None of these wars was worth fighting for America.
But the fighters of al-Qaida, and now the Islamic State and top-level leaders who call themselves Khorasan, are the spawn of the American-trained mujahedeen in the Afghan war against the Soviets. And they”re backed up by resentful Iraqi military and other men radicalized by the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
So now we have this incredible tableau in which everyone seems to be fighting everyone else over the fine points of their religion, none of them believing in freedom of religion or, really, the freedom of man. But perhaps this time Barack Obama will rise to the occasion, because it is HIS war, and it is a war that must be fought.
Georgie Anne Geyer has been a foreign correspondent and commentator on international affairs for more than 40 years. She can be reached at gigi_geyer@juno.com.
