President Pulls Lawmakers Into Box He Made - NYTimes.com

President Pulls Lawmakers Into Box He Made - NYTimes.com:

The President has no good options. The trick will be to muster enough votes in the House and Senate to approve what he intends to do. The risk of unintended consequences must be addressed in detail.

With all the talk of moral outrage, I think this Syria incursion, should we undertake it, is more about Iran.

What's missing in this discussion is the refusal of the President and the media to talk about the reality that this Middle East unrest is first and foremost a religious war within Islam. This is far less a political struggle than an Islamic sectarian conflict where radical Islamists seek to destabilize existing governments in the hopes of establishing a caliphate in the region. This is not merely a civil war.

TeamObama surely does not want to be seen as taking sides in the this ideological struggle, but he has boxed himself into a corner and whichever course is chosen in Syria will be interpreted by the Arab 'street' as interfering in Islamic affairs.

One Great Big War - NYTimes.com (David Brooks)

One Great Big War - NYTimes.com: "What’s the biggest threat to world peace right now? Despite the horror, it’s not chemical weapons in Syria. It’s not even, for the moment, an Iranian nuclear weapon. Instead, it’s the possibility of a wave of sectarian strife building across the Middle East."

David Brooks hits the nail on the head. While most of the talking heads and commentators in the popular media seem to talk and bloviate about the problems in the Middle East as political with political solutions, it's patently clear that this is first and foremost an Islamist sectarian conflict that is based in their religious splintering.

Political boundaries of these Islamist countries mean little in this conflagration.  The battles are about religious ideologies, not borders and about religious belief and practice, not about economics or politics.

The West has precious few options, as Mr. Brooks points out.  I believe TeamObama has made a mess of it by believing naively that the revolutionary forces at work would produce democracies, when many of the rabid rebel forces prefer theocracies or caliphates.

Perhaps if we became energy independent, the U.S. could avoid being the policeman in that area, but what of the other Western nations that depend on the region's oil? And Israel?

WSJ NEWS ALERT: U.S. Ambassador to Libya Is Killed in Attack on Consulate - dusher@gmail.com - Gmail

News Alert from The Wall Street Journal 

"Libyan officials said the U.S. ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans have been killed in an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, the Associated Press reported.
Demonstrators on Tuesday attacked the consulate and breached the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, amid angry protests over a film by a U.S. producer that mocks and insults the Prophet Muhammad."

Breaking News AlertThe New York TimesWednesday, September 12, 2012 -- 7:24 AM EDT-----
U.S. Ambassador to Libya Is Reported Killed by Protesters in Benghazi
The Libyan government said Wednesday that United States ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed along with three of his staff in an attack on the consulate in Benghazi Tuesday night in the first death of an American envoy abroad in more than two decades.
The U.S. State Department declined to confirm or deny the reports and said the previous night that only a single unnamed embassy employee had been killed. But if confirmed, the killing, during at attack by an armed mob angry over a short American-made video mocking Islam’s founding prophet, threatens to upset Washington’s relations with the new Libyan government that took over after the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and sour American public opinion about the prospects of the democratic opening of the Arab spring.
Mr. Stevens, a veteran of U.S. diplomatic missions in Libya, served in Benghazi during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi, and he was widely admired by the Libyan rebels for his support of their struggle to overthrow Colonel Qaddafi.

So much for the Arab Spring widely hailed as a positive development when it first started. Deposing dictators is a good thing.  Islamic mobs that we have seen in Libya and Egypt in the last day or two threaten the rule of law and basic security that democratic experiments must have in order to succeed.

What will be the American response?

'via Blog this'

Quick Reference for Strands of Islam

Thanks to The Economist for this chart. Click here for the Economist story.