I'm afraid that the list of probable outcomes for Syria, the Euro, world peace and the solution to the Global Financial Crisis have had a bit of a set-back in recent days - back to the drawing board, eh!
Let's just kick a happy ending to the GFC into touch with the announcement of unlimited Quantitive Easing from the Fed. Seems that they have finally accepted that no finite amount of money is going to solve this one and they're going to print, and keep printing, sufficient money to buy back all the toxic financial waste out there until there is no believable money left and the world's economy explodes in a shower of million dollar bills. They're betting on the off-chance that there is a completely inexplicable global economic recovery in time before all money turns to wallpaper or that, with luck, a total collapse stops-short when inflation reduces the real cost to a couple of weeks of your child's pocket-money delivered in a wheelbarrow. All of this will, of course, be in an attempt to save the banks from themselves - and from collectively destroying Liberal Capitalist Democracy.
Another blow to Liberal Capitalist Democrats is their inability to immediately seduce everybody on their first date. An inability recently confirmed by the people of Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen. That democratic capitalism isn't the Casanova of politico/economic systems they imagine comes as a bit of a shock to those that announced an end to history some decades ago. Rather than call the rejecters ungrateful, treacherous, sods we might take a look at why they might not want to get into bed with the likes of Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland. The tenets of Islam reject the fundamentals of capitalism. One has Faith the other economics. The will of the Creator versus the will of man. And that's before you get to foreign policy.
Which brings us to Iran, Israel and Syria. Iranian Revolutionary Guards are assisting Assad in his fight against the very sort of "freedom-fighters" that just blew away an American Ambassador and attacked disparate US Embassies - fired mortars into a coalition of the willing base in Afghanistan and have racked up a growing number of kills recently. Not on a par with the number of women and children collaterally killed by CIA drone strikes but substantial enough to ask "what the fuck are we doing"? Meanwhile Bibi is threatening to launch the, peace-loving, Israeli Defence Force against the Iranians to stop Iran having as many nuclear weapons as they have - what ever happened to Mutually Assured Destruction as a keeper of the peace? Just to make sure the Israelis don't do anything stupid, like lose, the US has moved a fleet into the Mediterranean accompanied by a couple of tugs from the Royal Navy.
All of this is predictable but apparently incomprehensible to the Americans who are baffled and yet again asking "why do they hate us"? It's not Americans they hate it's their government's policies. Which takes it way beyond an anti-Islamic film clip. The Arab world has found a voice after generations of a repression supported by the USA, among others, for pragmatic political and economic gain. The travesty of Americans complaining about how ungrateful the Egyptians are, when they have received $billions in US aid, need to remember that most, if not all, went to a dictator that ran a police state and not to the fellahin. If Americans learned to shut-up and not claim to have brought Freedom to all and sundry and were to stop claiming they're Exceptional they might lose a few less Ambassadors. This is a message that the US News media needs to get it's head around. As was said when the USA was last embroiled in a war they lost "the whole world is watching".
If you compare the manner of death of Ambassador Stephens in Libya with that of Ambassador Davies in Cyprus there's little to choose between them. A group of armed attackers among a few hundred or so protestors that clustered at the US Embassy opened fire on it and killed some of the occupants. There was never any contemporary suggestion that Davies' death was the result of a pre-planned attack - things were different then - although many of the armed attackers shooting at the Embassy were in Greek-Cypriot National Guard uniforms and had arrived carrying weapons - one had a stick of dynamite. The Cyprus attack was put down to EOKA-B terrorists - which suited everybody as the Embassy was attacked by Greek-Cypriot Guardsmen that believed the US had stopped the Greek Military Junta, then in power in Greece and supported by the USA, from providing military aid to combat the Turkish invasion of the island. The US didn't want two allies fighting each other and imposed it's will. In Libya, that there are a bunch of armed men at every road junction in Benghazi would have provided the requisite fire-power to attack the Embassy. That it was done by the very fighters that benefitted from NATO intervention in the revolution is problematic and needs an acceptable explanation.
You can't have the same freedom-fighters that you just provided with the blessings of freedom turn their guns on you as the spontaneous result of it - you have to protect your core belief of a grateful populace and invent a conspiracy involving a sworn enemy. Both deaths are the result of US foreign policy camouflaged to look like the work of rogue terrorists rather than a widespread, popular, and violent rejection of those policies. I believe this is called self-delusion.
I have always thought that the habit of US worthies to travel in not-so-discreetly armoured, heavily tinted windowed, American made vehicles in the company of two or three men the size of American Football Line-backers, dressed as heavily armed anglers, with overly sensitive eyes, was a bit of a giveaway. The concept that this group can arrived un-noticed at a "safe-house" in downtown anywhere is bordering on the hysterical. Especially after the reputation such vehicles gained in Iraq - not without some justification.
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