Sunday, September 08, 2013
Big Fat Red Line
Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish

Someone chalked a red line down the street near my house. It's sloppy, it turns, smears and meanders. Car tires have rubbed it pink and dogs have done to it what large four-legged animals do naturally when taken out of the confines of narrow apartments. The line turns a corner and dives inside a pothole near an exposed sewer grate. And then it is gone

Obama's red line is more famous than my red line. It appears in the Washington Post and the New York Times. There is speculation over what the nature of the red line is, what Obama should do about the crossing of the red line and how many devils can dance on the edge of a red line while juggling Sarin canisters.

Despite being much more famous, Obama's red line matters about as much as the one in front of my building. It's there one day and gone the next and no one really cares.

The red line, the famous one in D.C. is meaningless. It exists because politicians and reporters expect it to exist. It's a necessary optical illusion that convinces them that Eisenhower or JFK are still in the White House and that the United States of America is a rational world power with standards on truly important matters such as human rights and the percentage of cow flatulence to be allowed to ascend into the atmosphere.
. . .
None of this is about human rights. It's not even about humans. It's about big pictures and even the devoted readers of books about the Post-American World Order still have their big pictures.composed of grand historical movements and massive chess games in which leaders can be raised and toppled, in which power can check power until a perfect stabilizing point is reached and the rest of the world decides to start killing its own babies, dismantling its own industry and dedicating all its efforts to turning out graduates with three degrees to teach small children about transgender identity.

That obviously isn't going to happen. The plan to turn over the region to the moderate Islamists worked out about as well as the plan to use the Ayayollah Khomeini as a stabilizing force in Iran. Fortunately believers in grand historical movements don't back off because they have been proven wrong. They don't stop when the bodies begin piling up. Instead they move forward certain that they are doing the right thing, even if the dimmest man alive would have figured it out by now.

The red line in Syria isn't chemical weapons or blood. It's ideology. It's the red-green alliance exacting its deadly toll while the Great Teleprompter squats behind his curtain making shadow puppets on the wall and telling self-deprecating jokes to the press corps that waits for leadership and worries that the dictator, the other dictator, has called his bluff and he is going to have no choice but to ante up or fold. "