While the Administration quibbles with the Russians about whether they are attacking the bad guys or the good guys in Syria, the U.S. was busy attacking a Doctors Without Borders medical facility in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The air attack occurred in the early hours of Saturday, October 3, and lasted about 30 minutes. Nine Doctors Without Borders staff are dead and at least 37 are seriously wounded. And the casualty count has only just begun.
Doctors Without Borders is one of the most extraordinary charities in the world, sending well-trained Western physicians to the world’s hot spots. In 1999 they won the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. Now they’re leaving Kunduz, their mission to that beleaguered city having been destroyed under the command of the American president to whom the Nobel committee shamefully gave the same prize in 2009.
Doctors Without Borders had given Washington and Kabul their GPS coordinates well in advance. As the bombing approached the hospital, they sent urgent messages to American and Afghan forces, advising of their proximity. But the bombing did not stop. The patients and staff in the intensive care unit could not be moved to the safe room. “Six patients were burning in their beds,” said a nurse who had been able to take refuge there.
A terse NATO statement acknowledged that the air strike “may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.” The matter is being investigated. As Jeb! said apropos of the Oregon school shooting two days earlier, things happen. After the school shooting, Obama once more announced the desirability of confiscating citizens’ guns. Perhaps we should confiscate the Air Force’s bombs as well?
So who’s in charge of the Air Force? Deborah Lee James was appointed Secretary of the U.S. Air Force in December 2013. She’s a lovely woman and a great Democrat bundler, which has earned her appointments to posts about which she knows nothing in both the Clinton and Obama administrations. In June 2014 someone in the Air Force thought it might be a good idea to give her a ride with the very famous Thunderbirds aerial acrobatic team. If they could impress her, she might save them from the sequestration cuts. Alas, the ride made her “violently ill.”
Last fall Lebanese Prime Minister Tammam Salam told Obama that “to eradicate extremism and terrorism in our region, you need some boots on the ground. You cannot do it solely by air.” “Whose boots?” Obama responded, to which Salam replied, “You have a coalition set up now for this situation.”
And Obama decided — perhaps understanding the ineptness of our Air Force under his command — that if Putin so desired, it would be Russian boots that were put on the ground in Syria. Air cover would be courtesy of the Russians as well. Only Obama wanted to set the agenda for Russia’s military intervention. The Russians would ignore the terrorist threats to the coastal area running from Damascus to Latakia where the majority of Syria’s Alawites and Christians live, and which is controlled by Assad, and concentrate on other areas further away from the center that Assad no longer controls.
This didn’t sit well with Putin. He’s building an air and sea base in Latakia, for one thing. And for another, if Damascus falls, Syria will be where Libya was when we took out Gaddafi — in absolute chaos. Only the Islamic State is organized enough to step into the resulting vacuum. And then there’s the matter of the close ties between the Patriarchate of Antioch that is resident in Damascus and the Patriarchate of Moscow.
These minority communities — especially the Christians — are being targeted for annihilation by al Qaeda and the so-called “Syrian insurgents” who are allied with them. The weapons and military equipment we’ve been supplying to the insurgents have, after all, been finding their way into al Qaeda’s hands. Obama’s not interested in minority communities, however. A House Resolution that would require the Secretary of State merely “to ‘report to Congress a plan to expedite the processing of refugee admissions applications’ for religious minorities threatened with extinction by ISIS” is going nowhere notwithstanding the Administration’s plan to absorb 30,000 additional refugees over the next two years.
A grim fate awaits these folks at the hands of ISIS and its friends. Obama shrugs. Things happen.
