Just as Barack, Dave and François found themselves at odds with their countries, in rode Col. Putin on his white steed.
I’m not sure he saved the day, but he certainly saved the inglorious trio from looking even more pathetic than God originally made them. Now the rumour has it that they’ll join forces to adorn Col. Putin with the Nobel Peace Prize.
One wonders whether Heinrich Himmler would have been similarly feted in the 1960s had Germany managed to hang on in 1945. Probably, if he had ousted Hitler and begun to re-establish Nazi Germany as a world power.
There’s little doubt that KGB Vlad has pulled a fast one on the West. He was trained to do just that, so no surprises there.
Neither should one be surprised at the cosmic ineptitude of the dynamic trio who have allowed a KGB thug with neo-Stalinist ambitions to outmanoeuvre them with such contemptuous ease.
First, Obama made the classic geopolitical blunder of plunging in without leaving himself an out. Intelligent statesmen leave their options open. Obama, who’s neither intelligent nor a statesman, didn’t.
Any use of chemical weapons by Assad, he declared, would mean crossing the red line. America would punish the brute by using her own weapons tipped with morally acceptable warheads.
So it would have happened had Barack’s friend Dave not thrown a spanner in the works. Dave, you see, had been agitating for attacking Assad for months. With the next election but two years away, he desperately needed to change his well-established image of a feather-light, self-serving spiv into that of a global statesman.
There was a hitch though. Dave’s focus groups were showing that his own party felt about him the way a tree feels about a dog, and for pretty much the same reason. Moreover, people were less likely to vote for him if he sacrificed more British lives and money for no obvious reason.
Enough to give a chap cold feet, what? But Dave too had already committed himself to a strike on Syria so unequivocally that pulling out was guaranteed to make him look even more of a wishy-washy, shilly-shallying prat. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t.
I don’t know which advisor came up with the face-saving ploy. Perhaps it was Dave himself, he’s devious enough. Either way, Dave appealed to Parliament to save him from himself (and also from Sam who was so moved by suffering in Syria that she was pushing hubby-wubby to inflict some more). Parliament duly obliged.
Dave was rescued. He could now turn a lose-lose situation into a win-win one. He could now tell the world and his friend Barack that he personally remained a moral crusader for every immoral cause. But hey, bloody Parliament bound him hand and foot. You love democracy, don’t you, Barack? Well, it has spoken.
Dave’s beacon lit up the path for Barack to follow. For his focus groups told him pretty much the same story: few Americans supported yet another asinine action with easy entry and no exit.
Personally, Barack didn’t give two flying bucks about that, what with his own tenure ending in 2016 no matter what. But his party began to make threatening noises.
Dave’s brilliant turn of spivery showed the way. “Me!” shouted Barack. “Me too! I’ll put it to Congress! Democracy! Consent of the governed! Michelle!”
François was feeling left out. He had done enough in his presidency to be hated by most Frenchmen and despised by all. So his first inclination was the same as Dave’s: bomb the living merde out of somebody, anybody.
But, unlike Barack, he had something to lose personally. So François was reminded that he too had some sort of parliament to which he was accountable. After a fashion. “Moi!” he screamed. “Moi aussi!”
In that spineless manner the three ‘leaders’ found themselves in limbo, except in theirs purgatory beckoned on both sides. They had saved their political hides for the time being, but Syria was still out there. So was Assad. So were chemical weapons.
Enter KGB Vlad. We have “every reason to believe”, he declared, that it wasn’t Assad but his al-Qaeda enemies who had used the nasty compounds. To prevent them from doing so again, we should transfer Assad’s chemical weapons to international control, Putin’s own for preference.
Logically this didn’t quite add up, but this wasn’t a university debate. It was Russia reaching for the brass ring of dominance in the region. If in the process she could remind the West that it was ruled by nonentities, so much the better.
To prove that’s exactly what they were, the ‘international community’, meaning Barack, Dave and François (Angela kept her mouth shut on this one) heaved a huge sigh of relief. Focus groups were going to love this.
And the Syrians? Well, if anyone tried to implement Vlad’s scheme seriously, which no one will, it would take several years at best. In the meantime, Syrians will keep dying in growing numbers.
Vlad will supply Assad with stuff that can do the job just as well as gas but without causing moral indignation. Barack et al will probably offer similar support to Syrian al-Qaeda. And Vlad will collect his Nobel, thank you very much.
Here we have a thug who suppresses free speech, imprisons and/or murders dissidents, attacks one former Soviet republic and several provinces, blackmails his neighbours, makes a mockery of elections, runs the most criminalised major economy in history, enriches his cronies and himself on an epic scale, rearms his country for the express purpose of countering the West.
Still, as Descartes said, all knowledge is comparative. So how bad do our ‘leaders’ have to be to make Vlad look good?