The Irrelevance of Chemical Weapons

Well, it’s been coming for a while now–Barack Obama has decided to arm the Syrian rebels. The justification? The administration believes that somewhere between 100 and 200 people in Syria have been killed with chemical weapons, specifically, nerve agents, even more specifically, sarin. It is too often taken for granted that the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government provides a good reason for the United States to intervene in the Syrian conflict on behalf of the rebels. The assumption must be questioned–does the use of chemical weapons make it in the interest of the United States to intervene where before it was not in the US interest to do so?

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Our Not-So-Secret Spying Program

If you’re in the United States and you haven’t been living under a rock, the big story right now is how the government has been secretly gathering information about your phone and internet activity! You have no privacy! The media has whipped up a hysteria–I’ve heard it openly referred to as a “secret phone-tapping program”. The trouble is, this version of the story is extremely misleading. The government has been open about this since the mid-2000’s. Information about it has been widely available, so much so that I can construct a timeline of how this program came about with relative ease.

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Obama and Personal Responsibility

Last weekend Barack Obama gave a commencement speech at the historically all-black, all-male Morehouse College. Why we still have colleges that are segregated on race/gender lines is beyond me, but that’s not my topic today. My topic is what Obama said and the positive reaction it has gotten, despite the indisputable fact that if someone like Mitt Romney went to Morehouse College and gave the speech Obama gave, we would all be apoplectic.

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Extending the War on Terror

Back in 2011 when Osama bin Laden was killed, I was excited. This isn’t to say that I thought bin Laden’s execution and subsequent dumping into the sea were optimal–I would have preferred to see him captured and put on trial. No, my excitement stemmed from my belief that once bin Laden was captured the Obama administration would have an excuse to bring the war on terror to an end. See, in 2011 I still had some last vestiges of confidence in the judgement of Barack Obama, vestiges that, sadly, have since proven themselves grievously misplaced. What’s the trouble now? The Pentagon has given a straight answer to the question of how long it expects the war on terror to last. What answer did it give? Michael Sheehan, assistant secretary for special operations at the defence department, said: