Kirby: hypocrisy of NATO

The hypocrisy of NATO

Tim Kerby

The pretext for all of NATO's actions throughout the world is democracy, freedom or some other cute buzzword. Going around the world shoving your culture’s ideology down everyone else’s throat on a liberal crusade is bad enough but fighting this crusade in an openly hypocritical way is another thing entirely.

Syria has become the trendy “humanitarian crisis” of 2012. This is a story we’ve heard many times before; Iraq, Libya, Serbia. Some group of people somewhere is under the yolk of brutal tyranny so they need to be saved by being murdered by NATO bombs.

But let’s play a bit of a game. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that all the allegations of NATO are true and because Assad is a “bad guy” the West has the right to invade or fight him via proxy forces killing the population until they are free.

Then why is Syria so alone in the crosshairs when many of its neighbors are far from shining examples of democracy?

Luckily I recently had to do a bit of research on the lovely Island of Bahrain where they round people up for “Tweeting” about the King yes, arrests for what you say on stupid Twitter. The King, a MONARCH, has recently banned protests and demonstrations of any sort and arrested opposition leaders, if this happened in certain countries there would be media outrage but since Bahrain bribes CNN everything gets smoothed over. Since 2011 they also have a curfew as in you can’t go out of your house at night if they don’t want you to.

And what about Saudi Arabia, a country that has rampant gender segregation and on occasion actually puts witches on trial in the 21st century. But on the other hand maybe witch trials are a step forward because Saudi Arabia is also known for not necessarily giving you a trial or charges at all.

The thing is that there are BLATANT examples of countries that don’t meet western standards, that somehow get ignored. (again countries DON'T NEED TO MEET Western standards, I'm just talking about this for the sake of argument) With the size of the CIA and MI6 there is no possibility that they don’t know what goes on in these countries. It is a conscious choice to focus attention on one trendy target at a time. Whether conspiracy or not, sadly the mainstream media follows these trends ultimately allowing absurd military actions to be undertaken.

Let me take this in another direction. Think about the Syria situation from a common man's perspective. Even if the allegations against Assad’s government were true, if you lived in Syria would you rather live under a stable dictatorship, having to deal with censorship and government corruption or live under a bombardment watching your children die in shrapnel or fight like rats for the last scraps of food in the rubble for the possible chance that maybe somehow this anarchic revolution will bring about a bright future that is completely unguaranteed, especially considered the fact that the revolutionaries are far more brutal, murderous and fanatical than anything you've seen!? If you were an average Syrian, you wouldn't want anyone to support the rebels, end of story.

Not only is NATO hypocritical abroad but as home at well. The quality of the recent American elections was laughable in terms of fairness and freemen don't see drones in their own skies. If the countries of NATO were actually on a hunt to take out anyone who’s against their democratic philosophy they’d have to shoot themselves in the head.