Guest AuthorFlorida Rep. Neill Combee, R-Polk City, stirred up a small hornet’s nest last week with a Twitter post that asked the rhetorical question, “Did the White House Help Plan the Syrian Chemical Attack?”
On first glance, this may appear to be yet another dive into the deep end of right-wing paranoia, but with the civil war in Syria and the Obama administration’s proposal to take military action against the Assad regime, nothing is simple.
According to a report in The Ledger of Lakeland, Combee posted the tweet on Sept. 3.
“In the tweet, he linked to a blog post on the website globalresearch.ca that asserts the White House may be responsible for, or at least complicit after the fact, in the Syrian sarin gas attack the Obama administration claims killed at least 1,400 civilians and could lead to a U.S. military strike in the Middle East country,” The Ledger wrote.
The tweet was directed to U.S. congressmen Dennis Ross, R-Lakeland, and Daniel Webster, R-Winter Garden, and Combee followed the link with the questions, “Who knows? Did the White House Help Plan the Syrian Chemical Attack?”
The website Combee linked to is that of the Canadian Centre for Research on Globalization, which as far as I can tell is a left-leaning, anti-militaristic group, something Combee certainly is not.
He was a longtime Polk County commissioner before winning a seat in the Florida House in 2010. While a commissioner, he was generally known as a fiscally conservative but common-sense official, hardly an ideologue.
Interviewed by The Ledger, Combee said, “I think it’s my place, your place and everybody’s place to question what is going on here. Who do we believe? … Here’s the deal: I don’t know what to believe and there’s a lot of people I talk to on a regular basis who don’t know what to believe. There are a lot of things that we are told to believe that we clearly can’t believe.”
After the Ledger report, there was a Facebook exchange between Combee and Billy Townsend, a former Ledger reporter who now edits the news website Lakeland Local. Combee pointed to what he said is government deception about the ATF operation Fast and Furious and the assault on the American embassy in Benghazi as proof that the administration is untrustworthy.
“Knowing that the US is providing assistance and training for the rebels, who are trying to topple Assad, I wonder if the very best we can expect from any source is a slanted version of the truth,” Combee wrote.
Townsend chastised Combee for yielding to the common Republican temptation to pin everything that’s wrong in the world on Barack Obama: “One can find the truth murky and the case for violence weak without thinking the White House planned the gassing. … It’s never just a disagreement with you. Obama the arch villain is always sitting somewhere in his lair acting like a James Bond villain.”
The interesting thing is that this exchange played out in miniature what is going on across America and in the halls of Congress.
Combee and Townsend are basically in agreement that military intervention in Syria would be a huge mistake but for very different reasons. Combee doesn’t believe the Obama administration; Townsend is dismayed that Obama has resorted to the trigger-happy policies of the Bush administration.
For both, I suspect, it’s the uneasy feeling that we’ve seen this all before, and it won’t turn out well. In a strange way, by proposing a missile strike on a far-off and troubled land, Obama may have produced the political unity that everyone says is lacking these days.
