The shit is hitting the fan after the botched US raid on the Syrian village near the Iraqi border and even nominal US allies such as the Maliki government and even Fouad Siniora (!!) in Lebanon are condemning this aggression. Other protesting voices include Qatar, the OIC, the Arab League, Russia and China. Even the otherwise ‘tame and lame’ EU “voiced concerns” about this raid (which just goes to show that the EU is even more under the US boot than the Maliki government or Siniora). Iran also warned that the US should not try this kind of trick with Iran.

In the West the corporate press is doing an excellent job keeping this story as low profile as possible but then, it really matters little what the TV watching idiots in the West think about any of that. What matters is that this botched raid is nothing short of a PR-disaster in the entire Middle-East. Yet again, the Americans come out of this looking stupid, incompetent and phenomenally arrogant.

The UK’s Guardian put it well in an article called Syria, the US goes at it alone again: Yesterday’s raid into the Middle Eastern country was yet another example of Bush’s often disastrous approach to the ‘war on terror’.

To fully measure the boundless imbecility of it all one needs to remember that the Baathist regime of Assad in Syria has been, for a long while already, a very faithful and trustworthy ally of the USA in the self-declared GWOT (Global War on Terror): heck, they even kindly agreed to detain and torture high-security detainees kidnapped by the CIA goons and then turn them back to the Americans. Does anyone seriously believe that the USA would allow the Syrians to detain and interrogate any al-Qaeda members if at the same time Syria was protecting al-Qaeda?! And if not, then the Americans could have easily asked the Syrian to detain and torture or kill any presumed al-Qaeda members hiding right across the Iraqi-Syrian border. But no, they went in themselves, in broad daylight of all things, and did what US Special Ops do best: bungle a raid and shoot a bunch of civilian bystanders.

[The gross incompetence of US special ops never ceases to amaze me. The Brits, the Russians or the Israelis would have gone in quietly and either bombed the place or snatched their targets without anyone even knowing who did it. For that, of course, they would have needed to either bring (or get) some vehicles to a landing zone about 10km outside any inhabited area and they would have done so at night. The cowboys decided to come in with guns blazing and ended up being filmed by cellphone cameras. And I bet you that, like in Grenada (arguably the most inept military operation of all times) the morons who conducted this raid will get medals and promotions].

One could expect anything from the Maliki government in Iraq of course, but my guess is that the SOFA thing is dead and that the latest US fiasco will prove to be the final blow to this deal.