Talking Big

During the stopover in Hong Kong, Lee Hsien Loong said that while he is glad the Americans have taken a stand against the Islamic State militant group, Singapore has yet to decide whether or how it will support the United States-led coalition campaign. His first direct comment on the global effort to combat the Islamic State (ISIS) militants in the Middle East reminds one of the ant who climbed up the backside of an elephant, with the intention of rape.

Note it was the Malaysian police once again, not Teo Chee Hean's highly decorated Home Team, who provided the details about the Penang-born PR and his Singaporean wife who brought their two teenage children to fight alongside the militants in Syria. The family was only briefly mentioned in Parliament by Deputy Prime Minister and Home Affairs Minister Teo as being "among a handful of Singapore citizens" who had gone to participate in the conflict. Maybe it's too inconvenient to reveal more about what they don't know, just like they are being awfully quiet about how the scumbag Yang Yin was granted his residential papers in double quick time.

It's one thing to patrol the waters off Somalia for anti-piracy duties, it's another to send our boys smack into real harm's way. The hand held surface-to-air-missile (SAM) launchers that brought a Black Hawk down in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu can easily swipe our pretty F-16s or F-15s off the skies like any pesky mosquito. The fate of a downed pilot is not a pretty prospect, not something they usually prim for at another national day parade flyby. Of course they can fly higher, but who's to say the militants don't have the Buk SAMs of the pro-Russian separatists at Donetsk?

A more important question: who decides when a nation goes to war? Even Obama had to seek the approval of Congress, one step closer to authorizing the third significant U.S. military operation in Iraq. And to think Obama is only paid peanuts to maintain world peace.