Tag Archives: Syria

Political Rants

Red lines, green lights.

By the time you read this, we may already be at war with Syria. That’s how bad this is getting. On Friday, John Kerry laid out the administration’s case for intervention. It’s basically one of credibility – has a strange sound coming from the mouth of John Kerry, I must say, for a couple of reasons. First: that the Vietnam War, which he fought in and ultimately became a vocal opponent of, was often justified on the same grounds. Second: that we have no credibility in any meaningful sense. Whatever chimera of that was lost with the invasion of Iraq.

Obama drew a red line. That is what we are defending. Our action will do nothing to protect civilians in Syria. It will do nothing to tamp down the flames of civil war. Far from it, in fact … it will pour gasoline on the conflict, quite probably enabling it to spread dramatically beyond that sorry nation’s borders. All across the media, there’s this tiresome meme about how we have to do something, something to punish the Assad regime. If we allow them to get away with this, the story goes, it will embolden them to go further and embolden others to follow suit. Obama seems to think it’s just two days of bombing and then off to Switzerland. What’s wrong with this picture?

The notion that it is incumbent upon us to launch a military attack when someone kills scores of people is cracked. If that were the case, we should invade ourselves. We used white phosphorus in Falujah, but even beyond that, we killed thousands there alone in the two battles. Has anyone been held to account? Has anyone been held accountable for anything we’ve done in Iraq … or elsewhere in the world, for that matter? What kind of precedent does that impunity set? Haven’t we emboldened every tin-pot president on Earth to unilaterally attack any country at any time for any reason?

To behave as if there’s a different standard for us than there is for everyone else is just old-fashioned imperialism. That’s what this impending war is … aside from being just plain stupid.

Political Rants

Into the fray.

The Bush… I mean, Obama administration announced today that it would be providing arms to the Syrian opposition, whoever that may be. Not too hard to see that coming, I suppose. When a man draws a red line, it’s because he’s already all too eager to step across it. The Syrian conflict is like that shiny new car our government and our corporate media (including its NPR/PBS sidecar) just want, want, WANT more than anything. They’re ready to let the old Afghan clunker go, were able to pawn off their Iraqi wreck, and they just keep driving by that showroom lot, looking at that awesome Syrian number.

Already, I have heard more about the numbers of killed in Syrian than I ever heard about the Iraq catastrophe. Again, no surprise. The government and the press meticulously count the victims of official enemies, but when it comes to the corpses generated by our misguided policies, we don’t do body counts. They still won’t put a realistic number on the lives lost in Iraq, hovering around the casual 30K guess Bush made in 2007 or so. I suppose once we have both legs in the mire of this conflict they will stop counting again. But for now, the statistics are useful – they are trying to push the American people closer to intervention, and it’s evident that the effort isn’t working very well. Less than one in four is in favor of intervention.

Not hard to see why. Two wars over the past twelve years, with more than 6,700 Americans killed. The very real probability that our sophisticated and destructive weapons will wind up in the hands of fanatical militants. Skepticism over the case for chemical weapon use by the regime. Who can blame us, right? The scare talk about Hezbollah is probably a bridge too far for most, as well. Frankly, they are engaged in something close to an existential struggle. If their patron Assad falls and is replaced by a Sunni-dominated regime, that puts an enemy on their eastern flank. They already have Israel to their south. Forget religion, politics, propaganda for a minute – if you were one of their strategists, what would you do?

Then there’s the small matter of the overwhelming majority of Americans being against this. But then, we were in favor of background checks, too. So long as McCain is happy, we can pound salt, apparently.

luv u,

jp

 

Political Rants

Sand and salt.

Non-stop fun here in the land of the free. No coincidence that this is the week they dedicated the George W. Bush presidential library. Some of the key “decision points” of his presidency were in play this week. Let’s start with a honking big one.

Syria. Bush’s political allies (and many in the “muscular” liberal establishment) have been pushing for wider involvement in the Syrian conflict for a good long while now. This week, unconfirmed reports of the use of sarin gas by the Assad regime surfaced this week, by way of the Israeli and French intelligence services, for the most part. The Obama administration intelligence services seem ambivalent and non-commital on this evidence, but not so Admiral … I mean Senator John McCain and some of his clones, who really really really wants another mid East conflict on his resume of error.

Mac is back
Mac is back!

McCain is once again proving why he would have been a catastrophic president. He affects to believe that creating a “safe zone” in northern Syria and arming the fractious opposition (which includes a strong element of jihadi fighters from the Gulf) will not lead to a broader confilct that will commit us to another long-term occupation of a Middle Eastern state, ignite a broader international war, and generally result in another Iraq-like catastrofuck. I say, let’s just drop McCain on Syria, since he’s so eager to put someone’s life on the line. And if chemical weapons are a “red line”, we should have drawn it before using white phosphorus and depleted uranium munitions in Iraq. If Syria goes to the Hague, they should be in line right behind us.

Seneca Lake. A blockade by activists at the site of a salt cavern natural gas storage site being established by Inergy LLP resulted in arrests a few weeks ago. One of those arrested, Sandra Steingraber, was interviewed on the Capital Pressroom radio program this week along with her attorney. This project involves storing natural gas shipped in from outside the state in salt caverns left from old salt mining operations. Similar facilities across the nation have caused sinkholes, water pollution, etc., and now they want to site this thing on the largest of the Finger Lakes. Steingraber and her fellow protesters are fighting the good fight on this one. Pumping natural gas into geologically questionable formations beneath one of the largest fresh water lakes in the region seems like, well, not a real good idea.

Energy coporations and faulty intelligence. It’s like Bush all over again.

luv u,

jp