A note from today’s Skimm:

Syria…Well, hello there…The government of President Assad (the man Obama says ‘must go’) thinks it’s great if the US crushes ISIS but only if the US coordinates with the Assad administration. Rock meet hard place. Meanwhile, the rebels – the ones Obama hopes to support – think airstrikes could do a lot more harm than good.

September 12, 2014

I use the word We a lot in this entry. I’m not sure who I mean by We. The United States, certainly. American citizens as participants in the remnants of the American experiment in democracy, absolutely. Citizens of Western Democracies (tm?) as a whole, definitely. Citizens of the world who hate the idea of getting into another war or cheerleading for it, or who are indeed ready to go out and fight it. A hundred years after the opening of the War to End Wars, The Great War, The World War (to which we had to add a number when 25 years later we let it all happen again. When I say We, I mean all of these things.

13 years on, we’re doing it again. Of course there were those who knew in 2001 that we were going to war and all we needed was the pretext. The facts behind what happened with those four airplanes are documented. The missteps, the selling of the wars, the anger as we went to war unprepared are all in the record.

And we’re doing it again. For all the same reasons and many more, to be sure. Though in this year that the War celebrates its bar mitzvah, for it is male, there is little doubt, the army is definitely better prepared. Though I don’t suppose Donald Rumsfeld could have rammed the thing through quite so well had he prepared the armed forces first.

ISIS, ISIL, IS, The Caliphate. Whatever you want to call it, it’s not only our baby, it’s going to be very difficult to defeat with any integrity. ISIS has declared its opposition to the government in Syria, making it our ally, no? But the group beheads American journalists on video, making it our enemy.

We talk on occasion of Syrian moderates. Who are these moderates? The ones Senator McCain thought he was meeting several months ago who were fighting against Bashad’s forces? It came out this week that those moderates were members of IS, and are happily using the photo op McCain provided them in their press releases.

Why war, over an over and over again? Why all the isms (militarism, sexism, racism, fascism). The bottom line from my point of view, and this isn’t any kind of original thought, is that it’s lucrative to gin up cases for war and hatred. From the small-town bullshit in Ferguson, MO where the city financed itself on the backs of poor citizens terrorised for years by the police force, back to the late 19th century agreements that led to the Great War and forward to the idiotic arm-twisting that created the Versailles Treaty and the back room discussions that formed both it and Sykes-Picot.

Yeah, the agreement between the UK and France that divvied up their colonies in the Middle East and Africa into all those weird shapes with all the very straight lines. Iraq? The Lebanon? Syria? Iran? Palestine? Saudi Arabia? Yeah, Those didn’t exist before the 20th century. And divvying them up like that was (again) to the financial benefit of a few and to the detriment of millions. What was it British Petroleum used to be called?

Follow the money. A few people got very very rich and many people got moderately wealthy off the wars we started in 2001. Dick Cheney is one good example, but there are many in the Bush administration. The creation of American Security Theater benefitted a great many people as well. Industries that were doing well suddenly did amazingly well.

And please don’t go all Godwin on me here when I bring up that Hitler distinguished the system he was creating from fascism by suggesting it should be called Corporatism – the joining of the the mechanisms of industry with those of state.

The selling of the Iraq II is well documented, but the thing didn’t happen in a vacuum. It wasn’t that those in power ginned up the case for war in the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center. If you believe the gent who writes The Far Left Side, what happened to WTC was part of the planning for the wars. So many questions got pushed aside and so much protest unanswered. Source: http://farleftside.com/2011/9-2-11-911-unforgotten.html

And now American Democracy has had 13 years of Free Speech Zones and the absolute gutting of the principles upon which the country was supposedly based. I try to keep in mind Howard Zinn’s assertions that the US based itself not life, liberty and the pursuit of propertyhappiness, but those were the slogans that sold a system that benefitted the few and disenfranchised the many. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence reflected his own self-interest, as did the Constitution (agreed upon in secret conferences from which no written minutes were released) that of its creators.