It’s chilling to peruse the signatories of this letter and compare them to the signatories of the PNAC letter to Bush.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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It’s only “chilling” if you have not come to grips w/the idea of different, somewhat competing wings of the PermaGov. If you have done so? No big thing. It’s just business as usual. The strategy remains the same on all wings…militarily enforced economic imperialism. Only the tactics produce debate at that level.
AG
They don’t always agree on the next enemy target. (McCain would have had us defending Georgia against Russia.) The next one is always number two (we like taking out number twos in al Qaeda as well), because Iran is number one.
Article begins with:
Gee, where have I heard that before? Oh, right all the war makers back in 2002-2003.
Pierce gets this one right:
Yeah, because Iraq made the Bush and the Shrub more believable presidents.
How about we drop these so-called foreign policy experts into the Syrian rebel held territories and let them sort it out on the ground instead sitting on their well-cushioned asses demanding that we bomb more people.
I like the way the Syrians in the rebellion aren’t “ordinary Syrians.”
They’re not.
They’re terrorists (many of them Al Qaeda) including thousands of foreign fighters.
This is very reminiscent of how we funded the mujihadeen as “Freedom Fighters” in Afghanistan. How did that work out for us, joe?
Can you say “BLOWBACK”?
Very good job repeating the talking points from the Syrian government.
OH MY GOD SCARY TERRORISTS! THE ENTIRE SYRIAN OPPOSITION ARE TERRORISTS!
Syrian Propaganda?
Jesus fucking Christ.
Why don’t you go ahead and ask my why I love Saddam?
Marie, you are now giving “excellent” rating to a troll who signed up half an hour ago so he could follow me from site to site and harass me with parodies of over-the-top “anti-war” arguments.
Congratulations.
Richard47, do yourself a favor and ignore him. He has no clue what he is yammering on about, and sometimes I think he gets his rocks off by knowing he is an irritant.
It is a fact that some of the so-called “opposition” parties are not Syrians at all, let alone “ordinary” Syrians.
Right on, sister.
If Bush or another Goper was in office they would have bombed Syria months ago. And Egypt. And {Fill in the blank]
That said, the government is more than one man. And our political elites ensure that even in a worst case scenario, they get candidates from the two major parties that will not essentially change the system in place.
There is no way FDR could ever get nominated today.
Au contraire. They don’t use a different military calculus or timetable. Cheney/Rummy wanted to bomb Iraq after 9/11 (good targets) but they waited the requisite year and a half between major bombings campaigns (and elections).
Bill “I feel your pain unless you are Iraqi” Clinton’s record in Iraq suggests differently, Steven D. Clinton seemed to really get off on bombing Iraqis, not to mention denying them the most basic necessities. After all, it was he who ordered the inspectors out so he could stage a massive bombing attack on civilian targets supposedly to punish Saddam for an alleged plot against GHWB that turned out to be completely bogus.
I once had a dog that ate his own poop, and prime rib.
It didn’t put me off prime rib, because I knew he was just a dog.
So,
Iraq= poop
Syria= prime rib
Got it.
So lack of discrimination = lack of discrimination.
People who have the same answer to every question, and don’t need to know the details, are idiots, and shouldn’t be listened to.
That’s basically exactly why I pay so little attention to your foreign policy opinions, Joe.
Well said, Geov Parrish.
It’s disgusting how you compare dropping bombs on innocent civilians to a meal of steak.
But very instructive as to the mind set of the NeoLibs.
Methinks you wouldn’t be very happy about a few cruise missiles landing in the Merrimack Valley, no?
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.-
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
How about you take a look at the US use of depleted uranium if you want to see what something much worse than gas attacks looks like?
Or how about how the USA supplied chemical weapons to Saddam in the 1980s who gassed Iranians? Of course we didn’t do anything then because it wasn’t in our “national interest” of Empire and Israel.
Look at the hash we made of Libya, our last Imperial adventure:
http://rt.com/news/libya-gaddafi-fall-anniversary-981/
We need nation building at home NOT Empire abroad.
Resist the Empire.
Hello, troll who followed me from LGM.
Did you know that we can click…somewhere and see that you just signed up a few minutes ago for the sole purpose of doing this?
I think Obama, if he is made aware of that letter will just laugh at first. Then shake his head that some people never learn.
If he decides to take military action against Syria it will be for his own reasons. He does think a lot about WMD and how to contain them – ever since his senate days working with Lugar.
So Ted Cruz is against intervening in Syria. He coupled it with a nonsensical attack on the administration for allowing it to come to this point (and the alternative was what you walking disgrace?) but if he votes against any authorization I’ll take it.
I have a sinking feeling you are talking about America’s next president. Ironically he is playing Bush-era geopolitical weariness like a fiddle.
What I find disappointing is that progressives can’t seem to see the distinction between the situation the Obama administration faces in Syria today and the one the Bush administration concocted from whole cloth in 2003 targeting Iraq. It’s like one of those anachronistic IQ test questions, “Spot the difference in these two pictures…”
Oh I can see the distinction, at least Iraq was stable before we went in.
I mean you’re going to pick social security cuts as a hill to die on while throwing us into Syria when our armies are still tied up in Afghanistan?
I was thinking more of the actual use of a weapon of mass destruction vs the total fabrication of their existence.
So I took a look at the list of signatories.
……………
How about they form a volunteer brigade and we send THEM in?
Dr. William Kristol could lead the medical corps. Or at least the fake-social-scientist corps (the rear guard, because their asses are always covered).
The Weekly Standard article said 66 experts signed the letter but I keep seeing names like Karl Rove, Wm Kristol, Tim Pawlenty, and Joe Lieberman. They’re experts at being outfoxed by Barack Obama but I’m not sure that’s what they were working towards.
That’s Dr. William Kristol to your, sir. He’s a hipster social scientist–bought Harvard degrees before it was mainstream.
My deepest apologies, of course, to the good Doctor.
Patient: “Doctor doctor, it hurts when I do this: invade nations on false pretenses”.
Dr Kristol: “Well, keep it up then!”
I don’t watch the cable TV much so when I run into it these days it’s a bit of a culture shock. Boy-oh are the media war drums pounding just like for every previous media war event. Was in a store that was running CNN. They had on an “expert” whose claim to know Bashar Assad was that he and Assad’s wife served on a committee of the same international charity. Assad is bipolar in that he swings one way and another, according to said expert and he is unstable under stress. Where have we heard the “crazy leader” stuff before going into a war? And why do we persist that “crazy” leaders will understand the “message” we are sending them?
Then there was a clip of Biden at the American Legion making the argument for action in Syria.
Followed by Newt (do he pay them to allow him on?) with the very profound question, “What next? What do we do after a strike?” And no doubt his ideas parallel those of the PNAC crowd. Syrian and Iran would sorta of create the changed 7-country reality that Wesley Clark talked about in an interview years ago about the Bush agenda. And then Newt held forth with the “if Obama had talked less and took strong action we would not be in this fix” line of argument.
So deja view. Almost 50 years of deja vu.
IMO the tricky diplomacy that the Obama administration must navigate are the Syrian defense pacts with Iran and Russia.
And just so you know there is a video circulating by a group called Storm Clouds Gathering that makes the claim that a UK security contractor named Britam Deterrence had a contract with the government of Qatar to design scenarios for false flag gas attacks. The evidence for their claims are, they claim, documents hacked from Britam Deterrence that have been taken down from every web site that this group has tried to store them on. Take this with a huge grain of salt. But know that it is out there and you will see this story repropagated through the blogosphere.
The best case scenario is that it is over by the time Congress resumes and that there are not nasty follow-on consequences. I don’t see the Obama administration holding fire unless there is some huge and stunning diplomatic breakthrough.
Another defense complex stenographer weighs in:
Because nothing says “big cajones” like lobbing some bombs on the people in a smaller country with a leader that the west doesn’t like and doesn’t have the military means to directly strike back. The world really needs to replace all these adolescent bullies running the world with some adults.
You know what makes me sick to my stomach? People talking about “sending messages” and doing armchair psychoanalytics of the president based on his willingness to issue orders that will ensure a bunch of innocent people die. Exactly what else would result, nobody really knows – which is kind of a problem – but when you have no compelling idea of what a positive outcome might look like, you fall back on this sort of idiocy. And in the elite political and media discourse, they seem to breathe and spew this bullshit so reflexively they don’t even have any idea what’s missing from the picture – let alone its impact on the lives, and deaths, of real people.
Because when you’ve got about five or eight unsympathetic factions fighting each other, all of them using civilian populations as disposable collateral, and no side can get enough of a monopoly on force to get their way, nothing brings the peace like escalating the violence even further. Works every time.
Couldn’t agree with you more if I tried!
This is bullshit. What hubris. How fast will we kill more then the gas did. Obama is being bullied with his own words. Assad launches a gas attack one year after Obama’s stupid “redline” statement. Now ts personal it always ends up that way. Assad and Putin are baiting Obama. Lunatic neocons are baiting Obama.
I hope he has the courage to resist. Line up the destroyers but please do not use them.
Salunga, it is so much better to be killed and maimed and rendered an orphan by an America led by a hpey/changey Nobel Peace laureate who assassinates “his own people” than by anyone else. I am shocked that you don’t see that.
Obama is a politician. He will do what politicians do.
War is a racket.
He will do this until he’s banned.
There is someone named “Arch Puddington” on this list. That is all.
Ha! Obviously one of those Acorn voter-fraud people, corrupting the data.
Clearly. Arch Puddington is the proper name fpr an enormously corpulent British duke or earl who sits in the House of Lords and screams at his manservant, “Bring me more caviar, fool! And another pair of fowls!”
Here, the name has been sadly wasted on a simple American neo-con.
I’d like an audience with the Arch Puddington.
…
No? Well, can I get in to see one of the Under-Puddingtons?
The Arch Puddington is currently suffering from a severe attack of the gout. And the Under-Puddingtons are all engaged in important discussions at the Treacle House. Perhaps you’d be willing to speak with one of the secondary Pudding-mates at reception?
Arch Puddington is vice president for research at Freedom House.
He is responsible for the publication of Freedom in the World and other research publications, and for the development of new research and advocacy programs.
I think he used to go by the name, Spotted Dick.
(Dogwhistle for Peter O’Brien fans.)
The more things are hopey/changey, the more they stay the same.
And the more hopeless they become.
I see.
I doubt it.
Let’s just say, as a hypothetical exercise, that Assad has killed several hundred Syrians in their sleep with a 5% or 10% concentration of a deadly neurotoxin and the US, NATO and the UN does nothing. What do you expect to happen next?
If it is true that Assad is using chemical weapons with a carefully calibrated dosage to confound diagnosis and soften the magnitude of the response in the international community a really horrible calculus emerges with human lives in a genocidal game of Jeopardy. Will he do it again? As his hold on power weakens? At a 15% or 20% concentration? How many dead Syrians is the threshold, folks? 1,000? 5,000? More?
It seems to me this needs to be nipped in the bud because it is a tactic that could be used elsewhere in future. And the parallels with the weapons of mass destruction disinformation leading up to the Iraq invasion fail to account for the hundreds of fatalities for whom MSF has already confirmed the cause of death.
This is the same regime which perpetrated the Hama massacre in 1982 in which somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 Syrians were ruthlessly killed by their own government, mostly civilians.
Oh, give me a break with this business of conflating Bashshar with his father. Bashshar Al Asad was a kid when his father committed that crime, and had nothing to do with it.
So you see no precedent there for democide? I am beginning to doubt your motives in this discussion.
You don’t understand that it is the Baath Party leadership that runs Syria. Bashir Assad is only the head of state. His father, on the other hand, ran the Baath Party leadership. It’s not exactly the family business like the Gadhafi regime was.
If you will notice I said, “This is the same regime which perpetrated the Hama massacre in 1982…” It was my interlocutor who introduced the misdirection of Assad and his father and hence the family connection.
Tarheeldem, the man’s name is Bashar (or in a more correct transliteration, Bashshar, since the sh consonant is doubled). Bashir is a completely different name. Hard to ask Americans to do better than their government spokesweasels and mainstream media talking heads, but I like to encourage accuracy at least in naming people and places. 🙂
And the last name is not usAWD as we constantly hear frm the spokesweasels and talking heads, it is ASad with the emphasis on the first syllable, and the vowel pronounced as in the English word said. Asad is Arabic for lion.
Ah! Now you turn to using an ad hominem argument against someone you know nothing at all about – well done. AND you seem to think I care if you doubt my “motives” – whatever that even means.
For your information I have seen up close and personal and in real flesh and blood terms exactly what military violence in the guise of “humanitarian intervention” means, and in particular what it means to women and children, who are always the greatest victims of “humanitarian violence”.
So, based on nipping your little hypothetical in the bud you are just fine with exacerbating an already violent and dangerous situation and ultimately doing even more harm to Syrian civilians.
My god.
How many casualties was the question. Dismissing serious questions with less than serious responses or ad hominem attacks is a tactic of misdirection.
I’ve read you wonder about this a couple times. Is this something you’ve picked up in coverage of the events or is this your own hypothesis? I’m not trying to be dismissive of the idea, but rather would like to know more of what’s behind this thought.
What we know is that the injuries are consistent with some sort of nerve agent (Doctors Without Borders), but the exact agent cannot be easily identified.
This has prompted speculation along several lines. One line is that the chemical agent is a mixture of several chemical weapons agents which confounds easy identification; that requires some sophistication in mixing the agents or designing the delivery device. The second line of speculation is that the agents are Chemical Weapons Agrement Schedule 3 chemicals. Schedule 3 chemical have dual use; they are often heavily used precursors in ordinary commercial chemical processes or have acknowledged commercial uses.
From the al-Jazeera article I have cited previously.
MSF may have determined the cause of death, but no one has determined the source.
Hence the use of the term hypothetical. I have made a case for the perpetrator being the Syrian regime elsewhere.
How about we not launch cruise missiles based on a hypothetical.
We do. Just pointing out the consequences of doing nothing which seems to be a pretty popular notion otherwise.
Evil axis = US, UK, Israel playing their usual strategic game.
Losers = civilians everywhere
But the Syrians will ultimately benefit, yes? Why not ask the people of Iraq and Afghanistan about how much their lives have improved? Meanwhile, Lebanon has been destabilized (again) and the US and UK have turned a tin ear to Iran’s plea for peace and an end to sanctions.
The world’s actual puppetmasters look on the legion of internet conspiracy theories and pine wistfully for the powers of seamless manipulation granted them by comments such as this one.
The problem is neither that they involve conspiracies or that they are theories, but that they involve supernatural powers that somehow cause everything to run according to plan and nothing to fuck up.
Yes, I’m sure the actual powers that be pine for such omnipotence.
Again, this guy is a troll who follows me from site to site, writing parodies of left-wing arguments as a troll.
I did pick up on you posting that. But it’s not like he’s the only one who embraces the wildest imaginable CTs as a first-choice explanation for everything that happens on Earth.