It’s cruisin’ season folks. That time of year when America’s leaders think fondly of sending our missiles a-cruisin’ to foreign lands where they can drop in—with a big bang—on people our leaders don’t like.
Listening to American news reports about the President’s determination to take quick military action in Syria, you’d think Iraq had never happened. That our government never lied about weapons of mass destruction, never used that lie as an excuse to rush to war, and never got embroiled in a vicious civil war that cost America 5000 dead, 30-40 thousand seriously wounded and over one trillion dollars squandered, (Bright side: most of the cash went to American defense contractors).
Not to mention the several hundred thousand Iraqis who died, the one million or more who have been displaced, the destruction of their country and the continuing civil war. All this done to a country that never threatened the US!
So now it’s cruisin' season again. The president says we’ve got to cruise to Syria this time, and we gotta do it quick before them Syrians use weapons of mass destruction again against their people or worse against us. When I hear that talk, I don’t know about you, but I think, sounds just like Iraq.
Before they start this cruise, we the people desperately need to do a reality check. What do we actually know about this gas attack, and what more do we need to know? Given the sorry state of America’s main stream media, we’re going to have to do the check ourselves.
PDA Pre-Cruise Reality Check:
We know: that there are credible reports of a horrific poison gas attack that killed several hundred civilians in Syria. (Let’s keep in mind that before the attack, over 100,000 Syrians had already died in their war, but no one said we should get involved.)
We hear that Western and US government spokespersons say the attack was perpetrated by the Syrian government, but so far our leaders have offered little evidence to back up their claims.
We also hear strong denials of responsibilities from the Syrian government.
WE hear that a UN group was on its way to investigate but turned back due to security concerns. (Remember prior to our attack on Iraq, UN inspectors reported finding no weapons of mass destruction. Based on that information, the US attacked.)
Question: Before we go cruising again, let's get two things straight:
1) Did a poison gas attack actually take place? (Looks like yes, but it needs to be verified.)
2) If it did, was it indeed perpetrated by the people whom we intend to blow to smittereens? (As of Sept 1, no evidence.)
To answer these questions, US authorities should do everything they can to get the UN investigators to the scene before we pull the cruise trigger. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely they’ll do that, not during crusin' season. So let’s try to reason this out for ourselves.
The Syrian civil war has been raging for over 2 years, but in the last few months, the government was gaining the upper hand and might defeat the rebels. The one thing that could surely prevent them from winning would be foreign intervention.
As in Libya, when the rebels were being defeated, intervention from outside turned the situation around and soon, Colonel Kaddafi’s was dead. So it seems that the Syrian government would have a strong interest in preventing foreign intervention.
Now the one thing that could trigger that intervention would be crossing Obama’s red line, in this case, using weapons of mass destruction such as poison gas. Yet, our leaders are saying that’s just what the Syrian government did. Hmmm.
On the other hand would the rebels benefit from foreign intervention? Hmmm.
All conjecture of course, but during cruising season nothing’s going to be clear; the government will lie, and the media will repeat and amplify those lies.
So, we’re on our own, sitting in the dark, being fed s--t and trying to make sense of cruisin' season.
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