Sometimes there is a situation in which there is no good option for action, I think an attack on the Syrian government is such a situation for the United States. Neither side is clean, neither side is not willing to do awful things to maintain dictatorial control, outside Islamist radicals have been obviously among the side which in other civil wars would be presented as the liberators fighting against a brutal dictator and when that's the case what is likely to result isn't going to be anything like liberation. It will be the swapping of brutal dictatorships or a protracted civil war in which the governments are just the equivalent of the punctuation in one of my longer sentences.
The fiction that the United States can enter into something like the Syrian civil war - which apparently has more than one non-government side, and produce something like a democracy should have been destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan. As informed a person as former Secretary of Defense Gates learned that lesson. But the American media and political classes have scant experience of what the wars it wildly supported before they grew bored and weary of them are really like. They generally didn't ever fight in one and they rarely send their children to get killed in them. To them the war in Syria is a political entity with business potential or just a story to yak about and fill or get air time. They can call up the neo-cons on their portable device and have them on to give another variation of what they gave before. Apparently two disastrous wars since the turn of the century aren't enough to discredit them. But the media-political-corporate class never lets things like hundreds of thousands of people killed in futile wars of non-liberation sold to the American People as a war of liberation that will solve problems remove people like the Kagans and Wolfowitz from their guest lists. I mean to their parties where these things really generate, the Sunday Morning Lie Hours are just where they need to rope the suckers in.
As unskilled a politician as Barack Obama is, he's still a politician and so vulnerable to the media and what pressure they produce. Being an establishment kind of guy, he listens to the voices of the establishment, those who are brought to us by the corporate class and staffed by the same people who produce the neocons they present. He must know that this war he's been pressured into is not going to do anything good for anyone. He's a bad politician and about the worst negotiator I've ever seen in his job but he's not a fool. His response will be to do something while trying to minimize the damage to the United States and his presidency. And the same people who are criticizing him on both sides will mock as symbolic whatever he does. And he knows that too. And it is likely that the same people pressuring him into this war will, once it turns into the total disaster he must know it almost certainly will, will pressure him to escalate. That is as certain as it has been, constantly since Vietnam when the ancestors of today's media-military-industrial class pressured other Democratic presidents into entering a war in which the United States had nothing good to accomplish.
The Second World War in Europe with a clear evil in the form of Hitler and his allies and relatively good governments to support, formed the popular imagination of subsequent wars, But it was an exception of the most decisive kind. It's a really bad model to use to think about most wars, most wars aren't like that. The American Civil War in which the maintaince of slavery was the motive of the war and its abolition eventually adopted as its purpose is also a bad model on which to base our imagination of civil wars. Since Ken Burns reignited that dormant area of our popular imagination it has entered into the realm of how people imagine events today as well.
But the movies and novels and the media sell us war after war based on those models when the realities of those other wars have nothing in common with them. Historical fiction is fiction. It is constructed by authors, it is not a model of reality even in the best of them. One person can't imagine up a model of war. Even a team of Hollywood hacks can't do that. No, ESPECIALLY a team of Hollywood hacks can't do that. Even a documentary as good as can be made is a constructed reality with a narrative imposed on it.
The extent to which the idiots who populate our media don't understand those differences is unclear, we don't know to what extent they realize how big the lies they tell to get America involved in these serial disasters are. But they are lies and our ability to learn from the enormous loss of life, the maiming of tens and hundreds of thousands and even millions, the destruction and death - it is war, folks - remote from us doesn't seem to teach us anything. It doesn't even teach our elites to look at what they're getting us into. In the Syrian civil war, you're only going to find as bad a result as the present regime winning no matter who wins. And I doubt there's going to be anything so relatively benign as a winner. It will be as bad as Iraq in which the peace just means a relative decrease in the warfare, a situation that will be going on for decades yet.
Obama will do something in Syria, that bad lot has already been cast. Hopefully he will do the least he can, which will be called "merely symbolic" but it will not be merely symbolic to the people who get killed, the entirely innocent figuring heavily in those but who will only be mentioned in the media to the extent they want to use them to attack Obama. He's going to get that from both sides, no matter what he does. Our media is very good at pressuring us into these things, they've been doing it since at least the Mexican-American War of 1848. That is a pattern of behavior which really needs to be broken if we are ever going to stop getting into wars sold on lies. Our media is still in that pattern, as are the corporate and political classes that are in thick as the thieves they are with them.
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