I was on the CBC’s excellent The Current to discuss former Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy’s proposal that Western action in Syria should resemble the Kosovo campaign of the 1990s. I disagreed, pointing to the many differences between the two situations I come in about halfway through. Click on the image below to go to the broadcast:
Mr. Axworthy’s op-ed on Kosovo and Syria is here:
But there’s this big thumping similarity: An enormous war machine, wanting, inter alia, the opportunity to test and deploy and use up various bits of inventory, and novel tactics, and Grand Network-Centric Strategies, and there are MEDALS and COMMENDATIONS and PROMOTIONS to be “earned” for “Managing the Battlespace,” and who knows what-all is going on in Obama’s (and the rest of his entourage’s) head, and whether it was anything like what former CIA boss George Bush and later Blue Dress Willie were thinking.
For context, for anyone who cares, here is a timeline of that bit of MIIC activity in Central Europe, just 25 years ago, at about the same time the US was assisting Saddam to use chemical weapons on Iran and his own people, from PBS:
link to pbs.org
“Only a Peace Conference Can Stop Further Bloodshed: The Fallacy of Airstrikes and Armed Intervention” by Patrick Cockburn – link to counterpunch.org
“In Rush to Strike Syria, U.S. Tried to Derail U.N. Probe: Truth Beneath the Surface” by Gareth Porter – link to counterpunch.org
“But there’s this big thumping similarity: An enormous war machine, wanting, inter alia, the opportunity to test and deploy and use up various bits of inventory, and novel tactics…”
I wouldn’t be too sure that the US only plans on targeting Assad’s forces. Don’t be surprised if certain rebel forces are also hit by US/NATO strikes, i.e. “The Fog of War?”
Juan
I wish you could be heard on NPR and the other mainstream media outlets. You feel that the Russian and Syrian regime contention that the rebels were behind the gas attack is implausible. What do you make of this article at Oil Price.Com entitled “Could the Chemical Attack in Ghouta be the Markale of the Syrian War” by Yossef Bodansky, Senior Editor, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs? He seems to think that the attack was a false flag operation to terrorize an area that had recently defected back to the Assad regime and to provoke a Western military intervention to prevent the destruction of CIA-trained and equipped “Free Syrian Army” units that had been surrounded by Assad’s forces.
Whatever Juan think, I believe there are a number of blog trolls going around using almost the exact language about why would the regime, winning the war, use chemical weapons now and infuriate the West.
And a lot of avatars saying a lot of “same texts” about all the reasons why “we” have to “retaliate against Assad.” For disobeying the command of the Commander in Red Line Chief.
Fun, isn’t it, to make a lot of people believe in connections and rationales and linkages and Great World Order Rules That Only Apply Sometimes as excuses, once again, to do what the Rulers want to do anyway…?
For all their logic-chopping and justifications, the apologists for Acting Without Really Thinking have a nice skill at deferring and deflecting and changing the subject…
Letter to Obama from warmongers
link to foreignpolicyi.org
Oh Governor Tim Pawlenty signed it. Well thank good ness. You know, he of the Rom-knee clan, a separatist breakaway tribe of the Financial Roundtables. You bet your darn Tooty da US interests are at steak over dere in dat place.
Best part of the letter from the warmongers: Karl Rove is one of the signatories! One wishes the President would automatically put the brakes on pursuing any policy Rove favors . . .