The script is getting old. In a process that is starting to look so programmatic, Defense Chief Chuck Hagel makes a statement last April saying something to the effect that the Obama administration has "some degree of varying confidence of sarin use" by the Syrian regime.
This morning, the White House delivered -- delivered a letter to several members of Congress on the topic of chemical weapons used in Syria. The letter, which will be made available to you here shortly -- as soon as George gets it, we'll get it to you -- states that the U.S. intelligence community assesses with some degree of varying confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin.
Then he
goes on to talk about so-called "red-lines," about trying to get "consensus from the intelligent community," and about the important role of the United Nations in trying to ascertain whether chemical weapons have been used by the Syrian regime.
Precisely because the President takes this issue so seriously, we have an obligation to fully investigate any and all evidence of chemical weapons use within Syria. That is why we are currently pressing for a comprehensive United Nations investigation that can credibly evaluate the evidence and establish what took place.
Once I saw that script, I knew right then and there (April, 2013) that we were going to get involved. With the end of the war in Iraq, and the winding down of the war in Afghanistan, the market needs of the military industrial complex necessitates our involvement in another protracted quagmire. I put up my "counter" and waited for the the announcement... And here we are. It happened today, as reported by the New York Times: "
U.S. Is Said to Plan to Send Weapons to Syrian Rebels"
The Obama administration, concluding that the troops of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria have used chemical weapons against rebel forces in his country’s civil war, has decided to begin supplying the rebels for the first time with small arms and ammunition, according to American officials.
Assad is not going anywhere. Militarily, his regime now has momentum. He has the support of Russia, Iran, and "the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah."
In the meantime the rebels remain in disarray.
Now, of course, the government officials, who could actually be considered "the informal lobby" of the Military Industrial Complex are pushing hard for our involvement.
The flights, and Hezbollah’s decision to enter the fight on the side of the Assad government, have provided such an important boost for the Assad government that some senior State Department officials believe that Mr. Assad’s gains cannot be reversed unless the United States takes steps to curtail the Iranian arms flow, disabling the airfields that the Syrian government uses to receive arms, transport troops around the country and carry out air attacks.
Folks, I'm going to write, very precisely and with a "high degree of confidence" exactly what I did (and many others did) in the lead up to the Iraq war...
Here's what's going to happen: Follow the money. Just like in Iraq and Afghanistan, this is not (primarily) about helping the rebels win a war, or about the U.S. winning a war (once we get more deeply involved). This is just part of the continuum of the "eternal state of war" the Military Industrial Complex needs to satiate its relentless appetite for profits. This, ultimately about war profiteering.
We're getting involved in a quagmire (the favorite type of situation for war profiteers because it is usually open-ended).
Now the media is going to go into hyper-drive, people here and other places are going to comment all indignant as to the evils of the use of chemical weapons, and about by golly we need to help those poor people suffering in what is essentially an ethnic-sectarian conflagration.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel by George Orwell published in 1949. The Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public mind control, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (Ingsoc) under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as thoughtcrimes.
Of course, we're going to inflame passions, make more enemies, which will increase threats of terrorism, which will strengthen the hand of the surveillance police state here in the U.S.
Yes, this script is getting old, but "nobody seems no notice; nobody seems to care," as George Carlin would say. Get the popcorn ready.
“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt, April 29, 1938. Message to congress