I’ve heard all this rhetoric before. Suddenly there’s the perfect opportunity to go to war with Syria, and Iran, with decade old rhetoric. Last time we wanted to go to war there was the question of WMDs. It was all about the WMDs. Saddam Hussein had them, and he might use them on US. We needed to be afraid, and out of our fear we needed to lash out and depose the enemies who God was against, and who were somehow inherently different than us. The weapons couldn’t be found in Iraq, but we knew they were there. Saddam was hiding them in his palaces. We were not fools. But then he let the weapons inspectors in his palaces and there were no WMDs.
Weapons inspectors had been in Iraq before and couldn’t find any WMDs, and we’d had “Operation Desert Fox” during which we’d shot 100 missiles into suspected weapons sites. Nobody talked about that though, or that nothing could be found after that, because we wanted a brand-spanking new, full-scale, old-school war. A war that would go down in the annals of history. There would be an equestrian statue of our brave president, even if that would be a bit anachronistic. Eventually we got bored of looking for the weapons we knew the wily dictator was hiding, perhaps behind his mustache, and we decided to have a showdown. Our president gave him 2 days to get out of Iraq, or else. We gave them “or else”. We gave ’em hell. Over a hundred thousand civilians died. We showed ’em good, real good. We shocked and awed them to death.
But then we found out that Saddam didn’t have any WMDs. Nothing. We went to war with a preemptive strike – shoot them first because they might shoot us later – against an unarmed opponent. In the end the Iraqi people themselves paid the price. And the soldiers.
This time we found a fix. Let’s start with proof of chemical weapons being used against their own people. There’s no more need to search for nonexistent weapons in order to justify war. We have our ticket. We are dancing in the street. For every person who died in the chemical attack, we will insure thousands or tens of thousands more will die. It’s a death fest! And it’s going to be glorious.
Obama has morphed into Bush.
Lets do it again!
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Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
Seems to me that foreign ministers and secretaries of state are drawn from an elite pool of especially evil people and Australia is no exception.
Yesterday we had our current foreign minister telling us that “They” had fooled “Us” about WMD in Iraq and so that’s why everyone could be confident that “We” would not be fooled again. Therefore when “We” bomb the crap out of civilian areas in Syria “We” can all be confident it will be for the right reasons.
Then it was the turn of a former Australian foreign minister who now works for a militarist think tank that generates bogus reasons for attacking whoever the White House says, based on ‘R2P’ (Responsibility to Protect) the civilians “We” massacre from the skies.
He engaged the interviewer in a long, erudite and thoughtful discussion ranging across just war theory, various legal and other justifications for declaring war and the moral underpinnings of R2P. He wore down the interviewer and presumably most listeners with his balanced and reserved treatment of all of his initial topics before justifying R2P in Syria with a bunch of utilitarian sophistries that basically boiled down to “Sometimes you have to kill some people to save even more and it’s only the experts advising governments with access to intelligence data we don’t have who can make that judgement with any certainty – so just trust them”.
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Yeah, but we know it’s really “sometimes you have to kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people to benefit a small group of powerful elite.” Also, true, my Australian friends have been telling me about the politics there following the footsteps of America’s mistakes. Oddly, incidentally, Australians make up a very large percentage of bloggers I follow. I can’t imagine why that is. We need interviewers that have the background, acumen, logic, and balls to rip apart foreign ministers rhetoric.
What really gets me is that the people in power in the U.S. seem to actually want war, and are just looking for an excuse to have it. As if they really care about the kids and other victims in the chemical attack that took place in Syria. They don’t even care about American citizens. It’s all bullshit. War just means a lot more death and economic hardship, and a dimmer future for everyone. We can also be distracted from addressing hard-pressing, life-threatening environmental issues. Killing is not the antidote to killing.
Ghastly stupidity!
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Good post. I agree, I agree, I agree.
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Glad you do. I’m starting to research this whole thing so I have a better understanding, but I think even if we look back on past wars that we thought were glorious, they were rewritten by history. I for one am done with war.
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War sux. I don’t even begin to understand the timing of this. One day, our gov’t isn’t at all outraged by what the Syrian gov’t does and then all of a sudden, the timing is ripe and our gov’t is outraged enough to send warships and ready to start another war? WTF? I am more than done with war.
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Yup.
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