America: Drugged Up, Dumbed Down and Crazy Dangerous

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Soren Dreier

The dogs of war are barking in the backyard and some deranged minds seem determined to swing open the gates – again. At the same time, the American people, the only ones who can stop the savagery, are saddled with long-term debt, deficits and depression.

As the new age Romans mission-creep toward the next doomed Middle East neighborhood, this time in Syria, when does the quaint phrase “experiencing déjŕ vu” become just a polite way of saying we are apathetic spectators at the Circus Maximus?

Does uttering mindless platitudes while the swords are swinging make us accomplices to death and destruction? Do our politicians – the nice guys who bailed out the bankers to the tune of trillions while we got cash for clunkers – really care about innocent civilians abroad who are getting caught in the crossfire?

By playing the knight in shining armor on behalf of every oppositional groundswell, we are actually encouraging these revolutionary uprisings from the start. As the Arab Spring shows, the opponents of the ruling authorities are seizing the reins of power through street violence, which seems to be the preferred method of political campaigning these days.

The opponents of vanquished Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, for example, did not have to prove their political prowess to win power. They only had to show up and demonstrate their staying power until NATO air support was called in. Eventually, the opposition revealed their true colors, however, when they dragged Gaddafi from a hole, Hussein-style, before summarily executing him. No trial, no judge, no jury, no worry. Welcome to the brave new political jungle where the side with the best crowd control always wins.

Essentially, the western powers are bankrolling unproven political wannabes not with hard cash, which is bad enough, but with overwhelming firepower. This opens the door to crimes of worse magnitude than would have been the case had nobody interfered in the first place. For example, if the Syrian political opposition understand, as they certainly must, the infinite power of global communication, then they will also understand the effectiveness of sending a message (tweeting, texting, whatever) that government forces committed an “atrocity” – even if they have not.

Consider the May 25 massacre in the village of Houla. Nobody yet has been able to prove beyond a shadow of doubt the identity of the perpetrators behind that barbaric event, which saw the murder of 108 people, mostly women and children. The opposition claims government forces hired mercenaries known as Shabiha to carry out the attack. However, the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad maintains that armed groups were determined to sabotage UN peace talks (on May 15, one day before a UN Security Council meeting on Syria, militants carried out a massacre in the town of Homs, while the Houla attack coincided with a visit by UN negotiator Kofi Annan). Why would Assad, of all people, be opposed to ending the violence that threatens to bring down his government, and possibly far worse?

To date, western forces have thrown their support behind the political opposition in Egypt, Libya and most infamously in Iraq. And how is that working? Egypt is witnessing a tense standoff between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military, while the new Libyan authorities have just detained four members of the International Criminal Court who were in town to provide a defense attorney to Gaddafi’s son. So much for planting the seeds of democracy. Meanwhile, many Americans are still scratching their heads over the “preemptive” attack on Iraq, which never had weapons of mass destruction or a hand in the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Yet, we still have not learned the lessons of Iraq. In fact, some people are twisting that failed mission to fit in with the new mission statement. In fact, one writer for Haaretz argued that the “world must intervene before ‘Iraqization’ of Syria,” reasoning that “the collapse of the Syrian army and Assad’s regime is liable to lead to the ‘Iraqization’ of the country, in such a way that it will no longer be clear who controls it.”

Have we already forgotten that it was the US invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003 that prompted the “Iraqization” of Iraq in the first place?

Perhaps this is what Russian President Vladimir Putin partially meant when he once called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Although the momentous event triggered severe dislocations across Russia, it also gave the United States an opportunity to behave like a veritable beast on the human stage.

Now, after some 20 years of snorting and licking the mirror of power, the world’s solitary superpower, saying no-no-no to rehab, continues to do what it does best: acting like an infantile Bam-Bam from the Flintstones.

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