Obama's Generational Problem

I listened to the president’s Syria speech the other night where he attempted to convince the nation that we Americans are morally burdened with still another violent duty in the service of righteousness. The symptomatological cascade that Mr. Obama has succumbed to the pathology of imperial power, proffered by the permanent military-industrial bureaucracy, was confirmed by the encapsulation of his banal reasoning in a plethora of discreditable clichés glued together by the rhetorical excrement of empire – right down to the foolishness that some unique gift of “exceptionalism” justly enfranchises all the expedient, violent, and hypocritical activities this nation undertakes.

According to the unchanged opinions of the majority of Americans, even The Great Orator couldn’t re-legitimize our sham notion of “exceptionalism” which has been rendered intellectually and factually dubious to the ascending, culturally dominant generation geo-politically matured and edified by our brutal, blatant, and unapologetic Real politik fraud in Iraq. The demagoguery and rose-tinted lenses which for so long nullified the color of blood have been displaced by a new willingness to view impulsive militarism with the cynicism fitting to its nature and bequeaths to progressive, peaceful civilization. And that's a good thing!

Will There Be War?

Considering the continued murkiness of the facts and evidence, I don’t believe this nation should elect to war based primarily on a ‘prime time’ Presidential monologue. A serious and comprehensive national dialogue is required. If I were to ask the President some questions they would be -

1.    If violence is the answer to our grievance, why wouldn’t violence be the answer to someone else’s grievances a month from now or a year from now? Or is this war projected to be the war to end all grievances?

2.    If we bomb them, why shouldn’t we expect to be bombed? Americans have coasted too long on the anomaly of WWII and our recent conflicts where we engage in war and all the death and destruction happens “over there”. But war is not just us ‘doing them’; it is also them ‘doing us’. That’s war! And if bombs go off in their cities, we must expect they will go off in ours; exploded under the same construction of “justice” that supposedly informs our actions. Unless the President, in asking for authorization to go to war, is prepared to place this real possibility before the people, to make the people understand and appreciate the real consequences of war; that we must expect to see the blood of our children flowing down the storm drains in our streets, then his request would be less than his full moral duty. It would be an omission closely related to deception.

But there are other aspects equally pertinent to our national security and domestic tranquility to consider. We are not only debating a foreign war, we are debating a class war.

Over the course of the past weeks, right up to today, there haven’t been any other or new arguments presented differing from those generated on ‘day one’. No new evidence or proof has surfaced to sway adopted opinions. All of the originally held, various, and respective speculations are intact, in place, and unchanged. And the entire population is exposed to the same corporate media.  But I submit for consideration my admittedly unscientific conclusion derived from anecdotal evidence and my personal interpretation of the polls, that it appears that the economic top ten percent of the society is for the war, and the bottom 90% is against it. Why this is the case is another debate for another time. But “IF” I am correct I don’t believe it is possible for the President to lay out a case, lacking some as yet un-communicated, overwhelmingly compelling and believable arguments and proven facts that may have only emerged in the past hours, to change this calculus. So, although it is another discomfort in an uncomfortable and complex situation for a serially embattled president, a choice must be made. The President not only has a military decision to make, he has a political decision to make as well. His most vital and meaningful decision in this scenario doesn’t involve which weapons systems to employ, designating high value targets, or proving to the world how much of a badass he can be. What will have the greatest impact on our security and domestic tranquility is his decision on which constituency to appease. The historic and social trajectory of our nation awaits his choice.

Facts Americanus

It is time for the people of the United States to cease being herded to war like sheep. It is time to question our leaders and not simply follow where they lead. It is time to stop enjoying the arrogance that we are the most powerful nation on earth while simultaneously having our “security” threatened by every event in every backwater of the world. How does the recent tragedy which occurred in the Syrian civil war affect our “security”? We hear that mantra constantly repeated, but I haven’t heard an articulation of the nature of the threat that is so massive and imminent that it justifies us going to war against a minor regime already in the throes of civil war. I find it difficult to credit the horror our leaders express over the deaths of the Syrians caused by an alleged chemical weapon, when we killed many more civilians, women and children in the first hour of “shock and awe” in Iraq in an extra-legal attack over imaginary WMD. No, they are not motivated by regret over senseless death. Any intervention by the U.S. will not be motivated by humanitarian concern or defense of the integrity of an ancient convention. It will be motivated by the reward of regime change to our on-going strategy to eliminate any challenges to our hegemonic geo-political scheme to establish suzerainty over the region and its precious oil.

Of course there will be those who will claim my allegation is “anti-American”, but I request they measure the tempo and volume of the rhetoric of our warmongers against the information in the following articles.

                     

                      http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23947149

                      http://thebulletin.org/multimedia/chemical-weapons-syria

Does it seem strange to anyone that according to the first article, dated 9/3/13, that samples from the site are just now reaching the laboratories where they will be examined to determine what actually caused the deaths of the victims?  But our President has already drawn his conclusions and apparently thinks retaliation is so urgently needed that waiting for the results of the investigation is dangerous to OUR “security”. It is worth noting that some aspects of the forensic investigation will be to determine if the weapon was “improvised or designed for military use”, “possibly indicate the type delivery device used”, and ascertain the nature of the agent used.  From all that we’ve heard from official channels you’d believe all these questions had been resolved. But today we see they’re still open and haven’t even begun to be examined for actionable fact.  As “peaceful Americans” you’d think the answer to these questions would have a bearing on the grave decision to wage war. But following our imperial pattern it looks as if the President believes it is urgent to attack ‘before’ the facts are known, an urgency that is obviously tactical rather than altruistic.

The second article offers some perspective on chemical weapons and chemical weapons as WMD. The content of the two articles seem to require an intellectual and moral hesitancy that belies the rabid surety our leaders express by foreordained dismissal even in advance of the result of investigation and without a decent measure of certainty that should be required for war.

The farce of Congressional approval is meaningless unless there is someone in Congress, anyone, who will question how and why the Syrian civil war need become another American war. It is meaningless if any independent operator, any paid sociopath, any demented imperialist, any revenge seeker can compel this nation to war because of impolitic rhetoric that obligates us to act without facts or rationality. We, the President, and the Congress are too “for” war and too little “against’ it to be the positive force in the world we claim to be.