“If it makes no obvious sense for the US and its allies to once again start firing heavy metal into the Middle East, why would they do it?
Several possible explanations…
- Wag the dog. As I don’t need to tell you, the degrading Western democracies are broke as broke can be. In the case of the United States, the next debt ceiling will be reached in mid-October, after which the government will have to effectively stop answering the phones. Having run out of money for bread, putting on a circus might seem just the thing.
- The military-industrial complex is alive and well. I assume every one of you dear readers has already seen Dwight Eisenhower’s incredible farewell speech to the nation in which he warned against allowing the rise of a military-industrial complex. Unfortunately, not enough of the right people paid attention to ‘Ike,” and the military-industrial complex has grown huge… and politically very powerful. War is the health of the state, opined Randolph Bourne. And right now, the state could use a booster shot.
- US foreign policy has been hijacked by the Neocons. This notion is something I have written about before. Evidence for it arrived earlier this week in a short video forwarded by a dear subscriber. The video, which appeared on ZeroHedge, is from 2007 and features Gen. Wesley Clark calmly describing how in the days immediately following 9/11, a general working with the US Joint Chiefs of Staff showed him a memo outlining a US plan to take out seven countries in the Middle East, including Iraq, Syria, and Libya, before ultimately finishing up with Iran. It certainly seems a plausible scenario to me.
As I go to press, it seems as though the rush to war that was so evident as recently as Wednesday is running into a wall of public opposition. So much so that David Cameron has started back-pedaling and Obama begun waffling.
Unfortunately, for strictly political reasons, the odds are high that President Obama won’t back down completely. If he did, the loud-mouthed opposition would pillory him as being weak and indecisive, and we couldn’t have that. So, he’ll take action, if only to fire off a few billion dollars’ worth of missiles at random Syrian military targets.
(Speaking of loud-mouthed opposition, I feel compelled to mention John McCain, whom I now firmly believe to be insane. No, really. He has become a dangerous character á la Dr. Strangelove, advocating the invasion of Iraq and, to this day, defending it as a good idea.
As bad as Obama is—and in my view he’s about as bad as the younger Bush—I think we’d all be scraping for food through radioactive rubble if McCain had won the presidency.”
Remnants of Liberty 