not again please

HERE WE GO AGAIN

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

August 29, 2013

                At the moment, the best evidence I have found that the Syrian government launched the apparent nerve gas attack is that Israeli “intelligence’ has passed along cables shared with US intelligence purporting to be cables among Syrian military commanders talking somehow about the attack, which have “convinced” the US president and British prime minister that the Syrian government was “probably responsible” for the gas shelling.

                It is ironic that we are presented with the urgency of inflicting military retaliation against Syrian “assets” before the UN even completes the inspection that I’m sure the US government is responsible for barring from even asking who did the deed, just as many among us are questioning whether George Zimmerman was unfairly acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin, where rules of evidence demanded that Zimmerman remain innocent unless the evidence the public saw proved him legally guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of intentionally, inexcusably, killing Mr. Martin.

                Fortunately, some voices are rising to the media surface recalling the confidence that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction justified the hundred-days 2003 invasion of Iraq.  I recently blogged my weariness at the number of times even in my lifetime, from the overthrown of Prime Minister Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, from the Tonkin fabrication that got us overtly into Vietnam in 1964, and on and on, until now Syria falls under the umbrella of the war on terror grounded on limited evidence of who all set 9/11 off.   Will it happen again?  The UN Secretariat devoutly hopes not.  How hard have I had to listen to pick up on the fact that Iran and Syria have a mutual defense treaty, where an attack on one is considered an attack on the other—akin to NATO and countless other mutual defense treaties the US holds with governments, the kind of agreements that justified the US invasion of Vietnam as national self-defense, lest Communist dominoes fall in Southeast Asia, to stop the Communists (now it’s to stop chemical weapons) before they landed on the U.S. West Coast, agreements made and broken as it suits “American interests.”

                I remember desperately thinking that the US could not invade Iraq as long as the Russians opposed it.  I keep hoping, please, not again…love and peace, hal