A Strange Symmetry

Has anybody noticed the strange symmetry between the two events that are now dominating the news?  The eastern Ukraine and the Gaza/Israel situations have much in common.  In both cases tails are wagging dogs. In the case of the Ukraine Vladimir Putin, backed by the now firmly nationalistic Russian people would like to repossess some of  the vast lands that vodka inspired Boris Yelsen let slip away.  Of course the hapless idealistic Mikhail Gorbachev started the whole unraveling process. But greater Russia was still intact when  Gorbachev was forced out.  Now 20 years later the now fossil fuel extraction financed, gangster-capitalist run Russian state would like nothing better than to “reconstitute”  some if not all of the former Soviet Union. Of course the  provocative expansion of NATO into the former Soviet Union under Bill Clinton didn't help. NATO expansion along with cannibalization of the former fully socialist economy by the West and by former Soviet apparatchiks led to the rise of an ex-KGBer like Putin.  Recall the terrible collapse in living standards in Russia after the USSR imploded. Things were so bad many longed for a return to the old Stalinist order. Things are better now with rising oil prices such that the Russkies are now 'feeling their Wheaties.' 

But while the Crimea 'repossession' worked out well for Putin & Co, his support of pro Russian separatists  in eastern Ukraine is now becoming a huge embarrassment. The  Russians seem to have created an uncontrollable monster.  Of course the neo Nazi infested pro-West government in opposition  is not much better.  What could possible be gained  by shooting down a Malaysian airliner full of civilians mostly from the Netherlands?   As photos fill the news of  separatist types poking around in the grisly wreckage the stock of the separatist's adversaries, the corrupt chocolate billionaire led pro-West coup installed government in Kiev, suddenly shot up.  If you look at which side benefited politically, one would have to guess that the Kiev government shot it down and made it look like the separatists did it. But so far that doesn't seem like to be the case. Of course the Russkies prefer that explanation.

Then we turn to the never ending brutal misbehavior of the US client state, Israel, and the  US's unwitting involvement.  Of course our clueless AIPAC-funded Congress is overwhelming siding with Israel's war criminal Bibi Netanyahu and supporting the relentless bloodbath he is inflicting on the helpless trapped population of Gaza. With the Gaza's population penned up in essentially an open air prison, for Israel it is like shooting fish in a barrel - last count: 1839 Palestinians mostly civilians vs.  67 dead  Israelis mostly soldiers. Is this a war or some kind of mass martyrdom by the Gazans? By all accounts the  Gazans support the suicidal resistance by the military wing of Hamas. Remember they were essentially under siege already. And to make matters worse Obama & Co is now re-supplying Israel with more armaments since the IDF is running low.  Whereas  in the Ukraine 298 civilians were killed in the plane crash, Israel is now killing that many Palestinians sometimes daily. And how many more are wounded and maimed?  How the US  has increasingly chained  itself to militant Zionism which ironically has morphed into something close to what inspired the Zionist movement in the first place - the German Nazis.  Suffice to say the horror of the Nazi Holocaust has been overwhelming misused as an pretext for creating a racist apartheid state.   Furthermore Hamas is a creature of the Israel anti-Palestinian policies.  Recall the years of vilification of Yassar Arafat and the PLO, which was a totally secular resistance movement. In fact Israel encouraged the emergence of Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO.

Once the PLO was domesticated and co-opted (with US money) and turned into the corrupt and ineffective Palestinian Authority, serious Palestinian resistance activists were forced to turn to the more robust resistance led by radical Islamists such as Hamas.  All the while Israel has never let up in expanding into the West Bank making a Palestinian state ever more an impossibility.

We must not forget that the whole jihadist movement is blowback from the Cold War. Remember the  inception was the CIA financing of Mujahideen in Afghanistan under Carter and Reagan in yet another proxy war with the USSR (which turned out to be USSR's “Viet Nam”.)  For years Israel  functioned as the West's neocolonial  nuclear armed “Fort Apache” outpost.  Now fast forward to 2014 and Israel has metamorphosed into an out of control nuke-armed fundamentalist ultra orthodox religion run state.

The primary problem is neocolonial Israel's perennial intransigence in dealing with its indigenous native population. Unlike the American colonialists the 'locals' couldn't just be genocidally removed although Israel seems to be trying.  The forever festering Israel/ Palestinian conflict has to be a prime factor in provoking ever more enlistments into groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS, and in the spread of the worldwide militant Islamist movement in general.  This is especially the case in a time when many of the world's 2.08 billion Muslims get to witness via satellite television on a daily basis one-sided slaughter of  their fellow believers by the IDF (and on a lesser scale drones.)  Of course lots of other horror shows and misdeeds by warring factions within the Muslim world vie for their attention. See Iraq and Syria plus daily suicide bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and others.) How much of  that carnage results from the muddled policies of an imperial power losing its grip?

Imperiums in decline (the US) or ones longing for former glory (Russia) are dangerous. They have populations who enjoy or recall the status (and material well being) of an imperial citizenry and who have been spoon fed on visions of nationalistic glory and exceptionalism. This feeding process is known as “manufacturing consent” and it works especially well especially in the US where the population lives in a very ahistorical reality.

Doesn't it seems rather suspicious that once the 'specter of worldwide communism' dissipated it was soon replaced by the 'specter of worldwide jihadist terrorism?'  A conspiracy minded type might suspect that somewhere somehow covert intelligence agencies might be intentionally feeding energy into this whole miserable mess so we can continue to have endless war. Or is all of this it just ineptitude and stupidity by our own ruling class? Whatever it is, it is very ugly.

Rainbow Song

ALL IN PURPLES AND BLUES

DADDY MAKE ME A RAINBOW

SO I CAN CLIMB UP TO YOU.

SHE STOOD IN THE DOORWAY

FACE DRAWN WITH DESPAIR

TEARS SHONE ON HER CHEEKS

SMALL HANDS FOLDED IN PRAYER

MOMMY SAYS YOU’RE IN HEAVEN

YOU GOT HURT IN IRAQ

DADDY, I REALLY MISS YOU,

AND I JUST WANT YOU BACK.

ALL IN PURPLES AND BLUES

DADDY MAKE ME A RAINBOW

SO I CAN CLIMB UP TO YOU.

SHE RAN THROUGH THE DOORWAY

SMILES BROKE AT THE SIGHT

FOR GOD IN HIS WISDOM

SENT HER RAINBOW FIRST LIGHT

 

THE HOUSE IS CLOAKED IN DARKNESS

SHREDDED WREATH ON THE DOOR

ANOTHER CASUALTY OF WAR.

                                        WRITTEN BY MARY E. WRIGHT, 90 YEARS OLD

                            

Usually my blog postings are impassioned screeds on what I feel is a world besieged by a species that has evolved (and multiplied) but has never overcome its primal nature - the homo sapiens. Our  primal nature shows up in the ease in which we accept these endless savage confrontations called wars. We are a species that has refined our tool making capabilities, our evolutionary adaptation, to the degree that we now can't even utilize our most advanced  lethal creations - our chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The consequences of their use are simply too horrible even for us.  One would think that having devised something so awesomely horrible, so massive in scale, so doomsday-like as a thermonuclear weapon, that it would spell the end of the grand old game of war. But no, on any given day somewhere in the world (usually many places at once) armed bands, sometimes ordered into combat by their governments sometimes not, packs of young men are hard at work trying to kill each other with devices of lesser levels of magnitude by no less level of lethality. But what makes it so much worse is that innocent outsiders, non participants such as children, who have no idea what the fight is over, or simply members of the wrong tribe, religion or nationality who are caught in the crossfire.

The above poem is a step or two back from that long view. People like me who focus our rage at the malign political processes that produce wars often forget that the fundamental tragedy of war is at the personal level. The above poem hones in on that side of it – children who lose a parent in a war, seemingly inexplicably...

The problem of "silos"

When pressing issues that demand cooperative engagement are kept separate even as they are hopelessly intertwined we call that putting things in “silos.” A good example of that was a lead story last week in the NY Times on a the recent UN report on climate change.. This NY Times report like so many others before it tried to impart the gravity of the global warming crisis in their usual measured language. Interestingly in the same paper was another article entitled Was Marx Right? It was one of their panel discussions. The subject this time was on the wobbly state of the global economy and whether Karl Marx maybe got it right after all - that global capitalism will eventually self destruct.

The new UN report from the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) had the usual grim litany of impending disasters. There will be a disastrous sea rise that will flood coastal zones leading to mass population migrations (and lost expensive beach homes.) Unstoppable feed back loops will be set in motion especially involving methane gas. Frozen arctic tundra along along with massive chunks of frozen methane on the ocean floor will melt releasing large bursts of methane creating even more rapid warming as methane is many times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. As warming becomes ever more pronounced whole sheets of ice will slide off off Greenland warming and redirecting Atlantic ocean currents that have kept Europe out of another ice age. Doomsday stuff (we've even seen the movie.)

Already we have dying coral reefs, increasing ocean acidification and ever more erratic weather. Soon there will be mass extinctions, global food shortages and ever more political upheaval. It's all bad. Those already being affected are the long suffering “wretched of the earth.” people living on $2 a day or less, who never dreamed of buying any Ford F-250 or a Lincoln Navigator or flying to Cancun for spring break.

Then in the very same edition we have the Times reconsidering Karl Marx and his prognostication regarding the fate of capitalism. The Times invited a cross-spectrum mix (left,center, right) to proffer their views on the subject (however no eminent Marxists were included.) The discussion yielded a typical college history of economic theory course's acknowledgment of Marx's contributions to classic economic thought with the usual caveats – the shortcomings in his labor theory value, failures of working 'class consciousness' to properly evolve as their living standard rose and its composition evolved, and so forth. But always like a dark shadow looming, assumed but not explicitly mentioned, is the perceived failures of fully non-capitalist economies to date. Yet none of the participants could deny the Marxist view of the inherent instability of capitalism - its boom and bust nature and the social havoc that its so-called “creative destruction” produces.

But most importantly not one these worthy thinkers mentioned the relationship between the required need of capitalism for ever expansion and the impact that ceaseless growth has on a finite planet. In other words they all ignored the dynamic relationship between the natural world we rely on and the eed for the entire capitalist edifice to ever expand ("good") or shrink ("bad".) So no one on the panel mentioned the impending catastrophe of global warming. Therefore no one brought up the obvious observation that it was industrialization driven by capitalism that has both caused global warming and is preventing any effective mitigation. Their focus was myopic. Historically the 'free market' has allowed manufacturers to avoid the full cost of production. Manufacturers traditionally have been allowed from the onset of the industrial revolution to lower their costs and thus the commodity's selling price by off loading the useless byproducts of the production process, the waste, on to the land, into the lakes, rivers, the ocean and of course the atmosphere. Only in the last half century was that “externality”even recognized and somewhat addressed (and of course resisted.) But the final irony is the artificially high profits derived from fossil fuel extraction and energy sectors partially due to offloading the full cost of pollution now gives these industries the political and financial wherewith to fund a robust effort to resist addressing this grave problem in any comprehensive way. The world is wedded to a mode of production that not only is exploiting the planet's workers, it is killing the planet's very life support system.

What many have yet to recognize is that Marx had already been there. In the 1850s he was already concerned about what he called “the metabolic rift,” the drive of capitalism to sacrifice natural ecological relationships to the demands of industrialized production. (See Marx's Ecology by John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review Press.) Of course massive amounts of CO2 had not yet accumulated to dangerous levels in the atmosphere. But other mismatches between natural ecological relations and for profit mass production were already evident. For instance he observed that the natural fertilizers were so depleted in the agricultural sector that guano had to be imported from the tropics to artificially compensate. While at the same time sewage disposal was a serious problems in the growing cities where the former farming population had migrated and were now living in urban squalor. 

 

These two pieces may or may not have been intentionally run same day. But it was left to the citizens in the Comments section to each article to make the connection - not the experts. A basic problem with so many issues is that professionals feel locked into their area of specialization and are reluctant to make connections 'outside their silo.' Of course ordinary schmucks have no such reservations. So a good number brought up the direct relationship between climate change and capitalism's need to ever expand. It's too bad the economists, left, right and center, didn't. It is true of so many things. We zero in on one concern at a time in isolation whereas everything is interconnected. And time is running out.

60 Minutes misses the point

Every winter when it gets especially cold the same pack of inane yappers sitting around on couches on Fox start yucking it up over what an obvious hoax Global Warming is because, damn it, it's cold outside. It would be so cool if they were right (no pun intended.) In fact I deeply hope that they are right, that this whole “global warming thing” is a huge hoax, just a hobby horse for “green” liberals and lefties and a rich source of government grants for bunch of pencil neck academics. Yet even if these Greenie Cassandras are just a bunch of “the sky is falling Chicken Littles," all this effort for renewable energy will not be for naught. It will still give us some more energy options, some of them even may be cheaper. What's wrong with that? Also what's wrong with not having oil tankers periodically split in half in the open ocean or deep sea oil rigs suddenly explode and kill millions of fish, birds and mollusks along with some hapless workers?  Plus name one country that depends on oil as its major source of revenue that is a functioning stable democracy? Also what's wrong with not having our water tables polluted with secret patented chemicals or triggering seismic actions by wholesale fracking of each and every geological formation that may contain oil or gas?

Yet, sadly, one would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to be aware of the mounting evidence from just a degree or two of warming that has already occurred – and we haven't seen anything yet. Ocean acidification, rising sea levels and methane release feedback loops have yet to really kick in. So it pained me to see a recent segment of 60 Minutes regretfully inform us that non-renewable energy is not making it in the market place. Hey, we don't mind spending $600B annually on military gadgets and weapons that are never subjected to any market based calculations, and often don't work. It's not about whether non-renewables are the next big investment opportunity (even if the Chinese have the patience to wait to see if it is.) Fracked natural gas and oil are certainly making a big splash on Wall Street. Put your money there.

But the tragedy is on a far deeper level than some CBS television show. Our so-called” leaders” (read: politicians with self-serving agendas) of all nations are letting us down. They can't resist the usual geo political distractions – keeping the rickety capitalist edifice running, petty turf battles (read: jockeying for imperialistic influence) and now bloody religious wars (Sunnites vs Shites vs Judaic extremists.) But we are running out of time.

Obama could have turned the tide. Instead of trying to reform our badly dysfunctional health care system first (which did need attention), he should have engaged in a full court press to confront this emerging global world historical catastrophe. Why not use the compelling need to phase out fossil fuels as a creative way to massively stimulate the economy which was acutely in trouble at the time – two birds with one stone. But instead of a FDR we got a Herbert Hoover. The Great Depression was not really ended until there was a massive, no-holds-barred deficit spending program to arm for WWII. 

 

Properly framed the American public could have been brought on board and given a crash course on the science behind this world war level crisis. Obama should have made such an effort. He could have confronted the troglodytes in the GOP head on. He had the credibility then. He had the wind at his back. He could have presented an ambitious, appealing (would provide many jobs), path breaking. paradigm-busting revitalization of the entire economy based on building a spanking new 21^st Century "green" infrastructure. FDR changed the conversation with the New Deal. Obama could have done it with a Green New Deal. With a really robust stimulus (urged by many economists at the time) it would have reversed the Great Recession (which we still have lingering effects of) and presented the United States as a global model for moving against this rift in the metabolism of entire planet's life support system. Instead he let the opportunity slip away.

So fast forward to now. With a meaningful confrontation of the global warming crisis seemingly in perpetual hiatus, why does 60 Minutes have to pile on and bring up the the whole sordid Solyndra affair again?   Moreover, other sources are saying that 60 Minutes got it wrong – there is actually a 97% success with these loans. Anyway enuf said. The producers of 60 Minutes seem to have decided to provide more typical mainstream media corporate "newspeak" fodder. Just like I did CNN I may have to check them off my list.

No surprise really

As Obama takes heavy flack from all sides for the malfunctioning website healthcare.gov I can't help but be reminded of my years (and tears) at Centers of Medicare/Medicaid Service (CMS) trying to implement all the bug-ridden, oversold/under designed apps that came our way. They were provided courtesy of a pack of  opportunistic, parasitic, inept software application development companies that proliferate around the Maryland and DC area, also known as "beltway bandits."

Over the years we had to watch as all Federal government agencies in in every possible way, under both the Dems and the Repubs, assiduously contracted out as much of our work as possible. This was especially true of information technology (IT). Somehow it became an article of faith under both Democratic and Republican administrations that the "private sector" could do everything better. This notion, of course, can  be traced back to of one Ronald Reagan.  By the time I left we as the regional office level IT support staff did not even have the authority to work on our own staff's PCs let alone manage the larger operation. Our IT contractor at the time, the Lockheed Martin Corp, was tasked to handle virtually everything. We were left to simply passively preside over the process.

Privatizing all IT operations at CMS in time would become a recipe for disaster as people with little or no real world technical  experience (but identifiable "management skills") eventually migrated into key  executive level positions. So it is no surprise to see CMS management deeply implicated in the Obamacare website roll-out debacle - see today's NY Times article.  It is also no surprise that an outfit like CGI-Federal weaseled its way into being the lead contractor on the most important technical project of Barack Obama's presidency, and then did such an abysmally poor job. Obviously the Obamanista's in concert with DHHS/CMS upper echelon supergrades let themselves be bamboozled into signing off on a grand plan, and then as things started to head southward were rendered helpless when the circular blame game set in among the multitude of contractors.

Yet the two most populous states, NY and Calif which set up their own "health care exchanges", were able to set up functioning websites for the Affordable Care Act (ACA.)  Of course the Federal level website was many times more complex because it had many more private insurance companies to link to (35 vs 11 in Calif.)   Interestingly it turns out that the State of Maryland, a Demo-run state with their own health care exchange is also  having problems with their website.  Maryland  probably got lured into using the same 'beltway bandits' that CMS got stuck with. Inexplicably a "go your own way ethos" seems to be part of the problem.  Why did the designers of the big Federal one-size-fits-all website for multiple states not compare their initial design with ones already further along at the State level - like California's?  It seems like a scaled up version of a working site might have been easier that building a whopper from scratch.   Also why not look to Massachusetts which had years of experience with their RomniCare?  From the accounts in the news it sounds as if they went their own way.

Part of the problem is the basic concept of ACA. It is quite a rickety Rube Goldberg contraption.  It will probably be problem ridden for a long time because it is inherently an unwieldy concept. Apparently Obama felt like he could not take on the powerful health insurance industry and their deadly effective lobbying and propaganda apparatus. Recall they successfully deep-sixed Clinton's health care plan back in the 1990s. Of course private health insurance plans are  useless "middlemen" in terms of delivering health care. Their primary objective is not providing  health care but selling insurance - and for a profit.  In fact the primary concept of insurance as a business is betting that the insured will not need it, and then if they do the hoping lawyer-concocted small print will allow the insurer to escape paying.   Wasn't it these packs of heartless bastards that caused all the grief in the first place: denying claims for (suddenly uncovered) per-existing conditions, capping claims therefore driving millions into bankruptcy as they are struggling with ungodly expensive treatment for life threatening conditions, and having administrative costs that far exceeded those of government-run Medicare/Medicaid?  Including the insurance companies in any "reform" of the US health care system has the Republican Party ideology (courtesy of Heritage Institute) stamped all over. It still  baffles many why Obama would not take a more straight forward approach - like simply expanding Medicare. At least he could have started there as an initial bargaining position.

Nevertheless, for better or worse Obamacare/ACA is the law of the land and was found Constitutional even by our right-leaning Supreme Court.   Obamacare would have had hit heavy headwinds once it hit the streets even if its website had worked like a well oiled clock.  It inherently has  a soft underbelly very vulnerable to the long knives of the GOP and their right wing media.  It is a major social program and the GOP have opposed 'em all from FDR's New Deal to LBJ's Medicare. They hate social change in general (unless it harkens backwards to some glorified imaginary past.)   But what a monumental blunder to unveil a signature program through a kludgy, bug-ridden joke of a website.

The real irony is that the one thing everybody still agrees on is that the US is still at the forefront of information technology. With all the talent at their beck and call and all of Obama's donor friends in Silicon Valley, it really is a wonder how they let this happen. The answer is that years of privatization of IT operations and the atrophy of in-house IT expertise at the highest levels of CMS  have led to an agency inadequately prepared for projects of this magnitude.  Add to this to a bureaucratic culture that is  too inflexibly tethered to a Pentagon-like contracting process to consider reaching out beyond the Beltway for help. 

That said, since the administration is so deeply fused and identified with it's Affordable Care Act and its basically just nuts and bolts technical issues that need to be resolved (and despite Republican gloating and a campaign of sabotage), in time I believe it will work. And as crappy as ACA is, it will be a definite improvement over what we presently have.

Red Shift - liberals redefined as the extreme left

The entire political spectrum is shifting before our very eyes. The old "extreme left" is gone, chopped off and replaced by some imaginary false entity. Barack Obama's cautious center-right reformist position has now become the new “extreme left" - at least in the fevered imagination of the new Republican Party.  In the past the Communist Party, the old CP, was the extreme left and the boogie man. When the Soviet Union imploded in 1989, the Red Menace and home grown"Commies" as scary subversives ceased to exist. The world historical task of supplanting  capitalism with "something better" was put on a back burner.  Furthermore, as time passed Communist China morphed into instead of a "workers paradise"something akin to a "capitalist's paradise."

On the other pole is the "extreme right." The ultra right abhors the idea  that capitalism is anything but a godsend. Their ideal is a  pure unfettered market economy conveniently ignoring all historical experience to the contrary - depressions/recessions, worker exploitation, environmental destruction, extreme concentration of wealth, monopolies/oligopolies, etc.  The "extreme right" in the past was associated with fascism. Under fascism a nationalistic and dictatorial leadership allows privately owned corporations and the government to become absolutely fused. And then through propaganda and brutality a grudging  acquiescence from the population is created. We know where that led - Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. Now it has a more benign name: "corporatocracy" and a different allure - a tax free state with little or no pesky government interference with corporate operations - "the market" (and law suits) determine everything.  This is called libertarianism.  Fascism's support in the past was gained by exploiting patriotic sentiments  and economic discontent mixed with all sorts of malicious human inclinations including ethnicism, rabid nationalism, antisemitism, racism - and greed; the libertarian's allure is simply greed.

After the world experienced the horrors of a second world war and and horrendous incidents of genocide (committed by both the "extreme right" and the "extreme left"), the countries not run by the "extreme left" decided to accept capitalism but to work out some accommodations - known (pejoratively) as the "Welfare State."  The "extreme left" calling themselves "Communists"  continued to run the Soviet Union, which had been a temporary ally with the capitalist West during the war against the "extreme right", fascism.  In the decade after the war the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev tried to mend its totalitarian ways after their brutal leader, Joesph Stalin, died. But it was too late. The center right and McCarthyist extreme right in the US made sure that any alternative to capitalism was blocked at ever step of the way - hence we had a muted or Cold War for 40 years.  Internally in the Europe and the US  the center-right as “conservatives” and center-left as “liberals” (terms used in the US) each created there own political parties and coalesced around an acceptance of capitalism.  This accord for the most part has worked at least in the industrialized West. The rest of the world is another story.

In this arrangement there is an agreed upon understanding of  "loyal opposition" on both sides. One side advocates an extensive governmental social support apparatus and the restraint of capitalism worst tendencies through regulation. The other side works to resist and tone down that position believing  the less government interference with the 'magic of the market' the better.  All successful industrialized democracies are characterized by this accommodation, and are essentially run by centrist parties. Each side take turns running things.  Communists parties on the left and quasi-fascist parties on the right are tolerated (at least in Europe) but never seem to really acquire real power for very long.

However here in the US of A this is accord is unraveling.  We seem to be entering a disturbing new era in which this consensus on “loyal opposition” has broken down. The abiding toleration for a government that provides for the citizenry and a dulls the sharper edges of capitalism through regulation is now being called into question. That position is now dishonestly defined as the "extreme left." The tried and proven programs (Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, FDA, EPA, etc.) have become anathema to the formerly center-right party.. No longer does the political right wing of the establishment, the Republican Party, want to play by rules of ordinary majority rule.   Every gimmick, every loophole, every irrational idiosyncratic rule is exploited to the max – negative dishonest ads, voter suppression, gerrymandering, filibustering; and now the routine use of political extortion. The new extreme right is building on (and going far beyond) former President Reagan's ground breaking success at undermining public support for governmental social programs and regulatory authority.  And to make matters worse  a  pack of ideologues going even beyond the already extreme right wing Republican Party leadership threatens to take us over the brink and possibly crash the entire economy by refusing to allow the government to pay it's bills and fulfill it's obligations. Even former GOP henchmen like Karl Rove are alarmed by their ruthlessness.  This is not democracy this is an attempted at a coup d'état by non-military means.

Middle East - a color coded graphic badly needed

This is a strange situation. The US is now rushing off to 'punish' an evil dictator for something another evil dictator 'walked" on. As we know Saddam Hussein blatantly gassed several hundred Kurds before he became  an 'official enemy' - and nobody did jackshit. Yet ironically we want to 'punish' but not remove from power this chin-less wonder, Bashir Assad. It's only harassment and "degradation of his military capability" but not defeat because if he were actually defeated, it might mean our currently 'official enemy', the (ever multiplying) "El Qaeda 'affiliates," might take over.

It is alarming (to me) that when the leadership of the Republican and Democratic parties finally agree on something, it's something bad - that it's a good idea to again stick our arm into a hornet's nest.  Recall that most of the recent bad decisions by Congress (Iraq War, NDAA, Patriot Act) came with this kind of coalescence of Demo and GOP 'opponents. '

One almost needs a color-coded interactive graphic to begin to make sense out this complex geo-political mosaic mess. The Muslim religion is engaged in a internecine four-way war with moderates Muslims vs. reactionary Muslims vs. reactionary Shia vs reactionary jihadist Sunnis, and both vs. the "infidels in the West." And the Mid East states (along with Pakistan and Afghanistan) is the main battlefield.

 First you have the Syria involved in a bloody civil war with a brutal regime that may or may not have used nerve gas as a weapon. Then you have Iran, one of our current 'official enemies' which is actively pro Assad, Next you have Iraq (now almost a failed state courtesy of a US invasion a decade ago) with its besieged Shia government presumably pro-Assad while its bellicose terrorism-prone Sunni opposition actively anti-Assad (and sending fighters to Syria.) ,  Lebanon is the home of the Shia Hezbollah and the bane of the Israelis and who successfully forced the Israel Defense Force out of Lebanon.  Hezbollah, is now actively and effectively helping Assad militarily. Then there is the oil-rich Gulf States including Saudia Arabia all Sunni and actively supporting the anti-Assad forces including the Al Qaeda factions. Ah yes, and then there is the big bear, Russia, a long time ally of Syria going back to the Cold War days, who is also actively supporting the Assad regime with modern weapons (and along with China blocking any UN sanctions against Syria.) Turkey, now run by Sunni Islamists, is actively supporting anti-Assad forces and is constantly cajoling the US to become more involved. On the sidelines is the post Arab Spring Egypt, that volitile "ex-democracy” now army-run, presumably  on the side of secular anti-Assad forces but their now persecuted democratically elected opposition, the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood one would assume would also be supportive of Sunni anti-Assad forces.  Into this caldron of doom the US under Barack Obama now wants to jump in feet first and prior to any proper independent UN investigation of the facts.  And, of course, Israel, perennial enemy of Syria and now Iran (and everybody else in the neighborhood), quietly cheering on the US as it wades into another dismal swamp without a compass. 

As horrible a precedent as using sarin gas is (if that's what really happened) as a new way to 'drain the swamp' of insurgent supporters, its use should still is not be used as an excuse for the US to get involved in yet another regional war – or worse. It could become an assassination of Archduke Ferdinand kind of moment. There are too may power players, too may hot headed Jihadists, too many unknowns. Even the US military advised against getting involved (until ordered to cooperate by their Commander and Chief) who hemmed himself in with loose talk about crossing red lines.

Moreover the US assuming the role as global enforcer of 'proper' warfare standards seems a bit hypocritical to say the least what with our use of drones, cluster bombs, land mines, depleted uranium shells, white phosphorus, napalm, Agent Orange and nuclear weapons. Just because a given horrific weapon has not been formally designated 'illegal' does not mean its use is not cruelly effective and as grimly horrible as other 'legal' ones. 

I wish Obama would could wriggle out of this but he's committed now.