An unprovoked — remember, they’re no threat to us — U.S. attack against Syria seems inevitable. When will it happen? What form will it take? What happens next? Here are my bets.
Second answer first: I agree with everyone else that it will probably be a series of cruise missile strikes against Syrian military bases, radar facilities and government offices. There can and probably will be unforeseen secondary explosions, as when fuel supplies and arms depots blow up, and fire travels through gas lines under streets to destroy whole blocks. Civilian casualties will be substantial, in the hundreds. Not that Syrian army personnel deserve to be blown up for Obama’s ego, but the Western media doesn’t care about them.
First answer: Sunday East Coast time. Gives the UN time to withdraw their inspectors, who are leaving today, and takes advantage of the media blackout over the long holiday weekend here in the States. Belligerents typically take the weekend attack approach, especially when there is little support for the war they’re about to start.
As for next steps, Western “experts” are constantly predicting retaliatory attacks by U.S. victims and their allies. Though blowback is inevitable, it won’t come in such an obvious or immediate form. Nothing much will happen to the U.S. as a result. But it does take the U.S. down a dark yet familiar road of escalation. If cruise missiles attacks fail to deter Assad from using chemical weapons (which we don’t know that he did), then maybe we need to use greater force? If the rebels fail to gain an advantage, hawks will repeat the Libya argument that we need to do more to help them. And if the Qaeda-affiliated insurgents win, then we can attack them. More likely, this will further inflame anti-Americanism around the world, hasten a Talibanized Syria and turn the Middle East not into a fireball, but a series of increasingly sporadic wildfires. Good fun, just the way Washington policymakers like it.
Polls currently have war against Syria running about 50-50. Here’s everything you need to know about the American media: how many antiwar “experts” are we hearing from on CNN, MSNBC or FoxNews? I still haven’t seen a single one. Even Barbara Lee went on MSNBC yesterday to say that the case for bombing Syria was compelling, but she thought Congress should vote on it.
5 Comments.
Obomber needs to have Congress vote no. To have this “attack Syria or not” issue up in the air so long and dragged out has defused much of its capability as a deterrent. So much of the world is now against it, and it will simply kill some more people (only this time the US gets to be responsible for the death and anger) and make things worse – maybe a lot more worse. The hawks and MIC need to read the writing on the wall – “the world is getting fed up with your shit, you’ve run the economy down to its knees with your focus on wars and diverting resource needed to help our nation”.
Ted,
I think the more likely sequence would be something like this:
1. Congress votes down Syria strike.
2. A “tragic” terrorist event occurs. No one could have seen it coming. Large loss of (American) life (the only kind that matters).
3. Obama gets his war.
4. Reporters, late to the party, start noticing some things just don’t add up.
5. Those five or six people are shouted down as being America-hating sympathizers.
6. We piss away another trillion fighting a war that was initiated specifically for no one’s benefit but a few industrialists and their politicians.
Every time the media fails, they claim to have learned their lesson. Each time a president wants war, they still are in lockstep. They don’t ask critical questions. They don’t have opposing experts on. They assume the president is a good, honest man. The US media ignores issues, domestic or worldwide, until a fucking pol decides an issue is important and then, oh boy, do they pay attention. Suddenly whatever he thinks is important is the only thing that matters! Might as well make them officially the state media. When have they ever reported on Uzbekistan for one?
@Jack, The editor of my column often takes me to task for referring to our so called journalists as “state-controlled media” but I think it is more apt than ever. These guys are propagandists, pure and simple. They cut and paste government press releases and release them as new stories. They cover anything that a government official or publicist says as though it were fact, rarely questioning the motives or basic truths behind their statements. And, as you say, opposing voices are almost never heard from.
@Ted: you are right, the effect of the media is as if they were state controlled, but your editor is right in that they are not actually state controlled. “Manufacturing Consent” makes some excellent point that the deal is that rather then being state controlled, the media is actually controlled by the same people who control the state. Therefore while their purposes align 100% for things like wars, it isn’t because one caused the other, they are correlated but only because they have the same masters not because either one directly exerts control on the another. Effectively both the government and the major media are the “shadow cast by [big] business over the rest of society society”, so they have the same source but do not directly influence one another.