August 30th: Fever's Pitch
JMW Turner, detail of "Sunrise With Sea Monsters" (c. 1845)
There has been nothing august about August. The grass won't grow - it is scorched brown and hateful to my eye. The air is low and earthy and hot, like in a bakery. And I sit, a husk, on my anchor chair, surveying the grounds of my manor with a spyglass. When my chattering and cold sweats subside long enough to assay the land, I can ever so briefly remove myself from my summer troubles, my mind enraptured in the doleful chattering of the goldfinches that call my estate home.
I have made a decision, clean break, and must pay the piper: as of this summer, the laudanum shall play no part in my life. It has beggared my mastery of commerce and made a squeaking vole out of my once mighty rendition of men. Bathetic opium! This devil's tincture can never deliver the ending I seek. But then, this seems to be the illusion behind every addiction. Just ask the mandarins demanding another Mideast war.
It looks like they'll get it again, somehow. The "experts" - men who shouldn't legally be allowed near playgrounds - have spoken. And the Prince Hal we just elected to a second term is all ears. So what that even our poodle in Westminster can't go along for the ride? Our leadership doesn't even care - they've somehow become even more nakedly unilateral than the Bush war machine. The attack in the end will constitute that most courageous of military campaigns - a cruise missile attack against a sclerotic gangster regime.
There's not been a lot of consideration given to, say, what possible effect attacking Syria is supposed to provoke. No matter how many cruise missiles hit, the Alawite ruling class will still be utterly terrified of annihilation in case of a military defeat; US airstrikes won't palliate that fear. Indeed, instead, it may accelerate the conflict, as the pressurized, fearful, regime lashes out, in a desperate bid to prove its strength and viability. Don't scoff - it's happened before, in another brutal civil war, where NATO airstrikes provoked "full-scale, brutal ethnic cleansing, of killing, expulsion of people." Obama makes much of these missile strikes being "targeted" and "limited." In that case, what does Assad have to be worried about? America hits, they leave, and then the civil war resumes, as previously scheduled.
In other words - this insane military plan does not, to me, seem capable of doing anything to save any Syrian lives, now or in the future; does seem likely to worsen the conflict, in a concatenating series of aftershocks which may rattle every regional neighbor; and is another signpost on the road to American ruin, where, as with Libya and our borderless drone war, murder and treachery are executive privileges. It is borne of a sickness, an addiction, and Barack Obama is only the latest junkie.
Oh fuck it. Pass me the laudanum.
Share Gist