Stopping a War Before It Starts

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/05


Opponents of U.S. military action in Syria protest Saturday at New York's Times Square. (Photo: Craig Ruttle, AP)

Who’s up for stopping a war?

This is the time, as the next war strains to be born, amid the same old lies as last time, amid the same urgency and pseudo-debate and pretensions of seriousness:

The government of Syria has crossed a “red line.” It has used poison gas, killing hundreds of innocent people and committing a heinous war crime. And suddenly, clear as a bell, we have good vs. evil. Our only course of action, President Obama and his spokespersons tell us, is to “carry out a punitive strike against the Syrian government.”

This is the abstraction of warspeak, which summons a deeply satisfying mythology of righteous vengeance while making the action sound so clear and logical. President Bashar al-Assad committed a “moral obscenity.” It’s up to us to punish him by firing off some Tomahawk missiles. There’s no messiness in this action, no possibility of disastrous consequences, no hint that our intelligence might be compromised, no wink at our hypocrisy or past failures, and certainly no dead civilians — no random innocents lying just as still in the wake of our rain of thousand-pound warheads as those Assad may have killed in his alleged act of moral obscenity.