Stephen Lendman

Imperial warriors, apologists and supporters never say they're sorry. They want more nations attacked. It's the American way.

Perhaps publishing it was strategically timed. It comes with John Kerry in the Middle East. He'll be there through Sunday.

He met with foreign ministers of 11 so-called Friends of Syria countries and opposition group representatives. In Jerusalem, he discussed Syria with Netanyahu.

At the same time, the suspicious Woolrich London killing occurred. Another article suggested a possible false flag. The Journal op-ed urges war on Syria. So did others discussed below.

On May 22, Journal editors gave Jack Keane and Danielle Pletka feature op-ed space. They took full advantage. They headlined "How to Stop Assad's Slaughter." Keane's a retired general. Formerly he served as US Army's vice chief of staff. Pletka is the American Enterprise Institute's (AEI) foreign and defense policy studies vice president. AEI has enormous influence. It advances Washington's imperial agenda. It's consistently hawkish. It was a leading Bush administration foreign policy architect. It was instrumental in promoting war on Iraq. It supports regime change in Syria and Iran. More on the Keane/Pletka article below.

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Jim Lobe

If you want to get some insight into how the Washington Post’s editorial board increasingly thinks of the world and the U.S. role in it, editorial page editor Fred Hiatt’s column in Monday’s newspaper provides a good idea. While Hiatt is generally not as ideological as his deputy, Jackson Diehl (although he did hire Jennifer Rubin), his basic belief in U.S. exceptionalism, his rejection of “retrenchment” and “limitations” (on U.S. power), and, above all, his implicit equation of international “engagement” with military intervention demonstrates how his version of liberal internationalism is so easily co-opted by neo-conservatives:

But the dominant impression among foreign officials [read Hiatt himself] is of a policy of retrenchment. They see a steady reduction in the size of U.S. armed forces that will mean less ability to intervene and influence. They watched Obama withdraw all troops from Iraq, failing to negotiate an agreement that would have preserved some U.S. role in that now-unraveling country. They see him preparing to withdraw most — or all, his spokesman has said; the size of any residual force has not been announced — troops from Afghanistan. [Emphasis added.]

Consider the logic of this passage. He seems to be saying (through his unnamed “foreign officials”) that U.S. influence in world affairs is directly correlated with the size of its military and the willingness of its commander-in-chief to use it to intervene in foreign countries. In this very Kaganesque view of the world, hard power is really the only power that really counts. The notion that military power must necessarily rest on a strong economic foundation — or even that “soft power” may also play an important role in gaining influence overseas — seems to him or his foreign officials to be secondary at best.

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Adam Larson

A week from now it will be one year since the world first heard about the horrors of a place in Syria called “Houla.” On the afternoon and evening of Friday, May 25, 2012, a reported 108 civilians were massacred there. They were executed inside their homes, with guns and “sharp tools,” and maybe a little bit from shelling as well. As the reader might recall, most of the victims were entire families, included some 49 younger children and even babies. Anyone who had to watch the video results might recall having the bottom drop from their stomach with dread, and the lingering depression after. Many people, naturally, wanted revenge for that.

According to activists, all of the victim families were Sunni Muslim. It was of course blamed on the Syrian Arab Army – the only ones with artillery, if blades aren’t so clear - and their allied “Shabiha,” militias from surrounding villages, of the same Alawite faith of president Assad. None of these features was completely new, but this was by many measures the worst, most massive, most unambiguous massacres of innocents to date.

Western and Gulf Arab states took the events in Houla as clarifying the urgency of toppling the perpetrators; they expelled Damascus’ diplomats and otherwise moved to isolate Syria in the kill box. U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice said it had become clear that the “wheels were coming off” of Kofi Annan’s peace plan. The same point was made more aggressively by rebels shaking dead babies on video – no compromise was possible after this. Military aid to the rebels and talk of increasing it increased.

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