Shamus Cooke

Sometimes bad ideas die slowly. It was only one year ago that Obama announced he would bomb the Syrian government, only to change his mind at the last minute. Now the same fetid war talk is sprouting fresh roots in the ever-fertile U.S. military. Various media outlets reported that Obama might “enforce a no fly zone in Syria to protect civilians from the Syrian government.”

This just weeks after the U.S. public was told that ISIS was the reason the U.S. military was now in Syria. The 2014 media sound bites mimic the 2013 scare tactics, copying the “humanitarian motives” behind the push towards war with the Syrian government. For example, in 2013 The New York Times blandly discussed the “no fly zone” option:

“To establish buffer zones to protect parts of Turkey or Jordan to provide safe havens for Syrian rebels and a base for delivering humanitarian assistance would require imposing a limited no-fly zone and deploying thousands of American ground forces.”

Fast forward to September 27th 2014, where The New York Times published an article called, “U.S. Considers a No-Fly Zone to Protect Civilians From Airstrikes by Syria ,” where we read:

“The Obama administration has not ruled out establishing a no-fly zone over northeastern Syria to protect civilians from airstrikes by the Syrian government…Creating a buffer, or no-fly zone, would require warplanes to disable the Syrian government’s air defense system through airstrikes.”

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Nikolai Bobkin

The battle flag is raised and waving. The United States has launched an air campaign against the Islamic State delivering strikes in Iraq and Syria. It is done without the permission of the Syrian government and the United Nations Security Council. There were allegations on the part of Russia and Iran that the final objective of the US-initiated operation was the elimination of Syrian infrastructure. The concern Moscow and Tehran have expressed appears to be justified.

Rear Admiral John Kirby, the spokesman of US Defense Department, reported that the US aviation hit 12 oil installations on Syrian soil that were supposedly under the Islamic State control. The Admiral said more similar strikes are planned. On June 25, 2011 a memorandum of understanding on the construction of Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline was signed in Bushehr. And the unrest in Syria went on the rise right after this agreement was concluded. They are right saying the war waged by the US against the government of Bashar Assad is a war for oil and gas. Damascus was added to the list of US enemies in 2009 when Assad rejected the proposal to take part in the construction of US-sponsored Qatar-Europe pipeline going through the Syrian territory. Instead Syria preferred to strike a deal with Iran on building a gas route going across Iraq to the Mediterranean shore. Back then Henry Kissinger made his frank admittance pronouncing the phrase to become famous afterwards, «oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs».

The creation of caliphate on the territory of Iraq and Syria will make US (ExxonMobil Corporation) and British (BP è Royal Dutch Shell) oil producing companies suffer losses in Iraq and lose access to Syrian hydrocarbons (after the regime change in Damascus as Americans apply efforts to topple the Syrian government).

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Robert Barsocchini

Throughout history, as the various empires use overpowering ultra-violence to achieve domination over and profit from smaller, weaker groups, the empires have driven their victims deeper and deeper into their own extremism, as the victims try to maintain motivation for their usually hopeless resistance efforts.

Essayist Dan Sanchez here uses history to help us take a much-needed look in the mirror as we continue to look down our noses at smaller groups (that haven’t done a fraction of what we’ve done) and say they’re worse and we’re better (though, conveniently, we’re also better than every other group, too, in our fantasy world).

He gives the examples of the “Jewish Intifadas against the Greeks and Romans”, documenting how Jews were driven deeper and deeper into religious fundamentalism and extremism as they tried to resist the disgusting onslaughts of the Greek and Roman empires.

Sanchez also invites us to “imagine how Americans would respond if another country ever did to America what the U.S. government does to Muslim countries on a routine basis.”

The obvious response from US citizens “would be an armed insurgency” that would be “deeply Christian in character, and the more desperate the struggle became, the more dominant would be its religious aspects, and especially its most radically religious aspects.”

This is because resisting the overwhelming numbers and force of an empire, like ours, requires “the trans-mundane motivations and existential consolations that only religion can offer”. Some of the resistance, he points out, “may come to match and even surpass the evils of [the] dominators, as ISIS and Al Qaeda may be said to have done”.

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