Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Buy a Pepsi for Syria in the Tonkin Gulf While Rockin’ to Radio Gleiwitz
Last week (if anything on the news is true), our president sent 59 cruise missiles to fall upon an air base in Syria. The next day (if anything on the news is true), Russian and Syrian warplanes were again operating out of that air base. Each cruise missile (if anything on the news is true) costs close to a million dollars. Given that and the expenses of operating warships, American workers - because who else can pay taxes? - gave up maybe a hundred million dollars of their Churchillian blood, toil, tears, and sweat to damage a few buildings on an airbase in another country.
Why?
Has Syria invaded the U.S.A.? Has Syria threatened to invade the U.S.A.? Is Hitler hangin’ by the pool at Assad’s palace?
Syria, which has not been a nice place to live since the French Mandate of 1923-1946, suffers a civil war among, according to
New York magazine (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/guide-groups-fighting-iraq-and-syria.html), the Assad government, ISIS, The Kurdish People’s Protection Movement, Jabhat al-Nusra, Khorasan Group, Al Quaeda, Islamic Front, Free Syrian Army, Hezbollah, Peshmerga, Russia, the United States, and others, all shifting their alliances and allegiances without any sense of pattern.
According to the
New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/world/middleeast/us-troops-syria.html) there are perhaps 800 American soldiers, Marines, and sailors (Navy Corpsmen serve with the Marines) in Syria.
I don’t know why they are there, and I don’t know what they are expected to accomplish with the Assad government, ISIS, The Kurdish People’s Protection Movement, Jabhat al-Nusra, Khorasan Group, Al Quaeda, Islamic Front, Free Syrian Army, Hezbollah, Peshmerga, and Russian soldiers and airmen.
In a not irrelevant aside, Christianity has existed in Syria since before Saint Paul fell off his horse on the road to Damascus. Of all the combatants in Syria, only Russia has expressed a desire to protect the surviving Christians there.
This nation can’t even keep the peace in Chicago, which is much smaller than Syria.
Last week we all saw photographs. But of what? Were children gassed? Were adults gassed? By whom? With what? Says who? From what nation’s stocks of poisons? Were the toxins those WMD that Saddam had and then didn’t have and then hid in Syria? Were they from Libya?
Does no one in our government and media remember the Gleiwitz incident on the border between German and Poland on 31 August 1939?
How about the Gulf of Tonkin incident on 2-4 August 1964?
Or Article 1 of Section 8 of the Constitution?
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
A catalogue of questions does not constitute and effective narrative, but neither does it constitute a basis for a war, and nothing constitutes a basis for war without a declaration of war by our increasingly Merovingian Congress, who will investigate a baseball team but not stand up for the Constitution.
This week two young friends, kids I watched grow up, are off to join the Marines. And good for them. But their commander-in-chief is a man who avoided Viet-Nam because of a heel spur. Have you noticed the limp? The former Secretary of State (who also never made the first day of recruit training) also expressed enthusiasm for sending our young men and women to war in Syria, but since she was not elected, what difference does it make?
On the day after the cruise missiles fell upon a Syrian air base a local television station broadcast informal interviews with some young Syrian men idling and smoking huqqas in a Syrian restaurant in Houston. I did not record the broadcast, so I could be wrong in this, but I do not remember that any women were present. Maybe they were rockin’ to some heavy tunes on Radio Gleiwitz with Bill O’Reilly or Bill Clinton.
The young Syrian men expressed their gratitude that the United States bombed their country, but are disappointed that this nation has been dilatory in bombing those Syrians that these Syrians did not like.
So here’s another question: why are healthy young American men fighting in Syria while healthy young Syrian men are sitting on their dead (huqqas) in Houston, Texas?
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