Gassy Politics: There’s no advantage to the US for supporting either side in the Syrian civil war.

[kpete]

Gassy Politics

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Now, second: Syria. The world has pretty much lined up against President Obama’s proposal to issue a cruise missile spanking to Syria for supposedly gassing its own citizens. Nobody thinks this is a good idea, some for reasons of tactical advantage and some on the idea’s basic merit, or lack of. Mr. Obama pulled his punch over a week ago by standing down and taking the issue to congress for approval. I’m convinced he did that because he would have been impeached for launching an overt act of war — despite similar actions by his recent predecessors. The proposed spanking was a bad idea from the start. There was no visible threat to the national interest from Syria’s bad behavior within its own borders. The gas attack was a terrible act of depravity, but firing missiles into Syria wasn’t going to bring back the dead. It was only going to cause more death. There’s no advantage to the US for supporting either side in the Syrian civil war. The spread or deepening of any kind of disorder in that region will threaten a critical portion of America’s oil imports.

In the background of this, things are becoming unstuck in the seriously ill and constipated realm of international banking. The aforementioned deformities caused by central bank interventions, market manipulations, Too Big To Fail carry-trade rackets, and misreporting of financial data have begun to shred currencies in nations at the margin (India, Brazil, Indonesia) and that illness may prove contagious. The global economy depends on some basic faith that major financial institutions are sound, and that they trade in sound instruments that represent real wealth. That is all being called into question now, and how long will it be before a general paralysis freezes the entire letters-of-credit system that underlies global commerce?

The Syria soap opera has also managed to upstage the imminent mud-wrestling match between congress and the executive branch over the national debt limit and related matters of government spending. These problems appear for now to be completely intractable. If the government overcomes the latest version of this recurring dilemma, it will only be due to generating even more layers of accounting fraud to an already well-papered piñata that is just waiting to be smashed. While this goes on, the American public gets pushed deeper and deeper into a financial abyss, haunted by re-po men, lying bank officers, verminous lawyers, and chiseling hospital administrators.

All this is a recipe for a political explosion. What happens if the US Government starts gassing its own citizens? It happened in 1967. That one only made people cry. Maybe next time, they’ll use a different kind of gas.

http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/gassy-politics/

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. I usually like Kunstler, but disagree about the advantage thing.

Esp. since Syria has been a bullseye for the last ten years, and one part of a long term plan to control the flow of energy in the Middle East.
I do think what might be working against pushing hard on Syria is that Russia is a stronger ally of Syria than it was in teh recent past.
this ain't gonna be Iraq all over again, for sure.