This Bombardment of Syria Clichés Shows No Sign of Stopping

[polly7]

By Robert Fisk

Source: The Independent

Thursday, September 05, 2013

Missiles maybe. But the bombardment of clichés is real enough – and low enough quality not to do anyone any harm except for the gentlemen who utter them. Really, who writes this stuff for Kerry? There was “armchair isolationism”. Why an armchair? And who was the target of the weird reference to post-First World War US isolationism?

Was Kerry trying to turn Obama into Roosevelt after the 1941 “day of infamy” (a genuine non-cliché there from old Franklin D)? Then we had our old friend, the “state sponsor of terrorism” from the days of Saddam – no wonder a British minister mistook Assad for the executed Iraqi dictator – from House Majority leader Eric Cantor. And just listen to this from Kerry: “This is not the time to be spectators to a slaughter. Neither our country nor our conscience can afford the cost of silence.” Yup, it’s alliteration, folks (spectators/slaughter, country/conscience/cost).

And then yet once more – how tired can you get of this mulch? – Kerry also felt he could compare Assad to Hitler. This is preposterous. Over a hundred thousand Syrians may well have died in this terrible war. But Hitler started a war that may have killed 70 million. Does Kerry maybe think that Hitler is still alive? The late Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin thought that when he fantasized in a letter to Ronnie Reagan when he was invading Lebanon in 1982 that he felt he was advancing on Berlin (Arafat was the man in the bunker). And not long ago the now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told us all that the crackpot president of Iran (Mahmoud Ahmedinejad at the time) was “worse than Hitler”. So let’s have it just one more time: HITLER IS DEAD.

And get this. Obama is not asking America to go to war, but to “degrade and deter” Assad’s ability to use chemical weapons. We first got “degrade” in the 1991 Gulf war, then we got it again when Nato fired weapons at Milosovic’s chums in Serbia (targets, you may remember, that included a TV station, an express train and a hospital). And “the costs of inaction are greater and graver still” – this from Democratic chairman of the Senate committee, Robert Menendez. But is this true? When Saddam used gas against the Kurds of Halabjah, the US did not see this as a ‘grave cost’ to the nation. Indeed, it waited years before condemning it because Saddam was our mate at the time.

Full Article: http://www.zcommunications.org/this-bombardment-of-syria-clich-s-shows-no-sign-of-stopping-by-robert-fisk.html

[JayhawkSD]

1. Cliches indeed, and nonsense.

this from Kerry: “This is not the time to be spectators to a slaughter."

This civil war has been going on for two years, and more than 100,000 have died. What have we been? Spectators. And, in my opinion, quite properly so. We can do nothing but make it worse.

Attribute half those deaths to Assad. We have not felt the need to punish him for killing 50,000 of "his own people" by conventional weapons, but we feel the need to punish him for "the slaughter" of 1,429 by chemical weapons. Are the 50,000 any less dead than the 1,429? Do the families of the 50,000 feel any less grief than the families of the 1,429? Do any of the dead or their families really care how they died?

How many wwould he have to kill by conventional means before we dicided we needed to punish him? 100,000? 1 million? Presumably, there is no such number, because killing by conventional means is okay. We do it all the time.

Killing is not the problem. Killing is fine, go ahead and kill as many as you want. Use landmines. Use phosphorous. Use cluster munitions. We''l even sell those things to you, as we are the worlds largest seller of them. Just don't use chemicals.

[bemildred]

2. I'm waiting for the nuns, there are always some nuns.

Assad is using nuns, I've seen nun stories about al Nusra.