I sure as hell hope we don't lose one drop of our serviceman's blood in this chithole. We need to get out of the ME and never return.

How did that work in Iraq/Afgan ?

Exactly. This will likely become a massive foreign policy disaster for the U.S.

We can wait for the UN envoy test results and if chemical weapons were used, the burden of proof of who conspired to use them is on the US Administration after the allegations they've made.

This isn't the type of proof that can be kept secret. If it exists, it must be made public to the world as prior justification to any action.

The real "Moral Obscenity" is the US Administration trying to get the U.S. involved in another war in order to line the pockets of arms manufacturers and politicians.

Exactly. This will likely become a massive foreign policy disaster for the U.S.

The real "Moral Obscenity" is the US Administration trying to get the U.S. involved in another war in order to line the pockets of arms manufacturers and politicians.

There has to be a need for weapons and military machinery in order to produce them and make a boatload of money off the American Taxpayers. How do you use up the inventory? Get into a war.
A war will use up the supplies for our own troops, creating a need for more.
Worse, the politicians also give away billions and billions of American Taxpayer dollars as "aid" to all these medieval countries. Those countries then buy weapons from American manufacturers as well. The manufacturers then donate to the campaigns of those politicians who support the war.
It is the worlds largest money laundering scheme wherein the money is essentially stolen from the American Taxpayers, channeled to these cat litter sand box countries, who then spend it on weapons.
Talk about moral obscenity....Kerry & Obama can shove their obscenities up Their A$$

Al-Qaeda backed rebels or Iran/Russia backed Assad.

hmmmmmmm???

Sounds like something America can dump a trillion dollars into!

There is always more than one reason to enter a war.

Yeah, cuz we here in the US of A really require incontrovertible...and true...evidence before going in and spending a zillion dollars on defense contractor* toys and blowing them all up.

Fish on...

Todd

* "defense contractor" is a euphimism for "campaign donor".

Don't forget our Russian friends. They have to sell "toys" too.

From today's Wall Street Journal,
An American military attack on Syria could begin as early as Thursday and will involve three days of missile strikes, according to "senior U.S. officials" talking to NBC News. The Washington Post has the bombing at "no more than two days," though long-range bombers could "possibly" join the missiles. "Factors weighing into the timing of any action include a desire to get it done before the president leaves for Russia next week," reports CNN, citing a "senior administration official."

and then the very next paragraph,
"The New York Times, quoting a Pentagon official, adds that "the initial target list has fewer than 50 sites, including air bases where Syria's Russian-made attack helicopters are deployed."

And this administration is worried about Snowden leaks???

Looks like the UK won't be helping us.


http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/E...-08-29-17-43-07

An Accidental War
Perfunctory and ineffectual war-making in Syria is worse than nothing.
By Mark Steyn

I see the Obama “reset” is going so swimmingly that the president is now threatening to go to war against a dictator who gassed his own people. Don’t worry, this isn’t anything like the dictator who gassed his own people that the discredited warmonger Bush spent 2002 and early 2003 staggering ever more punchily around the country inveighing against. The 2003 dictator who gassed his own people was the leader of the Baath Party of Iraq. The 2013 dictator who gassed his own people is the leader of the Baath Party of Syria. Whole other ball of wax. The administration’s ingenious plan is to lose this war in far less time than we usually take. In the unimprovable formulation of an unnamed official speaking to the Los Angeles Times, the White House is carefully calibrating a military action “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”

That would make a great caption for a Vanity Fair photo shoot of Obama gamboling in the surf at Martha’s Vineyard, but as a military strategy it’s not exactly Alexander the Great or the Duke of Wellington. And it’s trickier than it sounds: I’m sure Miley’s choreographer assured her she was “just muscular enough not to get mocked,” and one wouldn’t want to see the United States reduced to twerking arrhythmically to no avail in front of an unimpressed Bashar Assad’s Robin Thicke. Okay, okay, that metaphor’s as thinly stretched as Miley’s talent, so what does unmockable musculature boil down to? From the New York Times: “A wide range of officials characterize the action under consideration as ‘limited,’ perhaps lasting no more than a day or two.”

Yeah, I know, that’s what Edward III said about the Hundred Years’ War. But Obama seems to mean it:

An American official said that the initial target lists included fewer than 50 sites, including air bases where Syria’s Russian-made attack helicopters are. The list includes command and control centers as well as a variety of conventional military targets. Perhaps two to three missiles would be aimed at each site.

Got that? So, if you’re a Syrian air-base commander, you might want to think about moving those Russian helicopters, or at least yourself — perhaps to that black-eyed cutie’s apartment, above the restaurant where the kibbeh with the pomegranate sauce is to die for, just for the night, until the Great Satan has twerked his ordnance at you twice or thrice and gone away to threaten the Yemenis or Somalis or whoever’s next.

In the world’s most legalistic culture, it was perhaps inevitable that battle plans would eventually be treated under courtroom discovery rules and have to be disclosed to the other side in your pre-war statement. But in this case it doesn’t seem to be impressing anyone. Like his patrons in Tehran and Moscow, Assad’s reaction to American threats is to double up with laughter and say, “Bring it, twerkypants.” Headline from Friday’s Guardian in London: “Syria: ‘Napalm’ Bomb Dropped on School Playground, BBC Claims” — which, if true, suggests that even a blood-soaked mass murderer is not without a sense of humor. Napalm, eh? There’s a word I haven’t heard since, oh, 40 years ago or thereabouts, somewhere in the general vicinity of southeast Asia.

The BBC footage is grisly; the British media have been far more invested in the Syrian civil war than their U.S. colleagues. But what’s the net effect of all the harrowing human-interest stories? This week, David Cameron recalled Parliament from its summer recess to permit the people’s representatives to express their support for the impending attack. Instead, for the first time since the British defeat at Yorktown in 1782, the House of Commons voted to deny Her Majesty’s Government the use of force. Under the Obama “reset,” even the Coalition of the Willing is unwilling. “It’s clear to me that the British Parliament and the British people do not wish to see military action,” said the prime minister. So the Brits are out, and, if he goes at all, Obama will be waging war without even Austin Powers’s Union Jack fig leaf.

“This House will not fight for king and country”? Not exactly. What the British people are sick of, quite reasonably enough, is ineffectual warmongering, whether in the cause of Blairite liberal interventionism or of Bush’s big-power assertiveness. The problem with the American way of war is that, technologically, it can’t lose, but, in every other sense, it can’t win. No one in his right mind wants to get into a tank battle or a naval bombardment with the guys responsible for over 40 percent of the planet’s military expenditures. Which is why these days there aren’t a lot of tank battles. The consummate interventionist Robert Kagan wrote in his recent book that the American military “remains unmatched.” It’s unmatched in the sense that the only guy in town with a tennis racket isn’t going to be playing a lot of tennis matches. But the object of war, in Liddell Hart’s famous distillation, is not to destroy the enemy’s tanks (or Russian helicopters) but his will. And on that front America loses, always. The “unmatched” superpower cannot impose its will on Kabul kleptocrats, Pashtun goatherds, Egyptian generals, or Benghazi militia. There is no reason to believe Syria would be an exception to this rule. America’s inability to win ought to be a burning national question, but it’s not even being asked.

Let us stipulate that many of those war-weary masses are ignorant and myopic. But at a certain level they grasp something that their leaders don’t: For a quarter-century, from Kuwait to Kosovo to Kandahar, the civilized world has gone to war only in order to save or liberate Muslims. The Pentagon is little more than central dispatch for the U.S. military’s Muslim Fast Squad. And what do we have to show for it? Liberating Syria isn’t like liberating the Netherlands: In the Middle East, the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy. Yes, those BBC images of schoolchildren with burning flesh are heart-rending. So we’ll get rid of Assad and install the local branch of al-Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood or whatever plucky neophyte democrat makes it to the presidential palace first — and then, instead of napalmed schoolyards, there will be, as in Egypt, burning Christian churches and women raped for going uncovered.

So what do we want in Syria? Obama can’t say, other than for him to look muscular without being mocked, like a camp bodybuilder admiring himself in the gym mirror.

Oh, well. If the British won’t be along for the ride, the French are apparently still in. What was the old gag from a decade ago during those interminable U.N. resolutions with Chirac saying “Non!” every time? Ah, yes: “Going to war without the French is like going hunting without an accordion.” Oddly enough, the worst setback for the Islamic imperialists in recent years has been President Hollande’s intervention in Mali, where, unlike the money-no-object Pentagon, the French troops had such undernourished supply lines that they had to hitch a ride to the war on C-17 transports from the Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force. And yet they won — insofar as anyone ever really wins on that benighted sod.

Meanwhile, the hyperpower is going to war because Obama wandered off prompter and accidentally made a threat. So he has to make good on it, or America will lose its credibility. But he only wants to make good on it in a perfunctory and ineffectual way. So America will lose its credibility anyway.

Maybe it’s time to learn the accordion . . .

Any guess to who Jackson34 is the sock puppet of ?

The GOP missed a huge opportunity to look a little less like war mongers.

That being said, Obama is handling this very well politically speaking...so long as he goes along with whatever Congress advises. Let the representatives go back to their constituents and explain why they did, or did not want to intervene in Syria.

That's their job.

Now if Congress does not give authorization, and Obama decides to do it anyway...well, let's just say that won't be well received by many.

Fish on...

Todd

A few observations from the last few days...if you are someone who supported a war in Iraq and now is against this, shut the fuckup. Shutthefuck up loudly. You are the worst kind of hypocrite. There are a ton of you on facebook flapping your jaws...STFU.

Todd

How about this...if you agree that you were 100% wrong on Iraq, and aren't now against going into Syria just because Obama wants to, then you can change your mind.

If you still think that Bushcorp(tm) was correct in going into Iraq, and that Obamacorp is not correct for wanting to go into Syria, then my comment stands...shutthefuckup.

Fish on...

Todd

Wrong.

So if you are going to kill someone in a square area - you are going to kill all, men, women, children, they will be either sick or dead. Why would a president of any country do that to their people? I'm not buying this - it doesn't make sense to me - so super sick of bs, lies and the war machine. Fck John McCain, if we all knew what they know we would puke.

did Hitler bomb the US?

i just want to see the airshow... this will be like something you have never seen possibly... and well, ya know what, the shady fvck deserves it...

They bombed Pearl Harbor!

my comparisons of Assad vs Hitler had nothing to do with what each of them were/are in situation wise, its the tyranny that each of them are/were doing...

own people, other countries, doesnt matter, both of them have murdered hundreds of thousands/millions of people that opposed their views... if Assad goes unchecked, he will kill even more people, and probably make the 100k+ people look like a pin prick...

he needs to go, 2 years ago....

Russia has sent in a missile boat of their own, it will be there in 10 days...

my comparisons of Assad vs Hitler had nothing to do with what each of them were/are in situation wise, its the tyranny that each of them are/were doing...

own people, other countries, doesnt matter, both of them have murdered hundreds of thousands/millions of people that opposed their views... if Assad goes unchecked, he will kill even more people, and probably make the 100k+ people look like a pin prick...

he needs to go, 2 years ago....

Russia has sent in a missile boat of their own, it will be there in 10 days...

No, I think they should disregard Rumsfeld.

So it's a C&P, you're surprised somehow?

I tried to do that and I did it the same way I embed the pics I post. It didn't come up.

I guess I'm not as 'puter literate as you. Thanks..

Wanna bet he is already selling them like hot cakes?

Update: Another good question is why Obama didn't make the same proposal to begin with. Why did he immediately decide to bomb?

It was Kerry who first floated the "turn over the chemical weapons" idea in what appeared to be an off handed remark. The Russians seized on the idea, which is good...assuming they are serious.

That all said, I really don't care that much about who should get the credit. If we can stop Syria's chemical weapons capability without killing anyone else, that's all that really matters. It would be a win for all sides with no risk of a quagmire for us.

"as that this brutal dictator with a history of playing fast and loose with the facts cannot be trusted to turn over chemical weapons"

It was Kerry who first floated the "turn over the chemical weapons" idea in what appeared to be an off handed remark. The Russians seized on the idea, which is good...assuming they are serious.

That all said, I really don't care that much about who should get the credit. If we can stop Syria's chemical weapons capability without killing anyone else, that's all that really matters. It would be a win for all sides with no risk of a quagmire for us.

rumor has it Biden is already loadin it up

I love my country for the same reason I love my parents, because they are retarded and I have to.