POSTED RESPONSES TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Syria's security forces face a moral choice?
What about America's in Afghanistan?
What about America's in Iraq?
What about America's in Libya - where, by the way, a aerial attack last week killed about a hundred civilians?
What about Israel in just about any territory it touches?
I hate tyrants and I hate war wherever they occur.
But it is a matter of simple fact that all Syria's ugly acts to date do not even equal the toll inflicted by Israel on its neighbors in the last few years, but the Globe and the press never treat the Israeli forces with this kind of view.
And we have no idea of NATO's total savagery in Libya, nor, for that matter, the "rebels" we support by killing civilians.
I am sorry that Globe editorial writers are so poor in the clarity of their thinking that they believe selective morals, selective ethical standards, have any meaning.
Selective ethics are no ethics, just the abuse of a term as propaganda.
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"The real lesson one should draw from these defeats is that the United States doesn't know how to build democratic societies in large and distant Muslim countries that are divided by sectarian, ethnic, or tribal splits..."
Yes, but does the United States know how to "build" democratic societies anywhere?
And just when did the idea gain existence that anyone at anytime anywhere "build" a democratic society somewhere else?
It's a lunatic notion of Pentagon consultants living on expenses-paid steak dinners.
In truth it's a propaganda cover for the neo-con agenda, clearly articulated in books and articles in the last decade, of using America's military might to re-shape the world to its liking.
The neo-cons have always pretended to care about democracy, citing the ludicrous example of apartheid, land-grabbing Israel as the Mid East's only democracy, Israel the secret friend of Arab tyrants like Mubarak or the king of Saudi Arabia who in fact serve its interests.
Democracy is an institution which grows naturally out of a healthy and growing economy over time, growth which produces a large middle class whose interests cannot possibly be represented by a tyrant or an elite group.
One thing we know for sure, you cannot bomb people into democracy.
The sad truth is that the United States itself is a fairly questionable democracy anymore, and there is a simple explanation for that.
You cannot build a monstrous military- intelligence-security apparatus, one with global reach and effect, and have people just vote on it and its uses. That does not work ever.
Such institutions are the enemy of democracy, always, and the Founding Fathers of the United States mostly understood that.
America goes through the motions of costly elections, but no mater who is elected, the government within a government - the military-intelligence-security apparatus - maintains its quiet direction of major affairs.
The American middle class has been so hollowed out for the last four decades - real incomes have dropped steadily for such people - that it is a weak voice in the country's affairs.
And America's establishment has encouraged the growth of not just a consumer-oriented society but a hyper-consumer society. People just don't have the time and patience to care about matters beyond being able to meet mortgage payments and buy things.
The society has become so militaristic it is unrecognizable. Cheap slogans substitute for thought.
Why? America's military hasn't fought a war of defense since WWII. All the scores of wars and incursions and coups since are imperial in nature and represent the interests of the government within a government whose real job is to keep the almost unbelievably rich class rich.
Many of these efforts were even against democratic governments, and along the way any tyrant who toed the line and served American interests was welcome to keep his kingdom.
In many respects, America is coming to resemble France before the Revolution, a super-wealthy class and a large pool of people who hardscrabble to meet ends, plus a military that spends unholy amounts of money trying to control the entire environment around it.
