Different Day, Same Shit.

Okay, you’re asking here about the Obama administration’s not-so-subtle signals that it wants to launch some cruise missiles at Syria, which would be punishment for what it says is Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians.

It’s true that basically no one believes that this will turn the tide of the Syrian war. But this is important: it’s not supposed to. The strikes wouldn’t be meant to shape the course of the war or to topple Assad, which Obama thinks would just make things worse anyway. They would be meant to punish Assad for (allegedly) using chemical weapons and to deter him, or any future military leader in any future war, from using them again.

The above quoted comes from Max Fisher's recent Washington Post piece, "9 questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask," a sort of Syrian Civil War for Dummies guide to help the average schlub keep up with current events. This answers question #7: "Why would President Obama just lob a few cruise missiles at Assad and call it a day?"

The answer lies with question #6: "Why hasn't the U.S. shoved its collective foot up Assad's authoritarian ass until he can taste our Freedom™ and Liberty™-flavored shoe soles?" Because, as Fisher explains, all of our other military options would literally make things worse:

• A full-on ground invasion would be Iraq all over again, only this time it's Barack Obama's presidential ass in the sling.
• An air strike? Forget about it. Too much time and political capital needed to maintain a no-fly zone a la Iraq.
• A targeted assassination of Bashir al-Assad would just open up a power vacuum for some other asshole or group of assholes to fill, putting the U.S. and ordinary Syrians right back where they started.
• Giving the Syrian rebels all the weapons they can tote and letting God/Allah sort them out wouldn't work, either. Too many opportunities to accidentally outfit the next Taliban with decent weaponry for dominating future internecine conflicts. Besides, the Saudis gave Syrian rebels some weapons and look at what happened with that.
• Doing nothing is also an option and it's one some on the left would rather Obama take. But doing nothing puts a bigger dent in his credibility in foreign matters than doing something.

So the only option left on the table is to smack Assad on the wrist with a cruise missile-shaped ruler and hope he's shook enough to stay away from chemical weapons for the foreseeable future.

Personally, I'm not so sure that this will be enough. We're talking about a guy whose goons have had no compunction against raping and killing civilians, children included. As far as everyone's concerned, Bashir al-Assad is a Bad Dude, as are is his majority-Alawite armed forces. To send any sort of message to Assad, it'd have to be a rather painful one - and there's always the fear of innocents accidentally sharing that pain.

According to Omar Dahi, the answer involves action that eschews actual military intervention of any form with something that actually helps the Syrian people:

What should be the response to these events? The answer for those who care about the fate of Syrians is the same as it has been to the ongoing violence previously, which is to push for a political settlement and an immediate cessation of violence coupled with humanitarian aid for Syrians.

A US- or NATO-led attack, which appears to be imminent, is likely to be disastrous for Syrians (as well as Lebanese and Palestinians). If the attack is intense enough to completely destroy the Syrian regime it will destroy whatever is left of Syria. If it is not, it will leave the regime in place to retaliate where it is strong, against its internal enemies, except now having its nationalist credentials bolstered as having fought off US aggression. Either way the strike will be devastating to millions inside Syria, not to mention the millions of refugees and internally displaced populations who are living hand to mouth and who depend on daily humanitarian aid that will surely be disrupted or stopped. There is no such thing as a surgical strike, and no possibility in a country as densely populated as Syria for an attack that does not incur civilian casualties. This is excluding the fact that US foreign policy in the Middle East, past and present, including its own complicity in chemical weapons attacks, makes it impossible not to be cynical about the motives behind this attack. Moreover, in the past two years people within the region became convinced that US policy towards Syria is dictated—as before—by what benefits Israel, which had not desired a total regime collapse but was benefitting from a perpetual conflict in its northern border so long as it remained contained.

It's not just Israel that has its eyes on Syria. Russia would very much like to keep its naval port on the Mediterranean while Iran would someday love to have the same. The Saudis seem to be working to cajole Russia into backing away from Assad, but the way it's going about it is likely to make things even worse.

In the short term, there seems to be nothing that can be done. As Fisher explains, the long-term ramifications are just as bleak: the various Syrian factions are likely to continue killing one another for years until fatigue sets in or someone achieves something resembling a victory. Afterwards, a precarious peace among numerous ethnic groups - at least until something somewhere sparks up yet another conflict.

The above video (sadly dead as of 2014) serves as a recap of the events surrounding the five-hour attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Criticisms surrounding the attack included the claimed lack of sufficient security at the compound, as well as why additional Army forces were nowhere to be found when the consulate needed help most.* Some claimed that not only did the White House delay their response to the attack, officials also seemed reluctant to immediately pin responsibility on the usual suspect in the region (Al Qaeda). Republicans attempted to parlay these criticisms into a scandal that would hopefully leave the Obama administration tarred and feathered.

This was supposed to be an impeachable moment for the president. In Benghazi, the GOP saw Barack Obama finally meeting his very own Watergate or better still, Iran Hostage Crisis. So far, that seems about as likely as New Coke being reintroduced on the soft drink market. So Republicans simply changed targets - instead of striking at a lame duck with a seemingly unimpeachable image, they're focused on scuttling Hillary Clinton's possible 2016 presidential candidacy, notably by returning a favor:

The brief period of bipartisan peace initiated by 9/11 ended for good in May 2002. CBS News reported that the president had received an intelligence briefing in early Aug. 2001 that "specifically alerted him of a possible airliner attack in the US."

Th CBS report left much open to question, but that mattered little to Democratic leaders in Congress. They saw an opportunity to attack the president's strong suit--his leadership in the war on terrorism.

The Democrat who most aroused the ire of the White House was Hillary Clinton. She declared, "Bush had been informed last year, before 9/11, of a possible al Qaeda plot to hijack a US airliner." She held up a newspaper headline, "BUSH KNEW." "The president knew what?" Clinton asked.

To the White House, Clinton's remarks seemed calculated to manipulate the narrative concerning who should be blamed for 9/11, trying to shield the legacy of her husband's presidency by shifting blame for overlooking available intelligence away from him & onto his successor.

GOP talking heads suggest that the president had prior knowledge of an impending attack and, for whatever reason, decided to sit on that intel and let the chips fall where they did. Of course, few people asked the magic question: exactly how would the Obama administration profit by allowing such an attack to happen? Even the talking heads over at Fox & Friends are backing away from the conspiratorial mayhem surrounding Benghazi:

On Monday, the morning show hosted cable news all-star Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), for his latest in a long string of attempts to prove that the U.S. government engaged in a massive cover-up of the September 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya. Although hosts Gretchen Carlson, Steve Doocy, and Brian Kilmeade are normally happy to promote a good conspiracy theory — for example, they recently seriously questioned whether or not NBC is replacing Jay Leno on The Tonight Show because he made a joke about President Obama — even they’re fed up with Chaffetz’s unsupported claims that “we were certainly misled every step of the way.”

“Are you saying that admirals Pickering and Mullen are complicit because they did the review board?” Kilmeade asked of Chaffetz’s suggestion that the government manipulated the findings of the Accountability Review Board report on the attack. “Are you saying that the CIA is complicit because they allowed their talking points to be edited?”

“What were they trying to cover up?” Doocy asked.

“You had the former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta — who was revered by both sides of the fence — coming out and saying, ‘Hey, we couldn’t have gotten anybody there.’ So you have him on the line. You have former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, President Obama, Admiral Mullen. Would all of these people go to bat just to get President Obama re-elected?” Carlson asked.

Back when the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld trifecta got it in their heads to invade Iraq, I wasn't paying all that much attention to what was going on in the background or any of the nuances involved in the decision-making process. Despite being in college at the time, I wasn't the slightest politically active or even politically interested. But even I knew that whatever thought process that made the invasion of Iraq appealing was one that would have also made swallowing pieces of crystal meth a perfectly sensible activity.

I suspect that just as many Americans, especially those who didn't have any loved ones fighting in Iraq and elsewhere at that time, were just as disengaged and ephemeral as I was during that time. After all, I did have other things much closer to home to worry about. Secondly, I was still somewhat enamored with hardassed conservative philosophy - one that made excuses for hard line positions that, with a bit of critical and constructive analysis, made absolutely no sense for anyone but the most diehard to hold. That took a bit of time to recover from.

At any rate, in spite of solid opposition against the invasion from many corners of the U.S. and the world, the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld trifecta were intent on using 9/11 and the opening salvos of the War on Terror as a segue for delivering the shock-inducing and awe-inspiring might of the U.S. Army to Saddam Hussein's front door.

"Shock and Awe." That was the Hitachi Magic Wand of buzzwords that made reporters and journalists shiver with orgasmic delight back then. 10 years later, it still has the same effect. I haven't heard those buzzwords since U.S. troops decamped from Iraq years ago. The supposed point of "Shock and Awe" was to shock the Ba'athist forces and awe them with our impressive military might. Instead, we shocked the Iraqis by dismantling their nation and awed them with our relative ineptitude and general insouciance about what we'd leave behind when the dust settled.

So many reporters were using the words "Shock and Awe" in their retrospects on the Iraq War that I thought about putting my foot into the next nearest TV that dared transmit those words.

To me, there seemed to be no rhyme and little reason for our nation's grand adventure into Iraq. For one, the WMD angle was proven to be dubious at best and a complete fabrication at worst. Again, I bought into the conservative spin over the "missing" WMD by convincing myself that Saddam must have had them relocated to Syria or someplace prior to the invasion. To this day, I still can't understand how I managed to come to that conclusion, although Time and Newsweek weren't of any help on that front.

Come to think of it, maybe it was all of the misinformation circulating about the Iraq War that led people to be a bit insouciant about the whole thing, especially when it was made clear that all the protesting in the world wasn't going to do much, if anything, to stop it.

Ok, so we got Saddam. Junior managed to get the bad guy his old man either couldn't catch or just didn't feel like catching. Not to armchair quarterback, but if the main purpose of the war was to snuff out Saddam and his sons, we could have done that with a good old fashioned CIA-sponsored assassination. Maybe that wasn't the real aim.

Perhaps it was the oil. Antonia Juhasz seems to think so and experts claim Iraq holds what possibly could be the largest reserves of crude oil in the world. After all, we were told that the invasion would literally pay for itself once those petrodollars started rolling in.

Or maybe it was to make Iran a bit uncomfortable by parking a now-U.S. friendly pawn right on their front doorstep. In light of our continuing difficulties with intimidating Iran out of continuing its quest for a nuclear deterrent against U.S. hegemony, it doesn't seem to be working all that well. I'm pretty sure it wasn't to "win hearts and minds" as so many claimed. If we wanted to do that, we wouldn't have sent our troops in the first place.

At any rate, as the war dragged on, more people came to the foregone conclusion that being in Iraq was a bad idea overall. Generally speaking, it became less and less fashionable to cheer on the Iraq War. Even the pundits who made their career riding the "Shock and Awe" orgasm changed their tune when they learned the batteries were just about out of juice.

And what of Iraq itself, aside from the inevitable ethnic/sectarian conflicts that have now popped up without Saddam or any other strongman-type as a definite check? Well, there's this:

Ten years after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and smashed Iraq’s military, the country has become a major buyer of military equipment, spending billions to rebuild its armed forces.

In doing so, Iraq has become a customer of some of the same companies that supplied the weapons used to attack Baghdad’s troops in 2003.(...)

(...)With a security and defence budget of about $16.4 billion for 2013 and a commitment to rebuilding its forces, Iraq offers significant opportunities for defence and security firms.

“From a vendor’s perspective, between the US and Iraqi funding, there’s been a lot of money spent on defence goods and equipment in this country,” said Chris King of Britain-based BAE Systems, one of the companies at the expo.

“They’re buying F-16s, they’re buying M1A1 tanks, they’ve bought equipment from other countries. So, there’s a market here,” King said.

“The Iraqi market is increasing, or at least it seems to be a market that’s gonna continue to spend on procurement at some steady level, if not a larger level over time,” he said.

The Iraqis aim “to rebuild their military, air force and everything, so there are many (areas) to cooperate with them as far as defence companies’ point of view,” noted Sang Choi of Korea Aerospace Industries.

Musab Alkateeb of US-based Honeywell International added that Iraq is “purchasing a great deal of equipment,” and its “procurement activity is sufficient to warrant interest from international firms.”

Representatives of aerospace companies were especially interested in advertising their jet training aircraft, given Iraq’s need for advanced trainers to complement the 36 F-16 warplanes it has ordered from the United States.

Though US troops departed Iraq in December 2011, the United States is still the main arms supplier for the country, which has taken delivery of US military equipment ranging from M113 armoured personnel carriers and M1 Abrams tanks to M-16 assault rifles.

The United States has also assisted Iraq in fielding equipment and training.

So, after 8 years, 4,487 deaths and over $1.7 trillion spent, we've managed to turn Iraq into a client state that's a viable customer for U.S.-made military hardware. Well, not just military hardware, but practically anything that's in need of rebuilding.

Maybe that's what Junior meant when he declared, "mission accomplished."