The supposed "missile test" of 3 September offers an insight into the strategy of egregious provocation that will, sooner or later, trigger the calamity that the war-hawks in Israel and Washington have been clamoring for.
In the event, the provocation passed, but the tensions remain. The evil Assad has gassed his own people, just like Saddam Hussein did. We didn't stand for it then, and we won't now.
How or why it has become the duty of the US to impose Israel's agenda on the Middle East is not a topic that our mainstream media dwell on. It's taken for granted. They are "the only democracy in the Middle East" after all.
The fiction that a limited cruise missile strike on Syria will not result in a massive and immediate escalation is just that; a fiction. If "missile tests" fail to attract a response from Syria, an actual missile attack surely will, and that will serve up the excuse for the US/Likud axis to go big.
Once that happens, and it will take mere minutes, we'll find out just how many Syrian, Iranian, and Hezbollah missiles are pointed at Israel. IAF strikes may take out some of them, a lot of them, even most of them.
They won't take out all of them, not by a long shot. Nor will the vaunted Iron Dome offer any protection after the first few barrages of incoming. The damage to civil society in Israel will be catastrophic. This will be the first war in Israel's history wherein its civilian population will bear the brunt of the retaliation.
That will prompt desperate politicians to take desperate measures. This conflict that Netanyahu and Obama are toying with has the potential to go nuclear. Then what?
Even after devastating attacks on every Israeli city, the IDF will have the capability of visiting annihilation on every Arab capital deemed hostile. Once that happens, whatever doubts may linger about US/Israeli policy constituting a "war on Islam" will be gone. It should be kept in mind that the Islamic world has nuclear weapons too.
There is no possible way to avoid the conclusion that the coming war will be a lose-lose scenario for all concerned. What then is driving events to the brink?
In Israel, the messianic elements have been emboldened by 65 years of easy victories over weak enemies. In America, the toxic combination of the military-industrial-financial war profiteers coupled with the Israel lobby have long held a strangle-hold on foreign policy.
Two out of the last three interventions that the US has undertaken have ended in disaster for America. The third has been a disaster only for the Libyan people, the imagined beneficiaries of America's benevolent intervention. Irregardless, those disasters allowed a clique of insiders in war profiteer circles to profit mightily. Since they cannot conceive of a downside and have never experienced one, they assume the possibility does not exist.
The PR lever that John Kerry has been flogging has utterly no basis in reality. Even if we assume for a brief moment, absent any evidence, that Assad bears responsibility for the gas attack of two weeks ago, by what logic would that entitle the bully on the world stage to "intervene?"
Regime change in Syria has been on the wish list of the usual suspects for at least ten years, and this phony gas attack issue is simply a tool for manipulating public opinion; Saddam's WMDs all over again.
The latest polls show that it's not working this time around. That's not enough. Concerned citizens in the US and especially in Israel have to make it clear to their leaders that under no circumstances will an attack on Syria be countenanced.
Questions of war and peace are too important to be left in the hands of politicians and war profiteers.
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