AIPAC and "civilized norms"

AIPAC's response to Obama's search for support for an assault on Syria is rich in irony.

By citing "civilized norms," the AIPAC crew invite examination of how the states of Israel and the USA conform to those civilized norms.

America has staged a series of illegal foreign adventures from Vietnam to Central America to Iraq to Libya and beyond. Those adventures have cost millions of innocent lives around the world. America has absolutely no claim to virtue in its conduct over the past 60 years.

Israel's heavy handed conduct in the occupied territories, her relentless policy of colonizing those territories, the outrageously disproportionate response to any real or imagined threat from any real or imagined enemy, all place that country firmly outside any so-called civilized norms.

Yet the America Israel Public Affairs Committee seek to justify an attack on a sovereign nation that has not attacked either of them on the grounds that Syria has violated civilized norms?

Utterly outrageous!

Nations of Virtue bay for blood after alleged Syrian gas attack

The "red-liners" are making a concerted effort to use this chemical weapon issue as the lever that will directly engage the US and some of the me-too nations in the euphemistically tagged "Syrian Crisis."

News sites across the western world are at this very moment unanimous in blaming Assad for the attack.

The source of this info seems to be William Hague, who apparently gets the straight skinny directly from George Sabra of the UK-US sponsored Syrian National Coalition.

Therefore this is an obviously impartial verdict coming down the chain of a whole lot of folks with no irons in the fire.

Bullshit!

It's almost impossible to imagine that Assad's military brain trust would choose to deploy chemical weapons on the very day that UN chemical weapons inspectors arrive in the country.

The entire "red line" issue is a bit of a red herring to begin with. Why has it been decided, and by whom, that spending a half hour bleeding to death while trying to push your intestines back where they belong after being collateral damage in a Hellfire missile strike is a perfectly acceptable death, but dying in your sleep in a gas attack is a red line, the crossing of which marks a war crime?

But politics being what it is, it looks more and more as though the red-liners will have their way.

The blow-back will come soon enough, and once again the pundits will scratch their collective heads and wonder aloud why "they" hate us.