I read it again because, though quite depressing in its actual premises, truth and the unflinching willingness to look at reality straight on makes me feel sane again in an increasingly insane (definitely increasingly “dysfunctional” as WithyWindle says above)
world. I know that foundation of an attempt to look “straight at reality”, without the cowardly and self-serving equivocation, is the only one on which true problem-solving or effective change, if there is any hope for it, is based.

But I am not sure I agree about Syria. I am not sure…for the same reasons you state Timothy…the current reality and thinking and “political” vacillation (depending apparently on political campaign donor calculations). But I think the definition of a true morality is that it doesn’t vacillate based on those calculations.

The time to act in Syria was immediately after knowing (and it isn’t really that hard) that Assad acted pretty much as expected. Actually the time to act was beforehand, by having a thought out plan that showed you believed in your own espoused morality and what a “Red Line” means; that you take responsibility for knowing that before you draw it. It doesn’t mean — re-doing calculations based on pointless public opinion polls (does it depend on what gas was used? or how the wind was blowing that day?) and how it “plays” politically.

Once you gather your solid facts, (what is all your billions of intrusive intelligence apparatus worth if you can’t move heaven and earth to get evidence of a humanitarian crime with this much “footprint”?) and avoid the lying cloud of total obfuscation that was WMD that foretold all the rest about the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Administration and their vision of both morality and war, you act. You act “strategically”, having already considered those actions and their most effective result and possible repercussions.

Sociopathic bullies never backdown once they see only cowards vacillating around them, history having taught us this above all else. Millions of lives having already paid the price of convenience-morality, which always runs from the risk of being truly stalwart, when that is the only morally valid response.

Yes, America lost any semblance of that true moral highground long ago, and perhaps a semblance is all we ever really had. But many Americans truly believed in it; morality still has its converts even today there and other places. It would be nice to see it again, in any leadership of anyone in the US, at all.

Thank you nonetheless, for the sad sanity of this piece.

No, we are capable of blowing up *some* of each.

Back in the days of Pax Americana, the US was quite capable of selling ‘chemical technology’ to the people who gas people, giving them satellite intel to help gas better, and send the diplomats out to poo-poo the ‘crazy’ idea that one of Our Guys would use such weapons. And that’s for the forbidden weapons; whenever it came down to some mass murder carried out with good old-fashioned artillery, bombs and machine guns, the US would happily sell the guns, ammunition and train people in the finer points of torture.

There WAS an associated farce, of course, but it was all in the diplomatic sphere, before, during and after…

And the result of that was the idea that the United States could go into a place, destroy the existing government, install a new one, leave, and everything would be fine.

“I don’t favor it because we are no longer capable of it for the reasons this post suggests.”

Oh, we’re plenty capable of blowing up Syria’s chemical-weapons stores, and their means of delivering those weapons.

What we’re not capable of is mind-controlling the entirety of the Arab world to convince them that this means the United States of America is a good friendly country they should like.

The first thing a battered woman does when the cops arrest her boyfriend is to scream and cry about how they’re a bunch of bastards. The cops, she means, because they’re arresting her boyfriend. Being part of the tribe and attacking the outsider is far more important than anything the other tribe members might be doing to you.

OK.

By the by, while I am generally Pessimistic about the American Empire, there’s a case to be made that we’ll make out OK because all our competitors are even more dysfunctional than we are. (I suppose that would specifically be “China has some spectacular problems looming.) Or, for a middle ground, that our decline will be slower than you might think because our competitors are nearly as dysfunctional as we are. Just thought I’d throw that out there.

By the by, when the American Empire collapses, isn’t that also going to put a crimp in African History? I can see most History departments shrinking back to a largely American core when we no longer rule the world.