The Big Dog and Its Tail: Who’s Hiding Behing the ‘Making Assad Accountable’ Mask?

By John Grant

Responses to wrongdoing must not exacerbate problems.
            - Jonathan Granoff, President, Global Security Institute
 
 
Watching news coverage of the debate over bombing Syria, one realizes there’s more going on than Barack Obama or John Kerry are telling Congress and the American people. Kerry may have sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- but that doesn’t mean he has to tell the whole story.

The fact is there’s an elephant in the room everyone involved seems sworn to never mention. Or if it slips out, it suddenly gets silenced. That elephant is Israel.

Consider this little mind game: What if Syria and the rest of the volatile Middle East did not surround the tiny state of Israel? Would we still need to bomb Syria? With the Arab world in an uproar right now, tensions are especially high in Israel, thanks to its iron-walled determination to sustain a military occupation over native Palestinians.

Secretary of State John Kerry sees the Israel/Palestine crisis as one of his most important diplomatic challenges. It's ironic that Kerry, once an eloquent antiwar Vietnam veteran, is now the Obama administration’s point man pushing hard for war and the bombing of Syria. The same irony haunts President Obama, a consistent opponent of the Iraq War and, of course, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Let’s extend this mind game: What if Israel had been established in the early 20th century on the Africa continent between Chad and Darfur, which is in western Sudan. Imagine that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir had voiced hatred for this tiny neighbor populated by refugees from Europe. When Bashir took up slaughtering many thousands of Darfurians, would the president of the United States have sent in cruise missiles -- instead of what he did, which was nothing? In fact, while the US president damned Bashir’s slaughter on one hand, US Pentagon and Intelligence operatives met with Sudan’s chief military intelligence officers to iron out cooperation against terrorism. (In the hunt for al Qaeda, let's not forget how Bill Clinton actually sent cruise missiles into Sudan to blew up what turned out to be a civilian pharmaceutical plant. It was a big embarrassment.)

Then there’s the very recent case of Egypt, whose military units purposely gunned down over 1000 students and other pro-democracy demonstrators in the streets and wounded or locked up many thousands more. Why this did not rise to the level of an “atrocity” in need of “accountability” is a mystery. But, then, I’m more a moralist than a blind US patriot.

Actually, I’m being intentionally disingenuous, here, since I -- and many other Americans -- do understand what’s going on...

For the rest of this article by JOHN GRANT in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new uncompromising three-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to:  www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1945