Remeber the Maine!
December 6, 2012 by Bruce Wallace, 121Contact
President Obama's U.S. officials say the Syrian military has loaded sarin components into bombs. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says Washington was concerned about the government losing control of such weapons to extreme Islamist armed groups among the rebel forces. Syria's Assad has an official saying, "if we had such weapons, they would not be used against its people. We would not commit suicide."
Vague rumors of Syrian forces mixing chemicals and moving rockets around are interspersed with diagrams of how to build a Sarin rocket without killing yourself. Images of Sadaam's gas war against the Kurds flicker quickly by as talking heads tell us of the horrors to come. The media is running amok and, frankly, scaring us a great deal. We are just as susceptible to this fear mongering as anyone.
One can only hope that the hype is just a way to a) get Russia to at least admit there are circumstances under which they will not support Assad (this gives them a way out should he fall), and b) a way to sell the News (if you insist upon calling it that). After all, we are obsessed with death and have become rabid voyeurs of horror.
The Maine, the Gulf of Tonkin, Weapons of Mass Destruction (remember that one?), the whatever. It wouldn't be the first time we were manipulated into choosing violence by making us fearful.
Oh, and lest we forget, there was that phone call yesterday from the Iraqi family who fled to Damascus to avoid the resurgent violence in their Baghdad neighborhood who are now too afraid to let the children go into the street because 'the shooting is very hard' and getting closer and closer and they think they are going to be caught between the Assad and anti-Assad armies and they 'will get crushed'. Those poor Christians. Doesn't it make you wonder why the world allowed such violence to take place, to grow, to mushroom into the disaster it has become?
