Truth Out has the oped piece War on Syria: Twenty Pounds of Stupid in a Ten-Pound Bag. I’ll quote the beginning and the end of the piece.

I’m just going to throw this out on the stoop and see if the cat licks it up: instead of attacking Syria, how about we don’t attack Syria?
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I think I read somewhere that Mr. Obama is a pretty smart guy. Now would be a fantastic time for him to prove it by coming up with an answer to this that does not involve cruise missiles, bombs and mayhem.

When, a few months ago, Obama first issued the ultimatum against using chemical weapons, it sounded to me like a pretty reasonable thing to do.  Now that we are facing the consequences, I hark back to an excuse we used to use in the Army to try to get out of almost any predicament involving the intervention of our superiors in rank, “Well, it sounded like a good idea at the time.”

The implication being, “Yes, I see why you want to mete out some punishment because it doesn’t sound like such a good idea anymore, but I am just a lowly soldier who can’t always think for himself.”

All of the talk about the things we could do to punish Bashar al-Assad were all tried when we wanted to stop the democratically elected government in Iran in 1953.  It didn’t stop them then.  It isn’t stopping Iran today when we try the same tactics.  It probably won’t stop al-Assad.  Except for saving face, what will we gain by spending billions of dollars on an effort that we know will not succeed and will only further enrage the Arab population of the Middle East?

What would happen if  we actually talked to the Russians and Chinese, since they are the stumbling blocks in getting anything out of the United Nations Security Council?  Instead of trying to convince them of our point of view, or going our own way if we fail, what if we really debated the pros and cons of what they want to do against what we want to do?  Could some actual, viable alternative course of action be figured out?

In the 1953 coup that we and the British created in Iran, the British used a clever ploy to get us to rescue them from the severe loss of control over the oil fields in Iran.  Rather than stating the need for the coup in those terms, they recast the issue as one of preventing the Communists in Russia from gaining control of the Iranian oil.  Apparently President Truman was smart enough to rebuff them, but Eisenhower fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Let’s not use the same inability to talk to the Russians (and Chinese) just like we were still in the cold war.

The issues in Syria are very tough ones.  Rather than resort to our brute strength, maybe it is time to use our brains.

In talking with my SO about this issue and blog post, we almost simultaneously came up with another idea.

A quote from the article brings the point home.

Doctors Without Borders seems pretty convinced it happened, despite the fact that the use of such weapons by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad doesn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense, given the fickle nature of chemical weapons and how closely concentrated his own forces were near the area of the attack. A rogue military commander, perhaps? The rebels themselves?

So, who might gain by a use of chemical weapons?  The USA (CIA), Israel (Mossad), al-Qaida? So maybe the Russians are  right in saying that even if the chemical weapons attack is proven, we don’t know for sure who is responsible.  The Russians are saying that the UNSC has a protocol for finding the answers to these questions before they sanction military action.   Or should we just take the word of the CIA and the US administration that they have incontrovertible proof.  After all, the CIA has wiretaps. The recent NSA scandal has shown us how much the word of the clandestine part of our government is worth.  We also have plenty of experience with the hotheads in the Republican party that are calling for immediate action whether we know who is responsible or not.  If anyone has the motto “Ready, Fire, Aim” it is the Republicans and our own media.

Nation Of Change has the article Spying Scandal Engulfs Other US Agencies.

Earlier this month, Reuters revealed that a special division within the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has been using intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a mass database of telephone records to secretly identify targets for drug enforcement actions.

In the wake of these revelations, a former prosecutor tells IPS he believes he and his colleagues may have been unwitting pawns in the federal government’s effort to deceive defendants and the court system, thereby violating citizens’ constitutional rights.

The article goes on to discuss the Special Operations Division (SOD) comprised of federal agencies including Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency (NSA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Department of Homeland Security.

Fakhouri says the SOD program is unconstitutional because of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments combined.

Full and fair disclosure is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution as part of the Sixth Amendment, which states, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right… to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.”

The Fifth Amendment provides, “No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

It is getting harder and harder for me to make excuses for what the NSA is doing in gathering information about people’s phone calls.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Mobilization and Money. The discussion is about how the government paid for the war build-up and execution of the war, and how did it prevent inflation when there were few civilian goods to buy.  The summary at the end is as follows:

By my calculations, the fiat money flowed like this: First, the sovereign government issued and paid the people dollars to build the war machine; second, the people paid the sovereign government back some portion of the dollars they’d earned by purchasing War Bonds and paying taxes; third, the sovereign government destroyed the dollars it received in taxes and for War Bonds, thus enabling it to pay the people even more dollars to produce ships and bombers without creating a spiraling inflation; fourth, the sovereign government redeemed the War Bonds with interest, paying the people with new fiat money—but rather than being inflationary, these new dollars were absorbed by the rapidly growing post-war economy, the people using the money to buy the newly abundant goods and services produced by what was now the most technologically sophisticated, creative, well educated, productive and equitable social economy in world history.

But now, somehow, we’ve lost our way and our momentum. We’ve convinced ourselves that our sovereign monetary system works by a different logic—a logic that leads inexorably to a perpetual and growing shortage of Federal spending power. Given the real threats now racing our way with the same inevitability as was Nazism in 1938—climate change, rising sea levels, super-storms, extended droughts, gigantic forest fires, loss of fisheries and ocean acidification, water and food shortages, nuclear terrorism, and the possible failure of democracy itself—it seems we might want to consider another great mobilization to defend ourselves—if we can ever remember how to do it.

Of course there was rationing and price controls, but that does not detract from the part  war bonds and taxes played in taming inflation.  It just proves that there can be more than one thing going on in the economy at one time.  You don’t have to restrict yourself to using only one tool in the tool box to solve a problem.

The question is, “What economic principle allowed us to do this in World War II, but does not allow us to do it now?”  Anyone care to hazard a guess?  We had a gold standard then, but we don’t have one now. That should make it easier to do now what we did in WW II. Our current  foreign creditors do not seem to be complaining about our monetary policy. So that can’t be what is stopping us.