Syriana

When I think of George Clooney (which I make every effort not to, thank you very much) I tend to consider his role in "Syriana", which almost made me like him.  I didn't quite push him over the line to "Not-a-hollywood-douchebag", but the effort was strong enough that I no longer consider him merely a set of teeth with an ability to remember lines for a short time.

Syriana was one of the few complex movies coming out of the Bush years.  It seemed to understand the complexity of the bullshit in the middle east and showed (I think justly) that there are no clean players in that neck of the clear cut.  

Seque to the present, with mainstream media like the Wall Street Journal and the New York times dutifully laying the groundwork for WWIII by putting up headlines about how Bashar Al Assad is going to chlorine gas his own population to fulfill his deliciously double-evil plans of actually taking control of the country he rules.

The Russians are there with him.  Their bases at Latakia and Tarsus are pretty damn important to them and their air-defense and air support are there for the Syrians.  To make it even worse, the Russians are there legally.  I cannot for the life of me find any authorization, either from Syria or the United States, for the Marine artillery that we have squatting on a foreign country's soil.  Awkward that.

Now, for some reason, we Americans put up with our Presidents attacking other countries on a fairly routine basis.  I think that if you ask the residents of Kileen or Leesville, they will respond that it is better to have the boys over there raising a ruckus than here tearing up the local real estate and impregnating the younger and more gullible.

Nope, we seem to be unsatisfied with losing in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past 17 years.  I think that dumb Donny is becoming aware of the idea that folks are trying to pull him down and seems to be coming apart a bit.  So Johnny Bolton and the NeoCon express seem to be sliding their long-gestating half-baked plans past Dumb Donny over to Jimmy (Have a plan to kill everyone I meet) Mattis.

I am hoping that this isn't a bridge to far.  We have been at war in the Middle East since 1991.  I don't know how to tell you this folks, but we most certainly haven't done anything useful there during those twenty seven years.  

I hope that the continued doubling down works, but it seems to me that others might decide that we are the problem.