An important read is attached to help understand the structure of decision making in Washington, DC; decision making that has killed millions overseas and destroyed entire nations in the Middle East.

When interviewed about such things, I’ve often described the maturity of national security decision making to nothing more than a game of Risk. Whether it be Republican or Democratic administrations the purposes of the policies enacted, murderous and barbarous when realized in person, are nothing more than to make the countries on a map the same color as the US and its allies. So, as in the case described by Lazare in the attached essay, to make Syria blue, to dis-align it from Iran (or Russia as is argued today), is the purpose in itself, it is the end that justifies all those bloody means.

Lazare’s essay is incredibly instructive and the cited memo, written by James Rubin to Hilary Clinton in April 2012, shows such thinking and decision making in its actual form. This is the true embodiment of what leads to 500,000 dead in Syria, 1 million dead in Iraq, unknown numbers of dead in Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan and throughout Africa. For my friends who still are in the military or government, or for their families, this is what has destroyed so many lives not just abroad, but also here at home – how many of us have followed such vainglorious and cavalier leadership and how many of us now know the true costs of such “service”? How many still go along with thoughts that the leadership of these wars might get better, the realities and circumstances of the wars may change, or that the professionalism of military, foreign or civil service absolves the necessity of understanding clearly, and acknowledging, the masters being served.

The first paragraph of Rubin’s memo to Clinton lays plain the convoluted, arrogant and ignorant thinking of those in DC power: “The best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad.”

From this opening Rubin lays down rationale that makes sense only when understood in what Washington, DC national security elites and their politician benefactors believe to be tangible goals; goals as have been passed onto them by previous generations and goals that are as if dreamt up by international relations graduate students in Kissinger-esque fever dreams. Goals that prove ephemeral in outcomes which can be controlled and are nearly always, inevitably, hopeless and damned for those upon who they bear.

Evidence of this simple, yet absurd, thought has been common throughout the war in Syria, for example see Michael Vickers’ Washington Post op-Ed in August 2017 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-administration-should-not-give-up-on-removing-assad-in-syria/2017/07/23/a7073878-6d59-11e7-96ab-5f38140b38cc_story.html?utm_term=.6255bc9ca7e5

or the examples laid out in Lazare’s essay. Similar clear and inculpatory evidence is also easily and readily available for our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen etc.

In moments as of now I am reminded of Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” dictum of not to give our lives to brutes or to those machine men with their machine minds….I did so for a long time, such a regret and a shame I’ll never get past. What I can do, and how can I not, is to offer what I know, not just from study and observation, but from my years at multiple levels of military, government and congressional roles.

The importance now is to pass on this information, to educate in order to embolden our society and population to the whims and fantasies of such men and women as Rubin and Clinton. For now we have the most malleable and mercurial President we have had in modern memory (and maybe in our country’s total existence) and I can tell you with great certainty that more wars will occur and that the simplemindedness and arrogance shown by Rubin and Clinton extends to both sides of the political aisle. It is only a matter of time until nuclear weapons will be cast into fiery apocalyptic use, bringing forth our demise as a species along with this beautiful planet, just to preserve or improve the color shadings of the map in the heads of the ruling neoconservatives or liberal interventionists.

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/01/13/the-memo-that-helped-kill-a-half-million-people-in-syria/