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Is Syria the "closest ally of the American people"? I don't necessarily think so, but, at the same time, I don't think anyone who believes this is subject to ridicule or that they also somehow believe in terrorism, genocide, the government of North Korea, China, Pol Pot, weapons of mass destruction, or any number of extraneous things that have appeared in these threads. And that is the point.
Syria's government has, in the past, made overtures to the U.S. to establish a thaw in relations. The current administration did not make any effort to explore the possibility of better relations. At the same time, Syria has never militarily attacked the U.S., nor was Syria in any way related to the September 11, 2001 attacks (or the Taliban or anthrax or anything else that those in the current administration would not hesitate to publish, expound upon, even embelish (much like the nuclear weapons program Iraq was supposed to have)).
Equating Syria, as a nation, with terrorism is wrong, illogical and dangerous. Wrong because not all -- or even a majority (or even a plurality) -- of the average Syrians have anything to do with terrorism. Saying that this entire nation of millions is terrorist simply defies logic. This sort of black and white thinking and these sorts of huge generalizations made on an entire culture, without knowing the people that make up that culture, are baseless and specious. Most average Syrian people, I am sure, are much like average American people. They simply want good government, education, a decent job and standard of living, and a nice retirement. In this way, Syrian people may very much be an "ally" of the American people. You'd have to ask mmmm. But I am sure they, like many American and Canadian people on these boards, do not support wars for oil or global or regional domination. I'd even bet that they had nothing to do with Pol Pot. So the caricature that all of Syria is a nest of terrorists is illogical, but more importantly, dangerous.
Dangerous because this is the very ploy which certain right wing elements have exploited to send the U.S. to an undeclared war that is supposed to last for decades. This war has been used to justify squelching dissent, awarding corporate interests with massive billion-dollar contracts, and re-electing the very president who lost the popular vote but sent the U.S. to the war in the first place. (National security, they say now, requires that the current president be elected to another term). Without naming broadcast stations, there are some that continually broadcast allegations of "terrorist nations," line them up one after the other, and there is good reason to believe that these are the next targets on the list for invasion by the current administration. Even though it was governed by a despot (that had once been supported by the U.S. and specifically by Donald Rumsfeld), Iraq was portrayed as terrorist and having weapons of mass destruction, and this label was used to justify going to war against it and millions of its civilians to root out these weapons of mass destruction. The argument was that -- although Iraq never attacked the U.S. and had nothing to do with 9/11 -- it should not have the weapons of mass destruction and should be preemptively attacked to forestall some hypothetical attack in the future. Now we know that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq, as a nation, is now a serious international, regional and humanitarian problem in the world.
Worse, the ongoing, undeclared war has allowed the current Administration to begin to alter the very institutions and ideals that make the U.S. what it is. Based on the constant fear of the ongoing, possibly endless war, and the resulting fear of terrorist attacks which are now a daily occurrence, individuals in the U.S. have begun losing the very freedoms for which the nation was founded. Most of all, however, the Constitutional protections that prevent the Executive from dragging the country into war and using that war to usurp power have been neglected and forgotten, and the Executive is using this to maintain power through another election cycle. What happens after that one can only shudder to imagine.
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