John McCain in Syria

John McCain in Syria: How Much Damage?

The Americans sent this old guy to give us the guns?

Now, meddling in foreign affairs for fun and profit is nothing new on the American scene, but Grampy's meddling supersedes even the most outlandish previous cases.  While it may be attractive to simply gloss over this latest embarrassing escapade with a jaundiced eye lubricated by some comforting political stoicism, making every effort to forget it as quickly as possible, that approach may lead us to take things too lightly.

The Senator's "visit to the war zone" is neither the innocent meandering of a man already far too long in the tooth for such things decades ago nor is it some arcane, yet rational, speck of a larger foreign policy picture.  The old war bird's fantasy of the fame and fortune from "cutting through the red tape" probably did some serious damage to our nation's long term strategy.

The Senator with ACTUAL Syrian rebels (image source)

We have to try to put ourselves in the minds of the Free Syrian Army rebels he met there.  

"If this US Senator doesn't take the US Secretary of State's efforts seriously, why should we?  Further, although John McCain met with us, what exactly does that mean?  In fact, does it mean anything?"

The domestic corporate media has been relentlessly repeating the old line from their criticism of the Libyan strategy.  Clearly, once again, the media has been ordered to plunge the American public opinion into a permanent "no exit" quandary about whom it is we're getting ready to help with our military intervention.

After all, when interpreted from the manipulative view of information challenged, isolationist nut rights, the US has "backed the wrong horse" in every interventionist military adventure since President Reagan funnelled ship loads of Sidewinder anti-aircraft missiles to the Afghan mujadiheen fighting the Soviets in 1992.  The short term policy worked out well enough, but as an historic aside -- unanticipated consequence-wise, of course -- we wound up with Osama bin Laden and the Al Qeada armed with high tech rockets which could shoot down an air liner.

Since then we've been "officially worried" about just where all those leftover missiles went after the Soviets left.

In their unending effort to sabotage and undercut the Obama Administration with every tool possible, the "mouth junk" pundits and the media have transformed that old Reagan error into an perpetual source of threat on every possible occasion since then. We are now accustomed to always hearing the same lament.  "Who are we helping?  Does anyone really know?  Are they like us?  Will they be our friends after this is done, or will they become enemies, using the weapons we gave them against us? And, do they happen to have any oil?"

In a failed media climate rife with such synthetic -- "two sides to everything, I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there" -- heavily manipulated artificialities and where network reporting credibility is already, quite deservedly, at a disastrous all time low, the predictable onslaught of the same fear grinding, overly simplified, uncertainty provoking bias is inevitable.  As US educational outcomes have plummeted, the task of cranking out mindless narcotic media propaganda has grown easier and easier.

If you break a sweat terrorizing a third grader, you're doing it wrong.

All this would be little more than "waxing philosophically" if we actually had any real reporting or real information about which Syrians are fighting Assad, but, of course, we don't.  We're "flying blind."  As usual.

This is exactly what makes Syria dangerous for us.  This is exactly what makes John McCain's bloodthirsty, maverick "foreign policy habits" such a problem.

MeanMesa is convinced that American intervention in Syria is both quite probably inevitable, quite probably necessary and also quite probably "doable." [There will be a follow up MeanMesa post of this side of the story in a few days.] There will no part of such a solution which legitimately serves personal aggrandizement such as the "temptation served" with McCain's reckless visit. There will be no part illegitimately providing more mindless "cannon fodder" for further inflaming the fickle GOP base. There will be no part resembling the comic book imaginings of the uninterested, uninformed and indulgently angry Republican Party House and Senate tea bags.

In other words, the nation will have to set aside its induced appetite for "red meat terror" and try to actually think.  The stakes are high.

While notably oily tea bag Republican opportunists in bad ties fight for imaginary advances in their now corpse-like poll ratings, the rest of the world -- including all the parties to the Syrian violence -- are up to their necks in the "real."

John McCain in Syria: The Geriatric War Starter

Oh Grampy...Not Again

McCain has been perpetually plagued by an unsettling combination of a decades old, gnawing failure to meet [the "daddy" Admiral's and the "grandaddy" Admiral's] fatherly expectations,  a thoroughly road weary claim of some sort of still unrecognized 1950's military strategic expertise and a heartbreaking, embarrassing panic with the prospect of finally being sent out to pasture with the other bald, irrelevant, aging Republican war mongers. 

Eternally ensconced in a political party which has yet to acknowledge a string of lost elections, the Senator continues to insist that the entire Obama Administration can be painlessly dispatched -- "out of hand" -- as nothing more than trailer park interlopers while he continues to represent the "real thing." Meanwhile, aside from his constant media companion, "Southern Belle" Lindsay Graham, Senate Republicans -- always far more interested in money than fame -- simply wish that he would quietly go away.

MeanMesa has posted about John McCain before.  He graduated 898th out of 900 from his class at Annapolis, wrecked four Navy jets during his training, was suspected of involvement in the fire aboard air craft carrier Forrestal, flew a 32 minute combat bombing sorty [For which he received 28 Navy citations -- just under one per minute.  In the Navy being "connected" helps.] over Viet Nam before he was shot down and imprisoned as a POW for 5 1/2 years.  In case you've managed to forget the painful Presidential election flop, review McCain's record here..

However, on a more serious note, the man has an unusually dangerous infatuation with the prospect being labelled a "maverick," and we're not talking Tom Cruise in Top Gun.

Gosh.  Were promises being made? (image source)

The Senator's ineffective, yet dramatic visit to the Syrian opposition casts a dismal shadow in its similarity to his "visit" with Georgian President Saakashvilli mere days prior to that little country's initiation of a disastrous military clash with the Russian Federation over Issetia.  While on these little amateur excursions into grown up land, the Senator is quite close mouthed about the details of promises made, but the rest of us "little people" get to see, later on, the wildly coincidental, yet sickeningly suspicious, mayhem which follows.

MeanMesa is afraid that Grampy has done it again.

McCain was sabre rattling at an even higher volume than usual for US military involvement in Syria immediately before and after the trip.  McCain's war mongering is still a favorite for Americans who are certain that, somehow, he defeated Obama in the 2008 election.  The old Senator can be counted on to "spice up" the otherwise moribund network talk shows and "news specials" along with the other painfully repetitive, mundane media products bellowing out of our televisions.

In fact, because the domestic media is controlled by the same corporate  interests which control the Republican Party, the Senator is exposed to so much air time that MeanMesa wonders when he has time for the little boys' room.

The grand pitch was that McCain's expertise in "handling" the Syrian rebels might have paved the way for Senate approval of the expected Administration decision to start providing arms.  However, we all know enough to assume that should the Senate ever have even a small chance to muddy such a decision, the Republican Senators will almost certainly filibuster faster than a heifer's tail shoos away a gnat.

This is a tough one for them.  The possibility of another money making war for their billionaire sponsors is tugging at their hearts from one direction while their phobic, pathological terror at participating, no matter how innocuously, in any successful policy originating with the President sends them screaming in the opposite direction.  They are still sulking over Obama's success with American involvement in Libya.

Of course, a rational American foreign policy now lays like a flayed corpse in the Senate chamber, unattended, forlorn, disgraced and pointedly avoided.  

A very loud but dwindling minority of American voters dares to presume that this nonsense can go on forever.  Their House Representatives are, at this moment, passing another one of their famous "no choice" anti-abortion bills while Syria burns.

Visit MeanMesa for more posts about Syria very soon.