Isis: War party's MacGuffin to prolong perpetual war

Movie buffs, especially fans of thriller director Alfred Hitchcock, know what a MacGuffin is: a plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues, often with little or no narrative explanation. For Hitchcock it might be the plans for the airplane engine (39 Steps) or the uranium ore stored in vintage wine bottles (Notorious). Everyone knows the most famous MacGuffin in filmdom, the black bird in John Huston's Maltese Falcoln. But neither Huston nor Hitchcock have come up with a better MacGuffin for America's endless real life drama of perpetual war, than the US war party's ISIS, also know as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. This rag tag assortment of Sunni Islamic extremists, which had some success in acquiring land in those countries from their arch rival Shi'ite Muslim brethren, are prime motivator which allows the war party to wage perpetual war all over the Middle East and Africa. Every president, congressman, military guru, media talking head says we can't bring out our token forces in numerous countries and stop dropping tens of thousands of bombs annually because ISIS will grow and threaten our homeland. That is utter nonsense fed to a public that isn't listening and doesn't care...so perpetual war drones on. And up in Celluloid Heaven Hitchcock might say: "Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I'll created 57 MacGuffins for my 57 films, but none compares to the Mother of All MacGuffins....ISIS."

Roskam's rush to judgement supports illegal, immoral and unconstitutional air strikes in Syria.

My congressman Peter Roskam's (IL-6) constituent email for April 8-14 touts the second US air strikes in a year for unproven use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government. That is not surprising since he has supported every illegal, immoral and unconstitutional military action in the Middle East and Africa that has killed innumerable thousands during his 12 years in Congress. At the end of his pitch for senseless war squandering trillions, Roskam reveals his real agenda there: regime change in Syria and "rolling back Russian and Iranian influence in the region." To use Roskam's logic, foreign nations would have had the right to unilaterally bomb the US for use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus that has turned Iraq into a decades long time bomb deforming, if not killing Iraqi babies. Nor will Roskam ever say a single word in opposition to US support of Saudi Arabia's relentless slaughter of Yemenis in neighboring Yemen, or Israel's weekly shooting gallery they've set up at the Israel-Gaza border to mow down Palestinians peacefully protesting the Israeli open air prison in Gaza.

Roskam's selective outrage, which only promotes bombing and shooting peoples targeted for regime change or perpetual servitude, disgraces an America that must promote peace and good will toward all people. The Sixth District deserves better in 2019.

Their certainly is an American agreement on what US should do in Syria

This subscriber the Trib Editorial Board labels an ‘isolationist’ takes umbrage with your assertion there is no US agreement on what this nation should do in Syria (What America does — and doesn't — want in Syria, April 14). First, let’s dispense with the myth there is an ‘America’, composed of the people, who have any interest in, much less a say so, on US policy in Syria. You would be hard pressed to find a single individual aside from new National Security Advisor John ‘Bonkers’ Bolton who wants massive, all out bombing to oust Syrian President Assad. Nor does our tiny but proud isolationist fringe have any illusions we have an iota of influence on criminal US military involvement in other nations affairs. That is because the US war party, not the people or the president, determines US policy in Syria as well as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Niger, Somalia, Libya and others of which we’re not informed. Their agenda is clear. Our murderous bombing of innocents in those defiled nations is good for business; the business of perpetual war which keeps the weapons makers rich, the military lavished with a trillion in treasure, and the war loving ideologues employed as talking heads on mainstream media. Keep those wars simmering at the low levels of minimal troops and low profile bombings and life is good. By arming Syrian rebels we get a twofer…keep ISIS well supplied to keep them as an imagined enemy to justify our involvement, and keep President Assad in our gunsight as a regime to change like we’ve done all over the world since the end of WWII.

If we want peace in the region we must pull our soldiers out and stop the bombing. That would be good for world peace but bad for the America’s most successful business: perpetual war.

It's more than a dangerous mistake...it's a war crime

Once again the Trib's Steve Chapman trots out his 'mistake' meme to describe the murderous US bombing in the Syria, and other countries in the Middle East. His latest 'Bombing Syria a dangerous mistake' must be his hundredth or more such piece, all lamenting US stupidity in its military actions around the region. Of course, what he writes is true but misses the larger point of US criminality in bombing tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of innocents to bits over the last 17 years since the 911 attacks. Chapman is the house peacenik on the Trib Editorial Board which backs every US war party intervention worldwide. If they didn't they'd lose access to government information, the currency of every media outlet. Chapman's 'US bombing is stupid' pieces represent a bone tossed to sanity in an otherwise insane foreign policy that has pushed the 'Doomsday Clock' to 2 minutes to Midnight, according the the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the closest it has been since 1953. We need to see US war criminals in the dock of international justice, not being flunked by Chapman for stupidity.