In Syria: Stupid power move | Common Dreams

Recently, I commented on Elmore Leonard's novel Ryan's Rules, which he later retitled as Swag. It's about the catastrophe a crook named Ryan brings onto himself by disobeying his own sensible rules, like, don't trust other crooks.

Crooks aren't the only ones who need to abide by sensible rules. One of the first rules for rulers should be: If you can't make it better, don't jump in. I think there's something like that in Clausewitz, or maybe Machiavelli, both of whom drew up sensible rules for rulers.

I agree with Jon Queally (link below): a U.S. attack on Syria is not going to make things there better, not for Syrian civilians of whatever politics hit by the cruise missiles, not for the fragmented "opposition" and certainly not for democracy, and not even for U.S. interests (economic, political or military) in the region.

But of course, if rulers acted sensibly, there would have been no World War I — to take just one example of blundering into disaster. Rulers act more often out of pride than pragmatism, pressure from their closest confidants rather than the larger interests of the states they rule, or (probably the case of George W. in Iraq) blind adherence to an ideological vision unchecked by evidence. There's probably a little bit of all three influences on the U.S. plan to attack Syria. So, disaster, here we come!

In Syria, Obama's Calculations Reveal Stupidity of US Imperialism | Common Dreams

Also, see this video of an interview of Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies:  As Strikes on Syria Loom, U.S. Ignores Diplomatic Track | Common Dreams

"Authoritarian leftism" support for despots

Remember Lenin's 1920 essay, Leftwing Communism: An Infantile Disorder? Nicholas Kozloff describes a similar disorder: What he calls the "authoritarian left" is so convinced that the enemy of my enemy is my friend — the "enemy" being western capitalism — that writers like Alex Cockburn and Robert Dreyfuss find nice things to say about Muammar Gadaffi and Bachar Al-Asad, and even Noam Chomsky refrains from critical analysis of the crazed Bolivarian Hugo Chávez. That means they're having trouble distinguishing "left" from "right."

The authoritarian left goes awry: From the Arab Spring to Latin America - Opinion - Al Jazeera English