Sunny London Sunday… and Other Satanic Verses

A sunny London Sunday. The Lamborghinis and other muscle cars are thundering about Mayfair. The terraces of Mount St. are overflowing with oligarchs, svelte, curvy lovelies in tow. Across Hyde Park kids are squealing with delight.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister-in-waiting, George Osborne, declaims the “urgent necessity to increase dramatically” the intensity of the war against Syria…

His boss is surely relaxing, sauvingon blanc in hand, as is his wont, this lovely afternoon, at his countryside estate, in deep discussion about his next pirouettes with Rebekah Brooks, the new… and old UK hacker-in-chief of news…

You will remember the same moment, from early March 2003… the Iraqis will throw rose petals in front of our armored divisions and place garlands of orange blossoms around the necks of our courageous warriors of liberation, so happy will they be to be freed from that wanton monster — our monster, who kept Iran bottled up, shh, shh, don’t say that so loudly…

And if we don’t invade, there will be mushroom clouds over Coney Island, and come summer that would never do…Oh, and there’s that little poodle, dressed up as Tony Blair, licking the heels of our Chicken Hawk U.S. Commander-in-Chief and his surrogate father…That was more or less the start of all of this.

Then there was the Cameron-Sarkozy-led insanity to impose regime change from the air — boots on the ground become messy, mate — on that tribal society, which operates under the collective known as “Libya.”

Along the way, of course, Sark was desperate to have the burlesque clown Gaddafi whacked — as the mobsters say —, and with him any trace of the 50 million euros which he apparently forked over to finance Mr. Bling’s 2007 presidential election campaign in France…

There are of course other antecedents, but no one much likes to talk about them, even when holding their nose. The US-Saudi spent well over a decade training, arming, intoxicating and generously financing jihadists in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as a parallel army they launched like wild dogs against Soviet troops in Kabul…

Somehow, they did not like that while the Soviets were there girls could go to school, that women could wear mini-skirts and do up their hair…

Roll the film fast forward to another fine September morning, just like today, but this time in New York, and slam smack into the symbolic soft underbelly of the most prominent symbol of the “indispensable” empire…

You will remember: We don’t need proof that Saddam was involved. We know he was! You’re with us, or you’re against us! Out, out, out and the world will be such a better place. Democracy will flourish across the Middle East, our oil supplies will be secured forever, the arms merchants will be in nirvana… Mission Accomplished…

There are antecedents to what we are dealing with today, to this biblical calamity that has struck these wretched refugees. But is there any accountability? Things happen in a context — even the great dramatic events we are witnessing today.

Does it make sense to destabilize Syria still further, despite Mr. Osborne’s rants? Refugees there are already aplenty. Do they want still more?

Consider Lebanon, with its population of three million, it is today “home” to some one million Syrians, and as many Iraqis… oh yes, and thousands upon thousands of wretched Palestinians who were forced off their lands some decades back…

Germany received with warmth and showered dignity on some 30,000 completely exhausted refugees children, women, men over the weekend.

Interestingly, Germany was against both, the unprovoked wars against Iraq and the war against Libya. Where are the United States, Saudi Arabia, Britain, France… now that there thoughtless turpitude has led to this further human calamity?