No Indication in the US that the Country is at War Again

It was a beautiful sunny day yesterday in Philadelphia, birthplace of the United States. Crowds of people took advantage of temperatures that were in the ’80s for the second day in a row to stroll the streets of Center City, shopping and patronizing the various restaurants and coffee shops. The only sign that the US had just attacked the capital of another Middle East country with a shock-and-awe blitz of cruise missiles was a small group of Marxist protesters gamely standing in a line along 15th Street on the west side of City Hall, holding up signs criticizing the attack on Syria and pointing out how US military spending and endless wars are robbing schools, health care and other human needs of funding.

The hastily arranged protest by several dozen activists was not derided by the strolling tourists and passing drivers so much as it was simply ignored like a part of the scenery.

Totally missing was any protest action by the larger peace and justice organizations — the ones that are calling themselves the “Resistance” to President Trump. Indeed, the so-called Resistance has been seeking pledges from supporters to come out on the street the moment Trump tries to fire special counsel Robert Mueller. Obviously the organization has a huge mailing list, but it didn’t turn to it to call people to action in protest of Trump’s criminal launching of an attack on Syria, ostensibly intended to “punish” Syrian leader Barhar Al-Assad for an alleged, but not proven, chemical attack on Douma, a suburb of Damascus on April 7.

Never mind that the attack was both a major war crime under the UN Charter, a treaty drawn up largely by the US, approved by the US Senate and signed into law, or that Trump had absolutely no authority under the Costitution to launch the attack, since Syria posed no threat, imminent or otherwise, to the US or its allies.

The response of the American public, save for those few dedicated souls at the City Hall protest, has been largely ho-hum. Up at Temple University, students were strolling around the campus also enjoying the nice weather. There was no sign of protest there either. And a Google search for protest only turned up events relating to the earlier threats of action or to last year’s launching of a smaller cruise missile attack on Syria by Trump. One had to look abroad to Greece to find an example of a major protest against the attack on Syria, in which the US was joined by token forces from the UK and France, but no other nations, even from NATO.

read more

A news collective, founded as a blog in 2004, covering war, politics, environment, economy, culture and all the madness