Dumb war.

“I don’t oppose all wars,” State Senator Barack Obama said in October 2002. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.”

Bombing a country to stop bombing a country is a dumb war.

Dumb wars kill people.

Andy Borowitz wrote satirically in yesterday’s New Yorker:

Attempting to quell criticism of his proposal for a limited military mission in Syria, President Obama floated a more modest strategy today, saying that any U.S. action in Syria would have “no objective whatsoever.”

Satire  became reality in today’s New York Times:

“The kind of attack the administration appears to be planning will demonstrate to Syria and to others that there is a cost the United States is willing to impose for crossing clearly established American red lines and violating widely held international norms,” said Richard Fontaine, the president of the Center for a New American Security, a centrist research center.

But, he said, “It probably will do very little to alter the fundamental balance of forces on the ground or hasten the end of the conflict.”

Bombing people to restore a blurry red line.

Dumb.

From Glen Brown:

On Syria/Remembering “Shock and Awe”

 

Aptitude and madness flew together,

creating irregular arcs of light in night.

 

Pilots winged without sleep

and with crazed eyes and clenched toes.

 

Jets rumbled with fevers of impatience.

The armchair commanders said,

 

“The world could wait no longer.”

So they rushed into the unknowable,

 

and the world was tilted by an invasion,

choking with fiery air.

 

We were never shown the unspeakable:

mutilations and murders.

 

But we were awed by broadcasts

of sorties unleashing raucous skies,

 

leaving behind in their wake

bursts of death and torrents of terror.

 

How was it to live among Blitzkriegs

of shattered glass and concrete,

 

sirens and foreboding clouds

of hydrogen sulfide?

 

When they dropped their payloads,

smoke rose from behind upturned thumbs.