Russia has already established a defacto no-fly zone over Syria. President Putin seems to be a lot less deceptive in his public statements than many of those who are hyperventilating about his actions. Perhaps they should have been reasonable during the past months when he and Foreign Minister Lavrov made a good faith effort to work out a diplomatic solution to the crisis the US and its allies, Israel, SA, et. al created!
http://www.unz.com/ishamir/if-they-are-bombed-the...

War is indeed barbaric. So too is religiously motivated violence. ISIS is but one example. Israel's Third Temple fanatics are another. Philip Weiss and Richard Silverstein, among others, have written about them. http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2014/04/15/isra... Silverstein wrote last year: "...when a bunch of seeming fanatics parade a bunch of fat, balding middle aged men through the streets of Jerusalem and tell us they’re the Jewish High Priests of the future, I sit up and take notice. This is friggin’ scary. Not because the rest of world Jewry will respond in any positive way to this rump attempt to revive the priestly elite. But rather because the combination of this religious movement allied with State power will send Israel even farther in the direction of religious holy war." Third Temple fanatics and their supporters within the Israeli government want to destroy the Muslim holy places on what they call the Temple Mount, there to build their Third Temple and reintroduce ritual animal sacrifice to what they consider its rightful place at the center of religion and worship. Israeli zealots need the chaos and fog of a major war to advance their plans to raze the Temple Mount, which Arabs call Haram al-Sharif. Thus the spectacle of the dangerous messianic demagogue Netanyahu bellowing for global holy war against Islam: http://www.tubechop.com/watch/4706372

Any group’s vision of an angry, vengeful God whose wrath can only be propitiated by the ritual slaughter of living creatures is primitive, savage, exclusivist, and utterly incompatible with the modern world. The reasons for that are readily evident and should be glaringly obvious. Religion is powerful essentially because it represents believers’ most cherished ideas and ideals, or their conceits, ideas and ideals that devout believers strive to represent in their daily lives. Religious belief informs and motivates human action. Ceremonial animal slaughter, ritual animal sacrifice in religion, shares typology with human sacrifice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice, and the vast majority of Jews and others consider the practice barbaric and repulsive. Most Jews view it as dangerous as well, not least because its reintroduction would surely increase anti-Jewish feeling and incite “blood libel,” the kinds of false charges of human sacrifice that were directed against Jews in the Middle Ages, a feature of classic European anti-Semitism that contributed directly to centuries of terrible prejudice and the horrific persecution of Jews. Efforts to reintroduce and re-legitimize ritual slaughter/animal sacrifice in religion and worship are dangerously retrograde, a reversion to a primitive religious vision with the killing of animals commercially raised, groomed, and sold for slaughter as its center. Those familiar with Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, ideas, attitudes, political parties, policies, and laws based on historical Hebrew texts that promote primitive, exclusivist, tribal notions of racial superiority, can only be concerned by evidence of growing religious fanaticism there, fanaticism that has found socially-destabilizing political purchase in Washington.

The current round of unholy bloodletting in the Middle East, while it is certainly shocking, hardly comes as a surprise to seasoned observers of the region who are keenly aware that Israel has purposefully sought and acted to destabilize the region for decades, too often with U.S. support, and too often with significant success.

In 2002, Professor Michael Neumann penned a prescient analysis and scathing rebuke of the Israeli extremism, militancy, and criminality that has by now thoroughly destabilized the Middle East. You should read it. http://www.counterpunch.org/2002/07/06/what-s-so-...

The eight paragraphs at the bottom of the piece clearly purport to be analysis and assessment. Because what you refer to as Engelhardt's "catalogue" of failures leaves out any mention of the singularly important covert role Israel plays in "a fiendishly clever Rube Goldberg-style machine organized around the principle that failure is the greatest success of all," Engelhardt's analysis is profoundly flawed. In fact, the thrust of the article's assessment is that, in Engelhardt's words, "at least 15 of the agencies and outfits in its 'community' [sh]ould simply be axed and the other two downsized." Were it followed, that suggestion, of course, would leave the Israeli intelligence machine and its operatives with even greater freedom of action in the USA than they currently enjoy. Why is Engelhardt peddling an Israeli pipe dream?

Yet another piece of claptrap masquerading as analysis from Tom Engelhardt that purposefully ignores a singularly important causative factor in the U.S. intelligence community's record of failure. How unsurprising.

Engelhardt mentions in passing the documents leaked by Edward Snowden and published by The Guardian but, if he read the documents, Engelhardt certainly didn't find it necessary to include any information about one of the most important revelations within them.

An article published by The Guardian on Sept. 11, 2013, declares:

"The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals. ...

"While NSA documents tout the mutually beneficial relationship of Sigint sharing, another report, marked top secret and dated September 2007, states that the relationship, while central to US strategy, has become overwhelmingly one-sided in favor of Israel.

"'Balancing the Sigint exchange equally between US and Israeli needs has been a constant challenge,' states the report, titled History of the US – Israel Sigint Relationship, Post-1992. 'In the last decade, it arguably tilted heavily in favor of Israeli security concerns. 9/11 came, and went, with NSA's only true Third Party [counter-terrorism] relationship being driven almost totally by the needs of the partner.'"

Could any serious observer interested in a thoughtful, useful, reasonably accurate assessment and analysis of the U.S. intelligence community's weaknesses and failures afford to dismiss this information, as Engelhardt has? Yet, somehow, Engelhardt's article does not mention Israel. Not even once, not in any regard. Imagine that.

Moreover, Engelhardt also mentions Hollywood noting that Hollywood made a movie about "the tracking down and killing" of Osama bin Laden, but again Engelhardt fails his readers, conveniently neglecting to inform or remind them that Hollywood, which plays such an important role in shaping American attitudes and informing popular culture, is a veritable playground for Israeli spies such as Arnon Milchan.

One might well wonder who Engelhardt is flaking for. Or not, given that it seems rather obvious.

The neocons and their dupes in DC don't really want a nuclear war, but they lack the creativity, foresight, and wisdom that are characteristic of enlightened, sagacious statesmanship. They're spiritually blind.

That Palestine begins to resemble a modern day Warsaw Ghetto is a public relations problem for Israel. The West Bank is analogous to the Large Ghetto, Gaza to the Small Ghetto. No footbridge.

http://www.tubechop.com/watch/1615336

"We have public relations people in the United States, and they handle these matters for us."

"I played violent video games for YEARS and NEVER had the inclination to go murder someone or think it was fun. I watched extremely violent horror movies when I was a kid too. Again, no problem."

Surprise: This is NOT about YOU.

The problem is not the millions of gamers who don't commit mass murder. The problem is the small but growing number of gamers who do commit mass murder. Law enforcement and military organizations use similar video games as training aids precisely because they are effective in reducing the natural inhibition to kill, training in rapid, repetitive target acquisition and effective fire. Law enforcement and military organizations use such products ONLY because they ARE effective training aids. Obviously, targeting large young, naive, impressionable audiences with such programming can only be socially destabilizing. Violent media product increases aggression and desensitizes viewers to violence, and regular viewing is especially harmful to children. Your own comments seem to be very good evidence of that.

Why would it surprise anyone that people with mental and emotional disease are more susceptible to the harmful effects of regular exposure to violent media product than are people who don't have mental and emotional disease?
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/124...

What "all-powerful government" are you referring to, Bill? You must be talking about the Israeli government, because the U.S. government certainly isn't all powerful. Were it, the Congress would long ago have investigated the deadly 1967 attack/act of war against the USS Liberty that killed 34 Americans and wounded 171, and, more recently, federal agents would have arrested the Hollywood spy who brags with impunity about his espionage on US soil. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/t...

Yep. I noticed. I'm not sure how many of those 15 are actually willfully ignorant. Many people have need of an ideology that appeals to them for one reason or another. Most people need and enjoy the sense of belonging that comes of being a member of a group. Often these needs are fulfilled by a political group with a particular ideology. A lot of people are caught up in one "ism" or another, "isms" that provide a convenient intellectual framework for understanding an increasingly complex and confusing world. Thinking critically about issues and organizations looks a lot like work to the intellectually lazy, and the ill-educated and ethically challenged are easy prey for shrewd politicians practiced in the arts of manipulation. We live in the information age, which might more accurately be described as the propaganda age (political, commercial, and religious propaganda are ubiquitous today), and few are trained to be skeptical. Not everyone has the advantage of a good education. Few have the advantage of having studied the history of journalism, mass communication, and media bias. Even so, sometimes an event or a confluence of events will enable a sincere but ill-informed truth-seeker to experience a moment of perspective-changing or even life-changing clarity.

That's the best you can do? LOL!

Well, I guess we all bring what we can to the conversation.