Leaving Well Enough Alone

REX TILLERSON, who forsook a perfectly good day job to assume a position of questionable efficacy with the trump administration, Secretary of State, announced in a speech at Stanford that the United States fully intends to continue its partial occupation of Syria, despite vehement Syrian disapproval. "Questionable efficacy", because Trump does deals, not diplomacy. "Vehement disapproval" because the Syrian government, actual if of questionable legitimacy, has repeatedly issued statements describing the American military presence as "illegal occupation". They are the experts, one must concede. Discerning readers are invited to consider two titles by Noam Chomsky: "What We Say Goes", and "Who Rules the World?" Tillerson made his broad made his broad shouldered proclamation in a speech delivered at Stanford, which, all factors considered, might not've been the choicest venue for an expression of imperialistic intentions. Universities tend to be congregations of liberals, who tend to abhor American imperialism. Whether the U.S. occupation of Syria is well intentioned, effective, massive, or popular is not relevant to the question of whether it is legal or moral. Every act of conquest in human history, especially in modern, more sensitive modern times, has been accompanied by an avalanche of propaganda on the part of the aggressor attempting to justify the action. Real motives in foreign policy, particularly American foreign policy, tend to be well hidden. Our most recent made in American was of conquest, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iraq again, were intended to fight terrorism, the story went. Actually, they were intended to steal oil, among other resources. The original American sin is the elevation of capitalism and money above morality and decency, a willingness to use violence in any quantity to acquire and secure them, and an inevitable attempt to conflate wealth, the true American religion, with moral imperative, which is not and never has been important. North Viet Nam, our enemy, defeated us in the Viet Nam War, and has now turned Viet Nam and has now turned Viet Nam into a country increasingly favorable to American interests, which is exactly what would have happened had the United States never become involved there in the first place. Fifty eight thousand american lives were lost in a war as futile as any ever fought. Then, we did it all over again, in the middle east. It is almost a certainty that the world would have become more amenable to American interests if the United States would have simply left it alone.