The punditocracy is shouting almost in unison that Russia and Syria have pulled one over us. The US, they say, has been weakened because someone halted the momentum of the American war juggernaut.

You see, the pundits and the pols cannot perceive of greatness outside the state because they are part of the state apparatus; and depend on it for status and income.

Individual Americas who have nothing to gain and only losses to sustain from a war are somehow mistakenly identifying with the state and its emissaries—politicians and pundits—who have everything to gain from the great theatre that is war. “In Syria (and all else), it’s ‘Us’ against ‘Them.'”

Think about it. Who benefits when America goes to war? Not you. Not ordinary Americans. Those who benefit “function within the nimbus of great power” in D.C. and around it—the media-military-congressional-industrial complex.

What happens to the bluster of Bill O’Reilly, his sidekick Dennis the Menace or Charles Krauthammer if the US is no longer dictating the terms of war (lots of it) and peace (too little of it) in the world? Their immense egos suffer. Maybe even their incomes, eventually. But not you, the ordinary American. Krauthammer, ridiculously, equates the failure to go to war against Syria with “Russia supplanting America as regional hegemon.”

But the proof is in the Putin, who stopped a war. Why is stopping a war tantamount to supplanting US power?

Rather, the Russians are replacing bully power with a balance of power. And this is good for Americans (if not for their overlords who art in D.C.)

He who saves you from war is better than he who sends you to war.

UPDATE I: Gerson, another neocon:

“This allows Moscow to supply proxies such as Syria and Iran with weapons while positioning itself as the defender of international law and peace.”

UPDATE II (9/15): Yet another Republican pundit (albeit one of the few talented ones) who depends on The Party for status and income. Here Ann Coulter praises Republican wars.

She promotes and profits from ’em; YOU fight ’em.

Fareed Zakaria plagiarizer is big in America primarily because of his reliably banal, unoriginal brain. This “gift” is a prerequisite for maintaining the establishment’s status quo. Or, as Jeff Tucker calls it, the “statist quo.”

The equally uncontroversial WaPo—they passed on the Edward-Snowden scoop—has seen fit to feature Zakaria’s hardly scholarly “analysis” of Syria. (Try Efraim Karsh, Professor of Mediterranean Studies at the University of London. The late, anti-imperialist scholar Elie Kedourie was especially interesting.)

It’s hard to know where to begin to dissect Zakaria’s tired stuff. Zakaria Second-Hander reproduces the old colonialism canard, according to which the sorry state of the Middles-East (and Africa) are blamed (by leftists of the liberal and libertarian variety) on borders drawn by colonial forces “along ahistorical lines.”

Wait a sec, didn’t Shaka Zulu consolidate his empire and commit genocide against the region’s tribes before British penetration proper into South Africa?

Zakaria also assumes (like an ass) that dominant minorities have arisen in the Middle-Eat due to … colonialism’s inorganic border-drawing (that’s my descriptive, in case Fareed finds something worth …borrowing, sans citation).

You’d be better advised to read Amy Chua’s remarkable work on market-dominating minorities (or, as she calls them in chinglese “market-dominant minorities”).

Much more than Zakaria’s idiocy, Steve Sailer’s brief observation about the Alawites will tell you something about why they came to dominate (intelligence? Emphasis is mine):

“The Alawites are another complex ethnicity with deep roots. They are despised by the Sunni majority as not being true Muslims. (Alawites are said to celebrate Christmas and Easter.) When the French took control from the Ottomans after WWI, most of the Sunnis shunned joining the colonial security forces. But after centuries of Sunni oppression, the Alawites thought that getting paid by European experts to use guns and push Sunnis around was a great idea.”

And here’s tired Zakaria via the WaPo:

He compares Syria’s war to the 15-year civil war in Lebanon and the war that erupted in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein. In both cases, the wars were as much about vicious competition between sectarian groups as they were about the decisions of military and political leaders. In both cases, power ended up shifting from minority to majority sects. In both cases, civilians were massacred, and minorities suffered terribly. The difference, perhaps, is that the United States took heavy losses in Iraq but stayed out of Lebanon.

His case, then, is that Syria’s war is not something that the United Stated can stop or alter. Zakaria has no illusions about the pain and terror of Lebanon’s civil war but says that the United States was right not to involve itself. (He also points out that Reagan’s decision to bow out in 1984 did not exactly destroy American credibility in the region.) He points to the war in Iraq; even though the United States toppled Iraq’s minority dictator and quickly moved power over to a government that represented the broader population, that did not prevent hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, the formation of many civilian militias that did terrible things and the infiltration by al-Qaeda and affiliated groups. In this thinking, intervening in Syria will not stop the war’s violence, which is after all more about competing sects than it is about the decisions of one leader. …

Yawn on.

UPDATE I: An interesting take on Syria from Jack Kerwick, except that it is predicated on a notion I have a hard time accepting: Obama is NOT an ass with ears, but is quite smart. Moreover, the country doesn’t care about BHO’s strategy. For the first time in a long time, the people are against war. They don’t care about political posturing. Wow. Just wow. I’m so happy.

UPDATE II (9/7): Personally I think Jack here outthinks BHO. The Libya case, which all new antiwar-warriors are ignoring, is textbook as far as BHO’s Syria MO goes, is it not? In other words, Obama did exactly what he is doing now in the case of Libya, except that there he ignored Congress.

Neoconservatives can relax. It would appear that America’s notoriously stupid news media reported in haste and before verification that Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s new leader, and a member of his cabinet, were sending out happy Rosh Hashana tweets to Iran’s Jewish community.

“As the sun is about to set here in #Tehran I wish all Jews, especially Iranian Jews, a blessed Rosh Hashanah,” Hassan Rouhani was purported to have tweeted, with the new president’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, following with a succinct “Happy Rosh Hashanah” tweet.

CNN Jessica Yellin erupted almost as she does when Obama looks her way or says her name during a press “briefing.”

International Business Times provided a correction it got from Iran’s official FARS News Agency:

“Mr. Rouhani does not have a tweeter account,” Presidential Advisor Mohammad Reza Sadeq told FNA on Thursday.

The western media claimed late Wednesday that the Iranian president has tweeted a felicitation message to the worldwide Jewish community to congratulate them on the advent of the new Jewish year.

“As the sun is about to set here in Tehran, I wish all Jews, especially Iranian Jews, a blessed Rosh Hashanah,” the western and Israeli media quoted Rouhani as saying in his tweet. The message was posted with a picture of a man in a yarmulke bowing his head in prayer.

In response, Sadeq explained that “proponents and fans of Mr. Rouhani were active in the cyberspace during the recent presidential election in Iran and used many web pages with titles similar or close to Mr. Rouhani (‘s name) to run their activities”.

“Of course, such activities are fully normal during election campaigns, and some of them might continue their operation even after the election,” the advisor continued.

“Yet,” he emphasized, “any official news on him (the president) is released by the presidential office.

Neoconservatives will have to conserve their energies until the next time they will be called upon to deflect any friendly gesture Iranian leaders may attempt.

“A non-interventionist does not pretend that he is all knowing,” explained the great, much-missed Ron Paul to the war mongers on CNN (cheerleader Christian Amanpour is seriously aroused at the prospects of shock ‘n awe). Given the US’s dismal record in detecting WMD in faraway lands about which we know NOTHING, Dr. Paul rightly doubts the evidence as to the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government. Syria is immersed in a civil war, observed Paul, we know nothing about the dynamics there—who’s fighting whom—and Uncle Sam killing more Syrians just because the factions in that country are killing one another will accomplish nothing good.

Van Jones, a former Obama lackey (whom I might just begin to respect on some limited level), seconded Ron Paul’s sentiments. (This just highlights how serious was the failure of Mitt Romney and his surrogates to adopt the libertarian foreign policy so as to galvanize both libertarains and the left to his candidacy.)

Little daylight exists between the Republicans and Democrats in the halls of power. This, in my opinion, will be patently evident in the vote in Congress for Obama’s so-called “strategic” strafing of Syria, as if daisy cutters can be lobbed judiciously.

UPDATE I: Debate, Or Self-Aggrandizing Disquisitions? The “debate” conducted by members of the “Senate Committee Foreign Relations,” better described as the delivery of self-aggrandizing disquisitions, confirms the unanimity of opinion among the people’s so-called representatives—even as most Americans oppose the strike.

If you have any sense, you’ll see that going into Syria, an adventure whose costs our people will shoulder, demonstrates again that is us against them, where them constitutes “The Comitatus—”the sprawling apparatus that encompasses the ministries of government, the lawyers, the diplomats, the adjutants, the messengers, the interpreters, the intellectuals”

Lest you forget, the D.C. hood is also home to your favorite, oh-so gritty media personalities, who gather inside or near the Bubble to reap “the benefits of being at the center of the Imperium.” This means rocking the ship of state just enough to retain street cred with “the folks.”

UPDATE II: ONWARD TO SYRIA. As was predicted in this post, “they” would win; “we” would lose. BBC NEWS is first to report that “US senators’ draft backs limited action.”

The measure to be voted on next week sets a time limit of 60 days on any operation. The draft document also bans the use of any ground forces in Syria.

Secretary of State John Kerry said the US had to act after the Assad regime’s “undeniable” chemical weapons attack.

The Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, endorsed Mr Obama’s call for military action.

According to a copy of the draft resolution obtained by AFP news agency, the senators wish to restrict the operation to a “limited and tailored use of the United States Armed Forces against Syria”.

The resolution states that “the president may extend” a 60-day operation “for a single period of 30 days” if he obtains further specific Congressional approval.

“The authority granted… does not authorise the use of the United States Armed Forces on the ground in Syria for the purpose of combat operations,” the statement added.

FACEBOOK THREAD. It amazes me how immoral people the world over are (US politicians included) about demanding American blood and treasure. As I wrote in The Titan is Tired, “We Americans have our own tyrants to tackle. We no longer want to defend to the death borders not our own—be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, [Syria], wherever. And we don’t need our friends looking to us to do so.” And I added, “This column has been consistently polite about—but disinterested in—the putative push for freedom across the Middle East. Dare I say that such a stance, and not slobbering sentimentality, is the proper, libertarian position? I promised, accordingly, that when liberty deprived peoples the world over supported patriots stateside, I’d return the favor. The same goes for Israel.”