Screaming headlines a repeat of previous drama in Iran-Iraq war, with nerve gas attacks as mysterious as 1988

“This is like déjà vu all over again.” - Yogi Berra

Now comes Barack Hussein Obama and introduces this his impassioned plea for war to a beleaguered Congress struggling to break free of war, the costs of war, the rumors of war.

Headlines compete for dominance – 75,000 troopers needed to quell the disturbance, rid the map riddled with red stars representing pockets of resistance, revetments of deadly Sarin and Mustard gas, representing weapons of mass – what?

Disappearance?

Weapons of mass disappearance.

That's what “Time” Magazine wisecracked in 2003 when the American armies that invaded Iraq failed to find the uranium enrichment labs - weapons of mass destruction - foretold in crowded UN conferences, heated Congressional hearings, purloined cables, leaked trial balloons floating over Capitol Hill.

This time, it's different.

The financiers have bled the economies of western nations and their trading partners white with the profits of war gleaned from no-bid, cost-plus contracts, loans against the future credit of nations as yet unborn, great grandchildren of our smallest toddlers sold into debt slavery with the stroke of an executive pen. Still don't believe it? Look at your grocery cart. Look at the cash register tape. Look at your bank balance. 

Superpowers have walked out of UN Security Council sessions. China and Russia see that this way lies folly.

The Yanks' credit is not much good these days. Their creditors don't need any coupons to clip. That great export, war, is rather an undesirable commodity. What a dramatic weekend we have on our hands.

BBC News Item from the mid-80's
involving nerve gas...

Congress critters run ragged while wringing their hands in 50 states, trying to find a way to satisfy the principle industrialists to whom they have rented their services while looking over their shoulders at we the people, the ones to whom they promised deliverance from debt, the debt of war.

The Parliament of the United Kingdom flatly turns down their Prime Minister when he asks for a resolution to wade knee deep into a bloody civil war between insurgents and a dictator as brutal as any other in a petroleum-rich totalitarian state under attack by a theocracy – the Muslim Brotherhood.

Meanwhile, Carrier Strike Group 11, led by the U.S.S. Nimitz, CVA 68, steams westward to the Red Sea to take up an optimum position when the balloon goes up. Ships unlimber missiles, and Air Forces go on the alert, Armies ready to strike.

Don't we feel as if we've seen all this before?

U.S.S. Nimitz

This is nothing new. Saddam Hussein was an ally in 1982, '83, '85, '86 when he turned mustard gas, cyanide on his enemies in Iran. Where did he get the chemical agent? Well, who killed Cock Robin?

More importantly, where did he get the money to pay for it?

Come1988, he used Sarin and other gaseous compounds on a despised ethnic minority in a high mountain pass at Halabja, a town located somewhere on the roof of the world, on a border near the center of a population of the largest ethnic group in the world with no homeland of its own – the Kurds, forever and a day exterminated and dominated by Turks, Mesopotamians, Persians – border dwellers who huddle in mud huts and make it smuggling, freighting, trading, bartering.

Ask the question again. Where did the nerve gas come from, who paid for it, who loaned the money. How was the deal made?

Do you care? Does it matter? Item: Conversation at the G20 Summit Conference will likely involve war in Syria, and not economic matters?

Are they really mutually exclusive? Indeed? Are they?

Who really has the power to levy war?

“We the people,” it says here. Article 1, Section 1. No flowery dedication to a noble ruler endowed with the divine right. We.

The people.

The newspapers and television reports at the time, back in the day, blared reports of a “yellow rain” that left people struggling to breathe, dead in minutes, either drowned in their own fluids or simply unable to make their diaphragms operate.

How much has that cost us?

The public has known for years just how the American “intelligence community” became involved and was kept abreast of matters as they unfolded in that previous confrontation with the horror of ethnic warfare, in a land far away.

And here we sit, staring at the television screens, waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

According to a "Costs of War" study published by Brown University in 2011, the costs of the war on terror between 2003 and 2011 in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are $3.2 and 4 trillion.