Controlled.

Editor,

I feel like I am being manipulated with the ghastly videos of children killed by chemical weapons in Syria.

Yes, this is an unbelievably horrendous event, but for me it underscores the urgent necessity of constructive dialog between all of the states outside of Syria that have seized on the violence there to further their own agendas: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, other Gulf States, Iran, and the USA.

Also, President Obama goes on and on about the horrible deaths of these children, which indeed are horrible. But there are deaths of children he can stop today in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere by ending the drone strikes that he is ordering and that routinely kill and maim children.

Whether it is one child by mistake, a thousand children by mistake, or a million children on purpose, there is no excuse for the behavior of so-called adults that causes any one of them.

The bulging arsenal of the USA, which eats up $700 billion a year that could otherwise be spent on constructive human activity, becomes in times of crisis the only instrument that American politicians understand, and they delude themselves into believing that military superiority will create the outcomes on which they insist.

This is not how human relations work, and it is not how the world works.

Violence is a tempting, easy path, and it creates collateral damage to government institutions, civil society, and interpersonal relations that can be neither predicted nor controlled.

Re: "Barry’s War Within" (9/8/2013)