War

Airstrikes destroy Syria's largest gas plant, grain silo and civilians.

US makes up a scarier terrorist organization.

"In short: lying works, and so administration officials simply invented a new enemy, one more fearsome – and, simultaneously, more familiar – to Americans than ISIS. They dubbed it "Khorasan," which, as far as anyone knows, is a former province of Iran, now divided into three separate provinces also named Khorasan. We are told their ostensible leader – whom we have just now supposedly killed in air strikes – was once head of "Al Qaeda in Iran," a shadowy group that has never pulled off a single action or engaged in any propagandistic activities, and for all we know never really existed at all. Those evil Iranian mullahs, the "experts" aver, have been sheltering a radical Sunni terrorist group – one that considers them heretics deserving of death – for their own malign purposes. No convincing evidence of this unlikely alliance is ever offered, however, and it seems about as credible as the Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection Bush and his crew broadcast far and wide.
What’s so fearsome about "Khorasan"? Well, they couldn’t care less about establishing a Caliphate, because, you know, that’s so 632, and as for overthrowing Assad, the Khorasanians won’t stoop to conquer. No, nothing less than an attack on America, preferably using an airliner as a weapon of choice, will do. What they lack in originality they more than make up for when it comes to the all-important Imminence Factor. We are told the Khorasan Group – sounds like an investment bank, doesn’t it? – is planning an attack on an unnamed Western target and that they have assembled a cadre of Western fighters who could just hop on a plane and ignite themselves in midair.
And, oh yes, they have special clothing that ignites spontaneously and other tricks of the terrorism trade which no one has ever seen or heard of before.
No one had ever heard of a group named "Khorasan" before: it simply appeared spontaneously, like Minerva from the head of Zeus – or from the head of some war propagandist somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon. We are told the very name of this mysterious group was "classified," at least according to the dubious Rep. Peter King (R-IRA), but as Glenn Greenwald points out here a great number of anonymous government officials were glad to drop this hot stuff into the eager hands of those court stenographers otherwise known as "mainstream journalists," who dutifully "reported" it as the gospel truth."

It works.

"Such descriptions of its history and character as we do have – the hurried and often contradictory explanations of anonymous US officials – all point to "Khorasan" as being a simple re-branding of an old enemy: Al Qaeda.
"Khorasan" is a marketing ploy, and the target is the American people. We’re used to hearing that the Al Qaeda bogeyman is under the bed, which is why we supposedly have to give the government carte blanche to spy on us and, while they’re at it, the whole world. This is the great problem Washington faces: it just isn’t having the same effect anymore. So a new brand name for terror had to be conjured, with new imagery – beheadings instead of falling buildings – to overwhelm our reason and let us forget the history of the past decade or so."

Obama claims to have defeated al Qaeda, so he couldn't have al Qaeda pop up as a threat again.

70 percent of US troops don't want to go back to Iraq. They will anyway.

After finally installing the president he wanted, Obama gets the Afghan war extended.

"A U.S. official says U.S. troops will stay in Afghanistan beyond the end of the year, in a deal to be signed on Tuesday under the country's newly inaugurated president."

Now more Americans can get killed.