Dear President Obama:

Little did your school boy chums in Hawaii, watching you race up and

down the basketball court, know how prescient they were when they

nicknamed you "Barry O'Bomber."

Little did your fellow Harvard Law Review editors, who elected you to

lead that venerable journal, ever imagine that you could be a

president who chronically violates the Constitution, federal statutes,

international treaties and the separation of power at depths equal to

or beyond the George W. Bush regime.

Nor would many of the voters who elected you in 2008 have conceived

that your foreign policy would rely so much on brute military force at

the expense of systemically waging peace. Certainly, voters who knew

your background as a child of third world countries, a community

organizer, a scholar of constitutional law and a critic of the

Bush/Cheney years, never would have expected you to favor the giant

warfare state so pleasing to the military industrial complex.

Now, as if having learned nothing from the devastating and costly

aftermaths of the military invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya,

you're beating the combustible drums to attack Syria -- a country that

is no threat to the U.S. and is embroiled in complex civil wars under

a brutal regime.

This time, however, you may have pushed for too many acts of war.

Public opinion and sizable numbers of members of both parties in

Congress are opposed. These lawmakers oppose bombing Syria in spite of

your corralling the cowardly leaders of both parties in the Congress.

Thus far, your chief achievement on the Syrian front has been support

for your position from al-Qaeda affiliates fighting in Syria, the

pro-Israeli government lobby, AIPAC, your chief nemesis in Congress,

House Speaker John Boehner, and Dick Cheney. This is quite a gathering

and a telling commentary on your ecumenical talents. Assuming the

veracity of your declarations regarding the regime's resort to

chemical warfare (first introduced into the Middle East by Winston

Churchill's Royal Air Force's plastering of Iraqi tribesmen in the

nineteen twenties), your motley support group is oblivious to the

uncontrollable consequences that might stem from bombing Syria. One

domestic consequence may be that Speaker Boehner expects to exact

concessions from you on domestic issues before Congress in return for

giving you such high visibility bipartisan cover.

Your argument for shelling Syria is to maintain "international

credibility" in drawing that "red line" regardless, it seems, of the

loss of innocent Syrian civilian life, causalities to our foreign

service and armed forces in that wider region, and retaliation against

the fearful Christian population in Syria (one in seven Syrians are

Christian). But the more fundamental credibilities are to our

Constitution, to the neglected necessities of the American people, and

to the red line of observing international law and the UN Charter

(which prohibit unilateral bombing in this situation).

There is another burgeoning cost -- that of the militarization of the

State Department whose original charter invests it with the

responsibility of diplomacy. Instead, Mr. Obama you have shaped the

State Department into a belligerent "force projector" first under

Generalissima Clinton and now under Generalissimo Kerry. The sidelined

foreign service officers, who have knowledge and conflict avoidance

experience, are left with reinforced fortress-like embassies as befits

our Empire reputation abroad.

Secretary John Kerry descended to gibberish when, under questioning

this week by a House Committee member, he asserted that your proposed

attack was "not war" because there would be "no boots on the ground."

In Kerry's view, bombing a country with missiles and air force

bombers is not an act of war.

It is instructive to note how government autocracy feeds on itself.

Start with unjustified government secrecy garnished by the words

"national security." That leads to secret laws, secret evidence,

secret courts, secret prisons, secret prisoners, secret relationships

with selected members of Congress, denial of standing for any citizen

to file suit, secret drone strikes, secret incursions into other

nations and all this directed by a president who alone decides when to

be secret prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. What a Republic,

what a democracy, what a passive people we have become!

Voices of reason and experience have urged the proper path away from

the metastasizing war that is plaguing Syria. As proposed by former

President, Jimmy Carter, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and other

seasoned diplomats and retired military, vigorous leadership by you is

needed for an international peace conference with all parties at the

table, including the countries supplying weapons to the various

adversaries in Syria.

Mr. Obama, you may benefit from reading the writings of Coleman

McCarthy, a leading advocate of peace studies in our schools and

universities. He gives numerous examples of how waging peace avoided

war and civil strife over the past 100 years.

Crowding out attention to America's serious domestic problems by yet

another military adventure (opposed by many military officials), yet

another attack on another small, non-threatening Muslim country by the

powerful Christian nation (as many Muslims see it) is aggression

camouflaging sheer madness.

Please, before you recklessly flout Congress, absorb the wisdom of the

World Peace Foundation's Alex de Waal and Bridget Conley-Zilkic.

Writing in the New York Times, they strongly condemn the use of nerve

gas in Syria, brand the perpetrators as war criminals to be tried by

an international war crimes tribunal and then declare:

"But it is folly to think that airstrikes can be limited: they are

ill-conceived as punishment, fail to protect civilians and, most

important, hinder peacemaking.... Punishment, protection and peace must

be joined... An American assault on Syria would be an act of desperation

with incalculable consequences. To borrow once more from Sir William

Harcourt [the British parliamentarian who argued against British

intervention in our Civil War (which cost 750,000 American lives)]:

'We are asked to go we know not whither, in order to do we know not

what.'"

If and when the people and Congress turn you down this month, there

will be one silver lining. Only a Right/Left coalition can stop this

warring. Such convergence is strengthening monthly in the House of

Representatives to stop future war crimes and the injurious blowback

against America of the wreckages from Empire.

History teaches that Empires always devour themselves.

Sincerely,