In his more than 40 years at the Institute for Policy Studies, Saul Landau produced more than 40 films and TV programs, 14 books, and thousands of newspaper and magazine articles and reviews. Among his numerous accolades, Saul received an Emmy and a George Polk Award for “Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang,” a film he directed with Jack Willis about the cover-up of health hazards related to 1950s atomic bomb testing.

Beyond his extensive body of work, Saul will be remembered for his steely nerve and caustic wit. “He stood up to dictators, right-wing Cuban assassins, pompous politicians, and critics from both the left and the right,” said IPS Director John Cavanagh. “When he believed in something, nobody could make him back down. Those who tried would typically find themselves on the receiving end of a withering but humorous insult.”

No matter how many times we’ve seen it before, the frenzy for launching a military attack on another country is -- to the extent we’re not numb -- profoundly upsetting. Tanked up with talking points in Washington, top officials drive policy while intoxicated with what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism,” and most media coverage becomes similarly unhinged. That’s where we are now.

But new variables have opened up possibilities for disrupting the repetitive plunge to war. Syria is in the crosshairs of U.S. firepower, but cracks in the political machinery of the warfare state are widening here at home. For advocates of militarism and empire by any other name, the specter of democratic constraint looms as an ominous threat.

Into the Capitol Hill arena, the Obama White House sent Secretary of State John Kerry to speak in a best-and-brightest dialect of neocon tongues. The congressional hierarchies of both parties -- Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, John Boehner, Eric Cantor -- are on the same page for an attack on Syria. And meanwhile, the U.S. mass media have been cranking up the usual adrenalin-pumped hype for war.

Some smart people thought, and perhaps some still think, that the 2003-2011 war on Iraq was unique in that it was promoted with the use of blatant lies. When I'd researched dozens of other wars and failed to find one that wasn't based on a foundation of similar lies, I wrote a book about the most common war lie varieties. I called it War Is A Lie.

That book has sold more than any of my others, and I like to think it's contributed some teeny bit to the remarkable and very welcome skepticism that is greeting the U.S. government's current claims about Syria. The fact is that, were the White House telling the truth about the need for an attack on Syria, it would be a first in history. Every other case for war has always been dishonest.

Who’s up for stopping a war?

This is the time, as the next war strains to be born, amid the same old lies as last time, amid the same urgency and pseudo-debate and pretensions of seriousness:

The government of Syria has crossed a “red line.” It has used poison gas, killing hundreds of innocent people and committing a heinous war crime. And suddenly, clear as a bell, we have good vs. evil. Our only course of action, President Obama and his spokespersons tell us, is to “carry out a punitive strike against the Syrian government.”

What do you call a proposal that breaks promises to city workers, destroys their family’s hard earned retirement security, lowers the city’s tax base, harms our fragile economy and actually requires the city of Cincinnati to pay out more in retiree funds?

In this case, the tiny group of wealthy financiers, tea party supporters and out of town petitioners sponsoring this ridiculous proposal are calling it by the misleading name of “Cincinnatians for Pension Reform” (CPR). However, unlike the medical procedure by the same name, this one would kill its patient!

WHO IS BEHIND CPR?

If you said; “It can’t be Cincinnatians, our own home town folks would never push something this bad,” then you are actually right on the money!

What about the 7,000 signatures filed by the so-called “Cincinnatians for Pension Reform?” Actually, that phony group paid nearly $70,000 to the California Company Arno Petition Consultants to bring in and put up out of town petitioners in order for them to collect the signatures needed to qualify for ballot status.