The astrologers were on it before it began (see Adventures in Foreign Lands). Venus started to trigger the Cardinal Cross late last month; Mercury is launching into its degree range as I write. As the Equinox configurations line up in the sky (details in my new lecture), Mars (war) is squaring Saturn (oppression) in fixed signs (entrenched positions). This daunting aspect, which peaks on September 9^th, offers nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Thus blocked and cornered, we are forced into our only possible healthy response: to stop and try to understand.

The most vivid manifestation so far of the explosive  Jupiter-Uranus-Pluto T-square is Obama’s proposal for a military strike against Syria, which hit the headlines just as Jupiter (escalation) transited the US Sun. Once again the bombing is being sold to the US public, in Jon Stewart’s wry phrase, as an effort “to bring peace and security to the bombees.”

On the face of it, such a policy seems wildly inconsistent; given that the people Obama wants to arm are, essentially, a branch of Al-Qaeda. And because evidence suggests that both sides have used and/or stockpiled the chemical weapons that have become the focus of Washington’s ultimatum (this, from a country that poisoned civilians, land and water with white phosphorous in Iraq, and that left so much Agent Orange in Vietnam that babies there are being born with birth defects to this day. As for Kerry’s ads touting Syrian child casualties, clearly he is counting on the fact that his American listeners have forgotten or never heard about the 600,000 Iraqi children who died of cholera and dysentery after Uncle Sam targeted Iraq’s water purification plants.)

And because… but never mind. Washington’s rationale is only inconsistent if we try to argue the official narrative on its merits. That way madness lies. If, instead, we look at what’s really going on, it’s all numbingly consistent.

It’s about oil, of course, as is everything else in the world of postmillennial geopolitics. Ordinary Americans may be blithely gas-guzzling along as if the wells would never run dry, but the powers-behind-the-throne in the USA know better. They know that global power belongs to them who control the region where the last of the black stuff remains.

So they need to wrestle Iran back under their authority; ideally by installing another puppet there, like the vicious old Shah who was kicked out during the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Jumping into war against Assad, Iran’s ally, promises to be the entrée that a certain element of the American plutocracy has been waiting for. (I discuss the astrology of the post-9/11 world scene in Soul-Sick Nation.)

The fact that Washington has been providing weapons to Syrian “insurgents” for about a year now should surprise no one. Uncle Sam’s game is always to provide covert military support for anybody in the region who might prove useful, sometimes arming both sides of a war at the same time (cf. the Iran-Iraq War, 1980s). Sort of like the way Big Business donates to both sides in a presidential  campaign, so they’re covered no matter who wins.

At the moment Obama is buying time and deniability by passing the buck to Congress. This creates a conscience break, hopefully to be taken advantage of by the American populace: the folks with whom the buck stops, financially and karmically, for the threatened military escalation. It’s our chance to sit back and cop a perspective.

This is an example of the delays and postponements for which the Mars-Saturn square is notorious. We have a moment here to think about what we can do, rather than fret about what we cannot do.

We can gather and march, for example, in a crowd of our fellows. We can speak up, telling people like Senator King from Maine that we don’t see drone strikes as being “a lot more civilized than what we used to do.” We can question the assumption that bloodshed of any kind is the most effective problem-solver. We can connect the dots between the increasing militarism of the 20th-Century superpowers and the fact that they find themselves, here in the 21st century, in a state of chronic economic panic.

When we use this moment to stop and reflect, we come back to ourselves; whence any wholesome decision or opinion must arise.

Transit trackers will find that the sky above us right now is corroborating what our own hearts tell us very clearly. They tell us that the people of the world (Uranus) are restlessly, actively finding their own strength (Aries). They say we are up against old geopolitical perspectives (Capricorn) that are breaking down (Pluto). They indicate that we’re being invited to expand our global awareness (Jupiter) to a state of fuller responsibility (Saturn); invited to pump our energy — with force and courage (Mars) — into healing a world in crisis.

The promise of these transits blossoms for each of us as soon as we look beneath the lazy pseudo-reality that passes for reality in public discourse; i.e. the spin that gets put on life-and-death issues like this war. When we commit to looking deeper, the truth of a given situation is made known.

It is at that point that creative ideas start flooding in, naturally. Impulses occur to us, in present time, about what to do. These impulses will not be generic; they’ll be tailored to who we are, given what our particular charts can do and need to do. It’s a perfectly organic process, as organic as the planets wheeling around their cycles in the sky.