When Obama went on TV and declared war last week,(1) Mercury was entering the degree range of the Cardinal Cross. The messenger god delivered the message.
But Mercury didn’t cause the catastrophe. Planets don’t cause events, nor do they supply us with quick and easy answers. In fact, they pose questions. Right now they are posing some very pressing questions, and they aren’t taking “I don’t know” for an answer.
Uncle Sam’s Cross
The USA, in particular, is squirming under an enhanced cosmic interrogation.
Uranus and Pluto are forming a grand square with Uncle Sam’s natal square: it’s a geometric crucifixion. The country is being asked what responsible leadership looks like. Its citizens are being asked to consider the integrity of their country’s foreign entanglements.(2)
At the same time, a related question is starting to take shape, about how we use our resources. The USA is nearing its Pluto Return, which will push to the fore an uncomfortable issue: the financial relationship between individual Americans and their country’s wars.(3)
It is the taxes of ordinary citizens, of course, that fund the missiles now being sent whistling into the mayhem.
Einstein’s dictum
Most of us have heard Albert Einstein’s sublime dictum, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
Alas, it is seldom applied to US foreign policy. If it were, wow. It could keep us from pumping new insanity into insanity already in progress.
It could keep us from perpetuating a mindless, monstrous, all-but-predictable pattern. It could lift us off the karmic wheel of war, from which there is otherwise no exit.
Wolves of War
To know what to think about the ISIS crisis, Americans need to know how to think about it. For this we need a strong, swift influx of understanding. The wolves of war have been howling for action, but at this level of consciousness they are capable only of reaction. Reaction is action without context, which brings out the worst in the god of war.(4)
This doesn’t mean that nothing should be done. Human beings are creative as well as destructive; history is full of transformational responses to horrible events. When we’re engaged with the world moment, the news of a calamity might descend into our hearts, from which vantage point it stimulates ideas that lead to inspired action. Some such responses are so bold and ground-breaking that they make a bigger mark on history than the atrocities that provoked them, such as Florence Nightengale’s response to the Crimean War.(5)
In our own time, war has galvanized groups like Doctors Without Borders, who serve as the conscience of the medical profession, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which arose in response to the Vietnam war. What these activists have in common is that they are motivated not by self-aggrandizement or ideological side-taking, but by basic humanity.
Are we to believe that the USA, with its vast human and material resources, cannot come up with ways at least as ingenious to ease the suffering created by the Islamic State crisis?
Einstein was saying that if we don’t want to make things worse, our action must be undertaken from a more enlightened perspective than whatever prevailed before. An example, therefore, of a good first move in the current context would be the USA admitting the terrible blunders that led up to this unholy mess.
If, however, Washington is unready to admit its mistakes in the Mideast, to shut down its secret embassies, to stop its backroom manipulating, to cut off funding for Israeli war criminals and to start sponsoring life-affirming acts instead of death-affirming ones, then its first step should be to do nothing.
And so should we, as individuals, just stop. Be still and reflect. And then begin to self-inform.(6) To consider the context of what’s happening.
Context
When we remember that it was Washington that toppled the secular governments in Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011), and has been trying to topple the one in Syria, we see where Einstein’s adage applies. Before we decide that the US military is the solution, we need to ask ourselves if it is part of the problem.
How different the results of opinion polls would be if Americans were given context — a smattering of modern Middle Eastern history, say – about these events, instead of the scripted media story about Uncle Sam as superhero, flying in to save the day.(7)
How much closer we’d be to that new level of consciousness, if viewers of the evening news were given just a few-years’-worth of memory jogging. We’d be reminded that the Shiites and Sunnis had cohabited in Iraq tolerably well, before the US invaded and destroyed the Sunni power structure.
We would learn, if we didn’t know it already, that during the Dubya years, while CNN was gushing over the heartwarming 
finger-purpling elections being introduced to a grateful Iraq,(8) Washington was arming a ruthless Shiite regime that was in the process of ethnically cleansing the Sunni population as the US military stood callously by.(9)
With this little bit of context in mind, what sensible citizen would think it was a good idea for the Pentagon (and its semi-willing coalition partners), unencumbered by an exit strategy, to green-light these new missiles in hopes of shoring up the Shiites once again?
We have here a prime example of Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
ISIS
At the moment, the Al-Maliki government is confronting an orgy of Sunni reprisals, as the Iraqis who were on top during the Saddam years hack their way back to the ascendancy. Heavies from the former Baath Party have joined the Islamicists in a massive counterattack.(10)
But the caliphate warriors have an Achilles heel: they do not come close to speaking for the majority of the world’s Muslims. If Washington had the wit to forbear from reacting, and instead undertook step one – to hold back and observe – the decay process might play itself out, organically. ISIS might go the way of rotting anachronisms everywhere, helped along by Pluto in Capricorn, defeated from within.
If, on the other hand, America escalates this war, many of the world’s peoples will see Uncle Sam as the evil giant in a David-&-Goliath fight. For the jihadists whose goal is to unite all Muslims against the infidels, this would be a dream come true.
It would be a classic case of attacking a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it.
Granted, collective awareness evolves more slowly than individual awareness. But as individuals, we don’t have to wait. We can practice cosmic law on our own.
Nothing stops us from choosing a wise idea over a foolish one, championing truth over lies, and directing our intention towards life instead of death.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. — Margaret Mead
Notes
1 Oh, right: he declared a “sustained anti-terrorism campaign.”
2 The grand cross, this year and next, spotlights the USA’s Saturn (responsibility) in Libra (fairness) in the 10th house (authoritative role).
3 For a country as money-obsessed as the USA, this is the elephant in the middle of the room: the barbaric percentage of taxpayer wealth that gets pumped into war while the tiniest expenditure for the public welfare gets whittled down to the bone. The USA’s Pluto Return, peaking in 2022, features Pluto (death) in the second house (expenditures) opposing Mercury in the 8th (taxes).
4 Mars is in the 7th house (government-to-government relationships) in the US chart, square to Neptune in the 9th (confused idealism). For details, see The USA and Neptune. 
5 Though innumerable, humane responses to mass tragedy are less likely to get mentioned in patriarchal history than war heroes are.
6 These are the first two steps of healing, according to herbalist Susun S. Weed. The rule of Primum non nocere (“First, do no harm”), from the Hippocratic Oath, echoes this idea. In bio-ethics, best practice is to err on the side of non-intervention if there’s an obvious risk of harm combined with a less certain chance of benefit.
7 This is Washington’s favorite apologia for war, and it’s easy to see why it works so well. It flatters the public, whose national chart features Sagittarius rising and Jupiter conjunct the Sun (the righteous crusader).
It is a spin that has been used to sell Americans on innumerable incursions throughout the country’s history. The people of Cuba and the Philippines needed to be freed from the tyranny of Spain, the people of Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam, etc. etc. The premise here is that violent governments deserve to be ousted via military invasion. But it seems not to have occurred to its American proponents that the rule might apply to the USA itself, whose own government, as Martin Luther King said, is “the most violent in the world.”
When all else fails, Washington’s default apologia for its military adventures — closer to the truth, but safely shrouded in vagueness — has always been “to protect American interests.” I didn’t hear this one invoked last week, by Washington (only its populist variant: fear-mongering media pundits warning that ISIS will kill us in our sleep). In its pure form, as a sober White House press release, it seems to get pressed into service more sparingly in these years of the Cardinal Cross, the transit that gave us the Occupy movement. Occupy introduced into popular discourse two very persuasive numbers: 1% and 99%, giving the public a framework for understanding that “American interests” refer not to themselves, but to a handful of plutocratic stakeholders.
8 In sugar-coating their power plays this way, America and its allies are following a long and storied tradition. Thus have empires throughout history rationalized the armed takeover of other kingdoms. Our predecessor in the world-domination department, Great Britain, cloaked its imperialism in soothing noblesse oblige. Victoria’s foreign ministers saw themselves as benevolent father figures of their subject peoples (as opposed to other nations, which, they declared, were motivated by greed).
9 If the US media had reported on the atrocities of Washington’s buddies in Baghdad, Americans would’ve been just as repulsed as we are now by the vicious Islamic State. It is the Maliki regime’s brutality that has allowed the Islamic fighters to get away with styling themselves as the defenders of Sunni communities in north and western Iraq (see the Answer Coalition’s response to Obama’s speech).
10 Also revelatory is Saudi Arabia’s role in financing the group who became ISIS, though the official narrative doesn’t mention it, any more than they mention the Saudis’ role in 9/11.
