Category: Foreign Affairs

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The Drumbeat

Bull, and rumors of bull

February 18th 2012

 It’s more than a little weird to see the Guardian, normally one of the more sensible newspapers, write a lead story that is pretty clearly informed by the growing war fever over Iran.

But in an article today, written by Chris McGreal and Conal Urquhart, it does just that, accepting without criticism the unfounded claims that Iran is developing a nuclear bomb, and utterly failing to mention that Israel has at least 25 nuclear bombs, and the United States, well over 8,000.

In other words, Israel alone could destroy every microbe on the surface of the land in every large city in Iran. The United States could so utterly destroy the country that it would retroactively vanish from all the history books. This would tend to make Iran think before pressing the button.

The article claims, thoroughly without evidence or even rationalization, that if Iran were to get nukes, then every other country in the middle east would want to get them, too. As if Israel getting nukes didn’t make her neighbors nervous. And the Bush administration had a simple message for the “evil doers” – nuke up, or the US might capriciously invade you. People noticed that Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded, but North Korea and Pakistan were not, and didn’t have much trouble concluding that the US wasn’t eager to attack nations that had nukes.

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Four stories

A grim day in the news

July 23rd 2011

Scanning the top four stories of the day, I found that one left me utterly mystified, another was so inevitable that it hardly even seemed to qualify as news, and one that manged to seem inevitable and utterly unexpected all at the same time. The last one sort of provides a framework for the social milieu in which the first three reside.

I keep trying, and failing, to make sense of the shooting in Norway. There have been so many mass shootings here in America, if not on that scale, that it scarcely seems worth asking “why?” The main question to me is “how?” How did one, or possibly two men build a bomb on that scale, and how did they get it next to the Prime Minister’s office building. How was one man able to get a police uniform, and what was he carrying that enabled him to kill 60 teenagers who crowded around him trustingly in just the first few minutes of his rampage? How did he manage that?

American right wing response was predictable, if in the usual demented fashion. As the story broke, of just the bombing, a loud howl arose about how important it was to do something about the Moslems, and that the bombing was doubtlessly Islamic revenge for those cartoons of the prophet Mohammad. Fox harpy Laura Ingraham tried to link it in some way to Park 51, the “ground-zero mosque.”

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Obama and the Middle East

A good speech, with good intentions. But…

May 19th 2011

Barack Obama, focusing on the middle east, gave a speech today that would have reminded older Americans of the sense of what the country stood for in the days before the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam, before the deep national cynicism and before the methodical erosion of American dignity and pride by a far right monied faction determined to steal America for itself.

Had Eisenhower or Kennedy given a similarly-themed speech 50 years or so ago, it would have been a clarion call, and praised as a great speech in American history.

Even now, it is a damned fine speech, and if nothing else, it shows that Obama recognizes the value of the time when people referred to America as “the leader of the free world”, and it wasn’t said with a smirk, or based on America’s economy or military might. It was said because American ideals and commitment to freedom really were a beacon to the rest of the world.

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Osama bin Laden

A good death

May 3rd 2011

He had kind eyes.

They were brown and glowing, and seemed to be brimming with compassion, empathy, and a touch of mirth. They were the eyes you might expect to see in the face of a Buddhist monk, the lady who runs the local Toys For Tots program, or a Hollywood priest.

He was almost certainly the man responsible for 9/11, the worst crime ever committed on US soil, a crime that killed 3,000 people in one hideous day.

I know about the dangerous charm of sociopaths and demagogues, and so the eyes shouldn’t have been so jarring. The most lethal monsters in the history of the world were nice fellows, often jolly, and made people adore as well as respect them. The fires and deaths and screams would come later, after they had achieved unassailable power. Everyone knows about the power of Hitler’s oratory, but it was his ability to charm and create trust that put him in the position where he could become the horror he was. It’s downplayed in the history of the Third Reich, but there were literally millions of women in Nazi Germany in the 30’s who would have gladly abandoned their husbands and lovers and families for a chance to have his baby. Just as England had the far more benign “Beatlemania” thirty years later, Germany had “Hitlermania”. When Stalin died, millions of men who had been shunted into the Gulags on trumped up and Kafkaquese charges wept openly in their cells. They had lost, not just a leader, but a friend.

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