All posts by Joseph

Political Rants

Persian rug.

Trump and Macron had their meeting of the tiny minds this last week, and it doesn’t look good for the Iran nuclear deal (a.k.a. the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – JCPOA). The French president appears to think he can save it by expanding it, but that’s not likely to happen; Iran may be less than a democracy, but its leaders have constituencies just the same as ours do, and I can’t think the Iranian people are going to be willing to trust this process a second time – not when they’ve checked every box, met every requirement, and continued to suffer as Trump calls them every name in the book and hires a National Security Advisor who gave a regime change address to the terrorist MEK last year.

There are also the other parties to the agreement to consider, two of whom (Russia and China) are adamant against changing the deal. As Juan Cole has pointed out, the Russians are calling bullshit on Trump’s vacuous claim that the U.S. gave Iran $150 billion as a kind of signing bonus. I heard some cat calls about this on Facebook when the deal was struck, and it’s frankly laughable. These were Iranian assets in U.S. banks, unilaterally frozen by the U.S. government as punishment for stepping out of line. Whatever you may think of the government of Iran, any capitalist should understand that they have every right to that money. (Good luck finding that kind of capitalist in Washington D.C.)

The unknown countryIt’s not hard to see why Trump is on the same page as practically every political leader in America in treating Iran like a muck room rug. Israel wants us to attack them. Saudi wants us to attack them. The UAE wants us to attack them. And the majority of Americans are under the spell of the propaganda campaign about the incomparable evils of Iran. We’ve been fed this with a fire hose since the immediate aftermath of the Iranian revolution and the “hostage crisis” – basically my entire adult life. It has been reinforced over the intervening decades, through the Iran-Iraq war years (recall the “hostages” in Lebanon), the confrontations in the 90s, their inclusion in the “Axis of Evil”, and so on. Trump is a product of the same smear campaign.

Scuttling this deal will likely make the current confrontation with Russia deteriorate even further. Worse than that, it sets us on a short path to the war John Bolton has wanted practically forever. That war would make the Iraq conflict seem like a folk dance, and could easily trigger a response from other world powers.

In short, let’s keep the JCPOA. If it’s a bad deal, it’s only bad for the Iranians. It gives us way more than we deserve.

Peace in Korea? Just a brief coda – I’m very hopeful about the prospect for peace on the Korean peninsula. When the dust settles a bit, I’ll return to this very important question.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Theme park.

That’s it, Lincoln. I’m tired of your get-rich-quick schemes. They always end up with trouble. Like that “Civil War” idea you had once. How did THAT turn out?

Damn, I’ll tell you … sometimes I feel like a walking suggestion box. Every time I turn a corner in this cavernous abandoned hammer mill, someone starts pitching ideas to me about what we can do to generate income, filthy lucre, serious bank. Capitalists! All they ever think about is their money. What about MY money? When the hell is someone going to build an economic theory around THAT? If I hear one more hare-brained scheme about starting a theme park based on the history of hammer manufacturing in North America, I’m going to move to another kind of abandoned mill entirely.

That said, this place really would lend itself to being a kind of theme park. They could do a kind of Gaslight Village or something equally fourth-rate – the vintage is about right, construction wise. Or it could be a life-scale model of an early 20th Century factory town, with plastic manikins and some kind of conveyor belt ride that drops you into a vat of molten nickel. (And it would only cost a nickel!) They could have a whole separate section in the courtyard called “Strike Land” where you can walk in circles holding signs that say, “Day’s Work For A Day’s Pay” and “Enough is Enough”. Then half-trained actors dressed as Pinkertons file in and beat the crap out of you. Hey … it’s educational!

Well, maybe NOT like gaslight village.Of course, why should we limit ourselves to the most obvious options? Hell, you could do anything in this barn. Just hang a sign over the front door that reads “Lost in Space Land” and you’ve got a theme park fit for the Robinson Family. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) could take tickets at the door, and Anti-Lincoln could pose as Professor John Robinson, so long as people aren’t expecting the stubble-bearded military dude in the current reboot. So what if John looks like Lincoln? He was modeled on Kennedy … isn’t that close enough?

There I go. Will you just look at me? I’m doing the very thing I admonished my colleagues not to do. I guess now THEY’LL have to find another kind of mill.

Political Rants

Long division.

Some good news (or at least not bad news): The U.S.-led airstrikes in Syria obviously haven’t led to a terminal nuclear conflict; not yet, anyway. That said, this was another loathsome destructive exercise by three imperial powers intent on maintaining at least symbolic dominance over their erstwhile colonial possessions. We’ve heard all the flimsy justifications for this action – the need to enforce the prohibition on use of chemical weapons, the need to alleviate the suffering of innocents, etc. None of it holds any water.

While it’s good that a class of weapons is at least nominally banned, it’s hard to see a substantive difference between gassing people and blowing their legs off, or piercing their skulls with fragments of depleted uranium shell casings, or dropping white phosphorus on them, or enforcing a medieval siege that results in more than a million contracting cholera (i.e. biological warfare). And if Trump, May, and Macron are concerned with the suffering of innocents, they can start addressing it by not supporting Saudi war crimes in Yemen or Israeli executions of Palestinian protestors. Then there’s the legal question. I can’t speak for Britain or France, but Trump has no legal authorization to attack the government of Syria. It appears as though their argument on this issue is might makes right; that’s transparently illegitimate.

The result when every power pursues their own interests.Restraining a Trump administration powered by John Bolton and Mike Pompeo is going to be difficult. It isn’t made any easier by internal divisions evident on the left. Clearly we don’t need to agree on everything to agree that American intervention in Syria is a bad idea and shouldn’t be done. There’s a natural tendency to turn conflicts of this type into a kind of zero-sum game between bad players and good players; this is not unique to the left, obviously. There are people on the left who support the rebellion in Syria and those who think it’s populated entirely by terrorists. Likewise, I’ve heard leftists essentially align themselves with the Assad regime and others call for its overthrow.

There are bad players on all sides of this conflict, obviously, and every power is pursuing their own interests. I don’t have to agree with Assad’s rapacious military assaults to agree that we shouldn’t attack his government, largely because American intervention has such a bloody history. (I would say it always fails, but that would entail the assumption that our military policies are intended to do our victims some good … which is never the case.) I’ve never been a fan of Vladimir Putin, but I understand Russia’s decision to intervene in the wake of previous regime-change efforts on the part of the U.S., all of which have resulted in failed states, hundreds of thousands of dead, and worsening political turmoil. I haven’t seen convincing evidence one way or the other with respect to who used chemical weapons two weeks ago, but the question is irrelevant – the solution to this conflict does not involve American military force. Period.

If the left (and center-left) can coalesce around the basic principle of non-intervention, grounded in solid legal, moral, and historical arguments, we will have a better chance at holding off the Bolton-Trump assault on the Middle East.

luv u,

jp