These are unnerving times. I feel as though, once again, we stand at the edge of catastrophe and yet we are unable 
to summon the will to stop it. I don’t mean to depersonalize that observation – I include myself in that broad “we”. Sometimes I wonder whether, years from now, I will look back on these days and curse myself for being so limp and impassive in the face of disaster. For the second time in just a few years, we seem to be sleepwalking into war. Our lame duck leaders, eager to demonstrate their relevance, are almost certain to bring about some kind of attack on Iran. Many in the Democrat-led congress are walking in lock-step with them (and sometimes a step or two ahead), particularly those with presidential ambitions. At the same time, Israel has struck a site in Syria, raising the question of what will come next (and from where) and Turkey is poised to invade northern Iraq.
With all of this (and quite a bit more) seemingly going septic at once, our ever-trusty mainstream news media is playing the same role it did in the run up to the Iraq invasion. I took a few moments to watch PBS’s Washington Week this Friday and was treated to the kind of superficial news analysis I’ve come to expect from a program sponsored by Boeing and the mining industry. It closely resembles sports coverage, actually – how the players are positioned and what their next move will be. We hear all about our leaders’ assessments of whether or not a given strategy – e.g. additional sanctions on Iran – will work, but little to nothing about why we’re doing it in the first place. Sure, they’ll regurgitate the administration’s rationales, most of which would fit on a bumper sticker – Iran is killing U.S. soldiers, Iran is building nuclear weapons, Iran is responsible for all known diseases, etc. Clearly, no one besides us has any business either contemplating a nuclear deterrent or maintaining a presence in Iraq… not even when they share a long border with Iraq, have suffered a particularly brutal invasion by Iraq in the past, and now see their neighbor occupied by an openly belligerent superpower.
The Hitler/Germany/1938 analogies continue to fly. Don’t wait for the New York Times to deconstruct 
them – best to do it yourself. It’s easy. Just ask yourself, is Iran occupying another country? No. Are they the most technologically advanced industrial and military power in the region, let alone the world? I think not. Are they issuing ultimatums? No, though Bush and others have tried to characterize some of Ahmadinejad’s comments as such (without accuracy). So… why are the nominal leaders of both political parties apparently pushing for an escalation, perhaps a military attack? Is there anything in this situation that could justify such an aggressive action? Don’t we already have two hands full with pointless war? What, we’re going to carry one in our teeth now? I hate to sound like Bob Dole, but … where’s the outrage? Sure, most of us will not be forced to fight any of these wars, but if we keep starting them willy-nilly like this, we will ultimately get bit on the ass, even way back here at home.
Bush suggests that he wants to avoid a general war in the middle east. If so, he’s going about it exactly wrong. I think we all need to tell our representatives that, and make clear that we’re not going to sit on our hands while they pour gas on the fire they started.
luv u,
jp
in the world’s most volatile region). Safe from socialized medicine or “government run healthcare” (by vetoing even the modest health care initiative passed by a spineless congress). Safe from terrorists (by terrorizing the accused and the extra-judicially detained). Don’t you feel better now? This has been another busy week for the administration, what with the launch of yet another in their long series of reasons why we invaded Iraq and why we must also confront (and perhaps attack) Iran. Yes, we are literally there to prevent World War III – that is what might happen if we back down now. This is the long awaited sequel to:
I’m certain I’ve left a few out, but you get the idea. Flavor of the week. My particular favorite is #7 – the “fight them there rather than here” bit. As if there were a finite number of terrorists in the world who would follow us to wherever we choose to fight them, then once they’ve been defeated, they’re gone for good. Safe!
1.5 million Armenians were put to death. To speak of it in Turkey now is enough to get you in trouble with the law, much as it is problematic for Turkish Kurds to converse in their native tongue or make culturally significant apparel choices. (Irony alert: back in 1915, the Turks employed Kurds to do some of the killing of Armenians.) The Bush administration and many G.O.P. congressmen have raised the alarm that such a declaration at this time will threaten the safety of our troops in Iraq… not that safety appears to be anything like a central concern, since they were the ones who sent them over there in the first place. Still, they suggest (with uncharacteristic accuracy) that the Turks will be pissed off about this resolution and that it may result in interrupted supply lines via Iraq’s all-important northern frontier. Representatives of the Turkish government have pointed out that, because their country is a democracy, they will have to respond to the will of the people if there is a broad public outcry.
My own guess (for what it’s worth) is that if there were a serious dust-up between Turkey and Iraq’s Kurds, Washington would throw the Kurds over the side as great powers have for many decades. In any case, it does strike me as painfully ironic that Congress is calling the Turks out for the Armenian genocide of 1915 when they cannot bring themselves to stop the killing spree that our own country is engaged in right now in Iraq. It’s not as if the numbers of people killed are all that different – if the Johns Hopkins study is as close to the truth as many think it is, the total may be around a million by now. So our cry of anguish for murdered Armenian families rings a little hollow, frankly. For fuck’s sake, we can’t even own up to the millions killed during our savage attack on Indochina back in the 60s and 70s, when perhaps seven times as much explosives were dropped on that sorry region as on every nation combined during World War II. Have we a moral leg to stand on here?