If you’re one taco short of a combination plate, I believe I may have the item right here … and quite a bit more besides. My weekly rant will be something of a grab bag … a disjointed journey through a handful of topics, liable to light on just about anything. Just so much going on lately it’s hard to settle on any one thing. Here goes.
Ebola. This is a disaster for coastal West Africa, particularly because the health systems of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea are in such a shambles. That’s due in part to the disastrous civil wars in the first two nations, but more generally it’s the product of the ongoing neoliberal project and the fact that, in so many of these nations, what wealth there is remains in the hands of the top 1%, whose loyalties to foreign powers, international investors, and global capital outweigh their concern for their poorer countrymen. We in the world’s developed countries have been slow to respond, as we are with practically every African crisis. Our hair doesn’t catch fire until somebody carries the virus home in a bucket; then it’s action time, right?
Abortion in Texas. There’s one answer to this latest court ruling that will close dozens clinics immediately: vote the jerks out, ladies, or they’ll continue to eat your lunch and stick their beaks into everything you do. Up to you, now. Will the extremists on the right continue to the carry the day? Only if we do nothing.
War and Peace. Once again, our attitude as a nation about going to war appears to be directly proportional to the degree to which we perceive ourselves to be at personal risk. There is a lack of interest on the part of Congress to get involved at any level; they truly embody the caricature of them drawn by Gary Trudeau some years back: They’ll be for it when it’s popular, against it when it goes bad, and it’s a question of principle.
Whatever we may think of the specific set of beheaders that operate under the black banner of ISIS, one thing is for certain: so long as Sunnis in Iraq are more afraid of the Iraqi army than they are of these black flag crazies, all the bombs in the world won’t make it right. Iraq is a complex place; when we broke it to pieces, we should have taken that into consideration.
luv u,
jp
The media, as always, is in the tank for this war. On the morning after bombing began in Syria, the first voice you heard on NPR’s 6:00 a.m. newscast was that of a retired general who had “crafted” America’s bombing campaign during the Gulf War – a man who thought we weren’t bombing Syria hard enough. That’s NPR, no surprise, but don’t expect any better from the liberal media. Rachel Maddow, while a war skeptic, gave a thumbnail recent history of the Iraqi Kurds and the Gulf War that might have been torn out of a Bush campaign media release. Our only role in that saga, according to this telling, was liberating freedom-loving Kuwait and helping the Kurds preserve evidence of Saddam’s pogrom against them.
The response to ISIS is another instance of decision-making driven by decades of bad policy. We are, in essence, seeking to deal with a mess of our own making, to put it charitably, and in so doing making an investment in future crises while bankrupting ourselves in the present. The money and arms flowing to ISIS emanate from Saudi Arabia, other gulf states, and abandoned resources in Iraq, not to mention oil payments from third countries, like Turkey (our NATO ally). Many if not most of the weapons are stamped “Property of the U.S. Military”. Working with the Saudis to arm and train “moderate” opponents of the Assad regime is akin to working with the Pakistanis to arm and train “moderate” opponents of the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s. How did that turn out again?