Tag Archives: obama

Political Rants

Ten years after.

It’s been a decade since the start of a war that never should have happened, and we are still waiting for some accountability. More than 4,400 Americans killed – more than the number killed on Sept. 11 2001 by 19 individuals from countries other than Iraq. (Mostly from Saudi, but you get the point.) Estimates are in the hundreds of thousands for Iraqi deaths related to the conflict – Les Roberts’ Iraq Study Group had it well north of 600,000 back in 2006, and that was adjusting for concentrated areas of losses like Fallujah. That puts us in Milosovic territory for sure, and more like Suharto-land. The Serbian leader was brought to justice; not so much Indonesia’s dictator. The difference between those two cases have less to do with the magnitude of the crimes, more to do with the magnitude of their geopolitical allies.

Mistakes were madeThat’s why I have long been a skeptic of the International Criminal Court. I have said this before, shouted it on the podcast, and I will say it again here: until they haul someone from a powerful country to The Hague, the effort will be a meaningless exercise. Iraq is an excellent test case. Given the number of deaths, given the destruction of a society, given the craven nature of the attack and the fact that it was an aggressive war – the most serious category of crime – our leaders should have been indicted at the very least. Nothing. Freaking. Useless.

Not only are the architects of the disastrous Iraq war not being held accountable, they are in fact skating from television program to television program, attempting to rewrite Iraq into a screaming success. They are, in effect, flaunting the law, daring it to come after them because they know it won’t, taunting the cowardly administration that shields them. Even worse, they are working to get us into the next conflict, in Iran, Syria, wherever. Not only aren’t they sorry about the catastrophe they brought upon Iraq and ourselves, they are only too eager to repeat the crime.

To paraphrase the president, are we really powerless in the face of such carnage? I think perhaps, but only by design. American political life demonstrates again and again how powerful the will of the people can be. Look at gay rights. Look at immigration. Our government has worked to insulate us from the experience of war by canceling the draft, borrowing the funds to keep the fighting going, etc. Perhaps we are simply not connected enough to act dramatically.

Perhaps. But nothing ever changes unless we do.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Short memory

North Korea has unilaterally withdrawn from its 1953 ceasefire agreement with South Korea, cutting the emergency hotline between the two halves of this divided peninsula. The move has been roundly condemned as provocative and an indication of increasing cravenness on the part of third-generation great leader Kim Jong Un, whose government recently tested a nuclear device. As reported on NPR and other major news networks, this behavior is portrayed as almost innate, not rooted in anything other than blind aggression and dogmatic fealty to the North’s longstanding cult of personality and garrison state mentality.

All they know of us.
All they know of us.

Now, it is true that the North Korean state is an ossified, garrison state, very oppressive – a dungeon, even. I can’t defend it. But they didn’t arrive at this state of affairs without prompting. There is one thing they want: a non-aggression treaty with the United States. Because the war of 1950-53 was fought with the U.S. more than with South Korea, and that was a war of genocidal proportions, particularly for the North. The U.S. unleashed everything short of nuclear weapons on the North during that period, until no standing structures remained north of the 38th parallel. This after years of oppressive U.S. occupation of the southern half of Korea, which itself followed more than three decades of Japanese occupation.

When North Koreans talk about destruction, they know the meaning of the word. It is not an abstraction for them. After all, they share Poland’s great misfortune of being geographically located between two great powers, frequently at odds. Worse yet, they became ground zero of a growing cold war that was never hotter than it was during that three year period in the Korean peninsula. If they have nuclear weapons, it’s because they don’t want to be attacked. And if they take exception to the annual mock-invasion of the north conducted by Washington and Seoul, it is because they have a deep memory of the devastation of sixty years ago.

In America, we haven’t forgotten the Korean War so much as simply never known it in the first place, except for the dwindling number of veterans who fought there. It’s high time we stopped acting like an aggrieved empire and found a way to settle this conflict … before it explodes again.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Another bag of it.

A couple of quick swipes on the political front this week. No time to ‘splain, man … just too damn busy.

Sequester. Well, it’s here. Big surprise. Note to the President: Never tell yourself they’ll never do something THAT stupid … because they always will. I know, the sequester was a collective enterprise, strongly supported by Boehner and passed into law by his knuckle-dragging caucus. But thinking that there is some precedent this group will not break is living in a fantasy world. Wake up, people!

Another screaming success for Boehner.

Syria. Secretary Kerry is pledging additional non-lethal support to the Syrian opposition. It’s hard to know how best to approach this crisis, but I know this much – whenever we get deeply involved somewhere, particularly in that region of the world, the result is not good. (What’s the opposite of good again? Ah, yes.) No good answers here, but I know that the motives behind whatever policy we advance in Syria are not likely to benefit the Syrian people, nor the people of the region. We are obsessed with the notion of Iranian domination of the Middle East – a sentiment echoed by our principal allies in the neighborhood. Any sympathy for the opposition, I’m sure, is driven more by the desire to deny Teheran and ally and to quash what they see as a conduit to Hezbollah. However, if they think the opposition in power in Damascus would mean harmony with Israel, they should think again. The most determined fighters in their midst are Sunni jihadist-types. Just saying.

Chavez. Venezuela’s president is in a pitched battle with cancer, and I can hear some chortling around the edges. He gets very little sympathy here in El Norte. It bears remembering though that he is the first Venezuelan leader in my lifetime that has ever done anything for the poor in that country. That’s why they love him, and that’s why he deserves our sympathy and moral support. I tend to judge a person by his/her enemies as much as by his/her faults and virtues. Chavez has definitely got the right enemies. Get well soon, big mister.

luv u,

jp