Tag Archives: war

Political Rants

More of the same.

Israel has been knocking the living hell out of Gaza again this week. This round of bloodshed began with the killing of Zuhair al-Qaissi, head of the Popular Resistance Committees, a militant Palestinian group. Rockets fired into southern Israel in response were supposedly shot down by their new anti-missile system. I will reserve comment on that until I see convincing confirmation that the system worked, having lived through bogus claims about Patriot missile batteries during the Gulf War. I can say, anecdotally, that the one thing I hear repeated by defenders of the Israeli government here in the U.S. is missiles, missiles, missiles. It’s like the G.O.P. candidates talking about gas prices. A million Israelis are under the threat of missile attack, they say.

Little is said about the fact that more than a million and a half Palestinians live constantly under the far more credible threat of attack from the fourth most powerful military in the world. Well over a thousand have been killed in attacks by the IDF over the past three years. Rockets from Gaza have killed about 30 Israelis – too many, clearly, but losses at a whole different order of magnitude from what’s happening on the other side of the Green line. Palestinian deaths have equaled that number just over the past week to ten days. Add this to the fact that, even without being shot or blown up, Palestinians live like dogs in Gaza mostly because it is under a constant state of siege by Israel and a U.S.-led coalition of powerful nations. At the very least, Israelis have some kind of a life between the missiles. Palestinians, not so much.

The fact that Hamas has, in essence, broken with Syria and Iran and are aligning themselves more with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which is in that country’s ruling parliamentary coalition, may seem to offer hope of some progress in this bloody standoff. The Egyptian group, a progenitor of Hamas, is no longer a militant organization; it appears to be having a moderating influence on Hamas. Prelude to a peace agreement? Don’t bet on it. If there is one thing the Israeli government fears more than anything else, it is the threat of a negotiated settlement. They prefer to settle things on the battlefield, where they hold a distinct advantage. Negotiations mean giving something up of value, like the 22% of historic Palestine that lies outside of the Green Line, including the West Bank – namely, the territory that would make up a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu, like Sharon, Shamir, and Begin before him, will never allow diplomacy to get in the way of Israel’s expansion of settlements on the West Bank. Expect more IDF attacks in Gaza as negotiations grow more likely.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Getoutistan.

The first question I asked myself when I heard about the Koran burning incident in Afghanistan was, how could anyone make this mistake? What were the circumstances of the burning? For chrissake, everyone knows what the consequences of such an act are likely to be. When that crackpot preacher in Florida was ostentatiously threatening to burn the Muslim holy book, diplomats, generals, political leaders, clergy … people all across the country and around the world were applying pressure on him not to do this. It is deeply inflammatory – this is widely known.

My second thought was, this is not simply about burning Korans. This incident followed ten years of war and all the evils that are contained within that fact. It occurred during a stretch of weeks in which we saw cell-phone video of American soldiers laughing and joking as they pissed on the corpses of Afghans; our military personnel adopting an SS-type insignia for one of their units; our Defense Department persisting in its robotic Drone war on both sides of the Pakistani border. Now Afghans are turning their guns on our people. Is anyone really surprised?

Here’s the problem: we just cannot see this issue clearly. Even on liberal MSNBC, it becomes a question of those ungrateful Afghans, railing against their funders and protectors from the U.S. It is portrayed as a component of Karzai’s corruption, a favorite meme of the mainstream political culture, leaving aside the inconvenient fact that he was planted in the country by the Bush administration, had been an exile Afghan fixer for fossil fuel industry prior to his tenure as head of a severely ailing country. We need to get past this idea that they owe us something. The Afghans owe us nothing. We screwed them severely during the years of the Soviet war, back in the 1980s. We screwed them afterwards, leaving them to an internecine struggle that tore what was left of the country apart. Then came 9/11, which we laid at their door, though the cave-dwelling Bin Laden was only the head of an al Qaeda snake that coiled from Saudi Arabia to Germany to Florida and beyond.

Bin Laden is dead. He wasn’t even in Afghanistan. He was safe and dry in Pakistan, laughing at our folly. What the hell are we still doing there?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Thoughts, etc.

As always, a bit pressed this week, so I’ll keep my comment brief. Moving right along…

The uncertainty principle. It can be said that the uncertainty principle is a major talking point on the center-right particularly, but certainly present across the political spectrum. Why is the U.S. job market so weak? Uncertainty. Why are global stock markets in turmoil? Uncertainty. Why does gravity hold down large rocks and trees? You know the answer. I hear this all the time – uncertainty is keeping businesses from investing in new capacity, new labor, etc. The operative question is, though, what is certainty? Since when do investors expect certainty? Don’t we all deal with uncertainty every moment of every day, particularly on the margins of society where one’s very existence is subject to it? When has that ever not been the case for either individuals or organizations? Invoking uncertainty is merely an attempt to shout down any thought of raising taxes on rich people, on profitable corporations, and so on.

Primary numbers. Cousin Rick Perry seems to have a lot of trouble with ordinal lists, even with Ron Paul trying to throw him a bone. (Note to Rick: when someone gives you an easy out, take it.) He somehow managed to draw attention away from Herman Cain’s various troubles for a large portion of a news cycle, and not in a good way. Given cousin Perry’s seemingly drunken performance in New Hampshire last week and his puzzling lapse this week, one has to wonder if he really wants that Washington job. Cain, on the other hand, seems to want it badly enough to hire legal counsel to threaten women with litigation if any one of them dares step forward with yet another allegation against the pizza king.  Now that’s the kind of message we want to send women, right? Spoken like a true CEO.

Field goal. Anyone who reads this blog knows I never, ever, ever talk about sports. This Penn State thing, though, is about as disgusting a story as I’ve heard in this vein since the Catholic Church scandal broke. Aside from the damage this has done to the victims, the most disturbing aspect of this is the culture of complicity that made it possible. Groupthink is a dangerous thing, and ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinarily beastly things, as Stanley Milgram demonstrated decades ago. 

Three modest pieces of advice to those fans of Joe Paterno who flipped cars after seeing their coach fired: 1) Don’t conform. 2) Don’t conform. 3) Don’t conform.

Great war. It’s Veteran’s day. Don’t just thank a veteran. Apologize to them for being so clueless as to let them spend the last ten years in two pointless wars we civilians would neither fight nor pay for.

luv u,

jp