Tag Archives: war

Political Rants

Onward christian soldiers.

The president is seeking Congressional authorization for his current campaign in Syria and Iraq. Looks like he’s going to get it, though begrudgingly on the part of knee-jerk hawks like McCain, Graham, and their various appendages. Not open-ended enough. The generals are complaining! we’re told. They’re unhappy with limitations and micromanagement by the President of the United States, the pundits say. Okay … first thing: sorry you’re unhappy with your jobs, generals. Maybe you should consider stepping down. You take your orders from civilian leadership … that’s how it works in the American military. Don’t like it? Resign.

This turned out well.That said, our President is on the brink of another useless military adventure. As this is debated, will anyone in Congress ask, “When has this ever gone well?” Kosovo? Don’t say Kosovo. We made the killing worse, predictably. Afghanistan? Just as ungovernable as ever, only now with more dead people. Iraq? Please! Libya? Now divided between two hostile governments; a failed state shedding refugees by the thousand. Now the conversation is centered not so much on whether we should fight in Iraq / Syria, but rather how heavily we should get involved. I hear a lot of T.V. talkers advocating for a ground war. They should consider whether they would want their kids to fight it. Or if maybe they’d want to fight it themselves. Anything short of that is just talk.

Obama got in some trouble at the “National Prayer Breakfast” for bringing up the unfortunate history of Christianity, as a counterpoint to his condemnation of extremist Islam. Of course, he needn’t have gone back so far. There’s another extremist religion he might have talked about – one far more deadly than ISIS or any other crazed sham-Muslim group. It’s called American First-ism, and it’s killed hundreds of thousands over the past decade. Can ISIS match that? Can they even come close?

There’s only one way to stop groups like ISIS: stop creating them. ISIS would be nothing without the large disenfranchised Sunni community in Iraq – a community at war with its own government, for whom the arrival of Iraqi security forces means a death sentence. They support ISIS as a counterbalance to Baghdad. Until they have a stake in Iraq’s future, there will always be another ISIS.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Big week.

This has been one of those weeks, to be sure. A lot has happened and very quickly, so let me take these one at a time.

Cuba.  President Obama announced a reset of relations with Cuba this past Wednesday, an initiative that includes establishment of an American embassy in Havana and the release of the remaining members of the Cuban Five, as well as the return of Alan Gross. This somewhat surprising announcement was, of course, met with flaming hair by the conservative majority in Congress and by other longtime critics of the Cuban revolution. Marco Rubio, for instance, bemoaned the fact that the maximalist goals of conservatives were not realized on the first day of the new relationship.

Patience, Marco! The cause of neoliberalism is not yet lost. To listen to Obama’s defense of his decision, you would think the prime motivation for improved ties between the two countries is for the joys of capitalism to rain down on the hapless Cubans. God help them. Still, a pretty momentous day, to be sure.

What North Koreans find hard to forgetNorth Korea.  When you produce a movie that makes a joke out of the assassination of the leader of a garrison state, its back against the wall for decades, you should respect a negative reaction. Agents purportedly working for North Korea have threatened violence against theaters running “The Interview”, promising 9/11 type attacks, somewhat incredibly. SONY Pictures pulled the film, generating a mountain of criticism. An AP article suggested that SONY feared hostilities against Japan by a nuclear-armed North Korea.

This is pretty overblown. Rhetoric is one thing; credible threats are something else entirely. Pyongyang’s rants against the United States and its allies are delivered in the absence of any capability to act upon them. On the other hand, when our government states that “all options are on the table” with regard to North Korea, and when we conduct massive joint maneuvers with South Korea (including mock invasions of the North), we do so in the context of overwhelming power that has been exercised against the North Koreans in the past. Best to remember that their section of the peninsula was utterly destroyed by our military in 1950-53; not a single standing structure remaining by the time we were done, and deaths in the millions. That leaves a lasting impression.

Our media-driven culture emphasizes the crazy when it focuses on North Korea. And sure, they seem particularly crazy when you ignore the history. History doesn’t excuse malevolent behavior, but it does render it more comprehensible. At the very least, it enables you to understand why a comedy about assassinating their leader might, well, make them angry.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Missing taco.

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?

We need more of this.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