Tag Archives: Middle East

Check the Kool-Aid

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If Iran had actually wanted to build an atom bomb, it could have done so years ago. They were using that threat as a bargaining chip in getting sanctions lifted against their economy imposed by Western powers. The existence of Israel has been an irritant to Islamic nations since it was forced on the region. The hidden issue, as in most things in the Middle East, is oil. Iran is a founding member of BRICS, a consortion of nations including China, Russia, India, and Brazil, challenging America’s dominance of the world economy, and has called for a Muslim embargo of crude oil into Israel. For those who remember when members of the Bush Administration were sharpening their knives to divide up the oil fields in Iraq, there are untapped oil reserves in Palestine. Meanwhile, the starvation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza rages on. Iran’s real threat to Israel was not nuclear; it is economic. Controlling the production and flow of oil is the reason behind Israel’s attack on Iran. For Donald Trump and the Art of the Deal, “having the cards”, in this instance overwhelming military intelligence and air power, made his choice easy, and we are now “all in” on climate change and global warming denial and the continuation of fossil fuel extraction and burning. Our modern world was built on its power. Mother Earth is now clearly casting doubt on the wisdom of that choice, but no one wants, as in “whistling past the graveyard”, to pay heed to those voices. Power over the flow of oil must be maintained at all costs.

RP

Humanitarian War

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To the Editor
American history is filled with a long and almost continuous succession of wars.  From the beginning we fought wars of independence, of unification and expansion.  We fought a “War to End All Wars” and a “World War” against two powerful nations with ambitions of Empire and then embarked upon a “Cold War” during which we amassed a mind-boggling nuclear arsenal aimed at the Soviet Union, formerly an invaluable ally against Nazi Germany.  During this time, despite the warning of departing President Dwight Eisenhower against the rise of a “Congressional military industrial complex”, the budget for the War Department , expediently renamed the Department of Defense, grew astronomically.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the vanished threat of nuclear war and spread of global Communism, a hope of beating our swords into plowshares briefly arose until the attacks of 911 elevated the threat level of a few thousand Third World radical Islamists somehow equal to that of Hitler. Mussolini, Tojo, and a possible nuclear holocaust.  We have been engaged in “hot” wars in the Middle East ever since and our “defense” budget exceeds that of the rest of the world combined.  We are also the largest exporter of military hardware and, sadly, we have no jobs available should we begin bringing our soldiers home.  And now, despite Martin Luther King’s shining legacy of non-violence in the Civil Rights Movement and Barack Obama’s (perhaps only hopefully pre-emptive) Nobel Prize for Peace, in our “humanitarian war” in Libya we seem to have fully achieved the double-think mindset of George Orwell’s 1984 that, indeed, “War is Peace”.  It is not a comfortable place to be.
RP