Independent of your views on the Iraq War, I would like to throw out some points of discussion. Now that everybody is focusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan (will the floods now ensure that al Qaeda and/or the Taliban get nukes?), what about Iraq? Will it just go away? Can we count it as one of the few friends of the U.S. in the Middle East?
The release of the Afghan Papers this weekend—notably in the N.Y. Times today—brings to the fore once again the perpetual conflict between national security and personal morality. We don’t like to talk about this gray area even though most of us probably have opinions about particular cases, but I will try to touch upon some of the issues and hope for the best.
It’s becoming more and more difficult to be supportive of the government of Israel. How do you understand that crazy government? You’d think that Israel is surrounded by belligerent governments that would like to wipe the country off the face of the Earth. You’d think that it’s surrounded by despotic regimes that are envious of a democratic state whose citizens can work together to turn desert into productive land and mom-and-pop industries into a modern industrial powerhouse. And you’d think that it’s surrounded by countries run by incompetent rulers that can’t even manage their oil riches wisely, if they have them, instead using them to widen the distance between the poor and the ruling classes.
In reciprocating his state visit to Russia with burgers at Ray’s Hell Burger in Arlington, Mr. Obama is continuing his chumminess with Russia’s President Dimitri Medvedev. The dapper Russki, who dresses like and serves as a mob lawyer for Mr. Putin’s Russian mafia, seems to be someone Mr. Obama can relate to. Maybe not a friend but just a nice guy that you can have a beer and burger with?
The sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge (more fi than sci), known for A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky (two entertaining but unscientific Hugo award winners), and others have postulated a singularity in technology where machines attain sentience and the next stage of human evolution will see humans become part machine, or vice versa (presumably the human part attains sentience also?). Vinge’s contributions to this theme lie mostly outside his fiction. The idea has enough popular science interest that most of an IEEE Spectrum issue was dedicated to the subject.
In fiction machine sentience appeared some time ago in sci-fi lit. There were Asimov’s robots (no one can deny that Daneel Olivaw is sentient). There was the computer in Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (I believe his name was Mike). Greg Benford’s Galactic Center series maps out Man’s fight with a machine civilization. Humans becoming part machine is a sci-fi theme from Heinlein’s hero with the toolkit arm to the GigaRAM bottling of the hero in Pohl’s Gateway series, i.e. from prosthetics to complete assimilation.
But there is another major sci-fi theme that bears relevance to the world of men. I for one believe that we are seeing another approaching singularity, one where a small group of individuals, even just one, well meaning or otherwise, can bring about a world damaging, catastrophic screw-up. Chernobyl came close. The BP oil spill may come closer. Sci-fi writers have treated this theme for years. They just didn’t call it a singularity in human affairs.
The question for the day: How can all those (fill in the blank) be so fanatical in their thinking? Your cultural upbringing and/or emotional reaction to current events will often determine what you fill in the blank with at any given time. This is human nature. Some will fill in the blank with “Muslims.” Others might fill it in with “Jews” or “Zionists.” The advantage of the internet is no matter how much you want to, you won’t be able to throw stones at me. (I suppose you might try to spam me but there are filters for spam.) So let me first go out on a limb and fill in the blank with “Christians.”
Three recent cases in the news struck me as disturbing since they point to the most insidious danger represented by our anti-terrorism efforts: Our willingness to give up our own freedoms to combat jihadist fruitcakes. This gray issue of how much surveillance and protection is enough dominates much of the moral ambiguity portrayed in my two novels Full Medical and Soldiers of God and, to some extent, The Midas Bomb. People often don’t give it a second thought and that worries me too.
This week we hit the bloody milestone of 1000 deaths of American servicemen in Afghanistan. This statistic becomes even more alarming when we add to it the number of wounded Americans and the wounded and dead among the innocent civilians in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. The maws of the war beast are dripping with the blood of human sacrifice-he knows the Middle East is a good feeding ground. Mr. Obama should hang his head in shame.
These statistics are all the more remarkable considering Mr. Karzai’s animosity towards the U.S. and the corruption in his government. Moreover, the Afghan poppy fields are still supplying much of the heroin that destroys the lives of men, women, and children world-wide. Afghanistan’s own population has a crisis of addiction, especially among the children. Only a small percentage of the money involved in producing and selling the national product is used in bribing officials and assassinating critics, but in absolute terms it is enough to make Afghanistan a cesspool of corruption.
The conversation that Mr. George Stephanopoulus (ABC News) had a week or so ago with Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reminded me of something which is plainly obvious but bears repeating: you cannot have a rational conversation with a fundamentalist. I believe this is a sociological theorem proven by experience.
The health care debate is winding down a wee bit, except for vindictive Republicans looking for any way they can to deny health coverage to Americans and continue their destruction of the middle class (that retrograde moving line in the sand I talked about yesterday). So maybe it’s time for our Robin Hood, Mr. Obama, to turn his band of merry men and women to other pressing problems. If the GOP is right and the next midterm and presidential elections go their way (are they smart enough to keep Ms. Palin off the ticket?), time is wasting, Mr. Obama. There may be only a small window to enact progressive policy before the Republicans continue leading the U.S. back to the Dark Ages.
On the domestic front, a partial list contains jobs, restrictions on the banking industry, and immigration, all of which affect the economy. On the international front, the partial list is removing troops from Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the Israeli problem, nuclear proliferation and Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan, and finally Russia and China, the first two and last two also having an influence on the economy.
You are currently browsing the archives for the Nuclear Proliferation category.
