Just before hurricane Sandy came roaring into NJ like a banshee on the loose, we went to see Ben Affleck’s Argo.  As usual, we arrived early to get good seats.  Another early arrival commented that a friend (or was it a relative?) refused to see the movie—she never watched violent movies, he said.  That started me thinking.

To paraphrase Tom Clancy, the problem with fiction is it has to seem real.  He’s talking about military thrillers, of course, but that statement is true about many fiction genres (probably not fantasy or paranormal).  It’s interesting that Argo is a movie based on true events surrounding the daring escape of six Americans from Iran during the hostage crisis.  A CIA agent, Tony Mendes, engineered the escape from the Canadian embassy.

(more…)

Among the world’s five great religions, Islam is the youngest.  It shows.  Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, and Jews have generally matured enough to get beyond fanatical and savage protests in reaction to perceived insults to their religion and they punish those who participate in such protests—not so Muslims.  People in the other religions shrug off the intolerance, turn their backs on it, and go on with their lives—not so Muslims.  If Islamic believers who have matured beyond fanatical responses still can’t control their savage and fanatical brethren, something is wrong.

A Muslim quoted in the NY Times yesterday said something like, “I respect Moses, Jesus, and the other prophets.  Why can’t the U.S. respect the Prophet Mohammed.”  This is an example of the myopic thinking of many Muslims, not just fanatics.  How dare they presume to dictate to me or anyone else how I feel about the prophets or anything else?  This kind of ignorance and arrogance is precisely what stands in the way of any solution for Middle East peace.  It’s like trying to reason with your five-year-old about world-shaking issues after he’s caught raiding the cookie jar.  You can’t have a mature discussion with people who are driven to deadly tantrums by their emotions.

(more…)

Religious belief has been a double-edged sword throughout the centuries.  Humanity seems to be mired in perpetual Crusades where one group of believers wants to beat the crap out of another group, and vice versa.  Warring crusaders are bad enough, but it’s even worse when those crusaders are using religion simply to take what others have by force and use the difference in beliefs as an excuse.  SOP:  Declare your enemies to be heretics in order to justify your butchering conquests.  Over the years, this often translates into ethnic hatreds that transcend any of the original reasons to go to war.

Religion as the justification for butchery often transcends religion v. religion, of course.  There is some indication that last Sunday’s attack on a Sikh temple was prompted by a white supremacist mistaking the Sikh religion for Islam, not that that would have justified his attack.  Fanaticism often is associated with people with low IQs—if a guy has a turban, he must be Muslim, right?—or with people who are easily manipulated by others, fanatics or not, who seek personal power and gain from the manipulation.

(more…)

The recent vote on censure against Syria torpedoed by China and Russia only emphasizes how ineffective the U.N. has become.  The last U.S. president to ask the U.N. to get behind him when going to war was Papa Bush (the Gulf War).  For Iraq, Baby Bush even changed a long standing U.S. tradition and launched a preemptive strike without allies’ or U.N. permission.  For Libya, Obama turned to NATO, not the U.N.

What’s happening in Syria is similar to but not the same as what happened in Libya before NATA intervened.  Gadhafi’s record as a brutal dictator had few equals.  Certainly Syria’s present ruler is not yet in his league, although father and son together come close.  Of course, this will all change if Assad makes good on his promise to use WMDs, mostly stockpiled biological and chemical weapons (his fledgling nuclear efforts were taken out by Israel—with help from the CIA?).  So far his threat is only directed towards “foreign invaders.”

(more…)

2012…a presidential election year…Memorial Day…a time for reflection….  At my age, I’ve lost friends and relatives, some from sickness, others from accidents, and still others in service to our country.  I value everyone that has served our country, from infantryperson to Peace Corps volunteer, infinitely more than the good old boys and girls sitting in the nation’s capital, those politicos who scheme and manipulate and put these volunteers in harm’s way.

(more…)

In this post, I’ll commit the cardinal sin of discussing religion and politics.  Maybe you never were invited to dinner where the host tells you, “Mr. and Mrs. X are also attending.  They are Y religion, so don’t discuss religion.  In fact, don’t discuss politics either.”  If you were, I don’t know about you, but it’s hard for me to sit down at a dinner table and avoid the topics of religion and politics, because most other Americans just can’t resist them.  Where European, Latin American, and many other countries are obsessed with just politics, people in the U.S. are often obsessed with both.  In fact, I venture to say that religion warps our politics in ways that are often as sad as they are humorous.

(more…)

It’s Saturday, December 31, 2011, and Mr. Obama has just given a New Year’s gift to terrorists.  Barack, the Avenger, just became Barack, the Santa Claus, with respect to Mr. Karzai and his entire corrupt government.  And Mrs. Clinton, his head elf, just goes along with it.  The Afghan leader, who knows he sits on a powder keg, is trying to make peace with the Taliban—our foreign policy gurus just helped him along the way.

Come on, Barack!  The friends of my enemies are my enemies—the Taliban showed their true nature many years ago.  They gave safe haven to al Qaeda members and terrorized and killed their own people.  They have killed our soldiers and civilian contractors whose only crime in that God-forsaken land was to work for the betterment of the Afghan people.  They have falsely accused men under their strict Sharia law and beheaded them.  They have stoned women who have been raped after accusing them of adultery.  They have killed girls whose only sin was wanting to study.  In brief, the Taliban are a blight on humanity, a pestilence that Pandora could have never imagined.

(more…)

Indeed, what will become of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan?  The problem with nation building is that it makes two assumptions:  (1) That the representative governments found in Western democracies offer useful models for governing human beings; and (2) people coming out from under the yoke of a strongman dictatorship will want to adopt some form of government based on one of these models.  I contend that these two assumptions are wrong.

(more…)

I don’t like to gloat, especially in these circumstances, but I told you so.  The U.S. government, through the loose lips of Mr. Mullins, has finally spoken the words—Pakistan is playing a duplicitous role in the war against terrorism.  This was no secret, at least not for me.  All the evidence was there.  Every sane person on the planet knew this was happening, but no one in officialdom would or could admit to it.  Why do you think we went after OBL without telling the Pakistanis?  Why do you think they shouted “foul” at not being told?  The claim that the spy agency is helping terrorists is no surprise.  What is a surprise is that the Afghan government is so weak that the spy agency’s bloody fist can strike all the way to Kabul and the U.S embassy.

(more…)

I’m referring to the Doomsday Clock, of course.  Last time I checked it read six minutes to midnight.  The case of the hikers in Iran and that country’s constant saber rattling might change the clock.  The instability in Pakistan and that country’s increasing animosity towards the West also might change the setting.  Al Qaeda threats, especially those related to revenging the death of OBL, are also a factor.  Add in then tensions between Pakistan and India and the posturing of North Korea, just to name a few hot spots in the world, and one can see that life was much better with the old U.S.S.R. and the Cold War, at least in some sense.  The West had thousands of warheads pointed in its direction, but only one enemy.  Now we’re not even sure who our enemies are!

The proliferation of nuclear arms is akin to a schoolyard of kids who each receive an automatic to play with.  Too many countries and citizens of those countries treat nuclear arms lightly now, like schoolchildren with their video-games education.  Even here in the U.S. (and we should know better), crazies that believe in Armageddon and Rapture have even infiltrated the U.S. Air Force, the very organization in charge of our atomic arsenal (see “The Theology of Armageddon” by Robert C. Koehler, 9/15/2011 CommonDreams.org).  It turns out that in a Vandenberg Air Force Base course titled “Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare,” the organizers wanted to give officers in the first week of missile-launch training a religious indoctrination in “Just War Theory,” often called “Jesus Loves Nukes” by its detractors.  Officers of numerous faiths complained and the course was canceled, one small victory for sanity.

(more…)