May 2011

I know sometimes I can be a bit of a blowhard. As liberal as I am at heart, I still bleed red, white and blue. And so I just gotta say, thank God they finally got Osama. But I also want to say: Pakistan has been shitting on us and taking our money for 10 years and it’s gotta stop. There is no way we ought to continue to put up with that.

In today’s New York Times, the Pakistan government, probably as a cover for the extreme embarrassment or, worse, complicity in having the world’s most wanted criminal living in luxury a few miles from their capital and #1 military training center, said that our incursion into their country was a crime, that they would retaliate, and blah blah blah.

Here are the facts: Whether or not a crowd of thugs chanting USA! USA! after somebody gets killed makes you quesy (it makes me quesy), there is simply no doubt that Osama bin Laden was a really messed up, bad guy, who has the blood of thousands, and probably tens of thousands, of human lives on his hands. Not only did he admit (brag) about it, there is, as they say, a preponderance of evidence that he was really and truly behind some very heinous acts of terrorism. Read more at this link about the life and crimes of Bin Laden.

Arab Spring now turns to Summer. The ripples from waves after wave of revolutionary fervor, for what can only be described as democracy pure and simple, now reach back from that region to our own shores, and they are heading for us. And so we find in ourselves and our dialog and our policy a feeling of foreboding, of fear even, as if somehow we too might be in harm’s way. And, indeed, we do seem somehow to be stuck right in the middle of the whole thing, both temporaly, with uncertain outcomes abounding, and philosophically, with ironies and paradoxes about the USA being both the champion of democracy and the defender of its enemies.

In times such as these it might behoove us to step back and ask: what is really going on?

I hate to say it, and as a critic of the Iraq War I know it will appear contradictory and likely to alienate my peace loving confederates, but it appears that it is precisely the brutal campaign of shock and awe and ultimately regime change that ironically inspired what we are witnessing today.

Whoever we believe, whatever the real reason, it remains incontrovertibly true that in the spring of 2003 the United States of America initiated a shocking and awful war against the government, and people, of Iraq, which in the first four years resulted in the loss of anywhere between 100,000 and a million human lives, depending on which source you choose, and cost, according to a conservative estimate by Paul Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, over three trillion dollars to the USA alone.