Saturday, July 29, 2006

Shooting at a Seattle Jewish Center and thoughts about a war with Iran.

I am just sick of this. My stomach has just been tied in knots for days, and I am unable to enjoy anything right now.

There was one bright spot to all of this, was the horrified reaction to the shooting of six young women, one pregnant, by some lone, pissed off American Arab. Everyone, including the Arab community here, immediately condemned this insanity.

I don't care if you are pro-Israel, pro-Arab, or think both sides are acting insanely, this kind of violence cannot be allowed to spill into American communities. If that begins to happen, all is lost. I doubt we will see the (mostly) peaceful protests that occurred during the Vietnam war. If we start having Israeli vs. Arab protests, things are going to get ugly here in our nice "safe and secure" country.

The drumbeat for war with Iran seems to be getting louder. Everyone is talking about it now. This reminds me so much of what happened in the run up to the war with Iraq. When I first heard of the subject, I was incredulous. They CAN'T be serious, can they? But, we saw how serious they were. Same thing here. We are still in the incredulity stage, but I think we are beginning to move out of that phase of planning. That seems to be the modus operandi of the neo-cons. Drive the conversation so far to the extremes that what now becomes the supposed “middle” position is far right of what the American people ever would have accepted if the subject had been introduced in a single speech. Many people are now not only accepting the idea of going to war with Iraq, they are now openly advocating it and saying that is the only logical thing we can do at this point.

The only solace I can take in this discussion is that it is so far removed from the reality of the situation on the ground is that the military people in charge cannot accept it. I think Bush and his war-mongering crowd will get quite a lot of push back. Not only have the civilians in control of the Pentagon totally screwed up the two wars we are in now, and the State Dept. is making trash out of the current situation in Lebanon, we don’t have enough men to do anything somewhere else, much less invade a country twice as large and much more advanced than the ones we are currently bogged down in. I just don’t see it as possible. Now, it is possible that the U.S. could possibly just go drop some bombs in, a’la Israel, and hope it all works out. But I don’t see how anyone with any sort of military background could accept that as a viable strategy. I’m not a military person, never professed to be one and hope to never have to be one, but even I can see that just sending over a bunch of B-2’s and B-52’s to drop several hundred tons of bombs on Iran isn’t going to accomplish much. It would be like walking up to a live hornet’s nest and whacking it with a stick repeatedly. This is NOT going to work.

So, I am currently hoping that our military people will act as some sort of check to these civilians whose grip on reality seems to be getting less and less every day.

I’m going to go get some Pepto-Bismol.

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