While we are being distracted by all sorts of serious matters ranging from abortion to tax returns and everything in between, we ought to give closer attention to what is going on in Israel and Iran: maybe this time they mean it about obliterating each other, and drawing us into a battle for the Straits of Hormuz. The oil markets are telling us something by taking it seriously.
The issue of war and peace is always the most important issue in our presidential debates, especially for a nation that has been at war for nearly 50 percent of my 68-year lifetime. That issue is often overwhelmed by more urgent-seeming issues of the economy or various social policy concerns, or even purposely evaded by the candidates. But the underlying purpose of debates is to separate the truly important from the merely urgent, and to reveal the true character and temperament of the candidates (so vital to their judgments on questions of military action).
We have weathered numerous financial crises in our country's lifetime, and employed solutions from both the Left and the Right to work our way forward (and then discarded them). War has far more indelible consequences, especially for the people who fight them, and economies that pay for them (or put off the bills). Consider the U.S. deficit, already huge post-Iraq and Afghanistan even before the Great Recession. Ask the estimated 2 million Vietnamese, or the 50,000 dead and 150,000 maimed from the U.S., who were the permanent victims of that conflict. But those outcomes were hardly foreshadowed in LBJ's 1964 campaign versus Senator Goldwater: that campaign did turn decisively on one TV commercial featuring a mushroom cloud, but certainly not on disclosure of our secret plans for post-election raids on North Vietnam from the Gulf of Tonkin.
Both Nixon and Humphrey campaigned and debated on their "peace plans" in 1968, but the Vietnam War continued for seven more years regardless. So we must pay the closest attention to what Obama and Romney convey about their intentions with respect to the current danger of yet another Mideast War involving the U.S. either in Iran, Israel, Syria or places nearby like Pakistan.
The troubled Euro will live or die without permanent consequences to the U.S.; our troubled economy is not nearly on its way to Greek-style bankruptcy, and can tolerate a variety of choices to attack our jobs and health cost problems. The irreversible consequences of choices of war and peace, however, mean that both candidates should be pressed to the wall in the debates about their true intentions in the Mideast.
Perhaps they will even let their imaginations -- and their campaign commitments -- run toward solutions that will not yield yet another decade of mass bloodshed in that region with the US as a central player (if not a willing payer) in terms of the economic and human "deficit" such wars extract, willy-nilly, from their participants.
Follow Terry Connelly on Twitter: www.twitter.com/deantrc
 |
 |
|
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Electoral Votes (270 to win) |
332 | 206 |
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 65,899,660 | 60,932,152 |
| Percent | 51.1% | 47.2% |
| Democrats* | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Current Senate | 53 | 47 |
| Seats gained or lost | +2 | -2 |
| New Total | 55 | 45 |
| Democrats | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Seats won | 201 | 234 |
By inserting itself into to this situation Israel was inserting itself into a struggle for Arab liberation and self-determination. It aligned itself with the allied imperialist powers and not only figuratively sought to impede Arab Independence did so directly through use of force of arms.
In doing so it created the conflicts that it became involved with. The consequences of its actions. You cannot on the one hand act to impede the rights of a indigenous group towards self determination, replace them and displace them without their being consequences to those actions.
The first step towards any peace process is Israel and Zionism taking responsibility for their actions.
But the bankers who happen to be all part of this conspiracy are colluding to make sure we have a war soon. They are the benefactors of that small state in the middle east after all, and they want to see all oppositions annihilated.
We, the people, can stop this. By our votes and by our activism, just like Vietnam.
Is the lobby that controls the foreign affairs agenda of the US congress an ‘Israel lobby’ or an ‘Israeli lobby’? The former is a pressure group controlled by American evangelical Christians whilst the latter is ostensibly controlled by the government of Israel.
We do know from where the funding originates, but who actually controls the money-men and is there a sufficiently legitimate reason to say that this lobby should actually be designated a foreign agent within the US and subject to rigorous supervision in order to prevent it from suborning the constitution and the lives of millions to the interests of a foreign state?
These questions are neither anti-American nor anti-European, anti-Republican nor anti-Democrat, anti-Jewish nor anti-Christian, anti-white nor anti-black, anti-Semitic nor anti-Muslim. They are pro-democracy, pro-civil and human rights and pro-religion.
The warning is against either overt or covert manipulation of the democratic process that effectively gang-rapes the provisions of the American constitution and the Bill of Rights, for which so many gave their lives so that we could enjoy freedom from the manipulation of power that we, unfortunately, see in government again today.
The rogue nation where every democratic attempt has been crushed for the greater delight of occidental countries until the toy blew up in 1979? The rogue nation whose civilian flight 655 was shot down by the USA with 290 passengers on board in 1988? The rogue nation that signed the NPT and agreed to inspections? The rogue country that has his scientists assassinated by we don't know who? The rogue nation that has been the target of a proxy war from 1980 to 1988? The rogue nation that sees all his neighbors invaded by the same virtuous democracies under fallacious pretexts?
May be, may be, that rogue nation doesn't like you for what you are. As you pretend.
But may be that rogue nation hates the West for what it did... And still does.