letters2america

Dear America

My reaction when I read David Brooks' column of June 27 was a mixture of affirmation and dismay.  What he wrote about Netanyahu and Trump echoed what I had written just a couple of days ago in response to the bombing of Iran.  Like him, I am loath to give either one of them credit for anything, but at its root, the action taken seemed at least in the context of recent history both prudent and necessary.  However, what I see as the captiousness and myopia that inspired the bombing is a problem looming over every positive aspect of both the decision to engage in it and the prospects for the future.

To start with, Netanyahu's, and for that matter Barrack Obama's apprehension about the Irani nuclear ambition seems plainly justified.  But we must consider the fact that the dreaded nuclear bomb Iran agreed not to pursue almost exactly ten years ago in the accords signed with a group of concerned nations indeed was never pursued despite Trump's efforts to sabotage that agreement.  And in light of that fact, I can't help but feel that the sagacious step at this moment in time would have been to do what Trump was ostensibly doing before last weekend: trying to reconstitute that agreement, and within its constraints trust the Irani's intentions, but to employ a Reaganesque trope; to verify.  But instead, we took the predictable Trumpian step and attempted to preempt the dreaded development of the bomb, which strategy history shows, never works in the end.  Remember the embrace of Kim Jong Un by Trump after the threat of Armageddon if Kim dared to act against us just before Kim repudiated Trump's advances and finished building his bomb and the missiles to deliver them, no doubt chortling in demonic delight the whole time. 

In that vein, Brooks suggested Reagan and Truman as paradigms for leaders in such circumstances as those leading up to the bombing but it cannot be ignored that the prospects for such strategies as they both pursued seem dim.  Fear of Reagan precipitated the taking of American hostages at our Iranian embassy during the year before Reagan assumed office and their release immediately when the perceived warrior president ascended to it.  But here we are forty five years later with the same theocratic zealots responsible for the seizure of the embassy and its staff firmly in control of Iran and still the source of our national consternation.  As for Truman, his bombing of Hiroshima did abruptly end the war with Japan, but his intervention with the UN in Korea left behind a rived nation, half of which is under the control of a conscienceless megalomaniac of ominous proportions.

But salient among the failures of forced capitulation is the most dastardly one of all.  It started with Neville Chamberlain touting "peace in our time" as he got off a plane from a meeting with a hateful lunatic.  What ensued was that lunatic's invasion of sovereign nations, and pogroms against the Jews to corral them for herding to, and extermination in death camps, all in the name of what Hitler and his cohorts denominated "the final solution."  They failed, but the brutal pandemic war that ensued upon the implementation of those strategies was the harbinger of what we are now looking at.  However, the worm has turned.  Despite Netanyahu's and his predecessors claim of right to what started out to be Israel but has now become a demand for suzerainty over "the river to the sea," that claim is no more viable than a claim of the autochthonous peoples of America for possession of the conterminous United states would be.  The Middle East, including what was called the Levant, has been the object of contention and war both in parts and in its entirety for four thousand years.  And while Jewry has been a part of that region all along, so have the Palestinians and for that matter all of the Semitic peoples, of which there are at least several if not many, resulting in internecine wars and incessant pursuit of mutual attrition for millennia.  Thus, the tactics in which the Israelis indulge--note I did not say the Jews as Israel is the nation in question while ethnic Jews are just inhabitants of the nation,  along with others--look much like the ways in which the Nazis prepared the Jews of Europe for extirpation, from the pogroms corralling the Palestinians to the West Bank and Gaza to the persecution and repression of those living in what used to be called Palestine.  The Nazis failed to exterminate the Jews, and the Israelis will fail in their attempt to exterminate or even expel the Palestinians.  Likewise, the Iranians will never destroy Israel or the Jews, nor will the Abraham Accords ever amount to anything as long as there is no Palestinian state: a two state solution.  Except for Israel, the nations who signed those accords have explicitly said so, but the Israeli government refuses to yield, even though it would be in its self-interest to do so.

My point is that extolling Trump and Netanyahu for taking what seems a bold action is really no more than a wishful thought, as were the aspirations of Truman, Reagan and any others who followed the course of forced capitulation.  The devil always rises again, and will continue to do so until humanity realizes that indeed, war is not the answer.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

 This morning, it seemed possible, albeit not particularly plausible given the American intelligence community's appraisal of the situation, that Donald Trump had managed to do something that other presidents had professed interest in but never categorically accomplished: the extinguishing of the putative nuclear threat from Iran.  I was prepared to set aside the fact that a group of responsible national leaders including Barrack Obama had led Iran into a pact that had ostensibly had that effect, but that Donald Trump had scuttled that successful effort by withdrawing from the agreement unilaterally and perfunctorily.  It appeared that the recent U.S. bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities under Trump administration aegis seemed to bring about the same result as the Iran nuclear treaty, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), had purportedly done almost exactly a decade earlier in Vienna.  My intention wasn't to be too effusive about it, given Trump's creation of the situation he had precipitated to begin with, but given my scorn for our miscreant of a president, my intended faint praise was a long way for me to have come.  But then about two hours ago I heard Trump regaling reporters at the NATO summit with a typically self-serving panegyric claiming, among other things, that he had dealt with (presumably effecting their resolutions) four wars now in his second administration.  However, the Ukrainians and Volodymyr Zelensky seem to think that the Russian invasion of their country is ongoing, so that one is off the table.  And Gaza authorities announced yesterday that Israel had surpassed the 56 thousand killed mark in its extermination of Palestinians in Gaza and were still climbing, including at lines for food, so Trump couldn't have been including that one.  Then, while it's true that the bombing of Beirut has ceased as has the Israeli assault on Syria, I suppose Trump could have had something to do with those cessations of hostilities, but I didn't hear about it, and I doubt that you did either, America.  So what's left to praise him for, even tongue-in-cheek?

He had me at "I bombed them into submission," but he couldn't shut up.  He had to promote himself not to infinity, but certainly to obscenity.  He had to go on and embarrass himself, and in the process his country...our country...my country with a surfeit of undeserved self-adulation and flattery.  It's not really a surprise given the way in which he conducts his White House business in front of all of his staff, including his cabinet members, so that the latter can shamelessly lick his boots and the press can submit to his vilification if they ask an honest question.  Whenever he pulls this maneuver, and he does it often, I am always surprised that his audience doesn't start snickering.  It's not just what he is doing.  It's the obvious way in which he is doing it.  He is shamelessly opportunistic in that regard, including the gilding of the White House Oval Office for his own ostentatious and gauche self-aggrandizement.  If he wants to act the clown, he should at least try to do it tastefully.  But I see that I have strayed from my original intention.  It may well be the case that Iran has been chastened by the "bunker-buster" blitz orchestrated by our comic-figure-in-chief.  That is certainly to be hoped for, and time and publication of some reliable information about the consequences of that bombing raid will tell.  If Trump's boasts about it turn out to be realistic, he gets kudos from me...except that...

He also took the step of publicly expressing his dissatisfaction with both Iran and Israel over their mutual lack of good faith, at least initially, with regard to the Trump engineered cease-fire that almost didn't last a whole day, and that was a good start.  But he has openly coddled Israel's prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, and like Joe Biden, Trump has given Bibi virtual carte-blanche when it comes to violating humanity in the name of ostensibly fighting anti-Semitisms.  So let me point out this caveat about Trump's prospects for snatching some sort of legitimate glory out of his aleatory participation in an event based on the probable canard that Iran was actually a threat to commit nuclear mayhem and had the actual capacity and intention of doing so.  The "Semites" of the middle east include not just Israel, but the Arabs as well, so anti-Semitism is a misguided premise.  The fact is that much of what passes for anti-Semitism today is a reaction to the conduct not of international Jewry, but to the conduct of the nation-state of Israel: a political entity, not a religious one.  It is also the case that, as Trump adverted to indirectly, the irrational mutual internecine attrition in which countries like Israel, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan and many other ethnic groups, in general "The Levant" and surrounding real estate, have indulged out of mindless (Trump used a more colorful word) enmity based on who-knows-what over the course of the past four millennia is a problem that only those ethnic groups, including Netanyahu and the Likud, can deal with in the end.  So if Trump goes back to pandering to Netanyahu based on the false impression that Bibi is somehow a victim, well go back to anything positive that I just said about Trump.  I take it back.

Your friend,

Mike