After the Rains

The air above Dunn Park, swimming with dragonflies, under the tall Chinese elms.  And the hill above it, the reservior hill, that rocky andesite outcrop, is greener than I can ever remember seeing it, carpeted with wildflowers, ephemerals, drought evaders.  The gift of the September rains.

America and Its Allies: Shoot First, Think Later

So, ISIS brutally beheads innocent civilians.  In response, President Obama and his European bullies blow the heads off innocent civilians with bombs and missiles.  Both sides claim they are fighting evil.  But in reality, both are doing evil.  The fact that we have learned nothing from the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, that we are now willing to make common cause with Assad and the Iranians, that we are giving arms to factions in Iraq that were our ‘enemies’ in the last round, guaranteeing a hundred more years of instability and hatred, shows what little moral consideration has gone into the decision to plunge us into another war.  Clearly, Obama is guided more by fears of a Democratic Party defeat in November than any reasonable ethical, strategic, or even military considerations.  The fact that we created this situation by our invasion of Iraq (again, with our sycophantic allies, especially the U.K.), and by our long, desultory involvement in the civil war that followed, is never even mentioned by the cheerleading, colluding press. The parallels to Vietnam are so obvious to anyone who knows anything about twentieth-century history.  Why are our leaders so morally bankrupt?  President Obama expressed his sorrow and outrage on national TV after the Sandy Hook massacre, and rightly so.  But what about the hundreds of children killed by drone strikes, by our training and arming of rogue armies around the world to fight our proxy wars; what about the children killed in the ongoing conflicts we started in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that we are now escalating there and in Syria.  Despite all the rhetoric about “smart bombs,” civilian casualties as a percentage of total casualties keep rising in each successive war the U.S. wages [Ahlstrom, C. and K.-A. Nordquist (1991). Casualties of conflict: report for the world campaign for the protection of victims of war. Uppsala, Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University].  Bombing of civilians is simply murder carried out without our having to see it close up, My Lai executed from the air.