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What I’ve Been Up To Lately
- mazel tov to @bluenatic and @grandstreet on the birth of their baby girl 3 weeks ago
- RT @JTownCrier: Tropper? Kolko? Margulies? Balkany? Dwek? Rubashkin? NO. Moetzes Gedolei Torah condemn AVI WEISS as more offensive. 3 weeks ago
- Rorschach from Watchmen is the new Freddy Krueger http://bit.ly/7s61Cj 3 weeks ago
- More updates...
A Memorial Day guest post/appeal by an Iraq vet
Guest post by Sholom Keller
If there’s anything I have figured out during the past several years, it’s that the troops are the only ones who can end the war. We cannot rely on our elected officials, for whom political aspirations take a higher priority than defense of the Constitution. We cannot rely on the media pundits, whose expertise seems to be near-verbatim regurgitation of the talking points fed to them by the administration, and whose perspective on the state of our nation is that it makes for good entertainment. The only way to end this travesty is by building a broad base of resistance from within the ranks of the military.
You can help us build that base, by visiting ivaw.org and making a generous donation today. The more evil-cash-money you give us, the more effectively we can accomplish our mission.
From a halachic perspective, your donation to IVAW can be counted as fulfilling the responsibility of tzedakah; definitely more so that buying an ostentatious chandelier for the synagogue.
Why is it whenever ending a war is discussed, its alway along the lines of backing down and slinking out? Why is it never about getting behind the troops, releasing the military to do its job, kick ass and win?
It’s because the USA in general lacks a stomach for long term conflict, a head for rational thought that leads towards uncomfortable concepts, and a memory as trusty as a DVR.
World War I and World War II were not easy, they were not glamorous or glorious, and there was much blood and lives lost. They were as every other single war to the beginning of human fighting: seriously violent, painful, and nasty. There’s no other side to human wars.
This does not however necessarily mean that all wars can or should be avoided. Wars do not happen as a result of failure of diplomacy or smarter thinking. We always like to look on things like that with an eye towards blaming ourselves, but it might be because despite out avowals to the contrary, we really don’t want to accept and internalize an important fact about ourselves: sometimes we are obsessively bloody-mindedly determined not to take no for an answer and willing to die for little to no reason or possibility of gain.
There are in this world people who would kill you, burn your home, rape your wife and enslave your kids as a form of intramural sport. It’s not a nice fact about humans, but some of us are just ornery unreasonable sorts and tend to force other people into situations where Stevie Wonder could see what’s coming and action has to be taken.
The war in Iraq is not now and never was about oil or WMDs. It was about bringing the fight between the west and the east onto eastern soil and letting a generation of anti-western easterners throw themselves on our spears on their home ground where all the collateral damage they cause will be taking place right where their fellows can see it. NYC is a bit far away to see the price of Bin Laden’s looniness. Downtown Baghdad is a lot closer.
If you know what is going to hit the fan, make sure your enemy knows it will splatter on his land not yours, and he and his will suffer ten to one more than you and yours if he wants to go through with it, then cry havoc and you know the rest.
That’s what this war was about and whether anyone likes it or not, it was coming. It would be there, Iran, the ashes of Israel, a newly belligerent Egypt, wherever, but it was coming. Sometimes you have to make a pre-emptive move that costs now, rather than delaying a much more costly response to that which you put off for so long later.