Iranian government thugs beat, kill women; Dealing with Iranian regime now will leave blood on our hands (and some other news commentary)

ADD 1:

“…Anyone who shakes hands with Ahmadinejad will have a hard time washing the blood off his hands”.

I lifted that quote from a piece by Jonah Goldberg I saw on the LA Times website.

And anyone who has seen that YouTube video of the killing of the young woman demonstrator “Neda” knows what that refers to (even if that clip is not vetted — Iran has made it difficult to get the news — I refer to this and the role of Iranian women in this whole freedom movement in Iran later in this blog).

And it makes me think about the National Geographic documentary on the recent Persian Gulf history I saw on TV last night. It reminded me how brutal Saddam Hussein was, and there was footage of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with the Devil himself (Saddam). How does Rumsfeld sleep at night? How will Barack Obama sleep at night if he continues to hold out hope for dealing with the murderers who make up the Iranian regime? I think he may be changing his mind on that. I still think he has handled the situation well so far. I believe we truly do need to let the Iranians sort out their own affairs — I just don’t want the U.S. to in any way, by words or deeds or nuance, to be seen as supportive of the current Iranian regime, as we should also not be seen as meddling by outwardly or actively supporting dissenters (we would not want to let them get their hopes up and then leave them hanging like we have done in so many other places in times past).

ADD 2:

I read that Obama today in his news conference condemned the violent actions against (peaceful) dissent by the Iranian regime. He also shot back at Repulican critics of his stance on Iran by saying: “Only I’m president of the United States”. That seems appropriate. George W. Bush was the “decider” in his time in office.  

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Just some random comments on the major news of the day:

Please don’t let it be that the cause of the commuter train wreck in Washington D.C. Monday evening was that the operator of the rear train (or anyone else) was text messaging at the time (and no one has said that as far as I know, but that seems to be happening on public transportation lately). As of this writing no official speculation as to the cause has been put forward. UPDATE: The current death count is nine in the accident, including the female operator of the rear train. News reports reveal that there had been safety concerns expressed about some of the aging trains in the Washington metro system.

– The turmoil continues in Iran despite the strong resistance from authorities and the deaths (don’t know the exact number) so far. Only helping to prove how diabolical the Iranian government is I offer this report: the parents of one of the demonstrators killed by security forces have been asked to pay $3,000 for the cost of security forces, referred to as a “bullet fee” (that comes to me out of the Huffington Post, Nico Pitney blog, and is said to come out of a Wall Street Journal report).

Don’t remember if I have mentioned it, but one of the most striking things about this defiance in Iran against the current Islamic government is the fact that so many of the faces in the crowds of demonstrators are women, and seemingly women of all ages, everything from young college students wearing modern clothing, maybe with a head scarf of some kind, and often dark glasses, to older women wearing the traditional black robe called the chador, often with their faces at least partially hidden. Even if women are second class both by Islamic religion and law of the Islamic Republic, they seem to be taking the forefront (and I repeat from a previous blog, women are also considered second class or under the requirement to be subservient to men under extreme conservative Christian teaching too). Saw the YouTube of Neda, the young woman shot down in the street in Tehran who has become a martyr for the cause of new freedoms in Iran. It is believed that she was shot by a paramilitary sniper or one of the vigilante-like thugs the government holds in reserve for uprisings. Assuming that this video is authentic, and it most probably is, then I can hardly see what is left to like or deal with in the current government there, if there ever was.

– Watched some two or three hours of a background on the Iraq and Iran and Middle East history of the past several decades in a National Geographic documentary. Even though I have lived through it of course all the events play out over a long period of time and it is hard to keep track and connect the dots. It serves to remind me that we are sorely shortchanged by our news media on regular background and even full information on current world events (not that many would pay attention). If only our leaders had more knowledge about history (to include recent history), maybe they could make better decisions. One interesting note in the documentary I watched was about Mamoud Amadinejad who was re-elected in the contested Iranian presidential election and who spouts off against the West and the U.S. in particular and who denies the Holocaust to gain political points with people who like to heap scorn on the Jews – which always serves as a good distraction from one’s own shortcomings or ulterior motives. Amadinejad was a young Iranian Revolutionary Guard back in 1979 and tried to talk his cohorts out of taking hostages at the American Embassy. He wanted to take Russians hostages in an effort to thwart the communist influence in Iran.

– I finally agree with John McCain on something – I think. If that North Korean ship they keep talking about that is sailing on the high seas to Myanmar (Burma) has nuclear materials on board then the U.S. Navy should board and inspect it. Some idiot U.N. rule that says we have to ask permission would be laughable if our own survival was not at stake. The U.N. may be useful for letting off steam, but we cannot surrender our ability to provide our own defense to it.

And if we even let North Korea fire a missile in the direction of Hawaii, then I would have to question our president’s ability to defend our nation (hopefully he has a plan here, other than to wait and see).

P.s.

Once a long time ago an Asian nation attacked us at Hawaii – maybe that little whack job of a dictator in North Korea or anyone else who might have the power there should consider that.

Half measures will not do in keeping terrorists from Pakistani nukes…

As we face the prospect of a grave military threat from terrorists in Pakistan who might grab that unstable nation’s nukes, I ponder my attitude toward war.

(And I call them terrorists because that is their methodology. They use the name of Islam, but their method is terrorism as brutal as any ever used and they have made no bones about wanting to destroy our way of life in the Western world and us along with it.)

I have always looked toward the wars in our time with ambivalence. Basically I am anti-war. That is to say I don’t see war as just another foreign policy tool. At the same time I have thought that once the nation is engaged in a war it should do so with focus on an acceptable outcome. That would be winning versus stalemate.

Unfortunately during my lifetime we have had no wars that I can think of with an acceptable outcome. Korea took place when I was a small child. We did hold the red tide back or beat the red tide back, but at great cost. I think in history it is questioned as to whether we should have gotten involved. North Korea with the backing of Red China (remember? we used to call it that) and the Soviet Union overran South Korea, but we got involved under the auspices of the United Nations and beat them back to a stalemate and all these decades later must still contend with a belligerent communist North Korea who threatens us with ultimate creation of their own nuclear force. This is after the Soviet Union dissolved and although the old Red China is still communist in government, it has a primarily capitalist economy (that I think one day would result in communism dissolving). We wouldn’t let Gen. MacArthur chase the red devils all the way to the North Korean capital. I was still a child, as I said, but that was the start of our more cautious approach to war. Whereas in World War II we decided the way to resolve the issue was total victory, by the early 50s we had no stomach for that – quit while we are ahead (where we began is where we finished).

And then came Vietnam. Again, the red menace. The country was sold (at least there seemed to be support) at first when it was thought we would just throw a little weight around (yes I’m skipping over volumes of history) and be done with it. But the war dragged on. Casualties mounted. And we did not define what winning was, let alone resolve to go for total victory, which would have been to take over what was North Vietnam, the belligerent who eventually overran the south. Nearly 60,000 American dead and thousands gravely wounded, and for what? Today a unified Vietnam as China has a communist government and, though not on the scale of China, it has moved toward a capitalist economic system.

Saddam Hussein’s forces turned out to be a pushover in the first Gulf War, but once again our resolve was less than full fledged (at least by our leaders), and instead of total victory, overrunning the belligerent nation that started it all, Iraq, we held back. And eventually the first president Bush’s son became president and found a convenient excuse to finish what his daddy didn’t. Some say all the trouble the younger Bush had in Iraq is proof we would have been wrong to invade the first time. But that was then and this is now. All evidence is we certainly could have done the job the first time, but we would have needed the forces and the resolve.

There is evidence we might have gotten more cooperation this time around in our initial invasion had a large portion of the Iraqi population thought we had the resolve the get the job done. They correctly guessed we did not and acted accordingly.

We initially invaded Afghanistan supposedly to go after Osama bin Laden and his forces who took credit for the 9/11 attacks. There was widespread public support and world sympathy (help would be nice, but sympathy’s good too and I know we’ve had help, but only token help — again my apologies to the soldiers involved). But little Bush decided he wanted to make a stand in Iraq and we dithered in Afghanistan (with all due respect to the actual troops who did not run the war – I’m talking about the leadership).

Today we face the threat of Taliban and Al Qaeda getting their hands on nuclear weapons due to an unstable Pakistan, our nominal ally.

I continue to be ambivalent toward war. It shouldn’t be  just a tool in the bag of foreign relations. But the survival of all mankind depends upon keeping nukes out of the hands of terrorists.

Does Barack Obama have more resolve than his modern predecessors?

The fate of the world may depend upon the true answer to that question.

P.s.

I actually was going to blog on a slightly different, but closely related subject. It had to do with the fact we don’t seem to get much actual war reporting. I checked out a library book entitled “The Blog of War” (a play on the phrase “the fog of war”), by Matthew Currier Burden, a former U.S. Army major. Nowadays soldiers tell their own stories in realtime (or near), blogging from the field. But unless you read those blogs you are not likely to know how things really are. It is not going to convince me politically whether a war is right or wrong by knowing how a participant feels, but he or she can provide me a sense of the real situation on the ground and the human aspect of the whole thing. That is something that has been missing, I think. And really the whole dynamic of the professional soldier (the all-volunteer military) vs. the drafted citizen soldier adds a whole new dimension to war for the United States, good and bad. When I finish reading the book I will have one more thing blog about, I’m sure. I had previously purchased another book with a kind of insider’s view of the war but at the time it seemed too much of a pro-warrior, my country right or wrong, inside baseball approach. But I’ll have to get back to it sometime, because it too had some actual battle accounts you just don’t get from the standard media. I think those who run the paid media feel that citizens just don’t have the patience or attention span for real stories and the business-oriented management thinks that they don’t sell. This is a long post script. I’ll quit now.