I would say "good morning" but it really isn't. I woke to the news the Bibi Netanyahu and his hand puppet (a.k.a. Donald Trump, sort of president of the U.S.) have launched air strikes on Iran to obliterate the nuclear capacities they claimed had been obliterated with the last strikes. Perhaps we should have expected a "wag the dog" maneuver since the early midterm election season is looking somewhat dismal for the Republicans. And the Epstein debacle isn't going away. And people don't really believe the administration's blather about a booming economy. We all looking at our lives and questioning for whom that economy booms because it certainly isn't for us.
Bill Astore's post today gives the news almost the right level of sarcasm it deserves. He notes something that I did: the absence of the accurate word "war." Our whole system has become so abstract that an abundance of evils can be at least partially hidden by legalistic language. Remember when the judge in the E. Jean Carroll case said that under "normal usage" what Trump did to her would be called "rape" but because of the wording of the law of NY he could only judge Trump guilty of "sexual assault." It may not be "technically" murder that ICE killed two Minnesota residents and U.S. CITIZENS, but by any normal usage of the word it was. Shakespeare wrote "a rose by any other name is still a rose. I say "war" by any other name is still war, and "Murder" by any other name is still murder.
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Somewhat cloudy this morning in the second day of Trump's and Netanyahu's "war" on Iran. I read something that reinforces the editorial Rachel Maddow wrote on MSNOW asking "cui bono?" The post was Bill McKibben's in which he notes, in the first paragraph, that Iran has the world's 3rd largest reserve oil and the 2nd largest reserve of natural gas. And supposedly the energy moguls are salivating at the thought of going in and "stabilizing" the industry there. They weren't so enthusiastic about Venezuela whose industry is very badly damaged and would be very expensive to refurbish. Not so in Iraq. Follow the money as they always say in criminal investigations.
But something else came to mind. In the early 1950s, The Shah Reza Pahlavi was ousted by a democratic revolution which elected Mohammad Mosaddegh who began nationalizing the energy industry which pissed off the western companies dominating the industry and their home countries. By 1953 the CIA and U.S. money engineered a counter revolution which restored the Shah. The Shah's regime was brutal and his drive to modernize and westernize only intensified the popular resentment which festered until 1979. That brought the Islamic Republic and Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini to power who was succeeded by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in 1989. Our government ended Khamenei's rule and, according to reports, wiped out a good number of possible successors. No one knows who will come up to lead though I don't doubt that intelligence agencies all over the world has extensive dossiers on all the likely (and not so likely) possibilities. Are we trying to go back to the 1950s? If so, the leaders of Israel and the U.S. should remember the words of Elizabeth I: I do not like wars. Their outcomes are very uncertain.
And McKibben has some interesting tidbits on various Republican law makers who follow the Trump party line decrying, delaying, and stymying renewal power initiatives while quietly installing solar panels and batteries on their own homes to lower their energy bills. Several took advantage of the tax credits they allowed to lapse.
I'll bore you with another historical reference: after the 9/11 attack when the government rushed to try to make sure we "never again" suffer such an attack on our soil and bolstered our law enforcement agencies and incorporated much of it into the new agency "Homeland Security." Dick Chaney was Vice-President at the time and justified this reorganization and, later, our military operation to remove Saddam Husain on the grounds that we had to guard against any threat, even one that a one percent chance of happening. In other words, we have to vigilant and take vigorous action against any threat however remote in time or from any place. Interesting, that we don't take that attitude about 500- or 1000-year floods, or increasingly devastating wildfires, or category 5 hurricanes.
Kautilya the Contemplator has a piece on Iran that has been rattling around in my brain in a much more fragmented state. Trump and his cronies think of Iran as though it was a western country with funny clothes and strange language. If you cut off the head of a western government and obliterate most of the line of succession you basically cripple the government. But the accounts I have heard indicate that there is NO definite line of succession in the Iranian government and power is somewhat decentralized. Kautilya adds to that the dominance of not just Islam but Shi'a Islam with its long history of venerating martyrdom and you have a mix which would make Iran particularly able to survive the kind of military strike the U.S. and Israel have conducted. It reminds me of the DUNE miniseries (the second of the three attempts to remake the novel on film) where Baron Harkonnen whines to the Emperor that Mua'addib is simply a religious fanatic like so many blown in from the desert of whom many are simply bent of suicide. The Emperor asks him how many religious fanatics he has looked in the eyes and that for them martyrdom and suicide are often the same thing.
