Bewitched
By the election of Barak Obama.
Bothered
By the economic policies of his administration.
Bewildered
By the decision to escalate the escalate the Afghan war while doing nothing to prevent Iran's acquisition of atomic weapons.
Bewitched:
It was little less than a year ago that I posted a video on Inauguration day from Aquasport in Eilat, Israel... the place I learned to scuba dive some 28 years ago.
Eilat was where my brother and I had opened a diving/deep sea fishing business only to be bankrupted 6 months later due to the impact of the first Lebanon war on tourism.
In the video you can see just how overwhelmed I was by the euphoric sense of hope that this man represented a real chance for America to regain its sense of pride in its system; and maybe even help unify the world with a new sense of hope for peace even in this horrifically troubled region.
I had been one of those that had worked hard to convince Barack to run for president in the first place.
http://www.youtube.com/...
Bothered
The euphoria was short lived... Though I kept holding on to a belief that Barack had something up his sleeve that he would pull out at the right time.
I couldn't believe that this man of the people would try to turn the economy around by bailing out unproductive parasitic companies that had caused a great part of our economic disorder in the first place, while allowing productive industries like GM to go bankrupt.
"Too big to fail" sounded like something Bush would have come up with, if he had had the ability to speak English. It's out and out "trickle down" Reaganomics.
But at least I KNEW he was serious about finally doing something to save the catastrophic health care system that the country had fallen into over the last 3 decades.
I refused to believe at first that he had made backroom deals with the Pharmaceutical industry, and then later with the Insurance industry. These are the same industries that through their greed and malfeasance were the primary cause of the problems in our system in the first place.
I then watched in stunned disbelief as Barack stood on the sidelines while the House and the Senate squabbled endlessly. Providing no leadership to the country or to his party, Obama actually left it up to the weakest sister of them all in the Democratic leadership, Harry Reed of all people to be the one to take a stand in favor of the "Public Option."
Today, under the headline, ", Breakthrough: Health Care Talks Advance In Senate," the Huffington Post is reporting that, "The discussion has focused on abandoning or greatly narrowing the public health insurance option. "
Apparently the mandate that Obama was given with control of both the House and the Senate is going to result in a "solution" that essentially puts window dressing on our current health care system while ensuring the continued control of it by the same people who destroyed it in the first place.
Sigh.... !
Bewildered
Thirty thousand more troops to Afghanistan? To prop up a corrupt, ineffective government, elected through fraud, and representing only one ethnic group of a country completely divided by multiple tribes who have never actually viewed themselves as constituting a unified people?
That's the real difference between Afghanistan and Vietnam. Vietnam had a deep historic national identity that could have been unified if the US policy had been focused on that rather than on the misplaced ideology of the Cold War known as the "domino theory."
There's no such unity in Afghanistan. I can see no way that the force of American arms can make any long term difference there.
Obama's policy is throwing our soldiers lives away in a hopeless attempt to turn Afghanistan into a "real" country; something it will never be until it adopts a pluralistic approach giving power and real autonomy to the various ethnic regions of which it is composed.
The argument that withdrawing would allow Al Queda to reconstitute itself there better than it has already done in Pakistan, Yemen and throughout the Islamic world from the Philippines to Gaza is unconvincing to the point of being laughable.
More laughable still is the notion that Al Queda, in any form it might take in the future represents a greater threat to the US than Iran.
One of the arguments given by Barack in his speech was that we needed to stay in Afghanistan to help prop up Pakistan to prevent their nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of Islamic extremists.
Meanwhile, Iran... A nation of 78 million people with a radical Islamic ideology that differs from Al Queda only in that it seeks world domination of Shia rather than Sunni Islam will have atomic weapons within the next few months.
While one can hardly blame the Revolutionary Guards for wanting to acquire the one thing that they believe will deter the US from ultimately engineering their downfall, the impact of their acquiring nuclear weapons will have a destructive and destabilizing influence on the world that will make even 9/11 look like an episode of Captain Kangaroo.
Iran is already planning to close the straights of Hormuz should their nuclear institutions be attacked by either the US or Israel. (See: The Naval Arena in the Struggle against Iran | Global Terrorism)
The effects of a radical regime like Iran acquiring Nuclear weapons represents a case of first instance in world history that is hard to predict, other than to know that it will cause instability and horrific consequences to the world economy as well as push the clock at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to one minute to 12.
(See: Lee Smith: How Iranian nukes would reshape the Middle East | News for Dallas, Texas)
(See also: The threat from Iran)
Am I...
While Barack focuses his energies on Afghanistan, Israel continues to prepare to "go it alone" against Iran. The non-stop nightly air force exercises continue unabated.
Preperation is already being made to handle the missile attacks on Tel Aviv that Israel expects to come in retaliation not only from Iran, but from Hizballa to the north and Hamas to the south, both of which now have hundreds, if not thousands of Iranian supplied missile aimed at and capable of hitting my home town. (See: Home Front Command readying for Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan missiles)
After the vitriolic onslaught that I endured when I published my last diary here detailing my fears of an oncoming Israel/Iran war whose viciousness actually made headlines in some journals concerning Kos' anti-Israel bias, I expect to be once again attacked as a "right wing" misguided "warmonger."
So be it.
Barack Obama has disappointed me as a progressive. Kos has disappointed me as a Jew. These disappointments pale in comparison to my trepidation regarding the conflagration that I can see just over the horizon.
May god have mercy on the human race if we can find no way to prevent it from happening.