Light On Dark Water

This Is Not A Current Events Blog

But some stories need to be propagated as widely as possible, such as the case of Sharyl Attkisson, the former CBS reporter whose reporting on the Benghazi story attracted some special attention from the government. 

To say that our government has become Soviet-like, Nazi-like, totalitarian, etc. is clearly to exaggerate. To say that it increasingly views itself as above the law is not, and makes the fear that the first claim will one day be justifiable seem reasonable.

Unrelated, but while I'm at it: this story by a journalist held captive for a couple of years by Syrian jihadists makes it more clear that we simply can't fix the Middle East. "Let them kill each other" and "Leave them alone" are in practice the same sentiment.  Perhaps conquest and decades of occupation might end the violence, but even if that were morally justified few would support the attempt now.

Maclin Horton

12 responses to “This Is Not A Current Events Blog”

  1. Marianne

    I don’t think we can “fix” the situation there, but, to me, the evil on display with those Syrian jihadists shows we can never just walk away and leave the Middle East to itself. If for no other reason than that nothing is too horrifying or unthinkable for monsters like that — just imagine if they were to get the capacity for germ warfare, for instance.

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  2. El Gaucho

    That story by the journalist you attached makes me want to revisit the last martini of the summer post. 😦

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  3. Janet

    There should be a like button on your comment, El Gaucho.
    AMDG

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  4. Robert Gotcher

    I’m reading the novel “Silence,” by Endo. There is a parallel in some sense. The cruelty of men never ceases to astound me. What are we so afraid of?

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  5. jkt

    That one would drive me to drink, too. It haunted s me for years.
    AMDG

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  6. Mac

    I’ve never read Silence. Have kind of avoided it, really. I get enough horrors in my head just from reading the news.
    What do you think we should do, Marianne? I would be enraged if a son of mine had been killed or maimed in Iraq or Afghanistan for what now appears to be nothing. And I always feel that if I would not be willing to fight myself, or have a child or grandchild fight, I can’t support the war. Reihan Salam said in Slate a couple of months ago that Bush made a grave mistake in starting the Iraq war, and Obama made a grave mistake in pulling out. Iraq had stabilized, at least, after all that violence, and then Obama just threw it all away. Why would any young American choose to participate in another of our debacles? You might fight for one president who at least seems to intend to win, and have the next one say “Oh, never mind.”
    My question is serious–what can we do in this situation that makes any sense? Here’s something I said back in 2006:
    “I thought, in the weeks following [9/11], that there were, broadly speaking, two responses open to our government. The first, and the one I would have chosen, would have been withdrawal and fortification: scour the country for Muslims in violation of immigration law and deport them; start keeping an eye on those whose status was legal; begin to do whatever might be necessary to get control of our borders and seaports, political correctness and the desire for cheap labor be damned; get very, very serious about reducing our dependence on foreign oil, which would mean requiring serious sacrifices from the American people; begin the process of extricating ourselves from the Middle East as much as possible, leaving perhaps only a warning that an attack on Israel would be treated as an attack on us, and otherwise leaving the various ugly regimes of the region to pursue their violence against each other and their own people, and too bad about the latter.”
    “The other option was to try to fix the Middle East. To say it that way is to make it appear ridiculous, and maybe it was. Such an effort would have to involve knocking down one or more of those oppressive regimes and hoping that liberty and prosperity would follow, eventually drying up the springs of violent jihadism.”
    Bush tried the second, obviously. Perhaps a string of determined presidents could have kept up the effort long enough for it to bear fruit. But now things are worse than ever.

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  7. Robert Gotcher

    We don’t know that things in the Middle East wouldn’t have gotten this bad if we had chosen your A) option or if we had had a president that stayed the course. It could just be that things are going to get really bad there no matter what we do. Then there will be a providential event that will bring them to their senses(?). I mean, how bad can it get? Pretty bad. Read Silence for more on that.

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  8. Marianne

    I really don’t know what we should do, Mac, but I’m leaning toward thinking we should give up the notion of pursuing any grand scheme of change and instead put out fires where needed and develop alliances with those Muslim states (mostly authoritarian unfortunately) who want to put an end to the jihadists as well. That sounds like a Kissinger sort of amoral approach, doesn’t it? Not very edifying, I know.

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  9. Mac

    That’s more or less the status quo 9/11, isn’t it? And what we did in the Cold War. It worked for a while, I guess, but at a moral cost, and also the cost of giving those living under the authoritarians a reason to hate us. Though the jihadists are going to do that in any case.

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  10. Rob G

    “The cruelty of men never ceases to astound me.”
    Was thinking the same thing last night after watching the movie End of Watch, a police drama about two LA cops who inadvertently get mixed up with a Mexican drug cartel after a fairly routine traffic stop. Very good film — extremely realistic like The Wire, but man, those cartel guys are just like the Syrian jihadists. Reprehensibly cruel, with absolutely no regard for anyone.
    Of course we can put it down to “original sin,” but in some ways that seems like almost a whitewash.

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  11. Mac

    That’s true, Robert, but then we never do know what would have happened. My option A, though, wasn’t intended to keep things from getting bad in the Middle East. It was to keep the homicidal maniacs out of our country, and avoid the waste of lives, and of money we don’t actually have.
    I do think things would be and are going to be bad in the Middle East no matter what.
    From the selfishly America-centered point of view, the biggest problem with withdrawing is that in another 20 or 30 years we could find ourselves in another nuclear standoff, this time with bloodthirsty religious fanatics.

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  12. Mac

    Breaking Bad and No Country for Old Men (both book and movie), especially the former, paint an equally disturbing picture of the Mexican cartels. I agree, “original sin” is a totally inadequate description or explanation for that level of cruelty and brutality. “Diabolical” is more like it. The old sheriff in No Country says something to the effect that what the Mexican drug gangs were doing (he’s talking ca. 1980 or so) was something way beyond anything he had experienced or could make sense of.

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