[liberty] invest in it before it's too late

Vietnam as it should have been.

With the anti-foreign push in most countries today, of which I became an unwitting victim, the desire to shut the shutters, shore up one’s personal resources and look after N1 is quite pressing on the psyche.

There is little doubt that people neither want to contemplate what’s coming, let alone read about it in blogs. Feel good stories are the ticket, or focussing on titillation or outrage at some new atrocity the media, esp. Sky News, keeps feeding us.

Then there is the macro-stage, the global stage:

The press coverage of the war in Iraq rarely exposes the twisted pathology of this war. We see [it] from the perspective of the troops or from the equally skewed perspective of the foreign reporters, holed up in hotels, hemmed in by drivers and translators and official security and military escorts.

Whatever your view on it, the Iraq War is a dirty war and America has fallen for it again twice in the space of one generation. It’s dirty because the public and power are not at one, because generals are coming out and speaking, because vets are not coming home to heroes’ welcomes, because the government’s provision of physical resources and services to the troops does not match its rhetoric.

In the World Wars, people were not exactly at one but at least they were looking in roughly the same direction against a tangible enemy. Not so in these two disasters. This is tough for me to say because I am ex-military and I feel onside far more with military mates than with "lefty moaners". Yet Vietnam still sears the brain and will not go away. No one in his right mind says that was anything to do with protecting democracy or preventing the domino effect.

And now we’re shaping up for a third round – Iran. There is, currently:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's taunts that Israel "will soon disappear off the geographical scene", President George Bush's repeated lambasting of the Iranian Islamic regime as a great danger to world peace, Senator Hillary Clinton's vow to obliterate Iran if it attacked Israel, and Senator Barack Obama's pledge to "do everything in his power" to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear power.

Having been in a position to discuss Iran at government level in the past couple of years, the message coming through is that Iran is a lot more than just a madman at the helm and could easily draw the U.S. and allies into an endless loop of debilitating tit-for-tat.

America must realize the story’s a lot more complex than Great Satan simply bombing the crap out of the place. Have they learned nothing from Vietnam? The Age article touches on this:

[Iran] can halt its supply of oil, which in the present world climate would cause a real energy crisis, with the price of oil going up beyond $200 a barrel, block the Strait of Hormuz, through which some 87% of the Gulf oil is exported, target oil platforms in the Gulf, and make life more miserable for the US in Iraq and Afghanistan than is the case at present by encouraging its Shiite allies and unleashing its own suicide bombers against the US forces there.

And then there is the scenario which any reader of the apocalyptic scriptures foretells – war between blocs, not nations, deception, Israel caught in the middle of it and the inevitable slide to the feudal bestialization of human beings to an extent not conceived of in the west for centuries.

There is a madness abroad just now and on the homefront – the economic jitters. Personally, I see the last time we really saw hope of escape, at least in part from this constant cycle of being squeezed from above was in Andrew Jackson’s time.

People are forever looking for a political saviour and I suspect one is just round the corner now but it would be as well to check the colour of his coat before extolling his virtues and placing faith in him. He might be working for the other side.

The cynical, serpentine manouevering to get people to relinquish freedoms and the right to elect representatives has to be vigorously opposed. The right to trade and to move about the world is also under threat of sovereign monopolization. The equally cynical invocation of terrorism,illegal immigration and global warming as a tool rather than as a legitimate issue must be seen for what it is and also opposed, at the same time as we oppose that very terrorism, illegal immigration and global warming itself.

The debate has to become less puerile and black and white. Because you oppose something does not make you a traitor - it could equally be making you a patriot.