Last night, I rode my bike around Glendale and listened to this song about a million times:
In between killing myself over how to study for the math portion of the GRE, trying to keep up with the ridiculousness of weekly GOP debates, and not losing my head at work, I've noticed that news is just getting more and more depressing. For your reading displeasure:
It's so frustrating when people meddle in our invasions. The Pakistan-based Haqqani network has been accused by Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, of carrying out the September 19 attack on the U.S. Embassy and NATO bases in Kabul. To make matters worse, U.S. officials accuse Pakistan's military and ISI of at best being too soft on the Haqqani network and at worse collaborating with it. Following imperial superpower standard operating procedure, unilateral military action has been put "on the table" (gotta love that table!). Unilateral military action is already a reality in Pakistan (ask the family members of innocent victims of drone strikes), but many are beginning to worry (or hope, depending on how much of a bastard you are) that troops on the ground may be the next step. Pakistani media sources are understandably freaking out, but those opinions, as always, don't seem to be of much import here. Can we now admit it was a bad idea to arm those guys with nukes and help them avoid signing the NPT, or will that come when all we are is radioactive dust in the wind?
Moving slightly west, although not so far west that our morals are compromised by illicit satellite programs depicting love triangles and wrestling competitions, some super bad news regarding Iran made only slight ripples here: A prominent Chinese scholar opined to Haaretz last week that he believes Chinese officials think that Iran is in fact pursuing nuclear weapons (the Haaretz article notes that China buys oil from Iran but refuses to help it build nuclear reactors or even sell it equipment for its nuclear program), that this is a bad thing, that the Chinese will for the near and probably distant future be in need of Iranian oil, and therefore would not mind so much if Israel struck Iran's nuclear reactors. Wait, what?
Chinese foreign policy is usually pragmatic to the extreme, but this really doesn't make sense to me. Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but if people didn't harass and threaten Iran with bombings, what excuse would they have to even build a bomb, let alone use one? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's notorious comments about Israel are either mistranslated by Western media or later contradicted by more powerful or influential Iranian voices and conveniently not reported here, and Iran hasn't invaded another country in over a hundred years. An Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would almost certainly lead to a regional war, so I don't understand how that option is better than a benign Iran that may or may not have built a nuclear weapon. Also, it's becoming more and more difficult for even the U.S. to ignore the hypocrisy of allowing Israel, Pakistan, and India to acquire nuclear weapons outside of the NPT while it insists Iran, a signatory to the NPT, should stop their nuclear program altogether.
Iranian officials talk big - often comically so - and yes, they have been known to Photoshop pictures of rockets, but it is widely accepted that they could make life very difficult for the U.S. and its allies throughout the region, actions to which the U.S. would almost certainly overreact, and we know how that would end, if it ever did. My country has been directly involved in war and violence in some form almost consistently since I was born, and well before that. I wonder if I'll ever live to see the end of it.
In between killing myself over how to study for the math portion of the GRE, trying to keep up with the ridiculousness of weekly GOP debates, and not losing my head at work, I've noticed that news is just getting more and more depressing. For your reading displeasure:
It's so frustrating when people meddle in our invasions. The Pakistan-based Haqqani network has been accused by Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, of carrying out the September 19 attack on the U.S. Embassy and NATO bases in Kabul. To make matters worse, U.S. officials accuse Pakistan's military and ISI of at best being too soft on the Haqqani network and at worse collaborating with it. Following imperial superpower standard operating procedure, unilateral military action has been put "on the table" (gotta love that table!). Unilateral military action is already a reality in Pakistan (ask the family members of innocent victims of drone strikes), but many are beginning to worry (or hope, depending on how much of a bastard you are) that troops on the ground may be the next step. Pakistani media sources are understandably freaking out, but those opinions, as always, don't seem to be of much import here. Can we now admit it was a bad idea to arm those guys with nukes and help them avoid signing the NPT, or will that come when all we are is radioactive dust in the wind?
Moving slightly west, although not so far west that our morals are compromised by illicit satellite programs depicting love triangles and wrestling competitions, some super bad news regarding Iran made only slight ripples here: A prominent Chinese scholar opined to Haaretz last week that he believes Chinese officials think that Iran is in fact pursuing nuclear weapons (the Haaretz article notes that China buys oil from Iran but refuses to help it build nuclear reactors or even sell it equipment for its nuclear program), that this is a bad thing, that the Chinese will for the near and probably distant future be in need of Iranian oil, and therefore would not mind so much if Israel struck Iran's nuclear reactors. Wait, what?
Chinese foreign policy is usually pragmatic to the extreme, but this really doesn't make sense to me. Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but if people didn't harass and threaten Iran with bombings, what excuse would they have to even build a bomb, let alone use one? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's notorious comments about Israel are either mistranslated by Western media or later contradicted by more powerful or influential Iranian voices and conveniently not reported here, and Iran hasn't invaded another country in over a hundred years. An Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would almost certainly lead to a regional war, so I don't understand how that option is better than a benign Iran that may or may not have built a nuclear weapon. Also, it's becoming more and more difficult for even the U.S. to ignore the hypocrisy of allowing Israel, Pakistan, and India to acquire nuclear weapons outside of the NPT while it insists Iran, a signatory to the NPT, should stop their nuclear program altogether.
Iranian officials talk big - often comically so - and yes, they have been known to Photoshop pictures of rockets, but it is widely accepted that they could make life very difficult for the U.S. and its allies throughout the region, actions to which the U.S. would almost certainly overreact, and we know how that would end, if it ever did. My country has been directly involved in war and violence in some form almost consistently since I was born, and well before that. I wonder if I'll ever live to see the end of it.
