Category: News and politics

DEI—a nuanced assessment

DEI — “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs or policies are efforts to promote fairness and full participation of people who have been historically underrepresented or subjected to discrimination. The normal standard of fairness when employing workers is that they are hired (or admitted to college) on the basis of merit—who best satisfied to the requirements for the job. This is what taxpayers who want the best results from their tax dollars, want as well.

Many universities set aside the admission of the best qualified students to reflect the fact that may blacks who might have greater potential than their past performance test score indicated because of racial discrimination should be given preferential treatment. But these “affirmative action” programs where struct down by the Supreme Courts 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and its companion case against the University of North Carolina, which effectively ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions.

To make room for more blacks, Harvard had raised the bar and thus discriminated against Asian applicants with higher scores. It is appropriate that the standards of equal treatment and merit should be observed for government jobs and public universities.

But private firms and colleges should be able to hire or admit whoever they want. Both firms and colleges may well want the social benefits from greater diversity. Not only can it make the workplace more interesting but the broadened understanding of different racial and religious groups generates greater social harmony as well.

I don’t know what DEI programs generally did or aimed for and am quite willing to believe that they wasted human resources. However, that is quite different from the desirability of properly educating our children about different races and cultures and the history of slavery and harms of racial discrimination. Along with civics, such instruction belongs in elementary school curriculums. Just as the enlightened treatment of gays, blacks, Muslims and other groups in movies and TV shows has led the way toward better understanding, exposure and education are important for building a better and more accepting society.

The government should not interfere in the choices of private firms and university about the composition of their work forces and student bodies.

Say what?

During his very busy first few days President Trump did some things I liked and some things I didn’t like.

Among the many executive orders I liked were: a) DEI rollback in federal agencies; b) Plan to reduce US troops in Europe by 20,000; c) Freeze on Federal hiring (hopefully reviewing where more employees are needed and where fewer are needed; and d) Delay in TikTok ban (though I doubt he can legally override Congress with an executive order).

Among those I disliked were: a) Pardoning  over 1,500 convicted of storming the Capital on Jan 6 in an effort to overturn the election results; b) Joining Israel’s genocide of Palestinians by lifting American sanctions on illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank “Trump-Israeli settlers in West Bank”; c) Halting Afghan refugee application processing and canceling flights for refugees approved to resettle in the U.S. This decision impacted thousands of refugees, including over 1,600 Afghans who had already been cleared for resettlement. “Refugee flights canceled”; and d) dropping government security protection for some of Trump’s enemies ( John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Anthony Fauci, etc.)—This in America!!!

But in Trump’s address to the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday he said that the US is back under new management and “open for business”, turbo-charged by the “largest deregulation campaign in history”. In the same speech he warmed our trading partners to “come make your product in America” or face more tariffs. Aside from the direct contradiction between these two statements the shocking ignorance (or Trump babble) of the second statement left me (almost) speechless. “Trump’s Davos speech”

For starters the US work force is fully employed. Though some German cars, for example, are already assembled in the US, to produce Porsche here would require taking workers from whatever they are now producing (perhaps those producing exports to Germany that Germany would no long be able to afford). Or we could increase legal immigration (badly needed already anyway as birth rates fall and our aging population increases retirees relative to workers) and bring German workers here to build their cars. If Trump really meant what he said, it would not benefit the US (America First) or anyone else. We do not enjoy a high standard of living because we are self-sufficient but because we trade globally for the best deals. But Trump doesn’t seem to believe in free markets.

https://wcoats.blog/2018/03/03/econ-101-trade-in-very-simple-terms/  

The politics of Trade
Econ 101: Trade balance

Trump

President Reagan pointed to our beacon on the hill as the foundation of our relationship and leadership with the rest of the world. Soon to be President Trump’s approach is to threaten and bully the rest of the world.

“US President-elect Donald Trump’s trade policy challenges the post-war global trading system. By rejecting the World Trade Organization’s principles of non-discrimination and reciprocity, Trump proposes a power-based approach that would fundamentally alter international economic relations, risking the predictability and fairness that have underpinned global trade for seven decades.”  “How Trump threatens the world trading system”

But he hasn’t stopped there.  Though promising to end our “forever wars” and restraint in our international relations, Trump is coming on as the most aggressive President in memory:

“Many people have been understandably astonished by Donald Trump’s recently proclaimed desires to “take back” the Panama Canal “in full, quickly and without question” and to take over the self-governing Danish territory of Greenland.

“While Trump has written that “For purposes of National Security and Freedom around the world, the United States feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” he would at least appear to be willing to pay Denmark for Greenland, as the U.S. paid Denmark for the Danish West Indies, renamed the U.S. Virgin Islands, in 1917.” “A thought on the Panama Canal and Greenland”

A bully, who forces rules on others that he disregards himself, will not serve America’s nor the worlds interests. We all want America to be safe, prosperous, and free. Thus, we must hope for and where possible promote a successful term for this and any other President. An important role can be, and hopefully will be played by the Republicans in Congress, starting with careful vetting of Trumps cabinet nominations. “Trump-bully-world-America-foreign-policy”

War movies

The Holocaust was such a shocking atrocity—effecting far more Jews than the 6 million murdered in Nazi ovens—that it is almost impossible to communicate it meaningfully to new generations. Many outstanding movies have done their best to do so. The pictures of thousands of rotting bodies do not have the same impact as the personal stories of individuals and holocaust films have done an outstanding job of telling them. The Diary of Ann Frank introduced most of us to the Holocaust’s horrors in 1959. But “Europa Europa,” “Schindler’s List,”  “Life is Beautiful,” “The Pianist,” “Son of Saul,” among others each present poignant and original examinations of the ugliness and heart wrenching harm of antisemitism. Just this last week I was moved again by yet another approach to the story in the recent film “White Bird.”

It is important to confront such ugliness in the hopes of reducing the prospect of repeating them. Hitler convinced his countrymen (to the extent that they even knew what he was doing) that the best way to get rid of the “Jewish problem” was to get rid of the Jews. Sadly, Israel itself is propagating yet another genocide this time in Gaza, and West Bank and possible beyond, by convincing many Israelis that the only way to get rid of the “Palestinian problem” (and to have a “democratic Jewish state”) is to get rid of the Palestinians.

War presents a tougher challenge because many believe they might find glory in war. But the reality of war is ugly and tragic. Every country must defend itself against attack, but the United State has not fought a war on its own territory for over one hundred and sixty years. None the less we have been at war somewhere most of the time. Most movies about war have faithfully reflected its ugliness—not only for those killed by them but for their surviving loved ones and the wounded survivors who live on without limbs or with other impairments. But we continue to wage them most of the time.

Movies like “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (the film site of which I visited in Sri Lanka), “Lawrence of Arabia”, “Dunkirk”, and “1917”, depict the heroism in war that might seem attractive but also its ugliness. “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Paths of Glory,” “The Deer Hunter,” and “Grave of the Fireflies,” explore in greater depth the horror of war. Last night I watched the heart wrenching story of a WWII Irish solder’s return to Dunkirk many years later, which wonderfully depicts the absurdity of most wars.

So why do we fight so many of them and in far away places? Much of my work has been in war zones such as Bosnia, Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, and Kosovo. While I have never been in the tranches, I have certainly heard gun fire. But more importantly, I have witnessed the aftermath of war and embarrassingly the bumbling incompetence of attempted American rule of conquered territories. “Warren’s travels to Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Israel, Kosovo and beyond”

But why do we so readily go to war? Perhaps because they are “over there” it is too easy to send our youth off wherever and “thank them for their service.” Unfortunately, there are also too many people who think we must flatten our enemies, ala Adolf Hitler, rather than diplomatically cultivate peaceful, get along relations with them. If American’s understood more clearly the ugliness of war, and the futility of taming neighbors via suppression or even eradication, we could have a more peaceful and prosperous world.  

“Data” – Flawed but see it anyway

Ito and I saw the play “Data” at Arena Stage last Tuesday. The Washington Post review was titled “This play is a flawed look at AI. You should see it anyway.”  “Data-Arena Stage review”  We agree. The production and acting were outstanding. But the story fell short in a number of ways.

Skipping all the personal mysteries that were inadequately explained, the play suggests that turning the screening of immigration applications (not asylum applications) over to a computer (AI) program would be bad. Whatever biases (criteria) are wanted for US immigration policy can be built into the screening program, of course, but if they are not the criteria America wants to apply, AI is a safer way of avoiding them than the judgement of individual immigration officers.

In requesting bids from programmers to develop the AI screening program, the play states that the government’s objective to sort out those applicants for residency (and ultimately citizenship) is to approve those who would be “positive and productive.”  If the criteria for finding such people can be identified for immigration officers (no easy task), they can be built into an AI program, which can be relied on to more faithfully and consistently apply them than any human officers. The boss in the play correctly noted that such a program could produce an answer in seconds that  took the US immigration service three years to achieve in his case coming from China.

Of course, AI is not perfect and can make mistakes just as humans can. But their accuracy is improving with training and use at a rapid rate. Tesla’s Full Self Driving cars have been linked to 956 accidents with 29 deaths. But this is already dramatically safer than the much higher death rates per million miles driven of car accidents by humans.

Training AI programs will draw on a much wider set of information than is now used for immigration applications. Anything on the Internet related to the applicant might be collected and evaluated by an AI program. How should such information be used? This opens new concerns that will need to be evaluated, but the promise of faster and better application processing from the use of AI promises much more benefits than risks compared to our current reliance on human immigration officers.

“Data” does a poor job of exploring these important issues, but it is worth watching anyway.

U.S. occupation of Iraq

The following blog is 100% true. I did meet with Erik Prince in his Tyson’s Corner office and the U.S. Army’s killing of an old Iraqi man in Baghdad and the related events are 100% true. Unfortunately, my confrontation of Prince with his security teams damaging behavior in Iraq only occurred in my dreams last night.

In the late 2000s (probably 07 or 08) I met with Erik Prince in his Blackwater headquarters at Tyson’s Corner Virginia to discuss a prospective project in Jordan. At the end of our meeting I confronting him with the bad reputation of his Blackwater team in Bagdad (sadly this was only in my dream but the events are 100% true).

Following the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq, Blackwater provided security in Bagdad to US Embassy staff and foreign contractors such as me. While reporting to the U.S. Treasury, I was paid by USAID and housed and protected as part of the BearingPoint team under the USAID contract. Because of Blackwater’s reputation for a high profile, roughshod approach to security (driving their armored cars wherever—including sidewalks and wrong way streets), BearingPoint had hired a British security firm.

Even when countries are “liberated” their citizens never like the invading army to hang around long. Iraq was no exception. And the U.S. has proved no better (to say the least) than other colonial powers at administering the lands they conquered. The following story from early 2004 of an illustrative incident in Bagdad was told to me by a US Embassy friend, Michael Cole, who was in the middle of it:

“On a residential street between the Green Zone and our destination in Kadhimiya – possibly Mansour, Karkh, or Hurriyah – I heard the young soldier in the gun turret above me yell extremely loudly at someone in the street. I often spent rides like this reading notes or emails I’d printed to prepare for meetings, glancing up frequently to become familiar with routes and landmarks in case I needed to return to the Green Zone alone. I saw the old man the soldier was yelling at as he walked directly into the road. The Humvee was going extremely fast, driving in formation with 2 or 3 others, swerving across the road in formation to prevent civilian vehicles from riding alongside us where they could block our route or gain a clear line of fire to assassinate me. The driver never could have stopped once the man walked into the road. Just as I saw him and realized why the soldier was yelling, I heard and felt each tire on the passenger side where I sat roll over him. I’ve never run over a deer, but I expect the sound is similar. The vehicle was too fast, loud, and heavy for me to hear a scream or bones break, but I heard a crowd behind us scream, and cars honk. I looked around for landmarks so I could file a report and return to the site someday to make amends. The man appeared to have left a small yellow house with a date palm beside a four-lane road.

“I remember the soldiers cussed loudly when we hit the man. Most had Southern accents and sunburned faces. They started the mornings clean except for their gloves, but ended every day covered in dust, with black outlines left by tinted blast goggles. We talked about the incident when we arrived in Kadhimiya and were safe in a walled parking lot. Most of the soldiers were as distressed as I was. We all knew the man was dead, and we believed it was too dangerous to stop and try to help.

“One of the soldiers, possibly a young lieutenant who was my liaison with the security details, explained that the local Forward Operating Base had a process to compensate families of civilians killed by Coalition Forces. He explained that Iraqi tradition permitted compensation in lieu of prosecution even among local persons, and that this was an accepted form of justice. My later study of Arab tribal culture led me to believe Baghdadis could follow the same practice. I submitted my own brief statement to a local colonel or lieutenant colonel, who knew the case and assured me the family was well-compensated for the man’s death. I remember doubting anyone could be satisfied by this, but I was pleased I was not the only person who had submitted a statement. The soldiers did so before me. I tried to estimate what the man’s life could be worth between a Shiite Baghdadi family and the US military, but the normal actuarial items never equaled what I imagined anyone could call justice. 

“I asked Iraqi colleagues what to do. They shared my grief. Some shared my anger. Others were dismissive – possibly because I described the man as poor. Most advised me not to go back because there was nothing I could do to help. One lady said I could help in a small way by visiting the family, and that was the advice I decided to accept. 

“My interpreter thought it was a terrible, dangerous idea to visit the old man’s family. He said they would kill me. However, he drove me to the site I described to him. He parked a block away, and I walked to the yellow house. One of the man’s relatives spoke English and translated for me. They knew why I was there, and they invited me to sit at a table in their front yard where they drank tea and watched the traffic pass. I told them I did not drive the humvee, but I was a passenger, and that I saw their grandfather, and that I was sorry. One man yelled at me in Arabic about his anger about the conditions in the city during the occupation, of which his relative’s death was just one event among many injustices. I listened, and I agreed. I asked for the man’s name, and they told me. Maybe I wrote it in a notebook that’s now in a box somewhere. I apologized again and held the hands of two men for a moment. The lady who translated told me the man was old, and his death was quick, and it was good of me to come. She said “the officer” had already visited, and her gesture suggested everything was resolved. I was glad they didn’t kill me, but I didn’t believe everything was resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. However, I thanked them for talking to me, and I walked back to my interpreter’s car. I walked up a block and he followed me until we were out of the family’s eyesight from their yard.

“That was that. It was another week in Baghdad, and I didn’t think much of it until I returned home that summer. Sometimes I remember that day when I see a thin, old Arab man, or a man in a grey dishdash, or a deer eyeing the road, or a sandbag beside the road, or plaid cotton with yellow in it, or olive-colored hands, or the shade of a palm over a blacktop, or smell hot tar or dust caked in sweat, which is to say, I think of it often and at unexpected moments. I’m no longer consumed by rage and sadness like I was in 2005, the year following my return home, which I barely remember. Now I remember it as an example of what happens in war, which should be avoided at almost all costs, and with an exhalation of sadness few who I’ve ever met might understand. We all have instances and threads of sadness woven through our memories and consciousnesses, and this is one of mine.”

You can read more of my own experiences there in “Iraq-An American Tragedy-My Travels to Baghdad”

America’s Trump style Foreign Policy

The world benefits from rules of interaction that provide peace and cooperation. Rather than building more weapons of war, we could build more temples of beauty. Championing rules most countries respect and aspire to and being the largest (or perhaps second largest) economy in the world, the United States has naturally led such an international order. Retaining that role would be jeopardized if the U.S. did not diplomatically fashion such rules that were embraced and respected by most other countries and if the U.S. did not itself abide by the rules it had championed.

America’s leadership role is being jeopardized by our hypocrisy, such as condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while given a blank check and American weapons for Israel’s invasion of Gaza and Lebanon and ignoring its abuse of its occupied territories in the West Bank of Palestine. America’s embrace of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC’s) arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and America’s condemnation of the ICC’s arrest warrant for Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s and its former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is the very definition of hypocrisy.  

President elect Donald Trump’s style of negotiating international agreements reflects more the behavior of a bully than a diplomat. Last Monday Trump threatened to levy a 25% percent tariff on all imports from Mexica and Canada, despite the large economic harm to the US as well as Mexica and Canada and despite the laws and agreements it would violate, if they did not stop the illegal drugs and aliens entering the US across their borders. WC: “tariffs”

“Trump’s threat spurred outrage across the northern and southern U.S. borders, prompting backlash and warnings of retaliatory tariffs from both Mexico and Canada.”  The Hill: “Takeaways from trumps new tariff threat”

“Donald Trump’s angry threat to impose 25 percent tariffs on all U.S. imports from Mexico… is widely being depicted as a bluff….

“But amid all this parsing of Trump’s intentions, a crucial fact about his new move is getting lost: At the center of it is a lie. This lie is hiding in plain sight: It’s the underlying suggestion that Mexico is not doing anything to stop migrants from coming and that Trump’s threat of tariffs is needed to change that….

“All this is laid bare by the sharp response to Trump’s threat that new Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum issued Tuesday. Her statement is getting attention for its barbed claim that American guns trafficked to Mexico are fueling crime and violence there among gangs supplying U.S. markets with drugs. ‘Tragically, it is in our country that lives are lost to the violence resulting from meeting the drug demand in yours,’ Sheinbaum noted acidly, suggesting that the two countries’ interrelated national challenges underscore the need for cross-border cooperation rather than Trumpian confrontation.”

She further noted that: “You may not be aware that Mexico has developed a comprehensive policy to assist migrants from different parts of the world who cross our territory en route to the southern border of the United States. As a result, and according to data from your country’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP), encounters at the Mexico-United States border have decreased by 75% between December 2023 and November 2024….

“What this polite (and euphemistic) language says is that Mexico is already acting extensively to thwart migrants who travel through that country—originating south of Mexico—so they don’t reach our own southern border. As Sheinbaum notes, this is partly why border apprehensions in the United States have dropped sharply of late.” New Republic: “Mexico’s Sheinbaum responds to Trump tariffs”

So, what did our bully in chief do next?  “President-elect Donald Trump has said he had a “wonderful” conversation with Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum, in an apparent easing of the tensions raised this week over trade tariffs….  After Wednesday’s phone call, both leaders described the conversation in positive terms. Trump said on Truth Social, his social media platform, that it was a ‘very productive conversation’ and thanked Mexico for its promised efforts.”

Perpetuating his original lie, “Trump indicated that Sheinbaum would stop migration through Mexico, ‘effectively closing the southern border’.

“Sheinbaum said she had explained her country’s efforts to deal with migrants and that her position would ‘not be to close borders but to build bridges’”.  https://on.ft.com/49czcol

Trump may or may not be a good negotiator (6 of his businesses have filled for bankruptcy) but his approach is that of a bully. Given America’s dominant status in the world, bullying rather than leading and negotiating in the search for mutually beneficial compromises will hasten American decline from leadership.

War

My many visits to Sarajevo, Mostar, and Banja Luka in 1996-7 exposed me to the devastation of war, as did my multiple visits to Pristina in 1999-2000, and my 23 visits to Kabul between 2002-13.  My two months in Bagdad as part of the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2004 and five, two week follow up visits added live fire to my “post” war experiences that left me jumpy for many months after returning home.  None of these came close to the front-line experiences of reporter Robert Fisk, whose accounts are reproduced in his thick book “The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East,” though he reported from the same countries I had worked in.

Fisk’s reports on his interviews with actual people and his viewing of their butchered bodies and mass graves in the dessert confronts his readers with the real victims of war. To characterize his accounts as heart wrenching doesn’t come close to the true tragedies he reports. The deceptions and lies of all sides, add to the immense tragedies of our post WW wars, which have accomplished nothing but death and destruction.

The current Middle East wars (Israel’s slaughter of men, women and child in Gaza, West Bank, and Lebanon), following decades of Israel’s abusive rule over Palestinian territories, is beyond belief and too many Americans remain silent.  But no side has been “pure.” Our illegal and lie filled invasion of Iraq in 2003 followed years of American and British bombing of Iraq following the Gulf War in 1991 (Desert Storm). Our sanctions of Iraq over that period staved to death 1.5 million Iraqi’s, mainly children (despite the Food for Oil program), and the U.S. military’s use of depleted uranium munitions in that war dramatically increased Iraqi cancer cases and birth defects in the years that followed. Fisk reports on these and US and UK efforts to keep it all quiet.

Some of Iraq’s health problems were also aggravated by Iraq’s use of chemical warfare agents such as mustard gas and sarin during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88. The United States, being on Iraq’s side at that time, ignored its use of these chemicals, which remain in the soil today.  American leadership, which is desired by much of the world, is undermined by such double standards. Our government lies to its own citizens about its illegal behavior as well. Edward Snowden is paying a very high price for exposing some of it. We owe him a lot.

American interference in other countries’ affairs (other than by being the beacon on the hill) has rarely served our national interest. While we have blindly assumed that we would be welcomed as liberators in Panama (1989-90), Iraq (1991, and 2003), Somalia (1993, 2007, and 2010), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1994), Afghanistan (1998, and 2001), Serbia (1999), Libya (1986, and 2011) and Syria (2014)–(need I mention Vietnam?), we failed to understand that peoples of most every country hate invaders no mater who they are. Moreover, our ignorance and arrogance made us very inept occupiers.

In Ukraine and Israel our interference stops short of sending our solders (almost). But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could have easily and sensibly been avoided if the U.S. had encouraged the negotiations Russia sought in December 2021 “Ukraine’s and  dead and  war”.  Following Russia’s invasion, we tragically threw cold water on the agreement almost reached between Ukraine and Russia in the March 2022 negotiations in Turkey. ‘Peace negotiations in the Russian invasion of Ukraine”  So onward to the last Ukrainian. The final outcome is very likely to be identical to the March 2022, Istanbul Communiqué but with 120,000 dead and 600,000 wounded Russians and 70,000 dead soldiers and 10,000 dead civilians and 140,000 wounded Ukrainians and 500 billions of dollars’ worth of property destruction. In other words, Russia and Ukraine paid a huge price (with our help) for nothing.

Fisk gives human faces to the real people who pay the price for our aggressions. This horrible cost in lives and property has contributed nothing to our national security. America has much to offer the world and has contributed much to the quality of life around the world. But it has done so with its example, trade, and diplomacy, not its army. The principles and institutions on which American was founded and has flourished have served us well when we have remained faithful to them.

President elect Trump has nominated Tulsi Gabbard to become his Director of National Intelligence. When she left the Democratic party two years ago and endorsed Trump for President this August she praised Trump for “having the courage to meet with adversaries, dictators, allies and partners alike in the pursuit of peace, seeing war as a last resort” and condemned the Biden administration for the U.S. “facing multiple wars on multiple fronts in regions around the world and closer to the brink of nuclear war than we ever have been before.”

“In 2022, she also faulted the Biden administration for failing to address Russian concerns as it invaded Ukraine.

“’This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO, which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border,’

Following a 2017 trip to visit Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, Gabbard defended meeting with an American enemy by saying:

“I think we should be ready to meet with anyone if there’s a chance it can help bring about an end to this war, which is causing the Syrian people so much suffering,”  “The Hill–Tulsi Gabbard-Trump Nomination — 11/14/24”

 I hope that she still thinks this way.

Should the US Still Police the World?

This was a debate between Bret Stephens and Jamie Kirchick for the affirmative and Matt Taibbi (without his baseball cap) and Lee Fang for the negative. You can and should watch it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/bariweiss/p/a-free-press-live-debate-on-foreign?r=1n8osb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

The affirmative side (Jamie and Bret) only seemed to understand policing in military terms. The idea that there might be good and bad policing never seemed to cross their minds. Bearing in mind that I was a member of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq for its final two months and made 22 visits to Afghanistan from 2002-2013 (not to mention my years of work with the IMF in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Serbia, and South Sudan), my experience has been that when led by our military, which is quite good at fighting, our policing is generally inept (to understate it considerably). Warren Coats life and travels

Jamie and Bret’s blindness sadly reflects the single-minded understanding of neocons of what our leadership role in the world should look like (military involvement and wars).  This blindness is shockingly visible in the debate. America must and should be involve in the world we are part of. We should promote the values of peace and freedom that have America the envy of the world. That means actively working to be a good neighbor and to help fashion the rules and norms of cross border cooperation (for the cross-border movement of goods, people, digital messages and value, etc.). We potentially have a lot to offer in such a role in our own self-interest and for the betterment of the world.

But when we have led with our Army, our “leadership” has been rotten for the world and for us. We are bad colonial rulers as I have seen first hand. These points were made by Matt and Lee who mopped the floor with Bret and Jamie. By the vote of those listening, Matt and Lee won the debate but were still supported by a minority of those voting. God help us.

More recently, our unconscionable support of Israel’s vicious slaughter of its neighbors in Gaza and the West Bank and now its invasion of Lebanon, has destroyed any remaining respect we had as a world leader.  https://wcoats.blog/2024/10/05/score-card/

Score Card

Three weeks ago, Israel detonated pagers and walkie-talkies in Syria and Lebanon that killed 37 people (including two children) and injured thousands. A week ago, Israel bombed Hezbollah headquarters in Beirut, killing its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, much of its senior leadership and thousands of Lebanese civilians. Israeli soldiers entered Lebanon on September 30 in a limited ground offensive against Hezbollah forces.

In retaliation Iran sent 200 or so missiles to Israel “targeting military installations and critical infrastructure.” While most were intercepted a few struck military airbases and killed one person.

Israel promises to retaliate for this vicious attack. “Donald Trump has said that Israel should ‘hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later’ in response to an Iranian missile attack on Tuesday.” https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-says-israel-should-hit-irans-nuclear-first-1964268

Need I say more???

Collateral damage (deaths of innocent bystanders) is unavoidable in war. But Iran seems to recognize that taking some care to minimizing it is not only humane but also wise for not creating more enemies to fend off in the future.  On Oct 7, 2023, Hamas killed about 1,200 Israelis in their attack from Gaza. In retaliation Israel has killed over 40,000 Palestinians according to the official reports of Hamas authorities many of whom were women and children. However, some aid works claim that the true number is much higher. Around 670 Palestinians, including 150 children, have been killed by Israelis in the occupied West Bank over this period.

According to Israel’s Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, this is not carelessness on Israel’s part, but rather the deliberate policy of removing Palestinians (one way or another) from the River to the Sea. One way or the other, Israel is committing suicide. Anyone who cares about the future of Israel should demand an immediate end to this fighting. Anyone who cares about the standing of the U.S. in the world, and how our tax dollars are being spent, should demand the same.