Left, Right, and Centered

The World Gets A Little More Dangerous May 31, 2010

It’s not enough that the batshit crazy North Koreans are just itching for a reason to pull the nuclear trigger, and it’s not enough that the longest war in American history just claimed its 1000th soldier, and it’s not enough that our national love affair with oil has not only led that fellow to his grave but is now destroying the Gulf of Mexico and every living thing within it and around it.  Nope.  A really successful Memorial Day Weekend just wouldn’t be complete without a random act of inexplicable insanity (over and above driving in circles at 250mph until someone goes airborne and disintigrates against the retaining wall.)

Today’s really really stupid move: Israel Attacks Palestinian Aid Flotilla  Nine dead, more wounded, all because Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu is determined to play hardball, no matter who is watching and no matter how many valid objections to the contrary they may hear.  I’m fully prepared to hear that these aid worker actually had a cache of deadly weapons stashed among the bins of food and medicines.  Count on it.  Because the only full-fledged democracy in the Middle East would never just start shooting up innocent aid workers, would they?  No more than our military would machine-gun unarmed civilians or blow up a convoy of SUVs carrying women and children.  The good guys just don’t do stuff like that…except that sometimes they do.

Obama has taken a lot of criticism on a lot of fronts, and with the oil still spilling onto the beaches of Louisiana and Mississippi, his long-term political survival isn’t much more promising than that of a petroleum-soaked bayou heron, but the criticism he’s taken on his Israel policy is probably misplaced.  The Obama administration has rightfully encouraged the Israelis to back off on new settlements and to resort to negotiation over intimidation and confrontation.  With Israeli actions like today’s, one can begin to see what Obama was talking about.

So now, instead of the Israeli Prime Minister visiting Obama at the White House to patch up the dying love affair, the meeting has been cancelled, and Netanyahu is at home left to answer troubling questions about why his military forces felt compelled to open fire on an aid convoy.  The answers should be interesting.

Just one more tinder-keg filled with way too much dynamite and way too short fuses.

BW