A 22-year-old Ohio girl, a member of one of our churches, died last
week of complications from H1N1. She was a recent college graduate
working two jobs. According to her roommate, she became ill two weeks
ago, but didn’t seek care initially because she lacked health insurance
and was worried about the cost.
In the first chapter of “The Inheritance,” David Sanger talks about Iran’s nuclear program and sheds light on some misconceptions we have.
In 2003 a secret US intelligence report concluded that Iran had suspended work on designing a nuclear weapon. It leaked to the public, and it undercut the Bush Administration’s call for sanctions against Iran. Why were we contemplating military action against Iran when they had halted their program? Other countries already felt we had misled them about Iraq (which we had), so there was no trust factor. Instead, they wondered if we were on the verge of another Iraq.
But that was misleading. Sanger notes that designing the bomb is the easy part. It can be done late in the process, and done quickly. The hard part is gathering the parts needed (like centrifuges) and enriching enough uranium (which can be part of the civil nuclear energy program). “The Iranians,” Sanger wrote, “had halted their work on the final step, the physical construction of the weapon.”
It’s like accumulating all the ingredients to make a cake. You just don’t figure out the specifics of the recipe–how much of this, how much of that, what temperature to bake at–until you’re ready to start. An experienced cook can figure out that part quickly.
Japan doesn’t have nuclear weapons, and they aren’t trying to develop them. But everyone agrees they could probably do it overnight if they wanted to. They have everything they need (especially the technical expertise).
That’s where Iran may be. The info about Iran suspending their weapon design program is misleading.
As the healthcare debate cranks up, we’re gonna be hearing lots of stuff about Canada’s healthcare system. It has a lot of dysfunctionalities, and will be used to scare people about the idea of government healthcare. Actually, nobody’s proposing a plan like Canada has. America’s private healthcare system is well-developed, and you build on what you already have (not scrape everything clean and start over).
CNN did a report on Canada’s system, trying to determine if what we hear is really accurate (ahh, actual reporting! what a concept!). Some is accurate, some not. In any system, you can find negative anecdotal stories. You can find them about Canada’s system (in which every person is, at least, covered), and you can find them in our system (where people forgo needed medical procedures because they can’t afford them, or because insurance companies refuse to cover them). We’ll soon be engulfed in Dueling Anecdotes.
A wonderful article in the New Yorker talks about the path several other countries have taken (England, France, Switzerland). Each country is different–and none relate well to where the US is right now. It’s a very pragmatic piece, written by a doctor.
I’m quite content with my health insurance, but it’s not about me. It’s about the 45 million Americans who have no health insurance. So I favor universal health care. And it IS about me in the sense that, despite our seeming good situation, a health situation could arise that would send Pam and I to the poorhouse. Most Americans teeter on that brink.
I also favor investing in energy independence. I favor investing in green technology, so that the US can become the world leader in what will inevitably become a huge industry. And the financial system definitely needs overhauled.
BUT HOLD ON MR. PRESIDENT.
I’ve thought for some time that President Obama was trying to do too much, too fast. Huge price tags are being thrown around, and we’re rushing to spend this money without really thinking things through. Sure, I guess plans were formulated back during the campaign, and duly published on websites for policy wonks to study. But…can we have some national debate first?
The perpetual Obama-haters at Fox and elsewhere have been spewing about this for some time, but their one-note partisanship lacks any credibility with me. Nobody is ALL bad, as these folks contend about Obama. I listen half-heartedly to what they say, but I pay much more attention to a lot of other folks who don’t take such a partisan approach.
Lately, some credible (to me) voices are speaking words of caution.
Colin Powell, speaking to CNN: “I’m concerned at the number of programs that are being presented, the bills associated with these programs, and the additional government that will be needed to excutie them…..I think one of the cautions that has to be given to the president — and I’ve talked to some of his people about this — is that you can’t have so many things on the table that you can’t absorb it all. And we can’t pay for it all.”
Jack and Susie Welch, in BusinessWeek July 6: “With his everything-all-at-once overhaul of our country’s $13 trillion economy, President Obama is unquestionably taking on too much….People are scared; many are angry. They want problems fixed fast. But change–especially massive, frame-breaking change along the lines the President is pushing–can’t just be about getting things done. It has to be about getting the right outcomes, and right outcomes rarely get sorted out in a rush. They emerge from vigorous debate, from grappling with ideas and wallowing in the details of options and their consequences, intended and not….Without question, every area of our economy that he is trying to upend could and should be remade to some extent. Our pushback has to do with pacing and scope.”
The column by the Welches is excellent. They get specific about some problems with things being passed. They write that “a ‘this is an emergency’ approach is just a way to silence debate over long-term consequences.”
I applaud Obama for moving aggressively on a lot of issues that desperately need attention. I don’t have confidence that John McCain would have gotten much of anything done now, particularly with Democrats ruling both houses of Congress. But I’d really like him to just SLOW DOWN.
On Morning Joe today, Mark Sanford’s affair was, of course, a major topic. But Joe castigated the “cable news pundits” from the previous night who took “unbridled glee” in Sanford’s fall. Scarborough said some of those pundits “are on this network.” And he likened them, in a way I haven’t quite figured out yet, as the Jim and Tammy Fay Baker of pundit class. Or something like that.
He’s obviously referring to Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow, the unabashedly liberal show costs in the evening lineup. I’ve heard him, at other times, criticize Olberman in particular, sometimes by name.
Scarborough drips with disdain for Olberman. I’m not sure why, but I suspect it has more to do with style than politics. Yes, Olberman’s a liberal and Scarborough is a conservative (who just published a book about the conservative movement in which he strongly criticizes Barack Obama). But I think it has more to do with fairness.
Olberman is a sensationalist who gets his jollies using his considerable verbal skills to criticize anyone who’s not a liberal. Scarborough, on the other hand, restrains his conservative leanings in order to treat guests fairly, and to take a balanced view of both sides of an issue. He regularly criticizes Republicans. This makes Morning Joe infinitely better than Olberman’s show, and is why Joe manages to draw such a broad range of guests.
This morning, after going on about this, Joe turned to Mike Barnacle and said, “Should we name names, or go to commercial?”
Barnacle cautioned, “I would go to commercial, Joe.” And they did. I was disappointed, but I suspect Barnacle’s call was the prudent one.
Last night, Anderson Cooper interviewed the husbands and a sister of the two US female journalists imprisoned in North Korea. The two women have been sentenced to 12 years of hard labor.
What struck me as wierd were statements by Iain Clayton, husband of Laura Ling. Rather than expressing concern for his wife, he kept bringing it to himself, as if he was the one suffering.
Iain: it’s not about you.
I spent quite a bit of time tonight talking to Tim and Tina, two Iranian immigrants who came to our table tennis club. I had talked to Tim before; he lives in Defiance, Ohio, about an hour away, and he’s a very good player. Tina, his sister, was visiting from Chicago. She came in her sweats, ready to play–and she wasn’t bad.
Tina came to the States in 1971, Tim in 1976. The Shah was in power; it was a dictatorship. Tina earned an Economics degree, landed a good job, and earned her US citizenship. Then, in 1979, she took a leave of absence from her job and traveled back to her homeland. She found work with a think tank of some kind in Teheran, working alongside eight Americans employed by IBM.
But she became very worried about what she was sensing. “This is not good, what’s happening,” she decided. She warned her coworkers, said they needed to leave the country. But they weren’t worried. “Nothing’s going to happen. We’re perfectly safe,” they told her.
But Tina didn’t believe it. She could feel something ready to explode, and she didn’t want to be there when it happened. So she packed up and left. Two weeks later, Iranian students stormed the US Embassy.
She had given her card, with her address info, to the IBMers. Said, “When you get to the States, call me.” Some of them did. And I’m sure she told them, “I told you so.”
I asked Tim, “What is something Americans need to understand about Iranians? What don’t we understand correctly?”
He mentioned the culture being different, but then said, “Iranians are a peaceful people.” He paused. “But everybody is like that. Wherever you go in the world, people are mostly peaceful.”
I said, “I’m sure you’re fascinated by what’s happening in Iran now.”
Tina said, “The people are MAD. It’s not about Ahmadinejad or the other guy. The people are just MAD. They’re tired of the way things are. They want things to change. You can see it in their eyes. They are ANGRY.”
It was almost amusing how she kept emphasizing that.
“The Iranian people want the same things we want,” she said. “And they want to vote, and have their vote count. They couldn’t vote under the Shah.”
I said, “Does it bother you when Americans talk about Iranians as being evil?”
She said without hesitation, “Well, Ahmadinejad is evil.” And she put the ruling clerics in the same category. She and Tim talked about how idiotic, incompetent, etc., Ahmadinejad is. They said the Iranian people are tired of his nonsense, of the stupid things he says, of the way he embarrasses the country.
I mentioned the three Iranians who attended Huntington University in the mid-1970s. I said many of us wonder what happened to them. Did they go back to Iran and get caught up in the revolution? Did they die in the Iran-Iraq War?
Tina said, “If they were here in 1975 or 1977, they didn’t go back. Why would they? Who would want to go back?” She figured they were still in the States somewhere. Like her.
Justice is finally occuring for the 17 Uyghurs who have languished in Guantanamo’s prison for nearly seven years. But it’s very complicated.
Four Uyghurs were relocated from Guantanamo to the island of Bermuda. This angered:
Most of the folks at Gitmo fought against the US in Afghanistan. A good number were part of Al Qaeda. But not all.
In 2005, the Bush Administration declared that the Uyghurs were not terrorists and shouldn’t have been imprisoned. Some were kidnapped by Pakistani entrepreneurs who sold them to the CIA, claiming they were Al Qaeda. Others were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong color of skin.
The Uyghurs are ethnic Chinese who, facing persecution at home, relocated to Afghanistan in search of a better life (most of us would not have chosen Afghanistan). Some may or may not have been seeking the overthrow of the Chinese government, as the Chinese government insists they were.
The first four to be released are now free men in Bermuda. The remaining 13 Uyghurs will be resettled on Palau, an island in the South Pacific.
Fox News, of course, us up in arms about releasing the Uyghurs. They didn’t oppose releasing them in 2005, when Bush was in office. But now that Obama is President, they think releasing innocent Uyghurs to “a tropical vacation” is the worst of sins.
They were torn from spouses, children, and parents seven years ago. They’ve been unjustly imprisoned for seven years. They were uprooted from a land they had made home, and will now be forced to make a new life in a totally foreign country. As a Christian seeking justice for the innocent and powerless: LET THEM GO.
As much as I would like to despise Iran, I can’t help but think they aren’t quite the Picture of Evil that we commonly see portrayed in the United States.
Don’t get me wrong. Iran is no knight in shining armor. At least some elements of Iran are helping the insurgents in Iraq kill US troops (though, in the 1980s, we helped underground groups assassinate numerous Iranian politicians). Iran is the force behind Hezbollah, which is a big threat to Israel. They have human rights issues. And they’re trying to develop The Bomb.
But:
1. Iran, I read some time ago, has one of the world’s highest proportions of blogs. Blogs are a sign of free speech, a vehicle for dissent and robust discourse. How authoritarian can you be when you allow so much free speech? When so many of your citizens roam the internet?
2. Prior to 2002, when George Bush placed Iran in his Axis of Evil, Iran was pursuing a moderate course and was helping the United States. Dick Cheney, according to David Sanger’s “The Inheritance,” continually shot down any attempts to reach out to Iran (others in the administration favored reaching out, but Cheney, in those early years, held virtual veto power).
3. The current presidential election shows a vigorous democracy, wrapped in an Islamic package. Ahmadinejad is on the ropes, his political life coming to an end against a more popular opponent. “His reformist and conservative opponents alike have criticized him publicly for spending too much time agitating the U.S. and Israel and not enough trying to fix the crumbling economy,” writes Middle East expert Fawaz Gerges on CNN.com.
Plus, Ahmadinejad is losing both the youth and the women’s vote. Half of the country’s eligible voters are women. His opponent promises to loosen restrictions on women, and pretty much publicly mocks those restrictions.
Now, Ahmadinejad’s role is mostly domestic. He’s not the commander in chief, not the country’s top executive. It’s a different role than being president in the US. But it’s still the top job subject to the will of the people, and the president is the face of the country to the rest of the world. (David Sanger’s book includes one chapter about Iran. While it focuses on Iran’s efforts to build nuclear weapons, he also tells some stories about Ahmadinejad that confirm how much of a total idiot he is.)
4. This is worth repeating: Half of the country’s eligible voters are women. So don’t call them a fundamentalist Islamic state. There is a very strong women’s movement in Iran. Iran does not like being described as an Arab state or being lumped in with other Arab states.
Excellent article about Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a holdover from the Bush Administration. The piece, by Joe Klein, is called “Robert Gates: The Bureaucrat Unbound.” Here’s one excerpt:
A military intelligence officer who was an Iraq specialist told me he had been pleading for more resources throughout the Rumsfeld years: “Iraq was Rumsfeld’s fourth highest priority, after China, North Korea and Iran,” he said. “But Gates called me in and asked, ‘What do you need?’ And he gave us everything we requested.”
 |
Copyright © 2013 Steve Dennie | All rights reserved
