When the big boys play, the little kids get hurt

I’m not talking about playgrounds but battle grounds.  And too many big boys want to make everywhere a battle ground.

Does anyone really know what Vladimir Putin’s game is with Ukraine and other countries bordering Russia?  Is he on a power trip or is he concerned that the West is encroaching on Russia and is a threat to the existence of Russia?

If it is strictly a power trip, then he is following in the steps of the Tsars and Stalin.  The Tsars and Stalin used their populations as cannon fodder for their own ends.  How many people are going to die before Putin’s goals are met.  Will the shooting down of Malaysia Air 17 give him pause in his power trip.

If he is concerned with the West encroaching on Russia, maybe he should join the West in providing a parliamentary and economic framework for all of Europe.  Major threats to Russia have all but disappeared.  Napoleon is dead and today’s France has no interest in attacking Moscow.  The Kaiser and Hitler are both dead and today’s Germany has no interest in attacking Leningrad or Stalingrad.

Whatever Putin’s game is with Ukraine, let’s hope that he takes to heart that his big boy play has really hurt lots of “little kids” who have nothing to do with his game.

Israel is a parliamentary state with many political parties.  No party ever seems to gain a majority of seats.  In order to govern, parties have to form coalitions.  Too often these coalitions include some religious party that believes that God gave Israel to the Jews about 3,000 years ago.  About 2,000 years ago the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and Jews fled to Europe and Africa.  Others moved in and eventually became today’s Arabs.

About eighty years ago Hitler with his big boy games decided that Jews were not part of these games and started executing them in obscene numbers.  Those Jews who could fled the areas Hitler controlled, some of them fleeing to Palestine.

To simplify history, all hell broke loose when the big boys of the European and American powers declared through the U.N. that a certain part of Palestine would become the new state of Israel. Now another set of big boys is playing various games that never seem to end.  The latest games are kidnapping and killing teenagers for no other reason that they were of the “other”.  Now that game has escalated with all the “little kids” in Gaza wondering where they can flee to escape the violence of the game..

Nicholas Kristoff wrote a good column on how the intransigence of both sides perpetuates the problem.  See “Who’s Right and Wrong in the Middle East?”, New York Times Sunday Review, July 20, 2014.

Mosaddegh was the duly elected prime minister of Iran.  He decided that Iran wasn’t getting enough marbles from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and nationalized it.  The big boys in Whitehall and Foggy Bottom arranged to have Mosaddegh overthrown and have Reza Pahlavi reinstated as Shah.  Among other things the Shah did was have his secret service, Savak, take out the little kids that didn’t play the Shah’s way.
Savak’s dirty tricks were no secret.  In fact, a colleague who was supporting a Univac computer in Tehran asked me to join him.  No way did I want to move from Sweden to a country like Iran.  In fact, in the last year I was in Sweden (1974), Iranian students were demonstrating in Stockholm against the Shah.

By 1979 Ayotollah Khomeni had overthrown the Shah and set up a new set of big boy rules; many of these rules were not to the little kids’ benefit.

But the big boys in Washington were not happy with the overthrow of the Shah, especially when the U.S. Embassy was taken over and diplomats held prisoner.

And matters got worse.  First, the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran, even when he used poison gas on Iranian troops.  Second when the U.S. decided Saddam was not to its liking and went to war against him, the U.S. shot down an Iranian airliner with over 200 “little kids” on board, few if any who were part of the big boy games.

And still the games go on, although in a more civilized manner than for the last two decades.  Iran is negotiating with the U.S. and others about how much nuclear capability Iran should have.  But the big boys like the U.S. and the U.K. aren’t offering to reduce their nuclear capability, a capability that some hawks wouldn’t hesitate using to flatten Iran, including all the “little kids” who have nothing to do with Iran’s nuclear capability or intentions.

Another big boy game going on is China’s assertion of sovereignty over offshore islands.  I recently read an article by a Chinese or Vietnamese author who said that China really has more to gain by playing nice than by throwing its weight around.  It is ironic that China is still holding a grudge about another nation that threw its weight around to gain supremacy in the Western Pacific: Japan.

The “little kids” sing, “When will they ever learn” and the big boys never do.

This was also published in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, July 24, 2014 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/07/24/3781_when_the_big_boys_play_the_little_kids_get_hurt.

A book review: Iran, A People Interrupted

Hamid Dabashi, an Iranian-American professor of Iranian Studies, has written an interesting 200-year history of Iran, its culture, and its politics, both geo-political and internal. I find his writing in this book to be arrogant, opinionated, full of big words, extremely interesting, and very important. Sometimes I wondered if I would even finish it when I got lost in some of his concepts. But I read several pages most nights and made it through and I'm glad I did.

I will return it to the Duluth Public Library 2009-08-11. If you are interested in borrowing it, its call number is 955.05 D11i.

For starters about arrogance, he writes in his introduction:

"I promise you by the end of this book, you will know more about Iran than the U.S. Department of State, the CIA, the Pentagon, the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, the Hoover Institution, the Heritage Foundation, and five other neocon think tanks–not to mention the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Islamic Culture in the Islamic Republic of Iran–all put together. I know things they do not know, or do not care to know, or would rather forget, or never learned, or would not tell you." (p. 11)

But considering the arrogance of the people in these institutions who pretend to understand a complex history and a complex people, I feel he is justified. Do I know more than they do after reading his book? In some respects, yes. I do know that war, torture, and execution are not going to do the Iranian people and a lot of other peoples any good. But many of the so-called experts think that these undemocratic and irreligious actions will bring greater glory for their causes.

As an example of the complexity that these experts do not understand, Dabashi writes:

"Iranian political history is a Trojan horse. Inside its belly is a hidden force never noted either for what it is or for its catalytic effect on that political history. The hidden force is the power of the imagination, the force of defiant intellect. Any attempt to reduce the cosmopolitan pluralism of Iranian political culture to an Islamist, nationalist, or socialist absolutism is at once analytically ludicrous and politically catastrophic. More than anything else, such lame and lazy reductionism distorts the inner grace and overriding power of a thriving culture that outsmarts its tyrant rulers and career opportunistic observers alike." (p. 125)

Geopolitics often damages the ships of the high and the mighty. With their grand designs treating others as mere pawns, they do not recognize that the pawns are icebergs. So it was with the U.S., first overthrowing an elected prime minister of Iran, then treating the Shah as a great ally, then using the Afghani resistance to fight the Soviets and to contain Iran, and finally then having the Afghani resistance turn against the U.S. and having the Iranian mullahcracy turn inward.

As part of this grand design of geopolitics, the high and the mighty indulge in demonizing those who oppose them, for example, George W. Bush and others calling any resistance to their grand design "the enemy". Is it any wonder that many of the rulers of Iran are paranoid about the U.S.? Especially when Bush included Iran in the "Axis of Evil". His and his advisors' ignorance of internal Iranian politics undercut reformers who had been making gains. Now these reformers were considered traitors.

BTW, Dabashi wrote this book in 2007, two years before the recent election in Iran. An election followed by the resistance of a culture that was often outsmarting its tyrant rulers.

Dabashi predicted the current turmoil as one of two possibilities of failure with the election of Ahmadinejad. "At worst, he will abuse the hopes and aspirations invested in him and resume an Islamic reign of terror over those young yuppie voters with their stylish hairdos, chic scarves, and sexy sunglasses–in which case he will turn them and their innocent semiotics of resistance into the real inheritors of the moral authority of Shi'ism. ... [Shi'ism] is alway on the side of the tyrannized and discredits those who are in power..." (pp. 233-234)

I have many more notes, but I'll finish with Dabashi's last sentence:

"...the only way that Americans can help promote democracy in Iran and anywhere else in the world is by first and foremost restoring and safeguarding it in their own country." (p. 263)