Father Knows Best

I read the cover story in The Atlantic magazine, "The Point of No Return: Israel is Getting Ready to Bomb Iran." There's quite an outpouring of comments about it on the magazine's web site. Without getting into the speculation of whether (nuclear empowered) Israel or the U.S. might bomb Iran's budding nuclear facilities, the part that intrigued me was the description of dynamics between Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, and his 100 year old father. His father is a hawk. There was an older, venerated son who died a military hero during the rescue of Jewish hostages at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976. It is Benjamin, "the Prime Minister son," who disappointed his father when, under U.S. diplomatic pressure, he withdrew Israeli forces from the West Bank town of Hebron in 1999. The father got up to speak at his centennial birthday party that Benjamin arranged. He did not wax sentimental about his children. He spoke about the need to trust in the military in the face of the existential threat that Iran poses to Israel. One friend of Benjamin's told the article's author that "always in the back of Bibi's (Benjamin's) mind is Ben-Zion (his father). He worries that his father will think he is weak."

The theme of favored, absent son and ever-striving present son sounds like an Arthur Miller play. I suppose that millions of adult sons can be analyzed in their actions and found still to be trying to please or piss off their fathers - me included. But not many of us direct armed forces that rule over another people desperate for their autonomy. Not many of us have a button that could launch a nuclear war.

Nuclear Warheads in the Mail

Last week a mystery was cleared up for me. It was revealed that the Defense Department had sent two nuclear bomb detonation devices through the mail to Taiwan even though Taiwan had only purchased battery-related devices for some US made helicopters. When the Taiwanese realized what they'd received, they notified our Defense Department. "Whoa! We just want to spy on and straif our dissidents. We don't want to nuke their whole home town!"

You've got to figure when a department the size of our Defense Department is fulfilling the number of weapons-related orders that it handles every year, mistakes are bound to happen. Even though I've yet to get some book other than the one I've ordered through Amazon, book titles are no doubt a lot easier to keep straight than all the different kinds of missiles, tanks, and helicopter gunships that we sell, let alone all their parts.

That clears up the confusion I felt when I received a box about a month back, from our Defense Department. I'd filed a freedom of information request about titanium tipped warheads and was expecting some thick files. Imagine my surprise when I cut through the packing tape and found a warhead itself! I can just picture that humongous warehouse with shelves just full of every which kind of cluster bomb, landmine, and waterboarding apparatus. It's probably as big as five Walmarts and probably underground somewhere in Idaho, with sub par florescent lighting. I can just see how some overworked federal employee grabbed a little warhead when he meant to grab the operation manual that was probably sitting right next to it.

At the time, my neighbor thought it might have nothing at all to do with my FOIA request, but instead was in lieu of the $600 stimulus package I'm due to get. He surmised that what with the bailout of the banking system a few weeks back when Bear Sterns went belly up, dollars are in short supply. He said it made sense that some of us might receive in-kind goods rather than cash. I told him I'd have been happy with an iPhone. That would be a lot easier to sell on Craigslist than a nuclear weapon.

Boy was I wrong about that. Within a half hour of posting it on Craigslist, I'd received a dozen emails from all over the place. And folks were offering more than my $600 asking price!

Now I recognize that the whole thing was just a bureaucratic mistake. Wish I had thought of that before I sold it to the guy with those mirrored sunglasses.

Cold War Back By Popular Demand

Somewhat buried on Page 13 of the SF Chronicle, February 20th, was an article about an escalating war of words that could lead to a return of the Cold War between the U.S. and Russia - complete with freaky arms race and spiraling mistrust amidst growing piles of WMD.

Apparently, the U.S. has convinced Poland and the Czech Republic to let it install 10 "defensive" missiles and a radar site, ostensibly to protect against an attack from a "middle eastern" country. Russia sees it as another step in arming its old satellite countries against it and that it represents just a foot in the door for the U.S. with more offensive missiles to follow. They have threatened to respond by producing intermediate range nuclear missiles to aim back at Poland and the Czech Republic even though they were banned by the Gorbachev / Reagan agreements in 1987. One observer quoted in the article, says that Russia perceives this as payback for selling missiles to Iran and Syria. In what appears to be a reassurance to Russians, the Polish Prime Minister made the unsettling statement that "the missile defense is not directed against any normal state."

I find it totally unsettling that the Dr. Strangelovian-missile-advocates have some operative definition of which states fail the "normalcy" test. It's equally unsettling that any government sees itself as an arms merchant to other countries. Has the current messy tragedy in Iraq made all the players nostalgic for the Cold War?