The Trap

Former CIA director James Wolsey---a sometime Presbyterian famous for arriving at church conferences a few hours before they might vote to divest from U. S. corporations doing business in the Israeli-occupied West Bank---has gone live on CNN today, Thursday 4/6/17, calling for air strikes on Iranian nuclear sites as a way to stop Syria. Bomb Syria at the same time, he said (mercifully omitting to mention if that would halt ISIS but might help Israel's worst leanings).  

          It's time to ask the Tet question again.  But first a brief review: 

          The Russians are busy in the region with their air campaign to help Assad, it's not always clear why.  The battle-seasoned Kurds, whom the Turks despise and fear, are helping the U. S./Iraqi battle with Isis in Holms and Mosul (not going that well). The U. S. promises to look the other way while Turkey continues mass arrests in exchange for keeping our airbase at Incerlik; and on the Arabian peninsula the U. S. and the Saudis are bombing the Shia Muslim minority "Houthis"  in Yemen while the U. S. is selling high performance fighter jets  to Quatar and Kuwait.

             Now the for the Tet question, newly applied:  during the ferocious North Vietnamese Tet offensive and U. S. counter offensive fifty years ago a reporter asked a U. S. General  "Just who's got whom surrounded here?"  As if replaying the Netflix script for "House of Cards," we cannot be surprised to realize that the stupefying killing in the Middle East is tied to the politics tolerated and practiced in the U. S. Hence the Wolsey connection, among many.  Wolsey is inviting us into the trap of a diversion to conceal the continuing U. S. debacle while other goals are pursued, especially world economic dominance.  "So It's the Iranians!" 

        There is so much to conceal.   Please look the other way as the Republicans exercise the nuclear option that condemns the U. S. political style to long-term polarization in which democratic practices are not really on the table anymore.  That's the message down below decks when the Washington Post reports that nine days before the Trump inauguration The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladi­mir Putin. (Washington Post April 4th).  Prince is scion of a wealthy auto-parts distributor, brother of secretary of education Betsy Devos, big-dollar donor to the Trump campaign, and leader of a giant global company that trains private mercenary forces for foreign governments.

           Below decks, the Financial Times' Edward Luce reports (Feb. 26, 2017)  that "the stocks of private prison companies soared after the Department of Justice scrapped an Obama rule that ended the outsourcing of federal incarceration. They had already jumped after the announcement the Trump administration would detain illegal immigrants in federal centres rather than release them." Likewise, Luce reported that "the new head of the Federal Communications Commission purged key parts of the net neutrality rules put in place to shield consumers from discrimination. The FCC also scrapped plans to open the cable box market to competition. Expect similar field days in the for-profit higher education sector, defense industrial stocks and public housing contractors,"

           It is a matter of the highest moral purpose and an act of faithful witness to see the traps around us, expose them, and resist.