Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

It’s the “Barrack and his cronies” vulnerability. Oh, the cronies are Democrats. It’s the GOP new foreign affairs policy, despite the call of a whole lot of Republican Congressmen earlier to avoid arming Syrian rebels and to keep the United States out of any involvement, air strikes or otherwise, out of the ISIL conflict and to get the administration to swear not to commit U.S. ground forces to any regional containment effort, a pledge that cannot be kept if containment is remotely the goal.

And this affords a “memory lapse” that it was a GOP’s-initiated false war on non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” that destabilized the delicate Shiite-Sunni balance when Saddam Hussein’s regime fell, disenfranchising Sunnis and creating a breeding ground for extremists like ISIL. Our waterboarding and sacrilegious efforts in Iraq accelerated recruitment of extremists everywhere.

With droughts resulting from global climate change turning once productive farms to dust, millions of angry Sunnis and their families were forced to leave their fallow farms to seek sustenance “somewhere.” The world turned their back on them, creating a fertile soil (sorry) for ISIL recruiting, all as Republicans from the Bible Belt fought tooth and nail to keep our environmental standards low, to stem the tide of joining a global chorus for greater commitment to reducing hydrocarbons and generally to deny an overwhelmingly scientifically confirmed fact as “bad science” or contrary to their interpretation of Biblical promises.

Oh, I’m not letting the Obama administration and the Democrats off the hook either. They extended the false and losing efforts in both Iraq and Afghanistan, backed super-corrupt and ineffective leaders in both nations, and perpetuated the myth that our involvement in the region – imposing a form of democracy of a region ripped by extreme factionalism – was beneficial to the locals and ourselves, even as Iraq was cozying up to Iran big time.

Never dealing with the realities of what these people were facing or the depth of this historical animosities (think sectarian violence in Northern Ireland as a recent parallel in the Christian world), the Dems overstepped rationality into the bizarre world of “I hope we are doing the right thing.” They didn’t, and when military conflict began escalating in the region, leadership vaporized and noxious timidity accelerated bad to worse.

How do we feel about what’s going on there? Ask the GOP. “The commercials play on Americans’ well-documented fears in a world grown more chaotic. A recent Associated Press survey found that 53 percent of Americans believed the risk of another terrorist attack inside the country was extremely or very high.” New York Times, October 8^th. We also don’t trust the government to control a potential Ebola outbreak here. So fear is the new GOP mantra, despite the fact that incumbents from both sides have done the wrong thing for a very long time… repeatedly.

“Take a new Republican ad aimed at Representative Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona that warns of terrorists streaming across the Mexican border. ‘Evil forces around the world want to harm Americans every day,’ it says. ‘Their entry into our country? Through Arizona’s backyard.’” NY Times. Really? Terrorists would pick the Mexican border – where all those little “brown Hispanics” are crossing – a heavily patrolled and fortified area with scanners, aircraft, detection equipment are deployed everywhere versus walking across one of the thousands of miles of virtually unguarded Canadian border (where those white “good” people live) that would be a piece of cake?

And it’s not like getting into Canada is that hard, even if you show up at the border without a visa when one would otherwise be necessary. Most can enter pending review of their status. Plus, as a sparsely-populated country with vast land mass, Canada actually wants immigrants. According to the June 6, 2013, National Geographic, “To combat a shortage of skilled labor that has been stifling the country's economic growth since the 1970s, Canada has adopted one of the most open immigration policies in the world. As of 2010, the foreign-born population makes up 21.3 percent of the country's total population.

“On April 1 [2013], the already immigration-friendly country launched a Start-up Visa Program in an effort to attract highly skilled foreign entrepreneurs. Immigrants with funding from Canadian venture capital firms or investment groups for a start-up business will be eligible for immediate permanent residency. If the new business fails, the entrepreneur will not be subject to deportation.”

Stupid finger-pointing by U.S. politicians desperately short on facts, living in a world where intelligence and education are frequently decried as useless elitism (the brightest have left politics to dominate Wall Street… a really bad use of brainpower, it seems), where polls lead politicians and not the reverse, where everyone in elected office has contributed to a fiscally draining failure to appreciate how easy it is to create really horrible long-term problems through vapid, slogan-driven, polarizing politics.

We need leadership, decisive action and initiative based on intelligent factual analysis. What we have instead is insipid finger pointing, destructive and polarizing slogans and not the slightest hint that the “solutions” promulgated by those seeking office would actually make the world better and Americans safer. Fear-mongering with toxic “solutions” should be a prosecutable war crime!

I’m Peter Dekom, and the aggregation of American missteps with the campaign promises of additional missteps to follow are nothing short of outrageous.