It's not surprising but it is disturbing. It's one thing to predict an escalating conflict, it's another to see it happen. Part of the instigators of hatred, suspicion and warmongering, are the media. Today on CNN's website, this headline was in the 'top stories' column.
Iran anti-Israel remarks slammed
TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- Several world capitals have condemned Iran's leader for saying Israel should be "wiped off the map," and Israel's vice premier has called for Tehran to be expelled from the United Nations.
During a meeting with protesting students at Iran's Interior Ministry, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad quoted a remark from Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of Iran's Islamic revolution, that Israel "must be wiped out from the map of the world."
The president then said: "And God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism," according to a quote published by Iran's state news outlet, the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA).
The remarks by Ahmadinejad on Wednesday coincided with a month-long protest against Israel called "World Without Zionism" and with the approach of Jerusalem Day.
Israel reacted to the remarks strongly by calling for U.N. action against Tehran.
"Iran is no longer just a threat to Israel. Iran is a global threat, and the international community must act against the leader of a country who calls for the destruction of another member state of the United Nations," Israel's ambassador to the U.N. Dan Gillerman said.
While, to a point, I agree that some information needs to be made clear to the public (such as the exact casualty rate and spread of a dangerous disease), not all information should be disseminated so freely. Everyone knows, for example, that gossip and slander should not be encouraged. Why, because it encourages resentment. If someone insults you behind your back, and another person tells you what was said, then grudges are formed, and alliances forged against 'enemies', when perhaps they could have been avoided. Why do reporters provide us with articles like the one above: they want to stir tensions. They want to incite conflict. And their audiences, entertained daily by video games (there is a real game where black ops from the US infiltrate a Iranian military installation (a Nuclear Plant) and try to destroy it) action movies, and the media get populations baying for blood.
Here in an article in The New York Times that tacitly supports war, when most enlightened creatures know that war is, for all but a tiny fraction of society, lose/lose.
2,000 Dead, in Context
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Published: October 27, 2005
Valletta, Malta
AS the aggregate number of American military fatalities in Iraq has crept up over the past 13 months - from 1,000 to 1,500 dead, and now to 2,000 - public support for the war has commensurately declined. With the nightly ghoulish news of improvised explosives and suicide bombers, Americans perhaps do not appreciate that the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the effort to establish a democratic government in Iraq have been accomplished at relatively moderate cost - two-thirds of the civilian fatalities incurred four years ago on the first day of the war against terrorism.
Comparative historical arguments, too, are not much welcome in making sense of the tragic military deaths - any more than citing the tens of thousands of Americans who perish in traffic accidents each year. And few care to hear that the penultimate battles of a war are often the costliest - like the terrible summer of 1864 that nearly ruined the Army of the Potomac and almost ushered in a Copperhead government eager to stop at any cost the Civil War, without either ending slavery or restoring the Union. The battle for Okinawa was an abject bloodbath that took more than 50,000 American casualties, yet that campaign officially ended less than six weeks before Nagasaki and the Japanese surrender.
Compared with Iraq, America lost almost 17 times more dead in Korea, and 29 times more again in Vietnam - in neither case defeating our enemies nor establishing democracy in a communist north.
Contemporary critics understandably lament our fourth year of war since Sept. 11 in terms of not achieving a victory like World War II in a similar stretch of time. But that is to forget the horrendous nature of such comparison when we remember that America lost 400,000 dead overseas at a time when the country was about half its present size.
There is a variety of explanations why the carnage of history seems to bring today's public little comfort or perspective about the comparatively moderate costs of Iraq. First, Americans, like most democratic people, can endure fatalities if they believe they come in the pursuit of victory, during a war against an aggressor with a definite beginning and end. That's why most polls found that about three-quarters of the American people approved of the invasion upon the fall of the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad in April 2003.
The public's anguish for the fewer than 150 lost during that campaign was counterbalanced by the apparently easy victory and the visible signs of enemy capitulation. But between the first 200 fatalities and the 2,000th, a third of those favoring the war changed their minds, now writing off Iraq as a mistake. Perhaps we could summarize this radical transformation as, "I was for my easy removal of Saddam, but not for your bungled and costly postwar reconstruction."
Part of the explanation is that, like all wars against amorphous insurgencies, the current struggle requires almost constant explanation by the government to show how and why troops are fighting in a necessary cause - and for the nation's long-term security interests. Unless official spokesmen can continually connect the terrible sacrifices of our youth with the need to establish a consensual government in Iraq that might help to end the old pathology of the Middle East, in which autocracies spawn parasitic anti-Western terrorists, then the TV screen's images of blown-up American troops become the dominant narrative. The Bush administration, of course, did not help itself by having put forth weapons of mass destruction as the primary reason for the invasion - when the Senate, in bipartisan fashion, had previously authorized the war on a score of other sensible writs.
Yet castigating a sitting president for incurring such losses in even a victorious or worthy cause is hardly new. World War I and its aftermath destroyed Woodrow Wilson.
I'm not going to quote any more of this article. The point is, he is saying, compared to other wars, not many have died in this one. It's a very dangerous and stupid point to make. For one thing, we are in the post-nuclear weapons world. Nuclear bombs were used to end off the Second World War. Now we have the country who dropped those bombs acting very aggressively elsewhere, inciting militarisation everywhere, and doing so in the name of 'Terrorism'. Who, please tell me, are terrorising the world? Which country poses a threat to all other countries?
And the argument that 'few' have died in this war, neglects to remember that one day there will be a successful counterattack, a real wolf (instead of the WMD wolfs America insists are there)and the cost to humanity will be incalculable. Meanwhile writers like this one, are saying, "You know, let's put war into context. In that one more died than in this one. So this one is really okay."
In a few years we will hopefully have paper to read the sort of mad thoughts that produced the coming catastrophes.
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