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Dan Simpson: Of parrots and bad policy
Why does the United States insist on intervening all over the place?
October 8, 2014
By Dan Simpson / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
SEVILLE,
Spain — Before becoming overwhelmed with the joys of Spain, including
drinking cold fino sherry and watching white doves and parrots sporting
around a Christopher Columbus monument with a lion on top, I wanted to
unload a little on the international issues obsessing — distracting —
Americans from the real world surrounding them.
For
better or worse, unless one makes a deliberate effort to avoid them, it
is possible to follow international and U.S. news fairly easily
everywhere these days, even in southern Spain. There is television in
various languages, from Chinese and Russian outlets to the Arabic
al-Jazeera from Qatar. There is also whatever one wants online, sitting
in a cafe in Seville watching the people parade go by.
From
here, at a distance, it becomes clearer what is going on in the United
States, particularly in national security policy. (That’s the subject
our government generally uses to scare us into doing what the military
and most political, industrial and financial leaders want us to do.)
The
most disgusting example right now is the way we are letting our
military, with at least tacit acceptance by President Barack Obama, drag
us into a third war in Iraq. Gen. John Allen, now in charge of U.S.
military action in Iraq, tells us it will take at least a year of U.S.
ministrations to Iraqi government and Kurdish forces before they will be
in a position to retake Mosul from Islamic State forces.
This
apparently will cost U.S. taxpayers billions more, money that will go
to the arms industry as well as for salaries, upkeep and the eventual
rehabilitation of U.S. veterans.
My
first question is, why does the United States care if the Iraqi
government in Baghdad, or the Kurds or any other Middle Eastern party
takes or holds Mosul? This policy is expensive, as well as stupid.
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