Moon Over Washington
Honorable Representative Blumenauer,
I draw your attention to the Salon.com article
here: that lists peculiar goings-on this March at a Senate office building where the Reverend Moon was crowned "King of Peace" by Rep. Davis of Illinois. I do not know if you were present; since your name escaped mention in the article, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and full credit for keeping your head down. Although it was not advertised as such beforehand, this event was a disgrace, and Representative Danny K. Davis, 7th District of Illinois, has not repudiated the events of that evening. This is beyond the pale, and he deserves censuring in the strongest possible terms.
The founding fathers had some pretty specific things to say about royalty and the US Government, starting with "NO!" Time has shown the wisdom of this specific prohibition. Giving the slightest hint of official sanction to the regal pretensions of a religious cult leader, regardless of how much he donates to campaign funds and charitable institutions, is a violation of the spirit and the letter of the Constitution. I urge you in the strongest possible terms to respect the proven wisdom of the founding fathers in this particular case, and censure Rep. Davis for his folly.
Please do not allow our democratic foundations to be eroded by the arrogance of the highest bidder and the weakness of fools.
Patrick S Lasswell
Trivial Pursuit
In 1983 I gave a speech calling for the impeachment of Ronald Reagan using evidence of his perfidy published by the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). In 1984, I went to US Navy Boot Camp. I made the speech and joined the service with equal honest fervor, and resolving those two moral choices has been a profound difficulty for my family for twenty years. In remembrance of Ronald Reagan's passing, I will attempt to resolve this.
The speech was for a public speaking class that I took to round up my grade point because I had been a National Forensics League geek in high school, and had kissed the Blarney Stone as a child. Additionally, public speaking is good for you; it forces you to confront your fears, makes you organize your thoughts in a coherent fashion, and subjects you to evaluation of your stated beliefs. In my case, I had cribbed a bunch of factoids from a NARAL pamphlet calling for Reagan's dismissal and presented them as an oratory to complete the assignment. Something strange happened, though. In a university campus in the United States, criticism of a call to impeach a Republican president was made by otherwise normal students and a member of the faculty!
The simple reality was that although my facts were accurate and my delivery smooth, my argument did not hold up. Reagan had floated trial balloons and changed his position when they got shot down. He did not commit perjury. He did not deliberately mislead the citizens of the United States for personal gain. He was a politician engaged in practicing politics. This was explained to me at some risk by the speakers, most of whom did not actually like Ronald Reagan, but they felt that impeaching him was just over the top. Imagine it, speaking blasphemy like that out loud at a center for higher learning!
Alright, I have to admit that my Alma Mater is the University of Portland, a Catholic school run by the liberal priests of the Order of the Holy Cross (CSC). Those priests allowed the weed of centrism to run rampant through the campus, and even encouraged it by adhering to high standards of ethical education. All the students were required to be exposed to dangerous ideas like, logic, ethics, morality, theology, and philosophy. Those educations, which public universities keep a safe distance from most students, are probably responsible for why I got creamed in the analysis of my speech.
The most galling thing about that analysis, in the middle of what was a pretty humbling semester, was that they were right and I was wrong. More than that, my call for Reagan's impeachment was petty and for trivial faults. Of all the many, many crimes that can be attributed to Ronald Reagan, the worst is one that he would admit guilt for cheerfully. Ronald Reagan trivialized the Left. It was a process they started themselves and have continued with wild abandon since the end of his administration. Ronnie threw their pettiness back in their face and made it stick. While he was confronting the greatest genocidal dictatorship the world has ever known, the Left was calling for his impeachment over trial balloons.
I could never stand to be unimportant. Confronted with the reality that all my efforts on behalf of the Left to accomplish meaningful change were nothing more than meaningless noise, I stepped away from politics. A year of exasperating aimlessness later, I joined the Naval Reserve for a summer job while in college. While in Boot Camp, I found things that mattered and were important. I learned about safety as well as the high price of recklessness and abandon on your fellows when something important is going on.
A lot of people forget that in the 1980's, we really had every reason to believe that at any moment the balloon would go up and that it was not beyond the realm of possibility that the Soviet Union could invade. With immaculate hindsight, defined as knowledge of past events without the possibility of personal sin, the Left today points out that there was never a possibility of the Soviet Union accomplishing a military victory. I suppose that they are trying to return the favor and trivialize Ronald Reagan in retrospect. At the time that Ronald Reagan was working to free the slaves of the Warsaw Pact, the Left was working on ousting him for trivial reasons. At the time, I chose to be part of something important instead of something inane.
It took a long time for me to change my views. I disagreed with Reagan about a lot of things, and still do. I never voted for him or George H.W. Bush. As late as 1988, I was mouthing off about the incompetence of the CIA, until somebody who worked with their real spooks corrected my ignorance. I never attempted to obtain a Top Secret clearance while I was in the Navy, due in no small part to my call for Reagan's impeachment.
I still support the right of women to control their reproduction. I think that many of the Right to Lifers have abandoned the morality of their cause by supporting and engaging in despicable, criminal acts. Opposing that kind of intolerance is vital. In summer 2001 though, I heard a speaker at a Pro-Choice rally call for the ouster of George W. Bush. After the Chief Justice of Supreme Court swore the man in, the reasoning for ousting him was flatly trivial. Since then, this "false" president has used the power of his office to free fifty million slaves, including the most repressed women in the world. I did not walk away from the Left, I just stopped playing Trivial Pursuit.
The Consequences of Falling in Iran
The Islamic Republic is going to fall; the institutional arrogance of a ruling class predicated on divine infallibility is a suicidal failing in the current era. Either the outrage of a populace denied their heritage for decades or acquiring nuclear weapons is going to see the regime undone. Unlike the essentially bloodless demolition of the Ba'athist regime in Iraq, the Mullah's are likely to take a significant portion of the population with them when they go. The bloodiness of this fall will be due to a combination of size, geography, culture, and wealth.
Iran is a much larger country than Iraq, both in area and population. More than three times the area and two and a half times the population of Iraq, there is more area and a greater governance problem inherent in an overthrow. Geography compounds this because the terrain is much more rugged as well as having a more dispersed population. The relatively simple run up the rivers to Baghdad is not a reproducible phenomenon. Simply getting the right people to the right places in time to stop a massacre is much harder than in Iraq. Complicating this is a government that has systematically neglected the infrastructure in favor of terror programs. The area of the Dasht-e Kavir and Dasht-e Lut is supported by one modern road; this desert region is almost the size of Texas. Whoever overthrows the Islamic Republic will have a massive logistics task and consequentially greater logistical vulnerability. This might be mitigated somewhat by fixing the Islamic Republic's attention on militarily irrelevant goals, but depending on the idiocy of you enemy is a certain way to lose. Even with as obliging an enemy as the Mullahs of the Islamic Republic.
Cultural aspects are not something I am prepared to speak to with authority. Personally, I have never had a Persian do me wrong; but I have also never wronged a Persian. There exists a strong cultural tie to revenge that should not be ignored, though. An unknown number of revenge killings will follow any overthrow and loss of authority. I greatly respect the Persian people, but they do tend to carry a grudge. As was seen in the Spanish Civil War, this behavior causes atrocities on all sides and should always be discouraged. Lack of US intervention could exacerbate pointless vindictive behavior all the way around, bringing discredit to any subsequent government.
Compared to
Afghanistan and
Iraq, the
Islamic Republic is relatively wealthy. The GDP per capita in Afghanistan was $700; the Islamic Republic's is $6,800 with more than twice the people. With more than twenty times the money available, the Islamic Republic has been able to hire foreign mercenaries who have shown complete willingness to murder the people of Iran. These mercenaries have no reason to expect good treatment from the Iranian people and this will also result in more and greater atrocities in an overthrow. Once again no US intervention will exacerbate this behavior; lack of an external enemy does the civilian populace no favors because it reduces the available targets.
Every so often I read or hear some idiot talking about how nations should free themselves from dictatorships and tyranny. Apparently there is a widespread delusion that the US won the Revolutionary War without any help. While I take no joy in acknowledging a debt to France, honesty compels me to admit that the US is free because of them. The kind of behavior subsequently shown by those who have liberated themselves is an almost unbroken chain of atrocity and repression. The Reign of Terror in France, the genocidal savagery of the Communists in Russia and China, and the ham-fisted butchery of the Mullah's in Iran are the rule, not the exception.
The "bloodless" fall of the Soviet empire has been cited as an example of how people can make themselves free, but that was after tens of millions had died from brutal repression. Further, today the leading exports of the former Soviet Union are oil, prostitutes, and organized crime. We are starting to see this pattern repeat in Iran with the rise of white slavery there. Exactly why are genocide, slavery, and crime advantageous to war?
With US leadership, the overthrow of the Ba'athist regime in Iraq cost less than twenty thousand lives. Due to the complexities discussed above, Iran would be lucky to only receive an order of magnitude greater suffering; two hundred thousand dead in a US assisted overthrow of the Islamic Republic. Without help, any revolution will likely cost two orders of magnitude more pain; two million lives before the Mullah's rule is ended. This is the likely consequence of the fall of the Islamic Republic and why the free peoples of the world should help the Persians be free.
