Some people are saying that our assination of Bin Laden was not in keeping with American principles. Technically, that is true. If we were treating him as a criminal, he should have been brought to trial before he was judged guilty and excuted. On the other hand:

1. His arrest and trial could have inflamed the Middel East and endanged American lives.

2. He was guilty of murder of Americans by his own public statements of involvement in 911.

3. Our military tribunal system now denies due process to Americans if they are arrested on terrorism charges.

4. We don’t seem to be too bothered by all the people who die from preventable causes such as smoking, drinking, car accidents, legal drug misuse, etc. Adding all those casualties up, we accept the equivalent to a 911 every day and go on about our lives.

5. In the last 100 years, the US has probably killed over a million innocent foreign nationals as “collateral damage” caused by our military actions. These people were guilty of nothing.

6. We know that many innocent people have been executed because of mistakes and deliberate action on the part of prosecutors in our justice system.

7. Corporations have killed many people with bad products and dangerous workspaces. Most of the time they are not even fined for this.

What I am trying to say is that many untimely and unnecessary deaths seem to be an accepted part of our “American system”. Why are these deaths not as important as the death of a mass murderer? I am more concerned that we prevent THESE deaths or punish those responsible than I am worried about Bin Laden not being treated correctly according to our judicial principles.

Well, the people of Eqypt have finally dislodged the US backed dictator Mubarek. What we don’t know is what will happen next. Revolutions have a way to dissolving into chaos. We were very lucky in founding this country. Look what happened in Russia and France.

If the VP Suleiman takes Mubarek’s place, it would be like Emperor Palpatine stepping down so Darth Vader could take over, or as if Bush had stepped down so Cheney could become President. Mubarek may have ordered torture but it was Suleiman who carried out those orders.

Officially, it is the Egyptian military who will take over. The military in Egypt is very popular with the people. They have largely stood back from the confusion and waited to see what would happen. They have a huge stake in the continued support of the US. The US gives them 1.3 billion a year as part of the Camp David Accords.

Israel also has a very big stake in the outcome of the Egyptian situation. Egypt is a very big and powerful ME arab country and it was the first to recognize Israel in the Camp David accords. They were able to reduce their defense expenditures by 60% when they made peace with Israel.

There has been a lot of concern about the Islamic fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood in the future of Egypt. They have been around for 80 years. One of their leaders wrote the book that inspired Al Queda. They may have been involved in the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president who signed the Camp David Accords. One of their leaders has already said that they would cancell the peace treaty with Israel when Mubarek fell. This makes the army very nervous because they know that they would loose if they went up against the Israelies. The MB has said that they would only field 30 candidates for the parliment and would not put up a candidate for president so maybe fears of their power are overblown.

One big problem is the lack of a coherent leadership and infrastructure for the groups that brought Mubarek down. In the past, many revolutions have been hijacked by the most violent and authoritarian factions, even if they were small compared to democratic factions.

We have already waited 3 weeks for the protests to bring dowm Mubarek. We may wait months to find out how all this shakes out. Stay tuned!!

The argument that corporations are entitled to the rights of people under the consitution is a terrible principle and has done great damage to our country and our world.

The recent decision of the Supreme to allow unlimited coporate spending on issue ads prior to elections was absurd.

Who speaks when a corporation “speaks?’ Whose opinions are being expressed? It  will not be the opinion of the workers, customers, shareholders or suppliers.

Who decides when a corporation will “speak?” Obviously, it will be the management. So, will the opinion of the managers be expressed. No, it is illegal for management to use corporate resources to express personal opinions. So, when a corporation “speaks”, it will not be expressing the personal political opinion of any of the people who are involved.

What type of opinion will be expressed by the corporation? Management can be challenged in court if they make decisions that cost the coporation money. They are legally obligated to see that their decisions always attempt to increase the corporate profits. So, therefore, we can assume that the only political opinions to be expressed by a corporation will be to try to influence our political system to increase their profits.

This can only lead to disaster for the citizens of our country.

Did you ever wonder why it was that there was so much over confidence out there? Look at the Iraq war, the financial collapse, etc. And the incompetence of organizations as lampooned in Dilbert is not that far from the truth. We all have stories of the problems of dealing with bureaucrats.

Some time back I read that the most realistic people were the pessimists. The optimists were happier but were less realistic than their confidence in their abilities and situation would suggest. 

Then I read about some research that suggested that people will forgive a leader who is wrong some of the time if only that leader is really confident. Apparently people prefer confidence to competence.

It turns out that groups with confident leaders do better than groups whose leaders are not as confident. So even with incompetence in leadership, those groups prosper.

The Peter’s Principle states that people are promoted to their level of incompetence. Now it has been found that the more you pay someone, the less competently they perform. This would explain Ken Lay who was “unaware of what his subordinates were doing” even with the huge salary that he was drawing.

So, it would seem that though our over-confident leaders may be overpaid and incompetent,  we will still follow them.

We tend to think of nations as having some sort of coherence and permanence although we know that nations come and go in the sweep of history. Something about naming things makes us believe that they have some sort of permanence.

There are new nations in some areas where humanity has lived in cities for thousands of years. A lot of these are in the news lately.

Iraq is home to the ruins of ancient cities such as Babylon and Sumer but it has only existed as a nation since the British drew the boundaries after WWI. India and Pakistan also hold many ancient ruins but it was the British again who drew their boundaries very recently.

Around 1846, a war between the British and Sikh resulted in the consolidation of 22 small states into the State of Jammu and Kashmir. After partition in 1947, Pakistan and India both brought pressure on the State of Jammu and Kashmir to accept being merged with one of the two. Several wars were fought over the Kashmir with the first taking place right after partion and ending with a truce in 1948. The “Line of Control” became the border between the area controlled by Pakistan and the area controlled by India. The Kashmir has continued to be a bone of contention between the two countries down to the present.

The North Western border of Pakistan is the “Durand Line” which was drawn by the British in 1893 as a truce line in a stalemated war with Afghanistan. It divides the territory of the Pushtuns. The tribal people living in that area do not recognize the legitimacy of that border. This is in the headline regularly as fighters pass back and forth across the Durand Line in a batter with Afghan and US forces.

Pakistan was severed from the British India colony in 1949. The “Radcliffe Line” was drawn to separate new Muslim and Hindu countries when the British granted the former colony independence.  The Radcliffe Line runs down the middle of the Punjab territories. Millions of people of Muslim faith moved to Western Punjabe in Muslim Pakistan and millions of people of the Hindu faith move to East Punjab in Indai.

South East Pakistan is the territory of the Sindh people. The ancient Indus valley sites of Moenhodaro and Harappa flourish between 2500 BC and 1500 BC and are hailed as “one of the most developed urban civilizations of the ancient world.

South West Pakistan contains part of the tribal lands of the Balochistanis. They also live in South Eastern Iran and Southern Afghanistan. Like the Kurds, they are a people divided by arbitray borders who desire a homeland and peace. The Pakistan central government has committed many atrocities againt these people with little attention of the Western media. The Iranians have also treated them harshly.

Pakistan is a patch work quilt of  peoples who do not care for  each other and who do not get along. They are divided by ancient hatreds and disputes. And they are connected to their ethnic brothers across arbitrary borders recently drawn by colonial powers and recent wars. This is a recipe for strife.

There are new rivalries as well. Karachi is a port on the coast of the tradional land of the Sindhis. People who came from the Eastern Punjab in what is now India are clashing with Pushtuns who have come down from the NW Tribal territories. I am sure the native Sindh in Karachi appreciate these recent arrivals murdering each other.

There are stories floating around that the US intends to redraw many boundaries in the Middle East including Pakistan.

“The US State Department has rejected suggestions that Washington is planning to redraft the boundaries of the greater Middle East, including Pakistan, along ethnic and religious lines.

The purported plan appeared recently in the US Armed Forces Journal along with two maps showing the new boundaries.

The article, by Ralph Peters, was the work of an individual and did not reflect the views of the US government, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.”

The articles suggests that the NW tribal territories be shifted to Afghanistan and that Balochistan region of S Pakistan be combined with other Balochistani regions in Afghanistan and Iran to create a Balochistani autonomous homeland. This would leave Pakistan much diminished with just the Western Punjab and the Sindh regions.

I agree in priciple with the author of the article  that:

“International borders are never completely just. But the degree of injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or separate makes an enormous difference — often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war.”

“Accepting that international statecraft has never developed effective tools — short of war — for readjusting faulty borders, a mental effort to grasp the Middle East’s “organic” frontiers nonetheless helps us understand the extent of the difficulties we face and will continue to face. We are dealing with colossal, man-made deformities that will not stop generating hatred and violence until they are corrected. “

Lieutenant-Colonel (retired) Ralph Peters, Blood borders: How a better Middle East would look, Armed Forces Journal (AFJ), June 2006.
Peters’ Article

Discussion of Peters’ Article

Peter’s article is definitely is food for thought but would be very difficult to implement. But without the changes that he discusses, further bloodshed and suffering are inevitable.