U.S. must be wary of chain reactions
but that's not the tag, that's the title. Since this isn't connected to anything, there is no tag. So here's the story; I was innnocently reading the newspaper when this article ambushed me, tearing off its editorial disguise and transforming into a beautiful impact. I struggled to extricate myself, to run away and lose myself in other news, but this article just kept plaintively calling me, threatening to impale me on its compacted paranoia unless I cut it into a card. I told myself no, I can't! I don't debate! I can't use this for anything. . . but I had to give in, and here it is, for the benifit of all you craazy readers out there (no? no one? oh well.) Pity me, an expatriate from the land of c-x debate. This proves that debate is similar to cutting oneself or being on drugs--extended pain gives you some adrenaline, some endorphins, cuts boredom, takes over your entire life, and withdrawal can be rough. Why are there cockroaches all of my body?
Holbrooke 2006 [Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. "U.S. must be wary of chain reactions" The Burlington Free Press, 8/11/2006]
Two full-blown crisis, in Lebanon and Iraq, are merging into a single emergeny. A chain reaction could spread quickly almost anywhere between Cairo and Bombay.
Turkey is talking openly of invading northern Iraq to deal with Kurdish terorists based there. Syria could easily be pulled into the war in southern Lebanon. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are under pressure from jihadists to support Hexbollah, even though the governments in Cairo and Riyadh hate that organization. Afghanistan accues Pakistan of giving shelter to al-Qaida and the Taliban; there is constand fighting on both sides of that border. NATO's own war in Afghanistan is not going well. India talks of taking punitive action against Pakistan for allegedly being behind the Bombay Bombings. Uzbekistan is a repressive dictatorship with a growing Islamic resistance.
The only beeficiaries of this chaos are Iran, Hezbollah, al-Qaida and the Iraqi shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr, who last week ehld the largest anti-American, anti-Israeli demonstration in the world in the very heart of Baghdad, even as 6,000 additional U.S. troops were rushing into the city to "prevent" a civil war that has already begun.
This combination of combustible elements poses the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, history's only nuclear superpoewr confrontation. The Cuba crisis, although immensely dangerous, was comparatively simple: It came down to two leaders and no war. In 13 days of brilliant diplomacy, John F. Kennedy induced Nikita Khrushchev to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba.
Kennedy was deeply influenced by barara Tuchman's classic, "The Guns of August," which recounted how a seemingly isolated event 92 summers ago -- an assassination in Sarjevo by a Serb terrorist -- set off a chain reaction that led in just a few weeks to World War I. There are vast differences between that August and this one. But Tuchman ended her book with a sentence that resonates in this summer of crisis: "The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit."
Preventing just such a trap must be the highest priority of American policy.
it continues, but that's the best part.
Holbrooke 2006 [Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. "U.S. must be wary of chain reactions" The Burlington Free Press, 8/11/2006]
Two full-blown crisis, in Lebanon and Iraq, are merging into a single emergeny. A chain reaction could spread quickly almost anywhere between Cairo and Bombay.
Turkey is talking openly of invading northern Iraq to deal with Kurdish terorists based there. Syria could easily be pulled into the war in southern Lebanon. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are under pressure from jihadists to support Hexbollah, even though the governments in Cairo and Riyadh hate that organization. Afghanistan accues Pakistan of giving shelter to al-Qaida and the Taliban; there is constand fighting on both sides of that border. NATO's own war in Afghanistan is not going well. India talks of taking punitive action against Pakistan for allegedly being behind the Bombay Bombings. Uzbekistan is a repressive dictatorship with a growing Islamic resistance.
The only beeficiaries of this chaos are Iran, Hezbollah, al-Qaida and the Iraqi shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr, who last week ehld the largest anti-American, anti-Israeli demonstration in the world in the very heart of Baghdad, even as 6,000 additional U.S. troops were rushing into the city to "prevent" a civil war that has already begun.
This combination of combustible elements poses the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, history's only nuclear superpoewr confrontation. The Cuba crisis, although immensely dangerous, was comparatively simple: It came down to two leaders and no war. In 13 days of brilliant diplomacy, John F. Kennedy induced Nikita Khrushchev to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba.
Kennedy was deeply influenced by barara Tuchman's classic, "The Guns of August," which recounted how a seemingly isolated event 92 summers ago -- an assassination in Sarjevo by a Serb terrorist -- set off a chain reaction that led in just a few weeks to World War I. There are vast differences between that August and this one. But Tuchman ended her book with a sentence that resonates in this summer of crisis: "The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit."
Preventing just such a trap must be the highest priority of American policy.
it continues, but that's the best part.