The Really Thin Red Line

I haven’t had anything to say about Syria in a long time, mainly because it’s been too upsetting, and like many in the West, I just wanted to think about other things. But that is a luxury we may no longer be able to afford.

President Obama said a while ago that the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons would represent a “red line” that if crossed, would trigger a U.S. response, though it’s never been made quite clear what that is. It would seem, however, that there is much more evidence of the use of chemical weapons in Syria than there was for the presence of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein, which triggered our launch of the Iraq war.

It’s almost impossible to count the number of horses that have left the barn here. Red lines are fine as far as they go – but what has already happened south of that line? The use of bombs and heavy artillery on civilian populations, Hundreds of thousands killed, atrocities too numerous and horrible to detail, and more than 1.5 million refugees fleeing to surrounding countries – a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions.

So the options that remain are bad ones. The Pentagon has a set of responses ready to be implemented, primarily for the securing of the chemical weapons – steps which may soon be necessary. And the talk of arming the rebels against the Assad regime continues. The European Union has the go-ahead to do so, but it’s a faint green light indeed: it’s simply a failure of European nations to agree on anything, so the current ban on such supplying of weapons will simply expire.

The West worries about the supplied weapons falling into the wrong hands. But it may be a challenge to find the right ones. Those who eventually come to power in Syria will probably not be our friends. The population will never forgive us for failing to come to their aid in their time of need – especially after watching what we did in Libya.

The bottom line is that we are going to be involved in Syria, whether we like it or not – sucked or dragged in kicking and screaming, choose your metaphor. Let us hope and pray that peace talks will eventually succeed and that somebody figures out what to do with the Assad family. But Syria is going to be our problem for a long time to come.

And I’m waiting for someone to talk me out of the idea that it didn’t have to be this way.

Race to the Cellar

It’s astonishing to me how two men with a couple of sharp instruments and a twisted interpretation of Islam could throw a nation of millions into alert mode, but that’s exactly what happened in the U.K. this week.

The two murdered an innocent British soldier in the London district of Woolwich in especially unpleasant fashion. Some officials called them cowards, but they weren’t at all. They remained at the scene of the crime and welcomed documentation of what they had done by people in the area with smartphone cameras, finding a willing audience for their insane ideas.

As if this weren’t enough, the footage (funny how we persist in using antiquated terms for digital information) made its way not only onto the Internet, but onto respected news outlets like the BBC. Pictures of one of the suspects holding a bloody meat cleaver were on the front pages of many newspapers.

We often hear the argument these days that information is now democratized, that we’re all reporters, and that we don’t need the traditional “big brother” media outlets to get out the news. In desperate search of ears and eyeballs, the media succumb to this intense pressure to share every single detail of a crime perpetrated by those seeking maximum distribution of it, partly on the grounds that such distribution will happen anyway.

Just to mix metaphors – and I’ve used this one before – we are like 12-year-olds sitting around a campfire in the dark, trying to one-up each other with a more shocking ghost story – and there’s nothing more effective than a ghost story that’s true. The result is, we get desensitized to normal levels of horror, and the bar is raised – or lowered, depending on your point of view.

I hope that some day, as we all get used to playing with our new electronic toys, that editors will be appreciated again. Freedom of speech is precious – but so is the freedom not to speak – or to deny full voice to an infinitesimal minority of individuals whose only goal is to scare us to death.

When Will We Ever Learn?

What’s wrong with me? What chip did I not come with?

Yesterday, London witnessed a horrible crime. Two crazies, armed with a machete and a knife, murdered a 25-year-old British soldier outside the Woolwich barracks of an artillery unit.  Seeing passersby with smart phone cameras, one of the suspects mouthed threats, held up the bloody machete and shouted something about Allah before armed police shot and wounded the two.

A grisly and shocking incident by anyone’s standards, to be sure. But some in the UK are calling it the worst incident of terrorism in the city since the bombings of 2005. The graphic footage is all over TV and the Internet; Downing Street went into crisis mode, with Prime Minister David Cameron cutting short his trip to France to meet with a security committee. Reporters are asking folks if they feel safe walking the streets. Has the new era of “lone wolf attacks” begun? the columns ask.

I don’t mean to minimize this whole thing, but these guys didn’t crash a plane into a building, release a lethal chemical agent, or even blow up a bomb full of ball bearings. They used a machete -- can’t get much lower-tech than that. And one person died – not 10, not hundreds, not thousands -- one.

Is there a chance that this has been overblown in some way? What exactly is wrong with this picture?

For one thing, the crazies got exactly what they wanted: PUBLICITY.  Some media – even respected outlets -- have been showing this graphic footage repeatedly. There was little regard for the victim of this crime, whose family could as easily have seen the whole thing on TV or the Internet before being formally notified of the death of their loved one. There used to be conventions about self-censorship. Not anymore. Some have called what was put on-screen to be just short of a live execution. I bet that day isn’t very far off.

Overnight, there were attacks on mosques. Today there are reports that the perpetrators were “known to security services,” so there’s sure to be am investigation into who dropped the ball. Two additional people have been arrested for alleged conspiracy.

I can’t help thinking there’s a rodeo we should have been to already, and a movie we should have seen before. Is there something that can be done differently the next time? We’d all better figure out what that is, and soon.

Obama's Rough Patch

So we thought that perhaps once President Obama’s second term began, Congressional factions would have little choice but to concentrate on getting stuff done. What were we thinking?

Opponents of the President are basking in the steam from the boiling pot, with no fewer than three scandals brewing. There’s the security failure at Benghazi; the selective targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRS; and the Justice Department’s acquisition of AP phone records to track down a leak.

The Benghazi issue has been characterized by the administration as a “sideshow.” Not a good word choice, as it involves an apparent failure that led to the deaths of four people, including a U.S. ambassador. Is the White House itself at fault? So far, probably not, but it’s generally agreed that a ball was dropped – the question is, who dropped it? Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, because of her failure to read cables asking for more security for diplomatic personnel in Banghazi? She wouldn’t be the first CEO to have glossed over a communication. And I bet all her Republican critics in Congress have read all the bills they vote on, right? Still, the administration failed to get ahead of this problem, and at the very least, it turned into an unnecessary PR crisis.

The IRS? Its selective targeting of Tea Party groups is inexcusable, and this scandal comes at a really bad time, as the implementation of Obamacare is supposed to come with the agency’s oversight of the program. The only thing that mitigates it,  IMHO, is that some of these Tea Party groups were seeking tax-exempt status, and the IRS was trying to dig into whether that was really appropriate. IMHO again, if we had a simple, clear and sensible tax code, this problem wouldn’t exist in the first place, but that, as they say, is a separate animal.

The least important of these scandals for the average American seems to be the DOJ’s acquisition of the AP’s phone records, supposedly because it “only” involves the media. Many forget that the records will lead authorities to government officials who had confidential contact with reporters, and going forward, officials may be spooked about ever talking to a reporter again. Are we living in East Germany? If we can’t have a free press doing its job, we may not have a democracy, either.

At the bottom, or the top, if you prefer, of the AP thing is Attorney General Eric Holder. IMHO once more, if anyone in the Obama administration should be falling on his sword, it’s this guy. We’ve already been through Fast and Furious with his non-answers. President Obama would save himself a lot of grief by showing Holder the door as soon as possible.

Impeachment? Well, I’ve seen this movie before, so I’m going to take my popcorn and go home.

Fascination with the Monsters Among Us

I think it’s very clear to most of us by now that most people are fine human beings – but not all. And often, we think they’re the former, and they turn out to be the latter. Now we have a school bus driver from Cleveland, Ariel Castro, accused of kidnapping and holding three women in bondage for 10 years. This is the lead international story, and every day, new horrors surface.

How many of us are shaking our heads in disbelief, calling for the eternal torture of the alleged perpetrator, while lapping up every “breaking news” detail that’s breathlessly delivered to us by anchors and reporters, some of them shaking their own heads? How much is a part of us enjoying this story? Do you think maybe the news media folks know this?

That said, I wonder if devoting 45 minutes of every hour to this isn’t a bit much. Sometimes, I think the news producers aren’t good at gauging when most of us yearn to change the channel and see something else. Maybe it’s just that I and some of the rest of you have seen this movie already: “Manhunter” or “Silence of the Lambs.” How long do you think it will be before the Cleveland movie comes out?

I think the Stockholm Syndrome has been covered well past the point of exhaustion. If there is a live topic here, though, I think it’s about privacy. Where is the bright line between minding one’s own business and intervening where it might save victims many years of grief? When do we pick up the phone and call 911 to report something suspicious, or is that just paranoid meddling? In a world where privacy is a vanishing commodity, where does our duty to respect it end and our duty to help another human being begin? If we help, are we heroes? And if we don’t, are we, in some small measure, accessories?

These questions may make us squirm a lot more than the story itself does.