War Just Gets Dumber and Dumber

On the Middle East

Weapons these days—like the ones now murdering hundreds every day in the Middle East--are so scary that we forget something simple: wars themselves are almost always stupid.

And the skirmish that escalated into mayhem on Sunday, after Israeli troops prohibited Palestinians from approaching the Al-Aqsa mosque to commemorate Ramadan, deserves the biggest dunce cap of all. That’s saying something because I’ve been collecting such chapeaux since I began writing about Israeli/Palestinian violence 43 years ago this May. 

“Palestinians will always rise up against those they view as their oppressors,” I wrote back then, and I’ll bet you, not to mention any other morally conscious human, would have said the same thing were you in my shoes.

True, they were just little red Converse sneakers and they dangled almost alarmingly above the blue linoleum floor of my 5th-grade classroom, where I was sitting on a stool behind my teacher’s lectern, the main perk of being named “editor of the month.” 

In fairness, the  Israeli soldiers may have been caught off guard by the pilgrims, who’ve only been commemorating Ramadan at the mosque for 15 centuries, scant notice for Israel, a backwards place lacking the sort of sophisticated early warning threat technologies that more modern nations enjoy.

Still, as you know (perhaps because the kids you’re now babysitting are quarreling when they should be Zoom schooling), the question of “who started it” isn’t central to anything. What matters is how to stop it. 

As Barack Obama told The New Yorker in 2016, usually Presidential powers are as circumscribed as those of the captain “who decides to steer the ocean liner two degrees north or south so that, ten years from now, suddenly we’re in a very different place than we were.”

Like most Obama aphorisms that’s generally rue, but not right here. Not right now. Because, all malarkey aside, only one person on Earth can stop the carnage with a single word, and he knows it.

His name is Joe Biden.

So why isn’t this President—who promised to make our country a moral leaders once again—forcing both sides to stand down immediately? You know he can because the U.S. gives more money to Israel than it does to any other country. 

I don’t know the answer, but I do have a theory: You see, I may have blocked the man’s vision in 2002, when I put a giant dunce cap on his head after he helped lead the U.S. into a war with Iraq that historians (who disagree upon almost everything else) rank as one of the most culturally, morally and economically destructive wars ever. 

Wait—NEWS FLASH! From late Wednesday—I’m told President Biden has decided that enough is enough and it’s time to speak out! Let’s tune in as he passes the mic to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken:

“….we urge…a de-escalation of violence…”

Wow, that’s so …not … meaningful.

Editorials that take a stand against war (such courage, those writers have!) yada yada on too long, so it’s time to end this one now by drawing upon something I learned at the commencement of my vast military training: “Fear is the mind killer.” Actually I read that on the first page of “Dune,” a science fiction book I began reading in class on that fifth grade day in May.

And so, OK, I admit I was playing hooky that by hiding the Frank Herbert book under my biology workbook. But does that make the quote any less true?