"Just Like Ringing a Bell..."
or, "You Like That...!?!"
In the latest news between warring countries, Ukrainian Airline Boeing 737-800 "went down" at a Tehran airport reportedly killing all 176 passengers and crew aboard.
No word yet from military strategist Bret Stephens or the NYT on how this makes America -- and Israel -- safer tomorrow...
USA! USA! USA!
"Pray for Peace, people everywhere...
Do you see what I see?
Do you hear what I hear?
Do you know what I know?
A child, a child, sleeping in the night,
He will bring us goodness and light.
He will bring us goodness and light."
God Bless all of the families -- American, Israeli and otherwise -- who are mourning their own sons and daughters tonight. May we never forget, or be misled into forgetting, our shared humanity with other human beings in this world, in order to artificially advance the monetary and security interests of ... "our own". What a loss.Watching CNN, I howl in frustration when a reporter states that in July 1988 the United States Navy warship Vincennes “accidentally” shot down Iran Air 655, a civilian passenger plane, and that nine months later, General Suleimani arranged the pipe-bombing in Washington of a vehicle driven by the wife of the Vincennes’s commander, Capt. William C. Rogers III. (She survived the blast.)The CNN reporter implies that this demonstrates how volatile and dangerous General Suleimani was. But the F.B.I. was unable to establish that the bombing of the Rogers vehicle was an act of Iranian terrorism; the case remains open. And the attack on Iran Air 655 by the Vincennes wasn’t, in any meaningful sense, accidental — and it killed 290 people, 66 of them children.
In 1988 I traveled to Iran for the funerals of those 290 civilians. Their bodies had been fished from the water of the Persian Gulf and brought home for burial. My editor called me as I left for Tehran, asking me to consider the possibility that Iran shot down the plane itself, since she thought it odd that the recovered bodies were unclothed. “Did they put naked corpses in that plane before they shot it down?” she asked.
She could be forgiven for not knowing the relevant physics: Clothing would be torn from the passenger’s bodies as the exploding plane plummeted from the sky into the sea. It was harder to forgive her cultural unawareness: A state as obsessed with modesty as Iran was — to the extent of covering every hair on a woman’s head and every male kneecap — would never consider undressing bodies before blowing them up.
Ignorance surrounded — and still surrounds — that tragedy. In the immediate aftermath of the downing of Iran Air 655, the United States military’s prevarications came thick and fast: The plane wasn’t in the civilian air corridor. (It was.) It didn’t have its transponder turned on. (It did.) It was descending toward the Vincennes. (It wasn’t.)
The truth gradually came out in the course of the Navy’s own inquiries and in later investigative reports that revealed a pattern of reckless aggression by the Vincennes captain, beginning a month earlier. David Carlson, the commanding officer of the frigate Sides, which was also deployed then in the gulf, called the downing of the Iranian airliner “the horrifying climax” of that aggressiveness. Just before firing at the plane, Captain Rogers had provoked Iranian gunboats and then followed them into Iran’s territorial waters.
Yet the United States later decorated Captain Rogers “for exceptionally meritorious conduct” as commander of the Vincennes during that time. The citation made no mention of the downing of Iran Air 655. How would Americans feel if Iran pinned a medal on a man who killed 290 American civilians?~ Geraldine Brooks, retired journalist.
(If we respect life, it will show in our own American society. If we teach our children that killing others makes us stronger, we will see more Sandy Hooks and Stoneman Douglases in the future here at home. Children learn what they are taught, through example. Does might make right, or do our smartest minds "win" in life? Mr. Stephens and those who advocate war, violence and foreign assassinations for solving problems, have yet to link domestic gun violence at home with heroic gun violence abroad... but it's all connected in the great Circle of Life, when some begin to conclude, in this variation or that, that Life is Cheap.)
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