US Arming Rebels

Russian M-35There was a somewhat humorous diplomatic incident last month. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the Russian Federation was supplying Syria with new attack helicopters. Not exactly what one would expect an America official to say that was trying to "reset" the United States relationship with Russia—especially as a State Department spokesman admitted that it was inaccurate. 

What Russia was doing, as the United States also does for its client states, was to have a program of repair and refurbishment for arms they had previously sold. There were no new arms being sold.

Of course Hillary Clinton is making a good argument that supplying Syria should not have been done as Syria, as any nation state will do, will use its military against its own citizens if those citizens are in armed rebellion. 

What is it I find humorous about this situation? After all, death from the sky is not funny. 

It seems that the United States is buying these same helicopters from Russia for use by the Afghan government against its own citizens who are also in revolt against their government. 

In addition, the NY Times reports that the United States government is supplying arms to the Syrian Opposition. So it is wrong for Russia to supply their allies, but right for the United States to do the same? While the article points out that the CIA is trying to keep arms from Al Qaida, they are arming the Moslem brotherhood. 

So we fight Moslem extremists in Afghanistan, but give them weapons in Syria. 

Only in America. 

Andy Griffith

Proof Texting

There are several reasons why the Bible seems at times to contradict itself. The most common is when we take a general rule and try to apply it to every situation. It cannot be done. We humans are too varied in our personal situations. Sometimes even a small difference in the exact situations can lead to a different outcome. This is why American case law is so huge. There are millions of people and individual situations can be odd.

There was one case I remember in my very brief “introduction to law” course many years ago. A truck had just had a tire replaced. The truck was going down the road when it swerved to avoid a jaywalker. The truck hit a curb and the wheel flew off, going through a window at a shop. A woman inside had a miscarriage. Who was responsible?

Think of the possibilities. Was the tire defective? Did the worker at the tire shop make a mistake? Was the driver inattentive? The jay walker certainly has a measure of blame. This is what juries do: they assess blame. No written law can answer every contingency.

The infamous phrase "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth" is actually discussing this aspect of the law. It means, at least according to the Jewish sages that interpreted it in the Talmud, that in a legal case the details of what happened, what the damage was, and so on, should be taken into account when determining damages. In Hammurabi's law, from about the same time period as Old Testament law, the social standing of the victim was a determining factor in the monetary penalty. This was not to be allowed in Israel.

Of course this enigmatic phrase was lifted out of context to justify revenge, the exact opposite of what the law intended. Jesus mentioned this false interpretation of the law in Matthew 5.

While there are various anomalies in the Bible, I have found that most of them are statements that are valid in the context in which they are used in the Bible, but not valid outside of that context.
Then these out-of-context verses are strung together to form a doctrine.

I suggest that those who treat the Bible this way follow the advice in these three verses.

And he went away and hanged himself. Matt 27:5

Go, and do thou likewise.Luke 10:37

That thou doest, do quickly. John 13:27

Do not delay! Obey the Bible.

Or maybe, just maybe, work a little harder when interpreting the Bible.

The Pound Is Sinking

A little obsolete as many of the currencies Paul McCarthy sings about are no more-but I think they will return. For the younger reader of this blog, Paul McCarthy was one of the Beatles. 

I have posted this before, but I think it is a good song worth listening to again. 

Russian Motivation Part 3

I was reading an article by Paul Craig Roberts, who was an under-secretary of the treasury during the Reagan regime. (Note that this is a joke, I admired President Reagan. But if we are going to label other countries’ leaders with this epithet it seems only fair to use it for the United States as well.)  Roberts reminded me of another reason that Russia feels threatened by the current geopolitical situation. They feel that the policy of the United States is to encircle the Russian Federation with enemies. Surely that cannot be the policy of the United States? 

At the end of the Soviet Union the United States and Russia had an agreement:

When President Reagan nominated me as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, he told me that we had to restore the US economy, to rescue it from stagflation, in order to bring the full weight of a powerful economy to bear on the Soviet leadership, in order to convince them to negotiate the end of the cold war. Reagan said that there was no reason to live any longer under the threat of nuclear war.

The Reagan administration achieved both goals, only to see these accomplishments discarded by successor administrations. It was Reagan’s own vice president and successor, George Herbert Walker Bush, who first violated the Reagan-Gorbachev understandings by incorporating former constituent parts of the Soviet Empire into NATO and taking Western military bases to the Russian frontier.

The process of surrounding Russia with military bases continued unabated through successor US administrations with various “color revolutions” financed by the US National Endowment for Democracy, regarded by many as a front for the CIA. Washington even attempted to install a Washington-controlled government in Ukraine and did succeed in this effort in former Soviet Georgia, the birthplace of Joseph Stalin.

Put yourself in Putin's place. Putin knows that any agreement he makes with the current president could be overturned by the next. The encirclement of Russia with enemies is a prime example of this. The United States gave its word that NATO would not be expanded into the former Soviet Union or its former satellites. The United States’ word was broken. 

Serbia and Russia were promised that Serbian minorities in Kosovo would be respected and that Kosovo would not become independent. The Serbian minority was expelled by the Moslems and Kosovo is independent in every way that matters, except in name only, and that is just a matter of time. 

Our foreign policy seems to be “Let’s threaten the two countries with the most nuclear weapons and lead us into war.” Yet the stupidity of this policy is seldom mentioned in polite company—certainly not by Faux News and PMSNBC. 

What Russia is doing in the Middle East is exactly what the United States is doing, protecting their allies. Why would we expect anything else from any nation state?