Life During War Time

I admit that I'm no closer to being able to figure out people and war than I was when I was a little kid.  With that in mind, let's have a look at what is going on in the world.

Is democracy a universally good idea?  There seems to be only one correct American response: yes.  I'm not real sure that it's working that well for us, and we all had to sit through jr. high social studies, so (theoretically) we're pretty well versed in how it's supposed to work.  Each of us has a responsibility to make sure that things work the way we think they should.  Not that any of us can agree on how things should work.

The United States is going to recognize the rebel forces in Syria if/when Assad falls.  We did a spectacular job of this in Libya.  Now those Libyans are free to hunt each other down.  At least the guy we disliked the most is out of it.  The LA Times points out this morning that we won't be recognizing all of the Syrian rebels, only the ones we think will impose a government that likes us.  Good thinking.

This is so not going to work.  What did we learn from Egypt?  Revolutions are exciting.  Americans love to see them happening elsewhere.  Was it Bertolt Brecht who said that fire is an intermission for the masses?  Maybe we could look at revolutions as a very loud kind of democracy.  For example: we voted to not have George III be our king.  Revolution is a strange thing.  You really can't decide if it worked well until it's been over for awhile and you can see the quality of life of it's people.  In Egypt, they have obviously decided that they need to vote again because they don't like the direction that Morsi is taking.

In Judaism we have a saying: two Jews, three opinions.  This saying could just as easily be applied to our Muslim cousins.  If someone sent me to Syria right now, and asked me to figure out which rebels will be able to form a cohesive government that has parallel values to the US, I would probably go (because I'm a sucker for trying to figure things out) but I probably couldn't find a single battalion of fighters who all agreed about everything.  Our alliances are formed by more than ideology.  If I'm going to go fight a war, I'm going to use my natural allies... people in my family or people I grew up with.  But if you followed us home at night, we'd be sitting around arguing as much as ever.

Remember... when I was a kid in America, we called the Taliban "freedom fighters".  Apparently who the enemy is is very fluid.