When Will We Learn Our Lessons :: Local News and Newspapers

When Will We Learn Our Lessons

June 30, 2008

All the government really needs to know it could have learned in preschool or before. The biggest of those lessons is minding your own business. According to a new CNN story we are preparing for war in Iran now.

CNN: “The Bush administration has launched a “significant escalation” of covert operations in Iran, sending U.S. commandos to spy on the country’s nuclear facilities and undermine the Islamic republic’s government…”

After telling the American people we want to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but we are preparing for war with yet another country. For those a little short on instant geography Iran lies between those two areas we hope to get out of. I can only assume the government failed two of the earliest lessons we teach children, “don’t tell lies” and “mind your own business”.

In failing to learn those lessons we have in fact brought most of our problems on ourselves. I am not say we deserve to be attack, but I do understand why we are hated and therefore attack. Before we allow the government to continue acting on our behalf for reasons too secret to tell us the truth over, the American public needs to ask why do they hate us?

They hate us because we have forgotten the most important lessons of statehood preschool. Imperial over-extension is bad. We taught that lesson to Britain from 1776 to 1783. Now, where we fail to conquer politically and militarily, we use huge corporations to do the dirty work. What we do in our own lands is none of your business, stay out of it unless you want a big fight on your hands, we preached that with the Monroe Doctrine. Being a social bully only works if those we bully can’t bite us back, 9/11 should have taught us that.

Will it take a dirty bomb going off at a crowded high school football game? Does it take the release of a fast acting chemical weapon in a Middle American Shopping mall? Will it be the slower but wider spread of an airborne disease through our airports: plague, some exotic virus, or even just a financially crippling common one like the flu, Rubella or TB? What will it take before we learn to start minding our own business or at least showing the respect other powers deserve? I don’t know, but I do know if we don’t start doing it, we don’t have to worry about what the attack will be, only when and where it will occur.