Category: HISTORY

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8:46 AM

     The sky was blue, as only fall days seem to be able to produce ,that special azure color of deep blue and cyan created by low humidity and cool temperatures.   A day , like a holiday, where everything moves slowly and breathing seems measured and special.  In an unusual weather pattern,  essentially the entire nation was treated to the same crystal clear palate sky that allowed one to see for miles and miles without the slightest hint or wisp of cloud, almost as if the morning was meant to unveil a special appreciation for beauty and organic quality of life itself.  Nothing out of the ordinary, yet in its special clarity, extraordinary.   Like a movie, too perfect, too visible, too quiet, too ephemeral.

     At 8:46 am  a searing sound like screeching bird caused people to look up and note a low flying object too big to be so low, too fast to be corrective, too aimed to be accidental, smash directly into the upper floors of the north tower of the World Trade Center with a deafening smack and an immediate fireball.  Just like that, the beautiful morning dissolved in a nightmare of progressive horror.  Was it a commuter plane? – too big. Was it an accident? – too unavoidable.

     At 9:03 am the mystery was solved – a second direct hit on the south tower of the World Trade Center – a second deafening impact, a second fireball.  This was no accident, no stunt , no movie.  This was real, this was terror, and this, changed us forever.

     19 committed men, supported by a death cult of abject murderers, had trained and practiced for years to direct their hate, to funnel their religious perversion, , to perform with precision the ultimate suicidal martyrdom of hijacking and flying passenger jet planes into special targets with the single solitary purpose, the decapitation of  western civilization.   In their hatred was to be consumed that morning the lives of 246 innocent crew and passengers of 4 planes, 125 innocent workers at the Pentagon, 2,606 innocent inhabitants and rescue workers of the World Trade Center, and over 6000 injuries.   Deaths proceeded with special heroism found in so many who awoke that day average citizens with no sense of their impending fate or special purpose.  The firemen and police heading to certain death to attempt to rescue people in collapsing buildings, the doomed leaps of people from the top floors to the streets below rather than accept the death of asphyxiation and fire, and the travelers of flight 93 who purposefully wrestled their plane into the ground in Shanksville, Pennsylvania rather than allow their hijackers to martyr themselves on the citadels of liberty and freedom, the US Capitol or the White House.  The beautiful morning shattered in a maelstrom of hate, destruction, and death.

     Nine years later, the day has become a hazy shell of memory with the visual still acute, but the raw emotions harder to feel.  We almost avert our eyes from the memory, so as not to deflect our advancing and progressive distortion of the sequelae.  The funereal mood and a sense of the end of times.  The security clampdown. The whole country bound together in righteous anger and purpose – “united we stand”.  The destruction of the Afghan Taliban Tyranny.  The escape of the chief designer and murderer Bin Laden.  The death of Daniel  Pearl.  The expansion of the War on Terror aims into Iraq. The overwhelming blitz on the Iraqi dictatorship and its fall.  The missing weapons of mass destruction.  The capture of Saddam. The deaths of Uday and Qusay.  The capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  The attempt to democratize the Iraqi nation.  The support of the troops, but not their war aims.  Abu Ghraib.  Waterboarding. The loss of of over 4000 more Americans in the conflict. The internecine struggles in Iraq. The pride of successful elections. The horrors of IED’s. The vicious fight for upper hand in Iraq. The bombing of the Grand Mosque. The Mahdi army. The Anbar awakening.  The Surge and its success. The return of the Taliban.  The tapes of Bin Laden.  The return of the American isolationist impulse. 

     The circle of history thus complete with lessons only partially learned, missions partially completed, and murderers partially vindicated in their theories of the tired lack of resolve of the western society. 

     At 846am, on a clear day, innocence is blotted from the morning sun, and the tides of fate are loosed on an unknowing and conflicted people.


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What Just Happened?

     The most important component in the determination of the trends of an historical event is the element of time. It is also the most difficult to tolerate, as often the results of significant investments in blood and treasure seem without reward, without conclusive outcome, in a time span that allows satisfactory predictability for the people who have made the investment. The study of history cautions all to not make snap judgements about cause and effect, as it is often decades before the true denouement is known. Despite the recognized complexity of the bends of history, our people and leaders continue to be ignorant of the rationale of proceeding with action with historical grounding, and having the patience to recognize the context of any outcome.

     President Obama delivered a speech the other night declaring the end of the United States combat participation in the historical event known as the Iraq War.  He made many historical mis-interpretations, as he has been apt to do.  He declared an end to the conflict he stated started with the incursion of US forces into Iraq in March of 2003, but the historical projection is obviously a much larger palette with the initial invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi forces in August, 1990, followed by the forcible expulsion of the Iraqi army from Kuwait  by US and allied forces, the subsequent ceasefire, the maintenance of an aggressive no fly zone for the next 12 years, 17 UN declarations ignored by Iraq as a means to achieve permanent resolution of the armed conflict and the eventual expulsion of the dictator in 2003.  That 12 year process was followed by a bloody occupation that extended until the successful “surge” of 2007, that finally achieved a relative stasis allowing for the removal of combat forces and the moment for President Obama’s declaration.  The separation of events has no historical significance and therefore no ability to predict the longer term consequences.  

     Examples for this are weaved throughout history:

     Great Britain suffered a horrific defeat at the hands of the American  revolutionaries in the War of Rebellion of 1775-1783.  It resulted in the loss of the American colonies and access to the majority of the massive American continent and its natural resources.  The result would seem obvious; yet, by freeing the British Empire of its North American heartache, it allowed more directed focus on its eternal enemy France and with the battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815,  development of the the British Commonwealth, making Great Britain the richest and most powerful  nation on earth for over a hundred years.

     The crushing defeats by Germany and Japan in 1945 seemed to signal the apocalypse for those countries.  Ironically it freed them of the national tendencies of subservience that allowed them within 20 years to restore their position in the world to mighty economic powers that persist to this day .

     The United States accepted the premise of the “domino” theory in defending against the loss of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to the perceived Comintern communist threat represented by North Vietnam.  Historical perspective implies that this interpretation was a transient western slant on a thousand year old conflict resulting in the inevitable consequence of  a single Vietnamese nation, a nation that now holds the United States as its largest trading partner and holds joint military exercises with the US against its “eternal ” enemy, China.

     As painful as it is, we are going to have to show patience to understand the effects of the interactions of the last 20 years in Iraq to determine what the positive or negative consequences will be.  In historical perspectives, “What Just Happened?” is a journey, not a race of understanding, and our future interventions by our country and leaders will be better served by recognizing that eternal truth.

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The Match Is Lit, and The World Changes Forever

     On September 1, 1939, the inevitable and the inconceivable met on the fields of Poland at dawn, and the world shuddered.  On the premise of a trumped up staged border incident the armed forces of Germany hurled their might into the antiquated defenses of the Republic of Poland, bringing to birth the cataclysm of World War II.  The predictability of the attack was foreordained by the ceaseless pattern of intimidation and provocation by the dictator Hitler throughout the 1930’s against the tired Great War weary nations of Europe occurring in a straight line from re-militarization, the restoration of the Ruhr, the Anschluss into Austria, the destruction of the Czech nation and absorption of the Sudetenland in a process that brought the word “appeasement” into the diplomatic vernacular.  Appeasement was conceptualized as the mature alternative to war in which  identified grievances were rationalized and negotiated rather than fought over by governments.  The underlying flaw of appeasement and the fatal illogic of appeasers was that only one side admitted flaws and only one sides grievances were appeased, in a process that allowed time for the strength of the dictator to grow to position him to  achieve his ultimate aim.   His aim was true on September 1 – the world was introduced to the concept of “Blitzkrieg” , the rapid and mechanized coordination of land and air forces that rapidly overwhelmed brave Polish forces that relied on outdated structures of fixed defenses and cavalry charges. By September 17th, the Polish forces had retreated to defensible redoubts in Southeast Poland only to find that their erstwhile allies, the Soviet Union, had secretly entered into a pact with Hitler to carve up Poland, and massively attacked from the east, crushing the the Poles in a vice and rapidly rolling up the nation out of existence as an independent nation for the next 50 years.

     By October 5th, the general struggle for the polish nation was over and the feasting on the remains by the totalitarian states was commenced.  The world saw appeasement for what it was, a delusional tea room exercise and girded itself for the six year death struggle that had commenced.  It has been assumed by most that the lesson of dealing with belligerent dictators was forever codified by the resultant investment of 60 million deaths  in the cataclysm of the second world war conflict, but we continue to argue today under similar scenarios as to whether early aggressive action or extended commitments to “understand” the grievances of the beligerents  offers a more rational course.  Our current President echoes previous leaders who felt that the key to inoculating against future violence is to “understand”  and “apologize” for the perceived affronts of democracies against aggrieved intolerants, and find avenues to address their concerns that assuage them.  The fascinating lesson of history remains that the agenda of all intolerants is not their own temporary disadvantaged state, but rather their overwhelming need to determine in final terms who is right, who is stronger, who will triumph.  Unfortunately democracies continue the pattern of airing their weakness in public and forcing the test of the tyrants onto a timetable best suited for the tyrant.  So far, the enlightened side has managed to ultimately win, at great cost.  Are you willing to bet this outcome is inevitable, regardless of the adversary?

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Are Big Ideas A Thing of the Past?

     Michael Barone has a thoughtful essay on our ability to conceive and create significant construction projects in today’s world.  He bemoans a smaller bridge project in Washington DC that has been going on for 42 months with no end in sight. He compares it to the building of the Pentagon in the forties that as the largest building in the world at the time was conceived,constructed, and opened in less than three years.  The number of similar current “big idea” morasses clumsily produced by the public sector brings forth the premise that we have lost the ability to conceive of the planning, coordination, and logistics that are required to bring big projects to fruition in a time frame that any individual would recognize as an achievement in their lifetimes.  The “Big Dig” in Boston was an effort to reduce traffic congestion over a 3.5 mile stretch of central Boston conceived in the 1980’s, begun in 1991, opened in 2006 ,and an estimated 22 billion dollars later still being shaped by shoddy construction, leaks, ceiling collapses, and minimal improvement in traffic congestion.  The “Deep Tunnel” project in Milwaukee invested billions and two decades in an effort to capture and treatment water runoff before it reached Lake Michigan – it has resulted in multiple sewage back-ups into homes with any steady rain and frequent needs to dump millions of gallons of  raw sewage into Lake Michigan – not exactly the vision of its idealistic planners.  The World Trade Center catastrophe stimulated the plans for a monumental restoration of the subway center, the skyscrapers, and a fitting memorial, all of which languish 9 years later in a state of paralysis and delay, with no conceived process for showing the necessary will to initiate and complete the project.

     Have we lost the ability to work and sacrifice together as a nation to achieve the significant projects that benefit us all in order to focus only on our own security and gratification?  Our government has become wholly interested in its control of the individual life, securing ifor the individual perceived freedom from want, responsibility, damaging health choices, and personal decision making capacity, at the expense of doing what it once did best – achieving the great ideas that were beyond any one individual or group, for the betterment of all.  In 1931, the United States committed to the Boulder (Hoover) Dam project on the Colorado river, completing the dam by 1936, supply water and electricity to millions in the midst of a great economic depression.  The total construction cost? -49 million – which paid for a 12oo foot long 726 foot high structure that 70 years later still generates 4.2 billion kilowatt/hours of electricity every year.

This clearly is not an issue about money, intelligence, capacity, workforce, imagination, or need. This remains a crisis of lack of will and overwhelming self-absorption. Can we once again achieve processes where strangulating regulations don’t destroy momentum and focus on the larger good, where important public needs are subjugated to the attack and erosion of personal needs, where corruption and shoddy leadership suffocate the realization of good ideas in reasonable time frames?  It is truly the question of our time, and reflects on us all.

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The Rant That Started It All

     On Tuesday, August 10th, multiple party primaries took place across the United States as part of a steady stream of electoral nominations to occur over the next weeks promoting candidates to battle for election to the US Congress in November, 2010.  Colorado’s Republican primary for Senate ended with Ken Buck, the so called “tea party” candidate, easily winning the nomination over the establishment Republican candidate to be the party’s standard barer in the upcoming statewide election in November.  The “tea party” has proved to be a potent mix showing staying power and grassroots organization and support, upsetting on many occasions the expected victories of establishment candidates and positioning the movement to be an electoral force on par with major special interest groups.  

     What the “special interest’ all tea party advocates have in common is the question of the hour.  The movement started from an seemingly innocuous morning broadcast of CNBC from the floor of  the Chicago Board of Trade on February 19th, 2009.  Rick Santelli, a CNBC reporter was listening to a debate regarding the proposed mortgage bail-out program of the Obama administration, the so-called Home Owners Affordability and Stability Plan.  The conversation strained his capacity for tolerance for the expressed  ideas and he went on a several minute rant regarding the outrage he felt for the concept, and the lack of respect by government for people who tried to meet their responsibilities and live within their means.  He  declared the time was at hand for a new tea party for those who felt the way he did to express their mutual outrage.  The power of the internet provided exponential exposure to the rant and suddenly the concept of a new American tea party began to take hold across the nation.  Initially an entirely spontaneous process, the organization of this concept has now grown to the point where it has the capacity of sponsoring winning candidates that espouse tea party “principles”, such as Mr. Buck in Colorado, Ms. Angle in Nevada, Mr. Rand Paul in Kentucky,  and Mr. Ron Johnson in Wisconsin.

     The success of the movement outside the control of the establishment parties has led to the inevitable establishment backlash.  The Democratic liberal establishment looking at tea party participants sees only the darker shades of demagoguery, implied racism, and fasciistic nationalism.  The Republican Washington establishment sees it as a threat to the status quo, an undisciplined group that will prevent the party from achieving diverse outreach, broad based solutions, and re-inforce the “looney toons” conservatism of flat taxes, guns, border control, and libertarian streaks they find so distasteful.  The clear indication is that neither party has the capacity to control the tea party message, nor the ability to absorb its electoral power without being changed immeasurably by it.  The  power source of the tea party is a simple one – as seen by the tea party, the process of government has exceeded the parameters on which it was founded and threatens the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness stated in the Declaration of Independence and encoded in the Constitution.  In no small measure, arguments regarding the current controversies of our day framed by governmental expenditures and policies not including these principles are anathema to the tea partiers.

     The future of the movement, either to disintegrate from internal division, or to propagate into a compelling force that changes America, will likely be prominently written by the outcome of the November election.  If the tea party movement turns out to be the representation of the Silent Majority some claim for it, we will have had the unique advantage of having seen the moment of birth of history in as vivid and precise a pivot point as has ever been recorded.

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The Power of the Universe

      Sixty five years ago,  on August 6, 1945, the power of the universe was revealed for all to see, and for all to be in awe.  At 8:15am at 1900 feet above  the quiet port city of Hiroshima, Japan , an explosive cap drove 9 projectile cylinders of Uranium 235  down a gun barrel into a waiting target of  6 Uranium 235 rings.  In one micro-second, 600mg of the combined uranium product achieved nuclear fission, and proved Einstein’s theorem of the exponential conversion of mass into energy, E=mc2. 

     6 hours previously, Captain Paul Tibbets and his  crew had taken off from the island of Tinian in the Enola Gay, a recently commissioned B29 Superfortress with a specially designed bomb bay , housing a 9000 lb bomb nick-named “Little Boy”.   They flew with a light escort for defence, as Japan’s air defence capacity was by this time minimal, and extent of power of the special package known only to a few.  The responsibility for a successful mission was in the hands of Tibbets, who shouldered the responsibility for the moment of impact and its consequences with a serene spirit for the rest of his life.  At 815am on August 6th, 1945, he was 30 years old.

     At 815am, on August 6th, 1945, the sun was brought close to earth.  An instantaneous blast wave of 4000 degrees Celsius vaporized all objects within reach of the 12oo foot fireball and the pressure wave anything within one mile.  The explosive power of 600mg of unstable uranium converted into energy measured over 18 ooo pounds of TNT.   For a two mile diameter the city of Hiroshima ceased to exist, as well as the 80,000 people estimated to have been caught in its inferno.

     The power of the atom was exposed one more time in anger and retribution on August 9th, 1945 in Nagasaki, Japan, and the war, which had claimed over 60 million lives, was suddenly over. Though the power of current thermonuclear fusion devices dwarf the capacity of these two events in their destructive power, the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have proved sufficiently ominous to this point to have prevented an further use of nuclear power as a means of achieving war aims. The obvious danger in history as one gets farther and farther from the event experience has always been the capacity of the world to repeat history’s most telling lessons.
     One can only hope that the understanding of the immense power of the universe to provide unlimited energy for man’s good use remains the solitary expression of what was achieved in 1945, and the message to those who would forget such lessons, the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project upon seeing the the first nuclear fission explosion, quoting the Bhagavad-Gita,   ” Now I am become Death,the destroyer of worlds “.

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Just Maybe, Finally, Something Wonderful

   The United States is approaching thirty years of direct and tumultuous involvement in the dangerous and tortuous politics of the Arab World.  President Reagan’s catastrophic 1982 decision to directly engage US Marines in force separation and peace keeping activities in attempting to bring a ceasefire in Lebanon’s murderous Christian Muslim civil war resulted in the largest single day loss of American service men since Iwo Jima in World War II, with 241 American and 58 French peacekeepers losing their lives to a terrorist attack in Beirut October 23rd, 1983.   The devastating nature of that attack and America’s quick withdrawal left America and Europe adverse to the direct involvement in middle east affairs and an impression in the radical Arab community that western forces were paper tigers that could not withstand loss.  Progressively since that event, persistent testing of western resolve has been the rule, with violent and cataclysmic contacts being the norm – Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein in 1991 and resultant need for the Desert Storm expulsion, the World Trade Center Bombing in 1993,  the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the American embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya killing hundreds in 1998, the USS Cole terrorist attack in 2000, and the penultimate terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and  Flight 93 foiled destruction on the US Capital building on September 11, 2001.   This succession of blows led to the extensive and sustained efforts of the United States to actively change the accepted paradigm by  invading Iraq and Afghanistan, and attempting to convert despotic processes into a democratic model not previously seen in the Arab world.

     Of particular focus and requiring massive expenditure in lives and resources has been the country of Iraq, a generally modern and one time prosperous country in the fertile crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and lying on top of the third largest known oil deposit in the world.  Iraq lies on the knife’s edge of Muslim history, split between the Sunni royal dynasties of the Near East and the Shia theocracy of Iran and Pakistan.  Ruled for thirty years by the fasciistic dictator Saddam Hussein,  its people remained buried beneath a tyrant’s whim and suffered greatly in spasmodic wars, government perpetrated rapes and murders, ethnic cleansing, and even internal use of chemical weapons against Iraq’s own populus.   The United States’ extremely risky strategy was to overthrow the dictator and help the Iraqis produce a form of self government known nowhere else in the Arab world.  The ideal was a society that would inspire others in the region to begin to focus on their people’s welfare and less on the perceived slights of a western world the radicals were convinced had purposefully left them so far behind.  This experiment in human freedom and self determination has demanded enormous sacrifice and a logical questioning by a tired nation as to whether the sacrifice could possibly be worth it, or the Iraqi people  sufficiently worthy or capable of recognizing and taking advantage of the opportunity.

     The answer has been laid out since 2003 by two Iraqi brothers named Omar and Mohammed Fadhil.  From the tumultuous moments of the fall of Hussein and his subsequent capture,through the horrendous summer days of 130 degrees with no public services for water, electricity, and sewage, to being eye- witnesses to the massive bombing and murder campaigns against Iraqis by warlord mullah armies and radical Al Qaida terrorists, through the aborted hopes of the first Iraqi elections ever, to the too slow too bumbling process of building viable Iraqi governmental institutions, the brothers have maintained a terrific “you are there” reporters’ eye and fundamental belief and optimism in the Iraqi character faithfully reported on their Baghdad blog IRAQ THE MODEL .  The archived history from  2003, 2005, and 2006 are particularly riveting and inspiring.  When all else struggled to see the faint shadows of change, the brothers using their keen eye  and fundamental knowledge of the Iraqi psyche kept  their poise and perceptiveness of the underlying currents for epic change.   At a time when reporters hunkered down in the Baghdad Green Zone reported societal collapse, the brothers and other brave blogadiers ventured out into society to report the world as it was, both faults and hopes.  A non-synthesized projection of the truth  began to be heard that inspired amateur observers the world over and have changed the world’s sources for information in difficult and censored zones forever. 

     This all leads to the current interpretation by the world’s assembled media of the continuing “debacle” in Iraq, as five months after a close national election the Iraq government has not settled on a leader.  This is thrown out as another example of the “failed” democratic experiment in Iraq, and the need for US forces to abandon their presence in Iraq before they are drawn into the inevitable and unavoidable instability in the Iraqi  self governance. The brothers Fadhil beg to differ, and as they have been right so many times, it is appropriate to listen when they suggest, finally, something truly wonderful is happening in Iraq. .  Omar offers in a recent post perhaps the most prescient description of what worked in Iraq, and what needs to happen in Afghanistan, if similar success is one day to be found – defeat the irreconcilable, and offer the reconcilable a chance to find political solutions.   Maybe the brothers are on to something, and maybe, just maybe, if the world listens to its independent voices, the path to achieving something wonderful.

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Happy National Day, My Switzerland

   Switzerland is a small country in a sea of much larger countries on the European continent.  One doesn’t associate it with typically boastful patriotism; it has prided itself on an outwardly neutral posture on the world stage, which has served its independence well.  Regardless, it is my familial homeland, and  on this day of August 1, a quiet boastfulness is appropriate.  The birth origins of the country of Switzerland are more romantically and mythically linked then most countries. As history’s record would have it, in early August of 1291, a group of like minded proudly independent men met on the meadow at Rutli to form a confederation of three homelands, the current Swiss Cantons (or States) of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, to declare their mutual support , and assert their independence from the Austro-German Empire of the time.  The Emperor Rudolf of Hapsburg had recently died, and the swiss homelands were concerned that their relative independence in action allowed by the old emperor were not likely to be respected by the new ruler.  Legend has it the driving force for the pact was sealed by the actions of Wilhelm Tell, a Swiss archer who killed the evil and dictatorial Austrian bailiff Gessler, thereby throttling the independence movement.

     As with all independence movements the price to be paid was not without bloodshed; the difficult battle victories against the Hapsburgs at Morgarten in 1315 and Sempach in 1386 were required to cement the confederation’s independence in the eyes of the Holy Roman Empire. By 1353 the original three cantons had grown to eight, and further victories on the battlefield cemented the Swiss early reputation as invincible warriors and willing mercenaries. the Pope Julius II acknowledged this reputation in his selection of the Swiss Guards as his security force in 1506, a relationship that continues to this day.

     The Swiss passion for fighting continued for hundreds of years in their need to fiercely guard their independence. It took the mighty armies of Napoleon to finally overrun the Swiss and abolish the canton structure, resulting in the formation of the Helvetic Republic in 1798 under French rule. It took no time at all for Napoleon to realize his mistake, and the independence of the unruly Swiss was re-established in 1803, and formalized permanently by Europe at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.  Since the formal declaration of a Swiss Federation and Constitution in 1848, the cantons of Switzerland have maintained a position of neutrality in all future European conflicts, a course that has been maintained not without difficulty at times severe stresses.

     The land now known as Switzerland centrally located on the European landmass has always served a pivotal role in European history. From its home to primordial Bronze age man establishing lake communities ~ 3800BC, through the tribes of Helvetii known to Caesar as guardians of the crucial passes through the alpine backbone of Europe, to the early Christian monasteries established by St Gotthard and St Bernard, as a home of the Reformation drive by the Swiss theologians Calvin and Zwingli, through its current reputation as an engineering, banking and manufacturing powerhouse belying its size, the nation of Switzerland has been an important player in the development of western civilization.

Oh…and its not bad looking, either.     Happy Birthday, Switzerland!
…and a little video of martial pride…

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The Dangerous Season

     For the United States, a nation battered and tired by a decade of conflict and two intractable wars, a period of retrenchment from world affairs has been pledged by the current administration. Unfortunately the world, as usual, is in no mood to cooperate. We have been entering for some time a dangerous season of instability and potential disaster driven by two authoritarian powers with aggressive desires and hostile intentions. We as a society ignore significant trends in these reactionary societies at our peril.

     The obvious issue that binds the futures of western society and these two dictatorial powers is nuclear proliferation. Both regimes have been bent on developing a nuclear program with nuclear weapon capacity. North Korea, despite have one of the world’s most wretched economies has consistently invested in an expensive nuclear weapons process despite multiple declarations to the contrary. In 1994 North Korea jointly signed an agreement with the Clinton Administration to suspend its nuclear weapons program and agree to international atomic energy inspections in return for economic support and development of nuclear energy grid to supply electricity to impoverished population. In 2002, North Korea admitted it had violated all definitive aspects of the agreement and succeeded at plutonium extraction required for development of a nuclear explosive device. On October 9, 2006, North Korea achieved a small but successful explosion consistent with a nuclear device, an obvious abrogation of the previous 15 years of diplomacy. The efforts to achieve nuclear weaponry are at great odds to the nation’s stated desire to use nuclear sources for energy production, as a satellite view of North Korea at night compared to its neighbors attests.   

North Korea At Night

      Iran has been on a similar path, eliciting North Korean nuclear scientist expertise, to develop similar nuclear weapon capacity. Using much the same diplomatic tactics as North Korea, in claiming peaceful nuclear use while forging ahead with infrastructure for weapon development, Iran sits on the precipice of achieving nuclear weapon capacity. Diplomatics efforts by multiple nations to steer Iran away from nuclear weapons development have met with much the same success. Iran, despite having the the third largest oil reserve in the world, and producing 5% of the world’s current oil production, has determined to put its nation’s economy on hold in the effort to complete the nuclear weapons task.   

     Since 1949, with the Soviet Union’s successful testing of a nuclear device, the potential catastrophe of a nuclear exchange has been feasible , but constrained by the nuclear powers acknowledged capacity to annihilate each other, and the recognition of each as to the destruction of civilized society with such an exchange. September 11th, 2001, changed everything in the world’s understanding of rules of engagement, and the risks have therefore increased acutely. North Korea since 1950 has been ruled into the ground by a dictator and his son, with now a complete implosion of its economy and a starving population, ignored by a military machine that props up the regime and jealously lashes out at its hated genetic brothers, the South Koreans, for their obvious success in nationhood. The regime has no qualms about starting a major conflict, evidenced by the unprovoked torpedo sinking of the South Korea military vessel Cheonan, with the loss of 46 sailors on March 26 of this year. The North Korean’s propensity for irrational and dangerous statements to the world can not be taken lightly given their propensity for just such behavior.   The Iranians have shown similar bluster, with repeated comments by the Iranian president Ahmadinejad to deny the Holocaust and promise the removal of the Isreali nation from the world map.   

     The blustering theats from both parties are unfortunately becoming a potentially realistic scenario as both have developed delivery systems capable of attacking both their local and regional enemies, and frankly, approaching the capacity to strike the United States and Europe.  Iran has shown ballistic missile development in the Sejil- 2 missile with a 2500 kilometer range;  North Korea is even farther along, with medium , and now long range missiles in the Taepodong series, reportedly capable of up to 10000 km range, approaching the distance between Pyongyang and Chicago.  It is clear that the United States’ once safe oceanic separation from the world’s regional conflicts is a thing of the past.   

     The time is likely inevitable when both states will have the capacity for enormous damage and the irrational and messianic will to engage a crisis.  How the civilized world responds to the threat before it reaches such proportions is the key question of our times.  The United States is currently led by an administration that has cut funding for missile defense and purports that engagement and appeasement offer safer routes then confrontation to controlling the risks of the modern world.  Such thinking has been on the wrong side of history since the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia to an dictator with insatiable allusions, and has continued in failures of logic as communist permanency , nuclear freeze, strategic missile reduction, military defense contracture, treaties of engagement with dictators,  United Nation sanctions,  apologies for perceived slights, and a myriad of other self absorbed illusions of means of peaceful co-existence.  The manning of the ramparts to preserve the peaceful protection of the great achievements of western civilization against those dictators that would risk a dark age for their own survival is likely upon us in the coming months.  Our will is being tested and our ability to respond before Danger’s Door, will determine whether this Dangerous Season marks an end to an era of human prosperity and liberty, or we hold on , one more time.

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The Eagle Has Landed

     July 16th is the 41st anniversary of the liftoff of three brave explorer astronauts from Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral)  in the greatest adventure of our modern times.  It is hard to recall through the distant mirror of time the extent of the world’s focused attention, hopes, and unstated fears the crew of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins carried on their shoulders.  I was young, but can still recall my own rapture and profound pride over the incredible exploits over an 8 day journey.    To put its miraculous voyage in perspective, the challenge of putting astronauts on the moon  and returning them safely to earth had been articulated by President John F. Kennedy only eight years earlier, at a time when the concept of a man travelling on a rocket was less than a year old and the idea of converting from a brief near earth flight to the intricacies and equipment required for planetary travel bordered on ridiculous.  In the space of eight years, the United States developed three completely revolutionary space travel systems, learned to orbit, dock and walk in space, devised landing and take off systems for extraterrestrial travel, and survived crushing timetables and the disaster of first Apollo spacecraft with its launchpad fire and horrific deaths of three astronauts a mere 18 months before the successful culmination of President Kennedy’s dream in Apollo 11.   The extraordinary accomplishments in so short a period of time compares uncomfortably to our current fixation on a twenty five year old launch system in the shuttle without a single advanced concept of flight leaving the drawing board over that interval, nor,  with the scrubbing of the Constellation system, one in the identifiable future.

     The mission required lifting payload on a rocket behemoth called Saturn 5, a three stage rocket 363 feet tall  (36 stories!) filled with huge amounts of explosive fuel delivering 7.8 million pounds of propulsion thrust to escape the earth’s gravitational pull.  No machine compared with its combination of height, weight, thrust and payload., or has been built since.  No one whoever saw a Saturn launch failed to be forever changed by its immense beauty and power.

     The journey to the moon, the landing, and the trip back to safe splashdown on July 24th was filled with so many never before firsts in flight it awed the mind – and the “perfect” landing on the moon assumed by all proved in later historical accounts to have been a near catastrophe, with Armstrong manually flying a landing craft due to failure of the onboard computer ( a computer with a computer containing the hard drive computing power and memory of a hand held calculator),  Aldrin rapidly making navigation assumptions and  residual fuel estimates with a slide rule, the original “safe” landing zone missed approaching instead a field of house sized boulders as the inevitable landing target, and a landing decision past the point of feasible safe landing abort – a touchdown with only 13 seconds of fuel left to fly. We who were watching heard only  the mission control statement “you have a bunch of guys ready to turn blue here”, a understated description of the true emotions attached to the avoided catastrophe by those in the know.

     Many have remarked that the rush to the moon ultimately did little to change lives here on earth and spent too much money better used for other services.  I beg to differ;  programs such as Apollo are critical to the human experience and promote its deepest aspirations and creative instincts.  In a nation that has turned its back on the sky above it, a whole new adventure to bind us, thrill us, and renew us is worth every penny.