Opinions
Turkey’s aggression
Turkey’s invasion of Syria emphasises in a bizarre way the seminal role of Trump and the USA in destabilising the Middle East, where the USA has been continuously fighting since 1958. Before that, the region was largely under the sway of Britain and France – the former holding a mandate over Palestine, Iraq, Kuwait, Egypt, Muscat & Oman, and the Gulf (Trucial) States, while France had the same role in Syria and Lebanon.
When Nasser created the United Arab Republic in 1958, starting as a jubilant union of Egypt, Gaza and Syria, ready to incorporate Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, Yemen and neighbours, the Christian President of Lebanon, Camille Chamun, disliking Nasser and not caring to join, was scheming instead for an unconstitutional second term. In 1958, Iraq revolted against its king Faisal and executed him and family, and established a republic.
The CIA, then under Allan Dulles – I remember some Caribbean intellectuals nicknaming him “Allan the Dulles” (his brother, John Foster was Secretary of State to Eisenhower) – in typical arrogant American fashion, reflexly concluded that pro-USSR Nasser had engineered the killings; in a flash, the usually cautious Eisenhower abandoned his instincts – which he would not have done, had Nasser been white – and sent 15,000 Marines to storm Lebanon, like a new version of WWII Normandy. The marines found the beaches occupied by tourists and shapely local women in inviting and new-fangled bikinis, instead of warring forces; Lebanese soldiers civilly escorted the marines into the country. Luckily for innocent Lebanese citizens, the US ambassador in Beirut had ignored orders and brokered an instant “peace”, then informed Washington of its faux pas, whereupon Eisenhower ate crow and recalled the troops; he remained more circumspect for the rest of his term.
The revolutionary government of Iraq was not readily accepted by Jordan or Saudi Arabia, but the region gained economically despite the Cold War and the over-riding control of oil interests, then dominated by Britain and USA, in Iran, Iraq and the huge lightly-tapped black lake deep under Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Persian Gulf. No threat was tolerated to the flow of oil through the first pipelines, built in 1936, from Kirkuk, Iraq, to the Mediterranean at Haifa in Israel, and Tripoli in Lebanon.
But the machinations of the new Israel fractured Palestine, killed or displaced many, and destabilised the region, the USA refraining from criticising Israel.
Iraq meanwhile came under a Ba’ath government, eventually Saddam Hussein (1979-2003), a secular Muslim who shared Turkish and Iranian dislike of Kurds and neighbouring minorities, who had bungled a chance to become an independent Kurdistan at the Treaty of Sèvres when the Ottoman Empire fell, a century ago.
The USA encouraged Saddam as foil to Iran, gave him the technical help to develop chemical weapons used against Iran and the Kurds in the Iraq-Iran war (1980-88), a sad affair based loosely on religion (Sunni vs Shi’a), ideology (secular vs orthodox) and American hatred of Iran’s Ayatollahs and their influence over Islam.
Errors heaped on errors, to bring us to the Turkish bombing of Syria, most made by the USA, in its characteristic jingoistic and bullying conduct of the Cold War and post-CW era, and from blind support of Israel despite its treatment of Palestinians, in every inhuman way possible (including denial of civil rights, expulsion, murder, pillage, land seizure, perhaps seen as a necessary step towards that greater Israel that will triumph in the final Armageddon) and ignoring UN resolutions.
US officials, businessmen, presidents have all put self-interest first and made lousy decisions, often against technical wisdom, provoking conflicts like the Iraq-Iran war that succeeded only in making the warriors indebted to Western arms suppliers, and disrupting the sources of oil and its transport from inland wells to customers many thousands of miles away.
Iraq’s attack on Kuwait for “stealing” its oil through “slant-drilling” was possible only in the climate of intrigue when Hussein was in the west’s favour. The worst error must be Bush’s destruction of Iraq in 2003, seeking imagined weapons of mass destruction, against expert advice.
Now, Trump’s dismissal of the Kurds is unconscionable, and ignores their key role in supporting and protecting American troops against ISIS, taking the brunt of enemy fire; over 10,000 died, compared with a handful of Americans. Imprisoned ISIS captives are likely to escape under the Turkish attack made possible by Trump’s withdrawal.
Will America ever learn to use its enormous power for good and not waste trillions on merchants of death?
The CIA, then under Allan Dulles – I remember some Caribbean intellectuals nicknaming him “Allan the Dulles” (his brother, John Foster was Secretary of State to Eisenhower) – in typical arrogant American fashion, reflexly concluded that pro-USSR Nasser had engineered the killings; in a flash, the usually cautious Eisenhower abandoned his instincts – which he would not have done, had Nasser been white – and sent 15,000 Marines to storm Lebanon, like a new version of WWII Normandy. The marines found the beaches occupied by tourists and shapely local women in inviting and new-fangled bikinis, instead of warring forces; Lebanese soldiers civilly escorted the marines into the country. Luckily for innocent Lebanese citizens, the US ambassador in Beirut had ignored orders and brokered an instant “peace”, then informed Washington of its faux pas, whereupon Eisenhower ate crow and recalled the troops; he remained more circumspect for the rest of his term.
The revolutionary government of Iraq was not readily accepted by Jordan or Saudi Arabia, but the region gained economically despite the Cold War and the over-riding control of oil interests, then dominated by Britain and USA, in Iran, Iraq and the huge lightly-tapped black lake deep under Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Persian Gulf. No threat was tolerated to the flow of oil through the first pipelines, built in 1936, from Kirkuk, Iraq, to the Mediterranean at Haifa in Israel, and Tripoli in Lebanon.
But the machinations of the new Israel fractured Palestine, killed or displaced many, and destabilised the region, the USA refraining from criticising Israel.
Iraq meanwhile came under a Ba’ath government, eventually Saddam Hussein (1979-2003), a secular Muslim who shared Turkish and Iranian dislike of Kurds and neighbouring minorities, who had bungled a chance to become an independent Kurdistan at the Treaty of Sèvres when the Ottoman Empire fell, a century ago.
The USA encouraged Saddam as foil to Iran, gave him the technical help to develop chemical weapons used against Iran and the Kurds in the Iraq-Iran war (1980-88), a sad affair based loosely on religion (Sunni vs Shi’a), ideology (secular vs orthodox) and American hatred of Iran’s Ayatollahs and their influence over Islam.
Errors heaped on errors, to bring us to the Turkish bombing of Syria, most made by the USA, in its characteristic jingoistic and bullying conduct of the Cold War and post-CW era, and from blind support of Israel despite its treatment of Palestinians, in every inhuman way possible (including denial of civil rights, expulsion, murder, pillage, land seizure, perhaps seen as a necessary step towards that greater Israel that will triumph in the final Armageddon) and ignoring UN resolutions.
US officials, businessmen, presidents have all put self-interest first and made lousy decisions, often against technical wisdom, provoking conflicts like the Iraq-Iran war that succeeded only in making the warriors indebted to Western arms suppliers, and disrupting the sources of oil and its transport from inland wells to customers many thousands of miles away.
Iraq’s attack on Kuwait for “stealing” its oil through “slant-drilling” was possible only in the climate of intrigue when Hussein was in the west’s favour. The worst error must be Bush’s destruction of Iraq in 2003, seeking imagined weapons of mass destruction, against expert advice.
Now, Trump’s dismissal of the Kurds is unconscionable, and ignores their key role in supporting and protecting American troops against ISIS, taking the brunt of enemy fire; over 10,000 died, compared with a handful of Americans. Imprisoned ISIS captives are likely to escape under the Turkish attack made possible by Trump’s withdrawal.
Will America ever learn to use its enormous power for good and not waste trillions on merchants of death?
Wholesomeness packaged today as A-Z
Romeo Kaseram
My mother insists on sending daily reminders, and now that she is an above-average user of social media, there is no escape hatch to turn to with the sinking feeling that comes when her latest electronic message drops into my inbox.
Those were the golden days of non-surveilled avoidance, such as deliberately not checking the mailbox. There was ignoring the clanging bells inside a rotary phone, and waiting for the call to be physically shunted with clicks and levers to a cassette recorder that was voice mail. Then, in a premeditation of rebellion, not rewinding the tape to listen to her shrill, cajoling voice.
However, in today’s world, there is a bitter irony in the hearing-impaired Beethoven’s Ode to Joy startling a quiet room, his heavenly tribute now a canned, electronic alert lighting up a smartphone. Following this, my mother’s message begins scrolling across the screen. In this parade is a multi-layered parody, today’s messaging shorthand swimming across the screen as a carnival of voices, its exclamation marks and truncated language dancing on the runway of a backlit screen as a chyron of caricatured imperatives: “Make sure u take ur vitamins!!”
There is no escaping this inexorable force-fed march of modern-day induced vitamin good health. Each visit to my old stomping grounds, or rather, where the cousins jumped in our old, beautiful wooden house when growing up, energetically bounding up, then down, on my grandmother’s steel-spring bed, sees more intrusion of the modern world.
Then, Ma’s bed easily served as a sturdy but makeshift trampoline for lines of a growing lineage of cousins, but nowadays its kitchen table is a Vitamin A to Zinc repository for every imaginable health supplement; and then there are some – mostly dried roots, jaundiced, curled, and predatory like claws; the translucent wings of dragonflies torn and shattered like pieces of stained glass, and the amputated, desiccated, and now stringy limbs of what once were dragons, all culled from the 500-plus characters making up the Chinese alphabet.
Healing and preventative medicine was not this packaged when I was growing up back home. Back then for me to wake up with a fever was to acquire in tandem with the infection symptoms of a mortal fear for my life. It was difficult to tell whether the sweating, shakes, and shivers were due to the pathology’s ascending complications as bronchitis and pneumonia; or fear for the inevitable, evil-tasting remedies coming down the pipe from my grandmother’s healing hands.
Among Ma’s dreaded dosages were noisome infusions to be gargled and spat out into a purposed, dented basin, but mostly poured down my throat from a large enamel cup following patient hours of boiling; and sometimes, inadvertently, down a reluctant windpipe for fits of coughing and accompanying lamentations.
Then there were those ointments bristling with shards of sharp leaves, coarse with barks and spines, and more evil-scented than that one cousin whose alimentary canal refused to efficiently process the vast quantities of beans Ma cooked for us when she was not tending her bubbling, medicinal vats.
“Fever grass. Go in the back and cut a good handful of fever grass for me. I have to boil a strong tea for this child to ward off that nasty fever!” Rubbing her hands together, Ma would instruct a hale, smirking, and evil cousin, who would then gather up the posse and head out. They exited like an overjoyed pack of puppies, tumbling down the wooden steps, nipping at each other’s heels, mercilessly elbowing too-possessive neighbours for possession of the grass-knife, that curved, toothed scythe for cutting tall swaths of grass.
As an afterthought, Ma would call out to the cloud of dust lifted in the wake of the cousins’ energised exit, “Don’t forget to dig up a big piece of ginger!” An evil voice, dripping with childhood malice, would acknowledge the instruction. It was a response that always upped the ante, the intention being to increase my discomfort, wondering whether Ma also wanted a handful of hot peppers to enhance the efficacy of her medicinal concoction.
Whether it was the curative powers inherent in Ma’s concoction of fever grass and ginger tea, which I later understood to be the ubiquitous lemon grass, its payload of fresh, ground ginger as sharp and hot as peppers, but thankfully minus my evil cousin’s bitter intent, and who had helpfully crushed the peppers in anticipation.
Thankfully, I recovered from my affliction. Whether it was Ma’s homespun medication, or me forcibly willing my internal healing properties to rise up to cure a chest as bony as a xylophone, the spear-tips of bones on my elbows used with lethal precision on offending cousins within elbowing reach, and my skeletal fingertips, I recovered enough to avoid a second force-fed infusion of Ma’s regimen of medication.
It seems I have always been pursued by my matriarchs’ good intentions wrapped in layers of the noisome. I shake my head at today’s world, wherein the wholesomeness of its fruits, vegetables, and even its good sense has been deconstructed, re-shaped into its separate, constituent parts, and then packaged from Vitamin A to Zinc.
There is no escaping this inexorable force-fed march of modern-day induced vitamin good health. Each visit to my old stomping grounds, or rather, where the cousins jumped in our old, beautiful wooden house when growing up, energetically bounding up, then down, on my grandmother’s steel-spring bed, sees more intrusion of the modern world.
Then, Ma’s bed easily served as a sturdy but makeshift trampoline for lines of a growing lineage of cousins, but nowadays its kitchen table is a Vitamin A to Zinc repository for every imaginable health supplement; and then there are some – mostly dried roots, jaundiced, curled, and predatory like claws; the translucent wings of dragonflies torn and shattered like pieces of stained glass, and the amputated, desiccated, and now stringy limbs of what once were dragons, all culled from the 500-plus characters making up the Chinese alphabet.
Healing and preventative medicine was not this packaged when I was growing up back home. Back then for me to wake up with a fever was to acquire in tandem with the infection symptoms of a mortal fear for my life. It was difficult to tell whether the sweating, shakes, and shivers were due to the pathology’s ascending complications as bronchitis and pneumonia; or fear for the inevitable, evil-tasting remedies coming down the pipe from my grandmother’s healing hands.
Among Ma’s dreaded dosages were noisome infusions to be gargled and spat out into a purposed, dented basin, but mostly poured down my throat from a large enamel cup following patient hours of boiling; and sometimes, inadvertently, down a reluctant windpipe for fits of coughing and accompanying lamentations.
Then there were those ointments bristling with shards of sharp leaves, coarse with barks and spines, and more evil-scented than that one cousin whose alimentary canal refused to efficiently process the vast quantities of beans Ma cooked for us when she was not tending her bubbling, medicinal vats.
“Fever grass. Go in the back and cut a good handful of fever grass for me. I have to boil a strong tea for this child to ward off that nasty fever!” Rubbing her hands together, Ma would instruct a hale, smirking, and evil cousin, who would then gather up the posse and head out. They exited like an overjoyed pack of puppies, tumbling down the wooden steps, nipping at each other’s heels, mercilessly elbowing too-possessive neighbours for possession of the grass-knife, that curved, toothed scythe for cutting tall swaths of grass.
As an afterthought, Ma would call out to the cloud of dust lifted in the wake of the cousins’ energised exit, “Don’t forget to dig up a big piece of ginger!” An evil voice, dripping with childhood malice, would acknowledge the instruction. It was a response that always upped the ante, the intention being to increase my discomfort, wondering whether Ma also wanted a handful of hot peppers to enhance the efficacy of her medicinal concoction.
Whether it was the curative powers inherent in Ma’s concoction of fever grass and ginger tea, which I later understood to be the ubiquitous lemon grass, its payload of fresh, ground ginger as sharp and hot as peppers, but thankfully minus my evil cousin’s bitter intent, and who had helpfully crushed the peppers in anticipation.
Thankfully, I recovered from my affliction. Whether it was Ma’s homespun medication, or me forcibly willing my internal healing properties to rise up to cure a chest as bony as a xylophone, the spear-tips of bones on my elbows used with lethal precision on offending cousins within elbowing reach, and my skeletal fingertips, I recovered enough to avoid a second force-fed infusion of Ma’s regimen of medication.
It seems I have always been pursued by my matriarchs’ good intentions wrapped in layers of the noisome. I shake my head at today’s world, wherein the wholesomeness of its fruits, vegetables, and even its good sense has been deconstructed, re-shaped into its separate, constituent parts, and then packaged from Vitamin A to Zinc.
