Simple Utah Mormon Politics

The American national maladies of which Dr. King spoke in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech in April of 1967 have only gotten worse. Imagine how much more the shining city on a hill the United States could and would have been today if we had followed Dr. King's prophetic advice.

Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan The other day another Iranian nuclear scientist was murdered in Iran.  Did the Iranian government do it and blame it on the west for propaganda value?  It doesn't matter, per se. What matters is the ever increasing likelihood that the West is already or soon will be at war with Iran.

How should we deal with the dangerous "mullocracy" in Iran? Will general sanctions work? No. They didn't harm Saddam in the least, but tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens perished for want of food and medicines. Trying the same thing by blocking Iranian oil sales is an excellent case of those not understanding history being doomed to repeat it. Or maybe they are just ignoring the history...

The ever-more-secret United States "War on Terror" is itself terrorizing thousands of innocent people in the Middle East. This ill-conceived war can only hope to make the world less safe for Americans.

The Iranian and Saudi Arabian governments hate each other worse than Iran and American Neocons. So what does the United States do while Iran eggs America on with sabre rattling? It thumbs its nose at the Iranian people and endangers the world by striking a war deal with the Saudis.

The ostensible back-up plan of the George W. Bush Administration for Iraq (once it discovered that Saddam really didn't have weapons of mass destruction) was to establish Iraq as a pattern of democracy for the rest of the Middle East to emulate. Ironically, if you ask almost anyone who lives in the Middle East, you'll find out that the prospects for democracy there are much worse than they were before the US attack on Iraq in 2003.  Destruction of nascent liberty couldn't have been planned any better.

Citizens of authoritarian regimes already depend heavily on government for the many of the basics of life. That's why sanctions against the authoritarian regimes don't hurt the regimes themselves--they only decimate the already subjected peoples. Iraq is but one great example of this phenomenon. Recently passed and continuing sanctions against Iran are a mistake that is becoming larger and larger.

Iraqis mourned with Americans on September 11, 2001. It wasn't long, however, before their tyrannical ruler was targeted as a possessor of weapons of mass destruction along with the intent to use them on America. When it was later proven beyond doubt that Saddam Hussein never had either such payload or such intent, it was too late for the Iraqi people. During our mid-stream mission change of bringing them "democracy", we have brought far more death, dismemberment, and destruction than liberty. Yes, Iraqis remember 9/11. It is still tearing their country apart. When I got to Kuwait in June of 2005, I was surprised that all of the Iraqi and Kuwaiti workers on my transition base couldn't understand very much of my limited Arabic speaking ability. It turns out they were Indians, Pakistanis, Philippinos, etc. When I got to my combat base in Iraq, the only three Iraqis workers I ever met there were translators who went with the brigade and battalion commanders, or wit...

Beginning in late 2008, the RAND corporation began lobbying for war in an effort to jump-start the moribund American economy. In an apparent effort to provide more fodder for that cannon, globalist extraordinaire Newt Gingrich warned recently that our next ticking time bomb scenario is likely to happen very soon. If we don't attack Iran and North Korea soon, Gingrich warns, the American economy will be utterly destroyed by the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) of enemy nuclear weapons. "War is good for the economy." Some of my co-workers agreed with that statement on a recent walk to the local Chevron for a Unfortunately, the likelihood of Americans being suckered into a frenzy by Newt's latest ticking time bomb scenario is immensely greater than the probability that Newt's apocalypse would ever happen anywhere in the universe. soda pop. Rubbish, I said. At best, it only appears to be good for the economy. War, even of a defensive nature, is never good for the econo...

The Taliban is moving gradually, but consistently from Afghanistan into Pakistan. President Obama and the U.S. Defense Department are poised to do something about it. Unfortunately, the United States is already to blame for the Taliban surge. U.S. foreign policy has an uncanny way of backfiring; Pervez Musharraf's strange brew of American-backed Pakistani "democracy" is just the latest instance to prove this fact. With a success equal to that of our achievements in Iraq, the latest installment of Shock and Awe is turning Pakistani hearts and minds against the United States. Barack Obama's plan of withdrawing most U.S. troops from Iraq is The feeling of helplessness and revenge is prevalent among a young generation of Pakistani males who have great difficulty determining why they deserve to be struck regularly by the scorpion-like foreign policy of the United States. on the slow track (284,000 military boots are still on the ground there--142,000 troops). Obama has...

I applaud the Obama Administration's recent release of torture memos that were the primary legacy of the Bush administration. The release of the memos rings hollow, however, since Obama indicated that no further investigation would occur into the matter, let alone any punishment being meted out for this embarrassment to America. People around the world are outraged. I hope you're one of them. America's worst nemesis is its lack of integrity vis-a-vis the rest of the world. Unfortunately, Obama's recent determination Obama has made some good moves. Opening relations with Cuba is one of them. But in the things that really matter--that involve the restoration of America's integrity--he might as well be Dick Cheney. that the tortured interpretations and implementations of Bush era torture will not be investigated dilutes our integrity even further. The rest of the world was expecting a lot to change when Obama took office. They're starting to see that not mu...

How I wish that mercenary armies had been just an aberration of the Bush/Cheney Administration. It would have convinced me that Barack Obama had at least some sort of significant change that I could believe in. But instead of my predictions being wrong , they are now haunting me. When I served in Iraq in 2005-06, I took a fairly hefty pay cut from my civilian job. Not a big deal, I thought, because I expected it. What I didn't know was that I could do the same military-like stuff for a civilian firm and get paid more (a lot more) . While in Iraq, I met some guys from one of the "mercenary groups" that were providing security for Operation Iraqi Freedom. I don't know for sure if they The places may have changed, and even the company name, but the activities of the corporate soldiers of fortune continue apace under the Obama administration. were Blackwater employees, but they were making almost three times as much money as I was making. Even the private firefight...