Bomb,bomb, bomb | Bomb, bomb Iran

Ever since tRump started campaigning, I have been blogging here and telling anybody who wanted to listen to me that he merely crudely distills the same message that most of the Republicans have always expressed more euphemistically.  Every once in a while, even those "statesmen" let their guard down and adopted a tell-it-as-it-is, which is tRump's winning electoral approach.  One of those was about Iran.

Unlike President Obama and the Democrats who wanted to to work a way out of the hostilities, most Republicans were hell bent on bombing Iran back into the stone age.  It was such a sentiment that then candidate Senator John McCain expressed when he sang about bombing Iran.  Recall that campaign moment?

tRump is making that Beach Boys cover song come true!

As a wimp, a wuss, a pacifist, war is never on my mind.

Of course, as most young boys are, I too was once fascinated by wars and battles.  Back in grandma's village, I eagerly listened to what later turned out to be exaggerated accounts of an extended family elder's service in the military during the Indo-Pak war that birthed Bangladesh.  As a teenager, I read books and watched movies that were set in the context of WW II.

And then I grew up.

It started with the excerpt from All Quiet on the Western Front that was required reading in school.  Suddenly, war began to make no sense.  Mohandas Gandhi's pacifism appealed a lot more to me.  But, it was not any immediate Damascene Conversion to pacifism.  I continued to oscillate back and forth through my late teens and early twenties.

By the time of the Iraq War during the first Bush presidency, I was a committed anti-war nutcase.  And have been since.

Reading Ernest Hemingway and re-reading Joseph Heller and others cemented my pacifism.  War is hell. So much so that even movies that featured violence appealed less and less to me.

But, wars continue. Wars are good for business and politics.  There are now new chants for yet another war against yet another country in the Middle East that has been in the Republican radar for a long time.  That context compels me to blog about war and peace.  There are others who tweet about their direct experiences, like this lengthy thread (and the comments there that I urge you to read.)

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They thank us, but they bite for war-hawks that want to put us in harms way for various, often very murky reasons. Before you get hung ho for war, consider that the human costs aren’t only tallied in death or injury but also in destroyed families and the theft of joy.

— JAFERD, MD (@Supermansings) January 4, 2020