Letters to the Editor
George Sears
Published Letters: 30 Editor's Choice: 15
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Is War Economically Rational?
[Read the article: Iraq sticker shock]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think I heard on the BBC that we are dropping 6 times as many bombs these days as we were a while back. Maybe this is why? I guess we could put all our forces in an underground bunker and lob bombs at various targets. But we are also told that one of the problems with the training of Iraqis is that no one is quite sure if an Iraqi commander, on his own, requested air support, that the request wouldn't be to settle a score.
I remember, back in 2003, seeing a boy in the store with a tee-shirt. The slogan on the T-shirt said something about his Dad being off somewhere, in the Army. The kid was clearly unhappy. I don't have much of a stomach for even this aspect of war, so reading that it will cost a trillion for ongoing medical expenses? What sorts of lives will these be?
The fundamentalists say the West will not fight. Bush says that what we have done in Iraq proves that we will. We 'brought it on'. Well, we could have taken two trillion dollars and built alternative energy. We could have suggested to bin Laden that we would not care so much about what he did in Saudi Arabia, and fairly soon. We are sending billions and billions to Iran and Russia. Neither is stable or democratic.
I was completely against the war. We need to define economic interests in some enlightened way. Would it be our responsibility to 'fix' the Middle East if we didn't need the oil? Nixon decided, after Vietnam, that we needed a well-armed Iran to defend our interests in the Middle East, against the Soviets. The Shah was our guy, recycling petro-dollars to buy arms. Now the Iranians still want to be well armed, by going nuclear. Can we be nuclear, if they can't? We just can't get clear of these situations.
I wish, for all our sacrifices, the Iraqis would find the center. Today we are told of the dominant Shi'a party is backing off of concessions to broaden the constitution. We don't really know what feeds the insurgents. We really don't know whether we are being used, scammed, by people aligning a situation that will emerge on their terms. It's a murky process. For this, our young people are dying and being maimed.
Bush will say I am helping the enemy. I truly wish I knew who the enemy was in Iraq, and how you form a center where none has existed, and none is emerging.
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We Like Being Scared... Of Course
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]People go to horror movies. We like scary stories. We obsess about certain kinds of crimes, though the odds of being a victim may be quite slim. Maybe the problem with terrorism, which also obsesses about aviation, is that we want to be scared, anyway, so it's hard to maintain the political edge. What's a radical Islamist going to do? Doesn't AQ live within the confines of a media defined world? How does Islamism win? We'll still have MSNBC and Fox, right? No revolution maintains that essential purity. Maybe bin Laden will just get a blog, Been Loggin', or something.
It's interesting that aviation intersects so well with the emotional fabrications that define the world. What percentage of our lives is now processed news? Or fake news? Whose responsibility is it, for people to find the 'real' world? It should be part of journalistic ethics that you wouldn't create a world so distorted that people have ideas that are wildly wrong. But, it isn't.
Too bad, really. People should actually get to know the atmosphere. They should get inside the air, the wind, in a smallish contraption that they guide around, as they please. To me, the real problem with the media fantasy of aviation is that it takes away the opportunity to experience something that is quite profound. Of course, there is a lot more risk flying small aircraft.
There's a mystique about flying, and rightly so. There's a mystique about giant flying machines that overpower the ground and integrate into a complex system of commercial transport with incredible precision. They talk about the 'biz jet' syndrome, where Congressman feel that power that comes from having high speed transport on a personal level, at your command.
Maybe it's because most people are excluded that the emotional reactions are what they are? How do we go from mystique to the multiple layers of fear? The media wants to put their stamp on everything. I guess any issue has been 'media-cized' when the basic reactions to it are fear.
It's odd, isn't it, that terrorists and journalists seem to share... so much?