Good evening, everyone:

It is so impossibly difficult to simply carry on “as normal” when violence continues to erupt, disrupt, and consume the Middle East.

Viewed with dispassion (and armed with a full-throated dismissal of international law), it may be possible – I suppose – for one nation to justify seeking the overthrow of another nation’s governing regime when that regime: . . . has relentlessly stifled dissent among all sectors of its civil society . . . has dispatched agents to other countries to eliminate actors deemed at odds with its values . . . has claimed its interpretation of religious orthodoxy as the one true religion . . . has used state-sanctioned authority to quell demonstrations, even horrifically entailing the killing of its own citizens . . . and has taken on qualities of a pariah in the international community of nations.

And indeed, the airwaves have been filled with the voices of those who argue vigorously the imperative and virtue of going to war with Iran under these circumstances. They point out that these circumstances are compounded by the uniqueness of Iran as the ultimate purveyor of terrorist ideology and action . . . as the only place where “Death to America” is the national motto . . . as a place that threatens to develop military capacities of direct threat to the region, and beyond.

My place is not to challenge those perspectives.  But simply to express the anxiety, sadness, and apprehension I suspect so many of us are feeling. Another war . . . Another nightmarish prospect of massive loss of life, including civilians . . .  Another deployment of brute force to usher indeterminate transactional results . . . Another invitation to escalate regional violence in ways that are both cruel and unpredictable . . .  Another destabilization of the international order.

And . . .  Another example of how painful it is to fail to see the circumstances of my second paragraph through the prism of our own national context.

Rip

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