 Armageddon in Waiting
 In the warm blue skies above my little writing studio in the White Mountains of NH, the warplanes are on maneuvers again. They circle and twist and dive, and with any luck won’t crash into my house, or inadvertently drop something on my children playing in the yard. In truth, aside from the noise, they pose little real threat to anyone on the ground. But they do crash. In fact, Gen Brent Scowcroft’s career as an aviator ended with a broken back in just such a mishap:
“I had just taken off, and one of my companions jumped on me and sort of attacked me right off. So I advanced my power to go after him, and the engine governor malfunctioned and the propeller overspun. I didn’t know it, but it had broken a piston rod and I was losing my coolant. My power was steadily going down. I was at about fifteen hundred feet, still strapped in. This was New Hampshire, forested, and I looked around—there was a little clearing. The last thing I remember was looking under my wing at the tips of the last trees just under me.”
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Scowcroft served as President George HW Bush’s national security advisor during Operation Desert Storm, and is a bitter critic of the current Iraq war.
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The official story is that the training is ongoing because the terrain around here is similar to Afghanistan’s. In reality, these are ancient mountains with rounded peaks – nothing at all like the jagged alps of Central Asia. Close enough for government work, I guess.
For the average Lebanese dad today, there's no such cold comfort that only an accident might blast his family into small pieces. During the past ten days nearly 400 civilians – a third of them children – have died in northern Lebanon, far from Hezbollah’s southern offensive. This collateral damage is primarily caused by Israeli F-16 “Sufa,” or “Storm” jets and F-15I “Thunder bombers,” all built and paid for by Israel’s best friend in the world, the good ol’ USA.
Naturally, it’s a two-way street, or it wouldn’t be a war, it’d be ethnic cleansing. A million Israeli civilians are hiding in bomb shelters, and are under attack by Hezbollah’s Chinese-made missiles. Still, considering the reports that this latest bit of aggression has been in the planning stages at the Israeli Defense Ministry for a year, without an ass-load of AIPAC propaganda, and news like this, it’s hard to tell the bad guys from the badder guys.
I haven’t received any replies from likely presidential candidates as to their insights on this latest tragedy (there’s a surprise), but I’m willing to bet the big house that – from conservative Senator Sam Brownbackto liberal former Sen John Edwards (D-NC) – there isn’t a shard of sunlight between their positions and that of Israeli PM Ehud Olmert. But that’s the value of the NH first in the nation presidential primary – eventually, they’ll all have to come clean.
~Jack McEnany
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