Category: International

When I saw that AP story with the accompanying, four-column wire photo of the United Arab Emirates’ planned $6.8 billion development–the one with a .75-mile ski slope and the world’s tallest residential tower–I had an immediate response. One, however, that had nothing to do with the mega-scale, Meydan One project in Dubai.

It was simply this. The world is aghast and appalled and aggrieved at the refugee crisis playing out from the Mediterranean to Europe. More than 11 million people have been displaced by the Syrian civil war alone. It’s a metastasizing migrant crisis that is reminiscent of worst-case World War II scenarios.

And the UAR and fellow sheikdoms are less helpful than Hungary.

Refugees have been pouring out of Syria through Turkey and Greece on the terrifying trek to Western Europe–especially Germany and Austria–and Sweden and a better life. Europe’s Eastern Bloc, notably wary of accepting racial and religious diversity, is being heavily criticized for being less than welcoming to the migrating Muslim masses. The U.S. plans to allow 10,000 Syrians in 2016.

But for the obscenely rich, geographically proximate Persian Gulf States, the UAR as well as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, the welcome mat has been missing in action. They bring in temporary workers, not migrants, is their rationale. Besides, they give amply to charities, they’re quick to point out. What they don’t mention is that such charitable giving is offset by subsidies–aka bribes–to various, refugee-creating, Middle East insurgents.

Here’s hoping, frankly, that the world can somehow shame the Gulf States into doing the right thing for their own cultural and linguistic brethren. We’ll know it when we see chartered planes full of displaced Syrian families–not tourists and construction workers–landing in Dubai.

* The “Trump Show” wasn’t the only big political debate on the continent last week. Canada also held one that featured incumbent Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and three challengers. It basically kicked off the national campaign. The election is Oct. 19. You heard that right. It’s an 11-week campaign. It can be done.

* How bad is it in economically-devolving Venezuela? Shortages now include Cervecería Polar, the national beer. It’s shutting breweries because of a lack of barley and hops. Sobering.

* One of the reasons that ISIS remains as viable as it is violent is a cadre of military and intelligence veterans who held Iraqi leadership positions in the Saddam Hussein era. Lest we forget: yet another legacy detail of the Bush Administration’s failed Iraq-invasion strategy.

I’ll be brief and less than objective. This is about the sad, cruel, unconscionably unnecessary death of Cecil the lion at the hand (and bow and arrow and, ultimately, rifle) of that American dentist. And good for Delta Airlines for no longer shipping hunting “trophies.”

This is not about witting or unwitting violations of big-game rules or where this incident and poaching fits in the hierarchy of tribulations besetting Zimbabwe. This is about orchestrated, choreographed killing of animals for trophy “sport.” That’s oxymoronic. That’s obscene. And that should be unworthy of human beings–from Teddy Roosevelt to Walter Palmer.

* Persian puzzle. When I was in Iran back in 1999, I remember leaving with this impression: We can work with these people. Yes, this government is an ideological outlier with terrorist proxies all around the Middle East. But the people, except for some hard-core clerics in Qum, were uniformly welcoming and hardly anti-American.

The population, notably the teeming, busy city of Tehran, is young, educated and not exactly enamored of living in an sectarian police state where holding hands in public can bring more than brow-arching censure. Incidentally, more than half of their higher-education students are female–and, no, the most popular major is not Islamic Studies. This isn’t a “stan” country or Saudi Arabia. And behind closed doors, it can look–and sound–downright middle class and Western.

They’re not Arabs, but Persians. They don’t speak Arabic, but Farsi. It’s a point of pride that is pointed out. A lot.

When I saw those wire photos of Iranians taking to the streets to celebrate their country’s nuclear deal, my first thought of an appropriate caption was: “Yea, we can buy stuff!”

For Iranians, this was about national pride, of course, but the bottom line is really the bottom line: This is more about economic sanctions than centrifuges and uranium stockpiles. This is about a consumer society that is increasingly restive about what it knows of the outside world–and what unnecessary hardships it has had foisted upon them. Hardships that have more to do with geopolitics than Allah.

Ultimately, we can work with these people.

* Greek Tragi-comedy. Compared to its Western European counterparts in the EC, Greece must comes across as an economic Parthenon-entity. It needs bailouts to bridge to the next bailout. Slovenia never looked so solvent.

When it comes to recently elected Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his left-wing Syriza Party, an immutable rule of governance is reinforced. You can run on thumbing your nose at the austerity crowd and call a pep-rally referendum to show the eurozoners a thing or two. But it ultimately comes down to this: It’s a lot easier to run for office than it is to run a government.

According to four-star Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., President Barack Obama’s nominee for Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Russia presents “the greatest threat to our national security.”

Yes, Russia has military heft and it has Vladimir Putin, who continues to wax nostalgic for Josef Stalin. And Putin, still a KGB punk at his core, has been able to play the nationalism and NATO-encroachment cards that Russia is so susceptible to. But, no, Putin’s Russia is not our “greatest threat.”

That  would be jihadist Islam, the ever-mutating, religious-cherry picking fanaticism that doesn’t see self-interest the way nation-states, even Cold War communist ones, do.

Recall the Cuban-missile crisis, an “existential threat” if there ever was one, and why it was ultimately defused.

Sure, there were compromises; i.e., an American no-invasion (of Cuba) pledge and a removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev then had face-saving and geopolitical cover to pull out Cuban missiles and turn around missile-carrying ships. The world, not just the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., exhaled.

But the bottom line was this. The leadership of both America and the Soviet Union knew the possible, more like probable, consequences of the status quo: a nuclear exchange, untold millions of lives lost and a planet imperiled. Put more bluntly: Nobody wanted to die.

We weren’t dealing with an enemy with a suicide complex, after-life priorities and rationales for everything–no matter how horrifically monstrous–when it involves “infidels.”  And we’re the cross-haired infidels.

With Putin, we still have the ultimate leverage. He doesn’t want to die either.

Moreover, for all his bluster, dismissive body language and perverse nationalism, he also knows who Russia’s most threatening enemy is. Frankly, it’s the same as ours.

The enemy of my enemy is, well, not my “greatest threat.”

Last week Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Congressional leaders thanked Vietnam War veterans for their service and presented pins to dozens of vets at a Capitol ceremony that marked 50 years since American ground troops arrived in Vietnam.

Two points:

First, Carter asserted that Vietnam had taught Americans many lessons and “all of them have made us a better country and a better military.” He noted two lessons in particular: “We leave no one behind” and we “must support our warriors regardless of our feelings about the war.”

Too bad he couldn’t have noted three lessons.

The third would be to finally learn the overarching lesson of Vietnam. That is: Never needlessly sacrifice American lives to unnecessary–unconscionably unnecessary–and, ultimately, unwinnable wars. By so doing, we continue to leave true national interest behind.

And second, President Obama held a meeting with the head of Vietnam’s Communist Party the night before the anniversary ceremonies. It was part of discussions on the groundbreaking Trans-Pacific Partnership

It was another reminder that while we lost nearly 60,000 Americans in Vietnam during the Cold War era, we’ve had normalized relations with that country since the 1990s. And, yet, the snarky sound bites and non-cooperation continue in polarized Washington and South Florida over normalization of relations with Cuba.

Amid all the outrage–especially from the U.S. side of the border–over the prison escape of Mexico’s notorious drug-cartel leader Joaquín”El Chapo” Guzmán, there is a blunt, often overlooked reality. Without the obscenely ever-ratcheting American market for cocaine and heroin, there would be no “El Chapo”–and somebody else would top Chicago’s “Public Enemy” list.

Anyone else feel this way? I root for the bulls at Pamplona, Spain. The annual nine-day San Fermin festival draws thousands of fools, including Americans, who run and cavort and wave and take selfies amid a mini, two-minute stampede. No bull, they really do. In fact, 15 people have lost their lives doing it over the years.

Just last week a guy from Gainesville, Flori-duh was gored. His luck apparently had run out; it was his 38th time defying common sense.

The bulls, it should be noted, are running in escape-less, confined routes from a holding pen to the bullring. There they will die at the hands of a matador. What a tradition. On the way, beef-witted tourists will have sport at their expense. What Facebook fun.

Go, Bulls.

While Cuba–with its Cold War-relic history, emotional links and geopolitical notoriety–has long been the obsessive center of America’s regional attention and concern, another Caribbean island has been alarmingly devolving on our 21st century watch. Only this one is not a foreign country.

This one is Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory of 3.6 million residents. Its chief of state is Barack Obama.

Its debt is $73 billion and rising, along with anxiety levels, crime rates and departures for the U.S. mainland, especially Florida. It’s been in a recession for a decade, and things are getting even worse. The poverty rate is 41 percent–nearly twice that of Mississippi–and more than a third of the population is on food stamps.

Yes, Cuba is important, and the U.S. is finally positioning itself for the right side of history, but Puerto Rico is family, however exotic and extended.

Another holocaust-era, German defendant, another case of following orders and denying evil. Most recently we’ve seen former SS officer Oskar Groening, 94, charged with 300,000 concentration-camp counts of accessory to murder. “There was a self-denial in me that today I find impossible to explain,” he says. It was the code of obedience that prevented him from rebelling, he adds by way of explanation.

But there’s a more insidious, disingenuous response: that of Albert Speer. He was “Hitler’s architect” and Minister of Armaments and War Production. He served a 20-year prison sentence after the Nuremberg Trials.

He toured the U.S. in the early 1970s to help market his memoir, “Inside the Third Reich.” Among his appearances: the “Mike Douglas Show,” based in Philadelphia. I still remember the interview.

Douglas, an engaging crooner/talk show host, was no Mike Wallace as an interviewer. But he did ask Speer, then in his mid-60s, if he took “responsibility” for all that the Nazis did in those death camps. Speer said he did, indeed, take responsibility because he “ought to have known” what was going on there.

And Speer was, as we know, hardly the only one to claim such self-serving ignorance.