Oh, it's worse than that!

Why this title?

The quote came from a Democracy Now interview with General Wesley Clark:

[Transcript]
Originally published in March 2007
General Wesley Clark:
Because I had been through the Pentagon right after 9/11. About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, "Sir, you've got to come in and talk to me a second." I said, "Well, you're too busy." He said, "No, no." He says, "We've made the decision we're going to war with Iraq." This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, "We're going to war with Iraq? Why?" He said, "I don't know." He said, "I guess they don't know what else to do." So I said, "Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?" He said, "No, no." He says, "There's nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq." He said, "I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists, but we've got a good military and we can take down governments." And he said, "I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail."

So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, "Are we still going to war with Iraq?" And he said, "Oh, it's worse than that." He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, "I just got this down from upstairs" -- meaning the Secretary of Defense's office -- "today." And he said, "This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran." I said, "Is it classified?" He said, "Yes, sir." I said, "Well, don't show it to me." And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, "You remember that?" He said, "Sir, I didn't show you that memo! I didn't show it to you!"

But this is not where I started on my recent shift in understanding current affairs. The turning point for me was 1st January 2016 and the events in Cologne on New Year's Eve.

About this blog

This is my second attempt at a blog as a newbie, so I will still be on a learning curve. This time I may have some more motivation to see it through.

The current intention is to record links and thoughts about current philosophical, political and religious issues, for sharing with friends and anyone else who is interested. I'm coming across a lot of information which is changing the way I see the world and it would be good to have some feedback to clarify my thoughts.

The inspiration for this blog is what I perceive as the growing threat to restrict freedom of speech and to prevent certain ideas from being discussed in public. This is my small contribution to help prevent that and to foster respectful dialogue between people of good will, whatever their beliefs.

I'm conscious that I will be walking into a minefield by touching very delicate subjects, but that makes them all the more important to address. I've lived through a time when traditional Christian values, particularly in respect to sexual morality, have become increasingly marginalised to the point where it may be detrimental to one's career or even illegal to express those views or act on them by conscientious objection.

No important ideas, events and human realities, should be off-limits, in order to understand them better, even if they are politically unacceptable, such as Nazism. I have no intention to cause offence, but if the very mention of a sensitive topic offends you, then this blog is not for you.

This blog will tend to have a Catholic worldview and moral perspective (inasmuch as my views approximate to that), in terms of assessing whether something is right or wrong. This is distinct from the truth of the facts and evidence of the matter at hand. In an age of highly sophisticated mass propaganda aimed at deceiving and manipulating whole populations, just telling the plain truth is a revolutionary act.

There are many problems in the world, but a future post will examine an aspect of the world situation which I am (belatedly) beginning to see as central: the "War on Terror".