Missles Over Israel

 Last night, Israel and the United States showed the world just exactly how good our anti-missile defenses are in blocking a major missile attack from Iran.  Without taking anything away from that absolutely amazing technological performance, I now want to know the dollar cost to Iran, Israel and the United States.  It is my understanding that the attack missiles are infinitely less expensive than are the defensive missiles.  I also assume that ship borne missiles cost far more to get into position than do land based missiles, so I presume that our overall expense is the greatest of the three.  I ask myself how many places in the world we can afford to do this kind of thing, and for how long?  I also ask myself how many of these various missiles we have in inventory and how deep our bench of trained technicians that know how to operate them is.  Assuming that we are unable to cool tensions in the Middle East, the prospect is for this kind of mindless expenditure to not only continue, but to escalate.

We tend to think about the Gaza imbroglio as being a contest between Arab and Jew, and it is, but it can also be seen as a struggle between people that agree with us, you and me, and people who do not.  Looking at it this way, sees Hamas aligned with Teheran, Moscow and Beijing.  Their individual gripes may differ but they are increasingly unified in their dislike of you and me.  In this context, last night was merely an insignificant battle in a much larger disagreement, and our opponents bled us of financial resources without any real harm being done to them.  Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine is another battle in the larger disagreement, and it is costing us dearly.  Not only do we not have the military supplies that Taiwan has already paid for, we do not currently have the capability to produce them, let alone restock our own inventories.

All of this is going on outside of our non-existent borders, while here, inside of them, none of us are discussing the problems that we face inside or outside of those imaginary lines that we draw around ourselves.  All we do is yell at each other and cancel each other.  Because we are an open democracy, this confusion is apparent to friend and foe alike.  Ukraine is literally begging us to live up to our promises, Taiwan’s former president is chatting with his soulmates on the mainland, and Teheran is on the cusp of building a nuclear weapon.  We helped our Israeli friends knock down a bunch of subsonic drones that had headlights on them and we are now telling them how to defend themselves against further aggression from Iran.  I would not be surprised if our allies thought us to be fair weather friends with little real concern for anyone but ourselves.

We can get out of the hole that we are digging for ourselves, but we have to do it together.  Neither tribe can do it by themselves, even if they quit the internecine warfare that is now going on.  We can not come together until we start talking to each other in a civil manner about real issues.  When, if, we do, we will, would, discover that we have more in common than we currently understand.  I am talking about you and me not "them," however you define "them."