BOG POST. For those old enough to remember, did you just get a flashback to JFK in 1962?

[Hekate]

POSTED IN THE BARACK OBAMA GROUP
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I first logged on several hours ago (morning, my time) and my eye was immediately hit by two posts about Syria, Russia, and the chem weapons hinting that Russia might take them in hand. It was jarring -- and just reading the titles was what gave me the flashback (although the days of Cold War style sabre rattling has been the prep for it I suppose). I clicked on them and one was sourced RT, so I moved on. The other had a noninformative thread so I went down the hall to make myself some coffee. As soon as I turned on the tv in the kitchen, there were the bobble-heads waiting for Hillary Clinton to speak. She had just come from a meeting with the Prez, and she spoke....

No need to recap it here, this is more about how it feels on a gut level. My flashback was to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when I was 15, which I remember very well. JFK had to show-willing to Khrushchev to get him to back down. My gut is telling me that we might pull out of this dive at the last moment.

Okay, back to my own real life again.

Hekate

[global1]

1. I Had The Same Thought When I Heard About Putin's Offer On the Chem Weapons.....

If this is for real - which a number of talking heads today are saying it's a ploy and a delay tactic - if it's for real - this could be President Obama's Kennedy moment. I'm all for that.

[mcar]

2. Very interesting

I was very young then but I've read a lotnof the history and seen the movies, of course. You make some good points Hekate.

[gopiscrap]

3. Yup I remember 62

I really little and living in Germany my parents were petrified and thought Kennedy was a God!

[Hekate]

6. You could really smell the tension if you lived near military bases

I went to school with many, many military dependents on O'ahu. I'm sure their fathers were all on high alert -- their kids certainly were. I don't know what it felt like in communities that were all-civilian, but from what I've read, nobody slept too easily in this country.

There's analysis of that event still going on, but one lesson should remain: our biggest opponents on this planet (and their proxies) will never cease to push for advantage, nor will they ever cease probing for signs of psychological or physical weakness.

Do we have to constantly go to war? I don't think so. Do we have to constantly pour more than half of our national treasure into the war machine? I don't believe that either. I believe in negotiation, diplomacy, and talking.

But should we ever let our guard completely down with either Russia or China? What do you think?

[Cha]

4. I hadn't thought of it with

that historical reference, Hekate. But, I have been thinking there's a lot more going on here than what's all over the surface and the President knows what he's doing.

I think with the President.. this is about the world getting Assad to back off with threat of a strike force and not about starting some gd war.

And, Comparisons to Iraq are ludicrous.. Notice how democracy has played into it. All the dissent, the vigorous at sometimes raging debate. All that was squashed, stifled, in the lead up to Iraq.

[Lady Freedom Returns]

10. There is a lot more going on.

Assad is hurting his people. we have been given evidence of that. It is not like what we were given with Iraq.

The thing is if we set back and do nothing we will be seen as being scared to do what is right because we are scared of Al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda will take it as a big win and run with it. With the world seeing us as "fearful"", Al-Qaeda will be in a better place to pull more power play.


President Obama knows this. He knows the score and all that is at stake!

Most of the citizens don't seem to realize that we are playing into Al-Qaeda hands by not standing up for what we have always believed in.

[sheshe2]

5. Well done Hekate, good analogy.

[Pab Sungenis]

7. If it works out well in the end

it will be a beautiful example of brinksmanship at its best. Well done.

[IrishAyes]

8. President Obama

was hinting to Dianne Sawyer this evening that Syria MIGHT be forced to give up its nerve gas arsenal, in which case we wouldn't need to make a military strike, something he made clear he prefers to avoid. I also like the idea that it could make the GOP eat dirt. By the bucket load.

[greatauntoftriplets]

9. I was in 8th grade at the time.

Between the nuns scaring the crap out of us and my mother vowing to drink all the booze in the house (no small feat), I'll never be able to forget it.

JFK was brilliant.

[freshwest]

11. I remember the terror of those days. The news said that my city was likely to be hit because of

the oil industry with all the refineries was a strategic target. We were issued dog tags at our elementary school to wear everyday with our name and religion on them, told they would be shoved between our front teeth or between our toes to identify our corpses.

We learned how to get under our desks in hopes it would protect us. One of the drills had planes flown overhead to make it more realistic, I guess.

The worst thing was that we were divided up according to how fast we would be able to get home when the bombs struck. It was assumed it would be an atomic bomb and we wre told what the bombs in Japan did, and that we would probably die when it hit.

I was in the group that was told I would have to stay and presumbly die without seeing my folks or home again. I don't think I was the only one who grew up with this.

I remember all the way through the Carter years when that was long over, that the weekly air raid sirens still went off every weekend and could be heard for miles. There were many places that were designated with the radiation sign as fallout shelters. Some people built fall out bunkers in their back yard.

I don't know if that was Kennedy's doing, if it was Cold War thinking, or the feeling that WW2 was alive and well. We grew up in the remains of that war, a job I had in the seventies still used that army green for trucks, and anti-aircraft bunkers were still on the beaches.

I look back and never imagined it was staged, it was a real danger to me. Sparring with Castro did not end there, nor with Russia. At the time, I just considered the adults who were going to get us all killed to be insane, but there was nothing could be done.

Most people I knew who really got involved with politics in the sixties had the same feelings about WMD and MAD. It was insane, just like so much that as happened since, and the world is sick of it.