Cheerful Curmudgeon

Few will argue with me when I suggest that the best way to lead a meeting or resolve a dispute is to help all of the participants both express their views and hear the thoughts and feelings of the others. It has been many, many years since anyone thought that anything from families to committees to large corporations should be effectively managed in a strictly hierarchical style with all power emanating from the top.

Oddly, the United States has been executing strategy in a strictly hierarchical style for the last several years, with mid-east politics the example du jur.

Do you remember the war in Iraq? That was the short little incursion that we started a few years ago. It began with a consensus of the affected parties and ended quickly. Didn’t it?

Well, the Iraq war was so successful that the Bush administration is going to try it again, this time in Iran. Esquire has a wonderfully detailed article, The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House Doesn’t Want You to Know.

Two former high-ranking policy experts from the Bush Administration say the U.S. has been gearing up for a war with Iran for years, despite claiming otherwise. It’ll be Iraq all over again.

In the years after 9/11, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann worked at the highest levels of the Bush administration as Middle East policy experts for the National Security Council. Mann conducted secret negotiations with Iran. Leverett traveled with Colin Powell and advised Condoleezza Rice. They each played crucial roles in formulating policy for the region leading up to the war in Iraq. But when they left the White House, they left with a growing sense of alarm — not only was the Bush administration headed straight for war with Iran, it had been set on this course for years.

It’s a long and detailed article but well worth the read.

In response to questions from Esquire, Colin Powell called Leverett “very able” and confirms much of what he says. Leverett’s account of the clash between Bush and Crown Prince Abdullah was accurate, he said. “It was a very serious moment and no one wanted to see if the Saudis were bluffing.” The same goes for the story about his speech in Israel in 2002. “I had major problems with the White House on what I wanted to say.”

It is not our place to dictate how other nations behave. It is certainly not our place to enforce how other nations behave.

If facilitation and consensus-building are right for groups ranging in size up to large corporations but a hierarchical style is right for the United States, what makes the USA different?

To be blunt: Mr. Bush, don’t invade Iran.

[Ed: I did not write this but I wish I had. I do not know the original author.]

Regardless of your feelings about the crisis between Israel and the Palestinians and Arab neighbors, even if you believe there is more culpability on Israel’s part, the following two sentences really say it all:

If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence.

If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.

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The Jews are not promoting brain washing the children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non-Muslims.

The Jews do not hijack planes or kill athletes at the Olympics.

The Jews do not traffic slaves or have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the infidels.

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The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000, or 20% of the world population. They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:

• 1988 – Najib Mahfooz

Peace:

• 1978 – Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
• 1994 – Yaser Arafat
• 1990 – Elias James Corey
• 1999 – Ahmed Zewai

Economics:

• (none)

Medicine:

• 1960 – Peter Brian Medawar
• 1998 – Ferid Mourad

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000, or about 0.02% of the world population. They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:

• 1910 – Paul Heyse
• 1927 – Henri Bergson
• 1958 – Boris Pasternak
• 1966 – Shmuel Yosef Agnon
• 1966 – Nelly Sachs
• 1976 – Saul Bellow
• 1978 – Isaac Bashevis Singer
• 1981 – Elias Canetti
• 1987 – Joseph Brodsky
• 1991 – Nadine Gordimer World

Peace:

• 1911 – Alfred Fried
• 1911 – Tobias Michael Carel Asser
• 1968 – Rene Cassin
• 1973 – Henry Kissinger
• 1978 – Menachem Begin
• 1986 – Elie Wiesel
• 1994 – Shimon Peres
• 1994 – Yitzhak Rabin

Physics:

• 1905 – Adolph Von Baeyer
• 1906 – Henri Moissan
• 1907 – Albert Abraham Michelson
• 1908 – Gabriel Lippmann
• 1910 – Otto Wallach
• 1915 – Richard Willstaetter
• 1918 – Fritz Haber
• 1921 – Albert Einstein
• 1922 – Niels Bohr
• 1925 – James Franck
• 1925 – Gustav Hertz
• 1943 – Gustav Stern
• 1943 – George Charles de Hevesy
• 1944 – Isidor Issac Rabi
• 1952 – Felix Bloc h
• 1954 – Max Born
• 1958 – Igor Tamm
• 1959 – Emilio Segre
• 1960 – Donald A. Glaser
• 1961 – Robert Hofstadter
• 1961 – Melvin Calvin
• 1962 – Lev Davidovich Landau
• 1962 – Max Ferdinand Perutz
• 1965 – Richard Phillips Feynman
• 1965 – Julian Schwinger
• 1969 – Murray Gell-Mann
• 1971 – Dennis Gabor
• 1972 – William Howard Stein
• 1973 – Brian David Josephson
• 1975 – Benjamin Mottleson
• 1976 – Burton Richter
• 1977 – Ilya Prigogine
• 1978 – Arno Allan Penzias
• 1978 – Peter L Kapitza
• 1979 – Stephen Weinberg
• 1979 – Sheldon Glashow
• 1979 – Herbert Charle s Brown
• 1980 – Paul Berg
• 1980 – Walter Gilbert
• 1981 – Roald Hoffmann
• 1982 – Aaron Klug
• 1985 – Albert A. Hauptman
• 1985 – Jerome Karle
• 1986 – Dudley R. Herschbach
• 1988 – Robert Huber
• 1988 – Leon Lederman
• 1988 – Melvin Schwartz
• 1988 – Jack Steinberger
• 1989 – Sidney Altman
• 1990 – Jerome Friedman
• 1992 – Rudolph Marcus
• 1995 – Martin Perl
• 2000 – Alan J. Heeger

Economics:

• 1970 – Paul Anthony Samuelson
• 1971 – Simon Kuznets
• 1972 – Kenneth Joseph Arrow
• 1975 – Leonid Kantorovich
• 1976 – Milton Friedman
• 1978 – Herbert A. Simon
• 1980 – Lawrence Robert Klein
• 1985 – Franco Modigliani
• 1987 – Robert M. Solow
• 1990 – Harry Markowitz
• 1990 – Merton Miller
• 1992 – Gary Becker
• 1993 – Robert Fogel

Medicine:

• 1908 – Elie Metchnikoff
• 1908 – Paul Erlich
• 1914 – Robert Barany
• 1922 – Otto Meyerhof1930 – Karl Landsteiner
• 1931 – Otto Warburg
• 1936 – Otto Loewi
• 1944 – Joseph Erlanger
• 1944 – Herbert Spencer Gasser
• 1945 – Ernst Boris Chain
• 1946 – Hermann Joseph Muller
• 1950 – Tadeus Reichstein
• 1952 – Selman Abra ham Waksman
• 1953 – Hans Krebs
• 1953 – Fritz Albert Lipmann
• 1958 – Joshua Lederberg
• 1959 – Arthur Kornberg
• 1964 – Konrad Bloch
• 1965 – Francois Jaco b
• 1965 – Andre Lwoff
• 1967 – George Wald
• 1968 – Marshall W. Nirenberg
• 1969 – Salvador Luria
• 1970 – Julius Axelrod
• 1970 – Sir Bernard Katz
• 1972 – Gerald Maurice Edelman
• 1975 – Howard Martin Temin
• 1976 – Baruch S. Blumberg
• 1977 – Roselyn Sussman Yalow
• 1978 – Daniel Nathans
• 1980 – Baruj Benacerraf
• 1984 – Cesar Milstein
• 1985 – Michael Stuart Brown
• 1985 – Joseph L. Goldstein
• 1986 – Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
• 1988 – Gertrude Elion
• 1989 – Harold Varmus
• 1991 – Erwin Neher
• 1991 – Bert Sakmann
• 1993 – Richard J. Roberts
• 1993 – Phillip Sharp
• 1994 – Alfred Gilman
• 1995 – Edward B. Lewis

Perhaps the world’s Muslims should consider investing more in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems.

The cease-fire in Lebanon begins as this entry is published.

Poems for Peace
Petach — The Opening

I am sitting at the opening of Abraham’s tent
wondering what the tent opens onto –

inside are the children of Abraham
his various wives
soon they will leave each other
some day their descendants will be hurling missiles back and forth.
They may do that for a long time to come.

Some of their books will teach contempt for each other
they will protect their suspicions
into the future
if there is to be peace
the texts will have to be changed.

Outside the tent
I am imagining
that field of Rumi
you know the one I mean?
The one beyond the ideas of right-doing
and wrong-doing
where Rumi says
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in the grass. . .

Right now I am standing at the intersection
between inside the tent
the enmity the separation the fear the reluctance
and outside the tent
the field beyond right and wrong
here in the opening,

a doorway
like all passageways
there is room to move through
neither within or without
transitional always
opening in opening out.

In the passageway
Abraham stands always
embodying chesed
lovingkindness
he sees only the good in everyone
he invites us in
he invites us out
wherever we live
within without
beyond right and wrong
we are all standing with Abraham
in the opening of his tent.

Now –
Jews Arabs Muslims Parties of G*d
Right wing Left wing
Hawk Dove
Irani Israeli Pakistani Lebanesi
Yitzchaki Yishmaeli

holy man holy woman

in
or
out.

James Stone Goodman
Congregation Neve Shalom

You can read more of Rabbi Goodman’s poems on Neve Shalom’s mailing list.