Also on today’s menu:
An Anniversary To Think About
Scams are all around us. They come by telephone, internet, and plain old mail. The card above arrived in our mailbox yesterday. While it includes the SmartEnergy name near the top, the bold type makes reference to Eversource as a way of misleading the customer into believing the offer comes from the same electric utility already being used. The focus is on the gift card, and it is easy to mistake SmartEnergy for a program offered by Eversource, providing a fixed rate for six months. It is only the fine print at the bottom that reveals that SmartEnergy is a separate electric supplier unaffiliated with Eversource. The deception allows SmartEnergy to get new customers at a reduced rate that will end after half a year.
More sinister approaches come by way of emails that thank the recipient for a recent purchase, usually in the $499 range, with a contact method that lures those who have not made a purchase to give up their personal information in order to avoid the charge — only to find that they have given away access that allows the scammers to get at more money. Apple offers a reportphishing@apple.com email address where suspicious messages can be sent, and if it is a message purporting to be from the Internal Revenue Service, forward the message to phishing@irs.gov. Another option is to contact the Federal Trade Commission by going to FTC.gov/Complaint.
Even when one is aware that there are scams operating all around us, it is easy to get caught. Always hesitate before responding to anything, keeping in mind my mother’s advice: “Question things before accepting them.”
An Anniversary To Think About
March 20 was the 20th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. That was the date that the United States, joined by the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland, launched the “shock-and-awe” bombing campaign that eventually brought down Saddam Hussein. It also resulted in the deaths of 4,599 U.S. troops and thousands of contractors working for the United States.
That “shock-and-awe” campaign was designed to bring about a victory in a matter of days, not unlike Russia’s expectations when it launched its “special military operation” in Ukraine last year. Instead, it was a war that lasted until 2011 and left the country decimated, providing an opening for the radical Islamic State to move in to fill the vacuum in 2014.
At the time, most Americans supported the invasion, believing the lie that Saddam had stores of “weapons of mass destruction” — but it created a rift with other allies and undermined the broad support for this country following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Not only our allies questioned the decision to turn the focus away from al Qaida to go after a man we previously supported; it was a wake-up call for Vladimir Putin that the United States could not be trusted, and would act like an imperial power without regard to the geopolitical, psychological, and domestic costs of the intervention.
Melvyn P. Leffler has written a new book, Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq, in which he observes, “The war enhanced Iranian power in the Persian Gulf, diverted attention and resources from the ongoing struggle inside Afghanistan, divided America’s European allies, and provided additional opportunity for China’s rise and Russia’s revanchism. The conflict besmirched America’s reputation and heightened anti-Americanism. It fueled the sense of grievance among Muslims, accentuated perceptions of American arrogance, complicated the struggle against terrorism, and dampened hopes for democracy and peace among Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. Rather than enhancing the spread of liberty, the president and his advisers left office witnessing the worldwide recession of freedom.”
Over the past 20 years, the previous support for democracy has increasingly turned to authoritarianism around the world and even within the United States, where Donald Trump’s MAGA cult has come to reject all the values Americans fought for during World War II, substituting an alternate philosophy that is very close to fascism.
Yet Leffler also observes, “Like most Americans, Bush and his advisers could not foresee how societal disorder, lawlessness, and personal vulnerability could trump the appeal of freedom for most Iraqis. Like most Americans, administration policymakers could not imagine how secret prisons, black sites, waterboarding, and prisoner humiliation by white Christian women soldiers could undercut all the talk of freedom, human rights, and personal dignity. Like many Americans, the president and his advisers could not help but conflate the evil that Hussein personified with a magnitude of threat that he did not embody. When critics blame Bush personally or his advisers more broadly, however, they tend to obfuscate the larger dilemmas of statecraft that inhered in the aftermath of 9/11. Bush failed not because he was a weak leader, a naive ideologue, or a lying, manipulative politician. Critics forget how ominous the al Qaeda threat seemed and how evil and manipulative Hussein really was. They overlook how imprecise the intelligence was, and the difficulties of gathering it. They ignore Hussein’s links to terrorists and the ongoing havoc caused by acts of suicidal terror. They trivialize how difficult it was to measure the threat Hussein constituted, how easy it was to magnify the danger he posed, how tempting it was to employ American power, and how consequential it would be if America was attacked again.”
Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, an Iraqi whose brother was killed in the war, observed, “I lost my country. I lost my beloved brother. I lost friends and neighbors. My family was uprooted and is now separated by an ocean. And yet. It is hard to express what it means, if you have lived under an authoritarian regime, to experience freedom. Those who have grown up with the privilege of liberty are lucky not to understand it — and the heavy price you are willing to pay for it if you have lived without it.”
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