Petty Republicans

So the U.S. government has finally gone into shutdown, but not like the last couple of times it was threatened when it was the issue of budgetary constraints which was the primary sticking point; the issue now is universal healthcare. That’s right, a significant portion of the Republican Party is appalled that hard-working Americans should be entitled to visit a hospital for treatment without paying extortionate amounts of money or enrolling in private insurance programmes which can often go to great lengths to not pay out on claims. I imagine these right-wing politicians think that the British National Health Service – one of the fairest healthcare systems in the world – represents some form of communism! It’s time that American citizens were put before party politics, and the Republicans need to grow up and understand that this level of petty immaturity will only cause their party to eventually disintegrate from within.

The Red Line Is About Time

Most people I speak to about the news (and most politicians that I see on the news) tend to be rather tentative about getting involved in the ongoing Syrian civil war. This mainly stems from the unnecessary war with Iraq, but I think there is a significant difference between the conflicts. Before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Hans Blix and his U.N. weapons inspectors were doing a good job, albeit a little slowly; they would have eventually determined that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and rendered him militarily impotent. I know that it wouldn’t have been particularly moral to leave a previously brutal dictator like Hussein in power, but further political measures would hopefully have been deployed (e.g. harsh economic sanctions) that may have forced a new Iraqi dawn – as in Egypt and Tunisia – without having to resort to warfare. But Syria is different: it is the U.N. Security Council that has been rendered impotent this time with Russia / China and Britain / America / France in a seemingly permanent stalemate that prevents political implementations. So now that today it has been revealed that President Barack Obama’s ‘red line’ has been crossed (proof has been shown that Bashar al-Assad has been using chemical weapons), I’m pleased that the U.S. government has taken the decision to arm Syrian rebels; in fact, it’s about time. Just because Russia and China have their own immoral agendas to keep Assad in power, doesn’t mean that the rest of the world should sit idly by while tens of thousands of people are massacred, many of them innocent civilians. As much as it may be reasonable to avoid sending in the soldiers (so that we don’t get dragged into another Afghanistan) we still have a moral duty to intervene somehow. We were able to get rid of Colonel Gaddafi by helping rebels in Libya (though that was with more political consensus), and that country is certainly better off without him. So I hope that Obama is strong in his decision-making, and forces Assad to back down from genocide.

Well That's A Relief

Barack Obama has won the U.S. Presidential election. This means that we will be spared four years of Republican belligerence, as they would probably have been threatening unilateral war with Iran (well, bilateral alongside Israel) and been much more reactionary towards Russia - not that Russia deserves a round of applause for recent decisions (i.e. Syria) but we can do without the old nuclear foes at loggerheads again. So as much as Obama isn’t perfect - he never was able to shut Guantanamo Bay - at least he guarantees us a calm head in any future storms, and he believes in universal healthcare (something us Brits take far too much for granted). And not forgetting, of course, that Democrats are generally liberal and free-thinking people; rarely a bad thing.