They called him stupor
mundi, at whom the world must gaze and gape. The emperor Frederick -- Fridericus
imperator -- Frédéric II du
Saint-Empire. His wonders are
legion; but only one concerns us
here.
Having promised the Pope a Crusade, and failed to follow through,
he was excommunicated; yet
thereafter, crusaded indeed, yet in a way peculiar to himself. He led an embassy eastwards, dealt with
the Ayyubid sultan as man to man, and managed to regain Jerusalem, Nazareth,
and Bethlehem for Christendom, without spilling a drop of blood.
So far from welcoming this, those who were adamant that the
ground should be embrued with paynim gore, reviled him; the Pope demanded a new Crusade, this
time against the successful Crusader.
(It did not materialize.)
~
Or indeed yet earlier, compare Gibbon on the reign of Honorius,
just prior to the sack of Rome:
By his advice and example, the
principal officers of the state and army
were obliged to swear that, without listening in any circumstances to any
conditions of peace [italics in original], they would still persevere in
perpetual and implacable war against the enemy of the republic. This rash engagement opposed an
insuperable bar to all future negotiation.
~
And thus we come down to our own day; the story is the same.
Had the jackals of war in the Senate had their way, we would
now be in yet another MidEast war, against pretty much anybody and anybody in
Syria, since the ever-shifting factions are impossible to sort out. President Obama avoided this,
while still managing to proceed -- with unimaginable efficiency and swiftness
-- to oversee the dismantling and disabling of Assad’s chemical weapons. For this, he gets no credit, from
those who are scheming still.
More recently, Obama and Kerry have managed what eluded
every statesman before them ever since the embassy takeover in Tehran: the Iranians have approached the table,
olive branch in hand. Yet as a
riposte to that unwelcome olive branch, the hawks or rather kites -- the
carrion crows of concealed daggers and hidden agendas -- demand sanctions yet
harsher than those that have already crippled the Iranian population for many
years.
The White House launched a harsh
attack on supporters of a Senate bill to impose fresh sanctions on Iran,
suggesting that they have a hidden goal of drawing the country into another
Mideast war.
http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-white-house-iran-nuclear-deal-20140110,0,1510706.story
The chicken-hawks feign outrage; but such indeed has been their goal, ever since, in the
engineered run-up to our invasion of Iraq, their motto was: “Everyone
wants to go to Baghdad; real men want to go to Tehran.” It is not America that these men
serve.
What the Iranians really have in mind, I have no idea --
quite possibly they are largely winging it, and will certainly wing awry should
these new sanctions go through.
Certainly we need to watch their hands. (Доверяй, но проверяй, as Reagan
liked to say.) I imagine that they would be overjoyed to forswear all dreams of nuclear
arms for aye and ever, if only they might then live in a nuke-free Middle East,
something no-one there presently enjoys, owing to [Halt! Taboo topic
detected. Revert to No Comment.]
[Update 12 January 2014] Moving forward, despite the would-be Senate wreckers:
“Beginning January 20th, Iran will
for the first time start eliminating its stockpile of higher levels of enriched
uranium and dismantling some of the infrastructure that makes such enrichment
possible,” President Obama said in a statement on Sunday.
Les chiens
aboient; la caravane passe.
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