'May You Live In Interesting Times'

As you go into your weekend, leaving the cares of work and other sources of stress behind you, I've harvested a few nuggets of wisdom to chew on now we all have a moment to ourselves. First off, here's John J. Mearsheimer, co-author, with Stephen Walt, of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, interviewed by Macclean's magazine:

"Imagine a situation with a Palestinian state where there's now the state of Israel. Instead of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories, you have Jews living in the Occupied Territories, with the Palestinian state taking land away from the Jews, treating them in brutal ways and denying them a state of their own. There would be a huge outcry in the West, especially in the United States and Canada. We would go to enormous lengths to put pressure on the Palestinian state to stop exploiting and brutalizing the Jews, and to allow them to have a state of their own. But here we have a situation where the roles are reversed, and the United States and Canada support Israel."

When it comes to the subject of Israel, a strange double-standard is applied by policymakers and pundits alike. Another example: If the citizens of any other country harassed and assaulted an American envoy – as happened in Hebron, Israel, the other day – you can bet we'd all have heard about it by now, from irate American officials and the news media. In this case, not a word.

Instead, we hear calls from the War Party to invade yet another hapless country that is no threat to us or our interests – Burma. Or Myanmar, as they call it nowadays, no doubt for some politically correct reason. Time magazine opines: "As the response to the 2004 tsunami proved, the world's capacity for mercy is limitless. But we still haven't figured out when to give war a chance."

So many in the West are all too eager to give war a chance: peace, on the other hand, rarely seems an option. These Johnny-one-notes are stuck in the groove of American supremacism, a sense of hubris that may seem old-fashioned before long, as the economy slides from a recession into something rather more serious and prolonged.

In any case, Lisa Schiffren, writing in National Review, chimes in with a few helpful suggestions: antiwar