[UPDATE : Granny Doc's current post indicates the US Intel Community Isn't Taking The insanity I Detail at length, below, lying Down. As a NYT story reports, "A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003". This morning that story is leading the news cycle, and the timing as well as mainstream media's ready acceptance of the story suggests a shift in the balance - towards a forceful repudiation of the Bush Administration's case for radically expanded war in the Middle East that some worry could spread out to become the very "World War Three" that George W. Bush has recently warned us of.
Have we passed the high water mark ? Will the danger now recede ? Perhaps, and for an antidote to the darkness of my post, see my postscript.]
TIM RUSSERT: So we could have two wars at once?
SEN. McCAIN: I think we could have Armageddon.
-- John McCain, on the possible outcome of a US war with Iran, April 2nd 2006, "Meet The Press."
"If people had known how close we came to world war three that day there’d have been mass panic. Never mind the floods or foot-and-mouth — Gordon really would have been dealing with the bloody Book of Revelation and Armageddon." - quote attributed to a "very senior British ministerial source", from an October 6, 2007 UK Spectator article on what allegedly almost happened as a result of the mysterious September 2, 2007 Israeli air strike in Syrian territory.
One of the astonishing things about the Bush Administration is how quickly it has managed to cobble together a new 'Cold War' with the same sort of dramatically heightened international tension and the same sort of hair raising brinksmanship as the old Cold War. Apparently, according to the UK Spectator, we were all just nearly incinerated.
Hmmm. That's interesting. Say what ?
Yes indeed. According to the UK Spectator, we came very close to Global nuclear war this past September. A Nov. 29 Slate article ( see section, below, entitled "Talking World War Three Blues" ) discusses this in detail.
Is it true ? Maybe, maybe not.
One of the most important imperatives of of modern nuclear war fighting is that decisions must be made rapidly and, because of that, things can quickly spin out of control.
Recently, I watched a BBC documentary on the 1968 Liberty incident which revealed that, in response to the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, the United States almost destroyed Cairo with nuclear weapons.
Whether the UK Spectator quote is accurate or not doesn't in the end especially matter (see my postscript, Read The Tea Leaves, Comrade). The Bush Administration has repeatedly rejected Iranian overtures to negotiate and so Iran has sought allies who might help deter a feared US attack. Russia has lined up with Iran, and now the conflict is fraught with nuclear danger going far past Iran's embryonic efforts to obtain nuclear capability which, a new US intelligence report suggests (see top of post), have been seriously curtailed since 2003.
Things have gotten so bad, even the NYT is worried. That worries me. [NOTE: for a quick action item, MoveOn has a petition - against war vs. Iran - that you can sign onto. Other action item suggestions welcome. ] The Gray lady, who more often than not sings a decidedly warlike tune when it comes to US Middle East policy, has taken to hand wringing editorials about the Bush Administration's basic sanity:
America’s allies and increasingly the American public are playing a ghoulish guessing game: Will President Bush manage to leave office without starting a war with Iran? Mr. Bush is eagerly feeding those anxieties. This month he raised the threat of "World War III" if Iran even figures out how to make a nuclear weapon.
With a different White House, we might dismiss this as posturing — or bank on sanity to carry the day, or the warnings of exhausted generals or a defense secretary more rational than his predecessor. Not this crowd
Nuclear Deterrence 101
One of the Bush Administration's early moves, in terms of nuclear war fighting policy, was to move to deploy the "star wars" shield that Ronald Reagan proposed, to the great alarm of nuclear deterrence theorists and the Soviet Union, about two decades prior.
"The Shield" does two things - deploying it it might mean the US could shoot down a few missiles heading towards the mainland US from wherever, and it also gives various nuclear powers around the globe, who might have reason to consider the US a nuclear war-fighting foe, cause to worry that the US is trying to fundamentally change the nuclear balance of power, to break out of classical nuclear deterrence. If the US, one day, achieves the ability to simply shoot down all, or most incoming enemy nuclear missiles, then the United States can opt to simply dictate terms to its foes and threaten to reduce those countries to smoking nuclear wastelands should they fail to comply (see section farther along in my post, "The Shield").
Consequently, US moves to deploy partially effective ABM systems give other nuclear powers incentive to use their nuclear forces while they still can.
Talking World War Three Blues
The Bush Administration's withdrawal of the US from the ABM treaty, it's deployment of Reagan's "star wars" system, and its subsequent actions in terms of invading Iraq and rejecting Iranian overtures on negotiation, have helped shove the nuclear clock --that measures how close the world is to nuclear war-- two minutes closer to midnight.
With the sort of statements that have been coming out of George W. Bush's mouth lately, and also his administration's refusal to negotiate with Iran, which reportedly was rebuffed by the administration when it offered to negotiate with the US about it's nuclear program and support for terrorism back in 2003, I don't feel that secure knowing that Mr. Bush has access to codes that might precipitate the end of life on Earth. I think Nancy Pelosi should have a key to the "football' - Include her in the nuclear-launch decision making process.
A November 29, 2007 article, by Ron Rosenbaum, in Slate magazine entitled Talkin' World War III : The Return of The Repressed discusses the growing insanity that seems to characterize the Bush Administration's Mideast policies in the context of the September 6, 2007 Israeli airstrike within Syria which, allegedly per an unnamed, high level British government official cited by the UK Spectator, almost triggered "Armageddon". I wouldn't doubt it, and the extreme irresponsibility of Bush Administration Mideast policy, which has in large part created the charged climate in which a runaway process of nuclear escalation might happen, must be checked.
Despite whatever misgivings I might have about Nancy Pelosi's responsiveness to her democratic constituents in California, she at least can probably be relied on to not gamble with the lives of billions of people. So I'd be much happier were she part of the nuclear war decision making loop :
Give Nancy Pelosi a key to the football
By most indications, the Bush Administration has never been anything but bent on war with Iran. Last summer, June 2006, the American Prospect came out with an article by Gareth Porter [link to PDF of June issue] detailed how, in 2003, Iran made a secret overture to negotiate with the Bush Administration on about Iran's nuclear program and its support for terrorism, and to offer substantial and concrete concessions to address various US concerns. The Administration snubbed the proposal.
That story has been corroborated by a recent story in Esquire Magazine:
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.
Back in 2005, the Pentagon revised US nuclear war fighting doctrine, and the new idea is to use nuclear weapons to 'preemptively' attack nations or terrorist groups that have WMDs (however we define those). Give the Bush performance in assessing Iraq's alleged WMD programs, it's hard to see how the new doctrine doesn't amount to a doctrine of using nuclear weapons whenever we want or, at least, against nations unable to retaliate in kind.
Lately, Mr. Bush has been slinging around the term "World War Three", darkly hinting that people had better worry about Iran getting nuclear weapons or just the knowledge and/or ability to make them because that could lead to World War Three. Meanwhile, many people who actually know something about nuclear warfare and nuclear deterrence worry that a US attack on Iran could lead to just that - World War 3 (or WW4, depending on your chronologies of world wars).
George E. Lowe is "very worried"
Recently, I met George W. Lowe, who knows a bit about nuclear war and nuclear deterrence, and he's VERY WORRIED. Besides being the author of several books including the two-volume It Can Happen Here: A Fascist Christian America, which I highly recommend, Lowe served in the two Reagan Administrations, as a speech writer in the Dept. of Education, and he worked in Naval Intelligence late 1950's and early 1960's (which included, he says, working in a secret group, under John McCain's father, that worked against would-be 'Christian fascists' and secular fascists in the Air Force prone to wanting a preemptive all-out nuclear strike against the USSR ). At the University Of Chicago, Lowe did the work for his PhD dissertation, on nuclear deterrence, which was published as a book, in 1964, by Little,Brown. There's a great more I could ay about the man, but that should suffice for now. George Lowe has been urging me to write something that floats an idea he thinks will make the threat of all-out nuclear war less likely: Give Nancy Pelosi a key to the 'football'
The Football
Those who structured US government had keen insight, but they did not anticipate the possibility the chief executive might gain literally the power to destroy the planet.
The 'football' may have been once a physical device and might be still, but it never featured big red flashing buttons that one might push to launch a world-terminating wave of MIRV'd ICBM's, from submarines and silos. From what I can tell, the 'key' to the 'football' enables access to codes that in turn authenticate the identity of someone who is authorized to launch those missiles...
George Lowe tells me he's very, very, concerned, and the UK Spectator story discussed below, other indications too, suggest to me I should take him seriously, especially because of his background in politics and nuclear deterrence theory.
It seems to me it would be good to have someone who's even slightly more grounded in the premise that it's stupid to play games with the fate of the world involved in the nuclear launch decision tree. If Nancy Pelosi had the ability to nix George Bush's or Dick Cheney's apparent lust for fighting a "limited" nuclear war, I'd feel much, much better and I'd sleep sounder too.
What really happened last September ?
The September 6, 2007 Israel strike on a Syria desert construction site has been shrouded in surprising, across the board government silence as Arab nations one would have thought would condemn the Israeli attack did not do so. But certain details of the Israeli strike that have slowly seeped out allow for somewhat more informed speculation, and that's the subject of a new reassessment, by Ron Rosenbaum, in a November 29, 2007 article in Slate magazine entitled Talkin' World Wat III : The Return of The Repressed.
Rosenbaum notes the concurrence of several ominous events. The recent, supposedly accidental migration, as if nuclear warheads were apt to take wing of their own volition and fly south like birds, of 6 tactical nuclear warheads from Minot Air Force Base to Barksdale AFB, gains considerably more menace (if the incident were not in itself menacing enough) in light of George W. Bush's jarring October 17, 2007 warning, "I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them (Iran) from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon" which, as many observers noted, amounted to a stupifying shove of the Overton Window, by Bush, as he warnd that the fate of the Earth, every woman, child, and man on it, rested on the necessity not of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons grade Uranium or Plutonium, acquiring nuclear bomb-making capability, or successfully building nuclear devices.
The fate of the Earth, asserted George W. Bush, hinged on preventing Iran from acquiring the knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons and the totalistic, manichean, apocalyptic insanity inherent in Bush's warning-- which may have been a slip of Bush's often erratic tongue but if so he hasn't since retracted the warning --was that the statement, taken in strictly logical terms, would imply that Bush was intent on immolating the 60 million odd human beings who live in Iran, in a large scale unilateral nuclear strike. How else could the United States possibly prevent Iran from acquiring the knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons ? Such knowledge could, and probably already does, exist - in documents stashed in safes, on computer hard drives, and flash memory sticks smaller than packs of chewing gum... somewhere in Iran. During the presidency of George W. Bush's father, George Bush Sr.'s administration turned a blind eye while the father of the Pakistani bomb, A. Q. Khan, distributed, shared, or sold nuclear bomb-making knowledge to various nations and non-state actors ; that Pandora's Box was opened, it's demons scattered to the four winds, years ago.
George W. Bush's October 17, 2007 warning seemed to imply those demons could somehow be rounded up again, nuclear bomb-making knowledge somehow corralled or eradicated by the selective immolation of designated, suspect "terrorist" nations and it is true that such knowledge could probably be eradicated but not through any "selective" application of H-bomb megatonnage however, although an accidental cascade of miscalculation and retaliation leading to global nuclear war would do the trick quite neatly.
Given the risk that a "selective" US nuclear strike on Iran could set off a an all out global nuclear war, the purported "solution" - the use of 'tactical' nuclear weapons, with an assumed 'collateral damage' that would amount to mass murder on a grand scale - could very possibly lead to a conflagration infinitely worse than the alleged threat. An Iranian bomb, even dozens of them and even if there was an absolute certainly that Iran would use such weapons when it got them, would pose a level of destructive threat that shrinks to near insignificance compared to the threat that all of the world's megatonnage, all the American, Russian, French, British, Chinese, Israeli, Indian, and Pakistani nuclear weapons (I've probably neglected one or two members of the burgeoning nuclear club) were to be set off.
George, Dick & The Button : How Lucky Do We Feel ?
What Lowe wanted me to float, by suggesting that we give Nancy Pelosi a 'key to the football' was the idea of placing Pelosi in the decision making loop of whether or not to launch a nuclear strike, such that her consent would be required. His premise ? - Both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are insane. Cheney likely is a secular utopian, and George W. Bush may hold a mix of secular and religious utopian thought, but from all indications both men seem to think that through a rolling succession of wars (which might well involve the use of tactical nuclear weapons) waged by the United States, working in concert with Israel and a few other key allies, the US can usher in a new era of world peace.
We can now reasonably assume, given that Iran has several times floated expansive peace proposals that have been spurned by the administration, that the Bush Administration does not want peace with Iran. Iranian proposals that reportedly even put Iranian support for terrorism and the Iranian nuclear program on the negotiating table were ignored, and that suggests the Bush Administration's alleged reasons were not the real ones for it's new Mideast wars. Weapons of mass destruction were the pretext, but control of oil, a new global Pax Americana enforced by draconian military might and the utopian vision for banishing threats to the US and Israel forever by somehow driving the very category of evil from the world, those motivations were likely all in the mix, but WMD's - as such - were not.
I have no idea of the Constitutional issues that would be involved, though I do know they would be considerable. But I do know that my trust in the basic sanity of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney is almost entirely eroded. I'm not sure if I think George Bush is somehow bent on precipitating Armageddon because his mind is currently infested with premillennial apocalyptic Christian beliefs, but I do think there's a good case to be made that Bush's mind is filled with a toxic slurry of those beliefs and also now, after 7 years in the White House listening to NeoConservatives, beliefs that comprise a secular analog to the sort of religious utopian thinking which characterizes Christian dispensationalist thought.
On Utopians: Religious, Secular, and Nuclear
The sort of thinking we can see at work in George W. Bush's October 17, 2007 warning can be termed "utopian", and that is a particular type of madness, which can be either secular or religious, which holds that acts of terrible and almost inconceivable destruction can fix what's basically wrong with the world. Twin ideological streams feeding into the Bush administration, apocalytic Christianity and NeoConservative ideas of a violent and sweeping transformation in the political landscape of the Middle East, are both utopian. There is a key similarity among the fevered visions of CUFI founder John Hagee and NeoCon visions such as that outlined in the 1996 NeoConservative document "A Clean Break". In both, an orgy of destruction, it is supposed, will usher in a new age free of conflict, a utopian age.
This was the sort of thinking that almost triggered nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it was the sort of thinking that, during the early Reagan years, almost led to nuclear apocalypse as well. George Lowe's 2000, two-volume It Can Happen Here: A Fascist Christian America provides an astonishing window into the early Cold War and the years of the Reagan Administration, and in Lowe's description Reagan's early years were marked by the sort of obsession with Biblical prophecies from the Book Of Revelations that we can see hints of, too, in a recent account of how George W. Bush tried to convince Mitterand of the need for an attack on Iran by citing "Gog and Magog". Before elements in the Reagan Administration pulled Ronald Reagan away from his obsession with "Gog and Magog", according to Lowe, Reagan would shuffle through the White House halls, often at night, looking for some hapless person to pigeonhole for a talk on prophecy and White House aides, who, Lowe says, nicknamed Reagan "Gog" and would whisper, when they heard him coming, "It's GOG !" and then run away and hide. It sounds blackly absurd enough to be true.
"The Shield"
There's a deeper background to all of this that's helpful for understanding how the Bush Administration has ratcheted up the tension in the realm of nuclear weaponry, where US nuclear missiles still square off against Russian nuclear missiles and an excess capacity held by both nuclear superpowers still helps ward off, to this day, the threat of global nuclear war. Very simply, standard nuclear deterrence doctrine holds that when neither side in a nuclear standoff can reasonably expect that it can wipe out most of the nuclear force of its opponent, there is no incentive to launch a nuclear first strike.
When Ronald Reagan announced the "Star Wars" program which hoped to throw a sort of protective astrodome over the continental United State which, Reagan envisioned, could swat down all incoming enemy nuclear missiles, the nuclear balance of power was suddenly destabilized: not because Reagan could suddenly snap his fingers and make his vision real but because the Soviets were aware that the US, under Reagan, begun to develop such a thing.
The problem, in terms of deterrence theory, is quite simple; the closer one great nuclear power might get to successfully deploying a "star wars" nuclear shield, the greater the risk of total nuclear war would become because the nuclear power without such an ABM shield would suddenly be susceptible to nuclear blackmail once its opponent deployed that "star wars" ABM systems.
In 2002, the Bush Administration began to actually deploy the system Ronald Reagan began around two decades prior, and although the system's capabilities don't come close to achieving yet what Reagan envisioned and may never actually be able to so, the new system does probably serve to increase odds of an outbreak of limited or even general nuclear war. The new "star wars [very] lite" system (see this Rolling Stone cover story, The Shield, for a description) increases the risk of nuclear war by increasing uncertainty. Such a system may not work as expected, but Russia and other nuclear powers have to take it seriously as something that just might tip the nuclear balance of power in America's favor.
A Common Thread: Nazis, Neocons, Apocalyptic Christian Dispensationalists
Christian premillemnial, apocalyptic dispensationalists, NeoConservative, and Hitler's Nazis share a common characteristic ; in all three hold, or held, ideological visions in which utopia --whether that was seen to be secular utopia or a religious utopia-- could be created by precipitating radically destructive, widespread war in an effort to somehow drive evil itself, categorical evil, from the world and so usher in a new, perfected age - a utopia.
For the Nazis, the quintessence of categorical evil was the Jews. For apocalyptic dispensationalists and NeoConservatives evil is "radical Islam". All three belief systems also see, or saw, categorical evil as inherent to socialist ideology, and all three placed categorical evil in other stereotypical pigeonholes as well - in homosexuality, in forces of secularism held be driving collective moral decay, in liberal tolerance for diversity and even in expansive interpretations of democracy that allegedly allow evil to creep in and flourish or which hinder effectively combating evil.
How Much Megatonnage Will Solve The Problem Of Evil ?
With some patience, George E. Lowe has coached me through to an understanding of a concept key to his understanding on the World nuclear dilemma - Utopians vs. Realists :
Since the dawn of the nuclear arms race, the great deterrents have held - neither the US nor the former Soviet Union, now Russia, could with sufficient probability hope to destroy enough of their enemy's nuclear weapons to prevent a disastrous counterstrike. But, many in the US military, and especially in the Air Force, have been gripped with the obsessive notion that wars can be fought and won with air power alone.
During the Cold War a significant faction in the United States Air Force advocated using nuclear weapons as if they were simply conventional weapons scaled up, so top ranking Air Force officials suggested using nuclear weapons during the dark days of the Korean War, and they advocated using nuclear weapons in Vietnam. They also believed, during the earlier stage of the Cold War, that their B-52 bombers laden with nuclear bombs could take on the Soviets and win, (annihilating the USSR in the process) and General Curtis LeMay, during the Cuban Missile crisis, went so far as to fire a "test" ICBM out over the Pacific, apparently in an effort to force the situation over the edge into full blown nuclear war so that Kennedy would be locked into ordering a full scale nuclear strike. As George Lowe relates the details of LeMay's attempt to provoke nuclear war:
That ICBM which General Le May launched was a "TEST" ICBM from Vandenberg AFB @ height of CMC [Oct. 1962], out over the Pacific without NOTICE and/or JCS NOTIFICATION. And YES the US-USSR were very/very near WW III, because Khr./Kremlin had DELEGATED the authority, to a Soviet General in CUBA to use the Soviets TACTICAL NUKES in CUBA vs. A US INVASION on MON/TUES.[28/29 OCT.?] Thus, if THEY DID first use TACTICAL NUKES, THE US COULD HAVE USED THAT RESPONSE TO STRIKE THE VULNERABLE HANDFUL OF SOVIET ICBMS in RUSSIA[THEIR GREAT DETERRENT] & then the SOVIETS IN CUBA WOULD HAVE USED THEIR MRBMS on the US EAST COAST CITIES per your description of ARMAGEDDON. McNamara only found this out 30 years later @ a CONFERENCE ON THE CMC!
The USAF members who were eager for a US nuclear first strike against the USSR and also to use nuclear weapons as a part of conventional warfare were, in the thinking of George E. Lowe, utopians (more on that later) who thought the use of overwhelming military force, decisive of use of the staggering power of H-bombs, could render both international politics, the messy give and take of diplomatic negotiations, and conventional war, unnecessary. They seemed to think they could fight and win an all out nuclear war and that this could somehow fix the World. Realists in contrast, per my understanding of George Lowe's use of the term, consider such thinking dangerous and insane because it assumes that the use of nuclear weapons can somehow banish the sorts of conflicts that have characterized the human condition. Even as Marxists thought that societal conflict could be banished by somehow eliminating economic and social inequalities, the nuclear utopians believed that human conflict could somehow be banished from the pages of future history by the properly decisive, overwhelming application of thermonuclear nuclear blasts to the surface of the planet.
The problem with such thinking, even at the early stages of the Cold War, was that it both minimized the costs of such an approach and assumed that massive nuclear explosions could somehow transform human nature and the human condition.
In reality, if Curtis LeMay's Cuban Missile Crisis provocation had succeeded, the Soviet Union and most of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States (at least) would merely have been reduced to charred, smoking rubble and, if the World pulled through aftermath - posibbly a nuclear winter, massive fallout, and so on - human conflict would almost assuredly have still remained, as it always had, a given.
Utopian thinking is something neither of the left or the right. Communist ideology was utopian, as is some capitalist, hyper-free market theory. There are Republican utopians and Democratic utopians. Central to utopian thinking is the idea that if only we are bold enough and strong enough, if only we have the courage to accept the task and set in motion an apocalyptic orgy of destruction, we can reshape the human condition itself, eliminating underlying sources of conflict that have troubled humanity through known history ; we can banish evil from the world.
***
[UPDATE 11:50 EST]
Let's Read Some Tea Leaves, Comrade
The problem is, it could be true. For a range of reasons, Americans know so little about what's going on in the Middle East that our position, as citizens in American democracy, is not so different from that of Soviet citizens in the USSR of old who might have speculated about the geopolitical intent of the Kremlin by studying possibly airbrushed photographs. We are dubious about the Bush Administration's intent, we do know that. But, what do we really know ?
To some extent our general view of things is murky due to a profusion on information rather than a lack of it, and the Bush Administration has spent US government funds on shamelessly partisan propaganda too. The administration has also worked to restrict the flow of information that reaches the American public from Iraq and Iran. So we speculate about a range of possibilities - apocalyptic war or the outbreak of full blown domestic fascism that might follow a US attack on Iran... but we're reading tea leaves, and that's the problem.
We never really know for sure what's going on except that our government seems to be growing more remote and that there's a draconian new domestic anti-terrorism bill before the US Senate that might be used to suppress domestic dissent. Are we the next experiment in "Disaster Capitalism", perhaps potentiating authoritarian rule ? We're scratching our heads, befuddled and worried. Maybe. Meanwhile, there's always the shopping and the laundry, the bills...
Many who have commented on this post have suggested the possibility that the UK Spectator story referenced here was intended to do propaganda work to make war with Iran more likely. That might be so although if true I'd say the effort was very badly botched, because it seems to have increased public concern about Bush Mideast policy. I'd also note that the unusual aspect of the Israeli strike on Syria concerns the fact that there's such a uniform silence about the incident.
In the end it doesn't matter what happened September 6, 2007 - what really matters is the apparently growing consensus, as suggested by a recent NYT editorial I've mentioned that questions the Bush Administration's basic sanity, that the administration poses a threat to world peace. It's far from a fringe view, and some observers go farther - a US attack on Iran, which the administration seems to crave, could destabilize Pakistan, or even accidentally trigger widespread nuclear war. Short of such grim outcomes, there's a wide range of ugly considerations, that Daily Kos writer FMArouet has outlined, that we should keep in mind concerning any possible US military action against Iran...
Despite The Specter Of Death, A Joyful Celebration
I was born about a year after the Cuban Missile crisis, so I wonder if my human existence can be seen, in a sense, as a celebration, by my parents, for the fact that the world had made it through the crisis and they were still alive.
Reports were that, following the September 11, 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center Towers, a wave of spontaneous sexual liaisons swept New York City as its residents, celebrating the simple fact that they were not dead, fell into the arms of lovers, acquaintances, and even complete strangers. Love "in a dangerous time", during wartime or times of great peril, carries an intensity of emotion fraught with the knowledge of just how easily our lives can be wiped out if those at the higher reaches of power make the wrong decisions, wake up on the wrong side of the bed or, even worse, choose to risk the lives of all in some geopolitical gambit that ties the fate of humanity, maybe the earth itself, to a simple roll of the dice.
***
image, right: Freddy Mercury, the creative force behind Queen - a rock band which has spent more weeks, in total, on the UK album charts than the Beatles - performs onstage, in honor of the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games, with the legendary Spanish opera singer Monserrat Caballe.
With his operatic musical sensibility and four octave vocal range, Mercury had obviously dreamed of performing opera on stage beside a singer of Monserrat Cabelle's stature, and shortly before his tragic early death from AIDS, Freddie Mercury was to achieve his lifelong ambition. For a moving tribute to the human spirit and it's ability to achieve the improbable, click on image, right, to watch a 5 minute YouTube video of Mercury performing with Cabello, in an emotionally charged, mutually empathic and tightly synced performance, a duet Mercury wrote for the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games that was one in a series of songs the two performed together and which were made into an album. The Barcelona performance was opera in the most elemental sense for the fact that, in the background of the performance, lay the knowledge the two singers shared after Mercury had confided to Cabelle he had been diagnosed with AIDS which, at that time, meant he would almost certainly soon die from the ravages of the disease. In an interview done after Mercury's death, Caballe discusses Mercury's revelation of his medical diagnosis, to her, prior to the Barcelona performance. In another video interview, Queen keyboardist and producer Mike Moran discusses how the powerful synergy between Monserrat and Cabelle was driven, in part, as Mercury realized that as he performed alongside Cabelle he had, for once, competition onstage. After his death, Monserrat Cabelle commissioned a statue to be made in Freddie Mercury's likeness.