The League of Women Voters Benicia and the Benicia Public Library are co-sponsoring the Foreign Policy Associations annual Great Decisions discussion series on word affairs Mondays at 7 p.m. at the Dona Benicia Room at the Benicia Public Library. The last in the series was “Nuclear Security: The Enduring Challenge of Nuclear Weapons.”
The League has been presenting this discussion series for several years. If you are like me, the world situation in all its complexity has become incomprehensible. How wonderful it has been to read articles from the Great Decisions periodical, to see the current documentaries and have an opportunity to discuss the international situations without getting into any political agenda.
It is refreshing to explore objective presentations from the experts, academicians, ambassadors, and historians.
When trying to make some sense of what is going on in the Middle East, I found this letter by an Aubrey Bailey titled “Clear as mud,” which itself was altered from a piece written by Richard Allen Jones in 2014:
“Are you confused by what is going on in the Middle East? Let me explain.
We support the Iraqi government in the fight against the Islamic State. We don’t like IS, but IS is supported by Saudi Arabia, whom we do like.
“We don’t like President Assad in Syria. We support the fight against him, but not IS, which is also fighting against him.
“We don’t like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqi government against IS. So, some of our friends support our enemies and some of our enemies are our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting against our other enemies, who we want to lose, but we don’t want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win
If the people we want to defeat are defeated, they might be replaced by people we like even less. And all this was started by us invading a country to drive out terrorists who weren’t actually there until we went in to drive them out. Do you understand now?”

It is with knowing that the world is a complex place that having the most objective, current information available is necessary to, perhaps not understand how we got where we are internationally, at least to know what ”the heck is going on out there.”
I show up to learn because there are a lot of smart people in the documentaries and in the very town in which we live. This series will begin again in October, you might look for it in the Benicia Herald’s calendar. That is where I found out about it.

Ellen Blaufarb is a Marriage Family Therapist.

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