WW3 linked to Cuban Missile Crisis

I’ll never forget reading about how President Kennedy asked the question how a room full of smart people could find themselves down at the end of the path facing all out nuclear war.
Thank goodness it was Kennedy at the helm and he made the decision to pull back from the brink of launching nuclear weapons over the Cuban missile crisis. It took courage and wisdom to do that.
But I’m also interested in how they ended up down such a path in the first place.
I have been watching the United States for many years now and I can certainly see some key things that might give some answers to that question.
It seems that unless there is a direct connection in front of us, humans have a difficult time connecting the dots.
During the Iraq sanctions I watched streams of information being spilled out to news organizations around the world from the White House and no one apparently had the time to investigate to see if the information was true. (The old adage that if you say something often enough, it becomes reality).
For example: My work in Iraq during the sanctions found direct evidence that the Canadian foreign affairs department, under the office of Lloyd Axworthy, didn’t have it’s facts straight despite evidence being presented to them by independent groups who had been inside Iraq and witnessed the true facts.
The first casualty of war is said to be the truth and certainly the situation in Iraq proved that.
Now we have Obama and Libya and questions about the legality of those attacks. Apparently Obama is facing the sixty day rule where he has to now ask congress to aprove his involvement in Libya. The lawyers are working around the clock as I write this to try and find loopholes.
This is another example of how we end up at the end of the path like the Cuba Missile crisis.
We can’t understand that these “small” things like ignoring international law when it suits us can effect events later on.
Few people make any connection to China’s huge military build up to actions taken when the US invaded Iraq in 2003. But this had a big impact on China’s decision not to lose massive contracts for civillian goods and oil developments. I was at a large important trade show in Baghdad in 2002 and I saw the scale of the new equipment on display. Huge equipment from China….obviously worth hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts. Those contracts evaporated the day America invaded Iraq.
And so there are reasons why we end up down paths facing bleak prospects without direct lines on the ground showing how we got there.
International law is everything. NATO is ignoring and stretching it’s mandate in it’s interpretations of what it is allowed to do in Libya. Obama is desperately trying to wiggle around the thoughtful rules his own government put in place to protect itself from one man making war decisions for their country.
It may be that he chooses to get congress approval…but “only” because his lawyers might find no way around it.
This is not in the spirit of these rules and laws.
Just obey them. Don;t stretch them. Don’t try your best to wiggle around them by using some kind of trivial trick to avoid adhering to the spirit of the law.
Don;t kid yourself. This will have consequences in the future for us in ways we don;t see coming at us.