Readers of this blog know that I have championed the rights of transgender people especially after my experiences as the Chief Medical Officer at Legacy Community Health, a health care haven for the LGBTQ+ community in Houston. When I walked into the men’s bathroom at Legacy and saw what was apparently a woman adjusting her make-up and retreated to the door thinking I had entered the wrong room, but had not, I got it.
It’s a thought I had had myself, but was articulated by former Australian Prime minister Tony Abbott in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on February 28. Why didn’t NATO and especially the United States throw up a no-fly zone over Ukraine to keep Russian planes out of Ukrainian skies as soon as Russian troops began amassing on the Ukrainian border?
After all, the great mistake of the Iraq War was when President Bush stopped relying on a United States imposed no-fly zone over Iraq to protect the Kurds and instead marched in. We had Saddam in a box, just like we had the Iranians in a no-nuke box, then we opened Pandora’s Box and now we are the worse for it.
This title comes from the great Thomas L. Friedman’s op-ed in The New York Times on February 27. This piece is titled “We Have Never Been Here Before” and Friedman describes why the current Russian aggression in the Ukraine is unique in world history. In short—it’s on the Internet. Friedman makes a compelling case suggesting that if we had had smart phones and the Internet in Vietnam, that war might have ended with the burning of the first Vietnamese village by American troops or the first use of napalm. The horrors of war are being beamed around the world in real time for the first time in history.
