10 posts tagged “war”
Some days I wish I didn't follow current events. I wish I didn't read the news or listen to the radio. Today is one of those days.
Seymore Hersh reports that the US is currently preparing for military action in Iran. According to Hersh, the build-up of troops and equipment is taking place in Afghanistan. US officials counter by denying that they're launching any attacks from Iraq. Iran, meanwhile, offers that they're already digging graves to properly bury the bodies of invading troops.
It's like both sides have hired Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the former Iraqi Minister of Misinformation. On the one hand, he regrets to inform us that we are "too far from reality." On the other hand, "There are no American infidels in Tehran. Never!"
Could we possibly bump the presidential election up to August?
One quote from Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf cannot be denied, but then even a stopped clock is right twice a day: "I speak better English than this villain Bush."
We left Vietnam on April 30, 1975.
Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945.
By the numbers, we should have been out of Iraq by April 30, 2005, but here we are with another April 30 come and gone.
I thought I'd feel better when people who supported the Iraq war began slowly to come to their senses and admit they'd been wrong. I don't. I don't feel even a little bit better, because when I read their excuses for why they were wrong it's just a litany of ignorance. That's the excuse at heart--a failure to understand the implications of war, deep-seated cultural divides, all things that could have been fixed with a little research.
So Andrew Sullivan can claim he committed "four cardinal sins," but he didn't. He committed one: willful ignorance. He believed what he wanted to believe, based on the data that he chose to consider. In his little confession on Slate.com, he writes, "What I failed to grasp is that war is also a monster." Come on, Andy! What? You haven't seen any of the hundreds of war films that have been made in the last 70 years? You missed Full Metal Jacket? Saving Private Ryan? The news footage coming out of every war zone in the last twenty years?
General William Tecumseh Sherman spelled it out at his speech to the cadets of the Michigan Military Academy over a hundred years ago: Cadets of the graduating class--boys--I’ve been where you are now and I know just how you feel. It’s entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that some day you can use the skill you have acquired here. Suppress it! You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is hell!
It's no secret. You don't have to go very far to find out how monstrous war is, but that didn't serve Andy's purpose. Doing research might have made him wobbly in his early support of the war. Knowledge might have undermined his faith in Bush's morality. That's the other thing Sullivan writes in his admission of wrong-doing: that he made a "fatal misjudgment of Bush's sense of morality. I had no idea he was so complacent—even glib—about the evil that good intentions can enable."
No, asshole. You made a fatal misjudgment of your own intelligence, because with access to all the information necessary to take up an anti-war position, you chose to place your faith in someone who had repeatedly shown a complete lack of real morality. You got it wrong because you were willing to take form over content. You were willing to believe someone who claimed he was a Christian with moral values, instead of looking to see what his actions proved. And how could anyone not know how glib Bush was? That's a man who mocked a fellow Christian on the eve of her execution. Can you get more glib?
So, officially, I'm no longer interested in hearing the confessions of guilt and complicity of those who wanted to invade Iraq. They don't do anything for me, because they all come from the same place: an awkward, self-effacing moment that does no one any good. Andy Sullivan may be struggling to forgive himself for following an amoral leader, but I doubt he's learned anything from the experience, because he hasn't figured out that willful ignorance was his real mistake.
Full text of Sullivan's column: How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I seriously misjudged Bush's sense of morality
While we're all huddled around this battered copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, let's talk about the thing its author feared most. On more than a few occasions, Vonnegut talked about his fear that literature was irrelevant, or worse, futile. He feared that all of his writing meant nothing, just marks on paper. Quickly, quickly, we all want to blurt out, "No, no, it wasn't all in vain." We want to mean it, too, but maybe it's that same urge that makes us lie to someone who's just received a truly terrible haircut. Our first urge is comfort, not truth.
Now is also the time we get to trot out all of the quotes we loved of Vonnegut's, while death has made him fresh again. The one that sprang to mind immediately on hearing Vonnegut's work blandly eulogized comes from Slaughterhouse-Five: There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. No wonder he feared the futility of literature. The thing he wanted to teach the world has only been learned by a few. In fact, most Americans don't remember, or never learned that the firebombing of Dresden was our lesson. America was the teacher and the students. We used technology to kill people from a distance. At some point we decided that was a good thing, a desirable thing.
In early February 1945, Allied forces dropped nearly 4,000 tons of explosives on Dresden, and the resulting firestorm consumed so much oxygen that the fortunate among the estimated 150,000 actually suffocated before being burned. The less fortunate were sucked up into the flames by the updraft between hot and cold air. They burned alive. Less than two weeks later, Allied forces began firebombing Tokyo, killing more people there than in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In 1969, Vonnegut published Slaughterhouse-Five, and successfully picked the scab off the firebombing of Dresden, reducing all of its strategic lethality to the pain and horror of one man. Did we learn? Oh, indeed. Our new strategic bombing technique involves cluster munitions instead of incendiary munitions. That's the lesson our military industrial complex learned. If we take a look at the enlistment numbers, it looks like some of our children have learned not to sign up for crusades. (Of course, the military industrial complex knows how to solve that. They solved it in 1969 even, when that earlier generation of children became wary of the crusades.) No wonder the writing seemed futile to him sometimes. You can write it, you can print it, and people will even read it, but you can't make them learn anything from it.
The other Vonnegut quote I keep thinking of came from a Playboy interview in the 1970's: Human beings will be happier — not when they cure cancer or get to Mars
or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie — but when they find
ways to inhabit primitive communities again.
By primitive, I envision that Vonnegut meant when we can return to living simpler lives, demanding less of our resources. When we can be satisfied with fewer things, won't we automatically be more satisfied? How long will it take us to learn that greed and consumption don't make us happy? The two lessons--greed and war--are now more clearly intertwined than they ever were before. War has always been about money, but until recently the war-mongers have been a bit more slick about hiding the connection. Or people have been more willing to ignore it.
I end with another quote, one that ties back to my post yesterday: And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or
murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what
is." (From his essay "Knowing What's Nice.")
As well you know, none of this is permanent, so enjoy it while you can. Pay attention and take notes. There may be a test later.
Just finished reading an article about how Army and Marine reenlistment bonuses have skyrocketed, with some special forces jobs getting bonuses of $150,000. Almost makes me wish hubby were still in the Marines. I said almost.
In the article Col. Mike Jones, who is in charge of retention in the National Guard (good luck with that, sucker) is quoted as saying, "War is expensive. Winning a war, however, is less expensive than losing one."
Really, Mike? I'm not calling you a liar or an ignoramus just yet, but I'd like to see your statistics on that before I take you at your word. What you're saying is that it would have been cheaper for us to stay and "win" in Vietnam? Because we're not talking about the old days, when losing meant being overrun by the enemy and trampled under his boots. If Britain had lost WWII, that would have been expensive, but "losing" in Iraq is a whole different ballgame.
The thing is, war isn't and never has been like a sporting event. Does the phrase Pyrrhic* Victory mean anything to you? It should. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't think we can afford to win.
After defeating the Romans at the battle of Asculum, Pyrrhus is reported to have said, "One more such victory and we are lost."
[walks through the living room, where the drunken celebrants in the Scooter Libby Guilty! Conga Line collapsed in a stupor last night, into the kitchen / begins to brew the coffee of harsh reality]
On the walk to work this morning, I listend to a Democracy now interview with Wes Clark that depressed me. As much as I think we committed a terrible crime in invading Iraq, and as much as I wish we could remove American troops from Iraq as soon as possible, Gen. Clark makes an observation that I suspect will cause me to lose sleep tonight:
...let's say we did follow the desires of some people who say, “Just pull out, and pull out now.” Well, yeah. We could mechanically do that. It would be ugly, and it might take three or four months, but you could line up the battalions on the road one by one, and you could put the gunners in the Humvees and load and cock their weapons and shoot their way out of Iraq....You’d probably get safely out of there. But when you leave, the Saudis have got to find someone to fight the Shias. Who are they going to find? Al-Qaeda, because the groups of Sunnis who would be extremists and willing to fight would probably be the groups connected to al-Qaeda. So one of the weird inconsistencies in this is that were we to get out early, we’d be intensifying the threat against us of a super powerful Sunni extremist group, which was now legitimated by overt Saudi funding in an effort to hang onto a toehold inside Iraq and block Iranian expansionism.
In short, the American Monster Machine that created Al-Qaeda in the first place, by giving money to Osama bin Laden to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, has created a whole new monster in Iraq. Thanks to Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, and that lying bastard Colin Powell, we have created a situation that is a thousand times more threatening to our national security than Saddam Hussein was. Sure, Saddam was a murderous creep, but 1.) we created him, 2.) his job wasn't easy, and 3.) we're not exactly succeeding as his replacement.
Clark also mentions in the interview that a friend of his in the Pentagon, who shall remain nameless, told him about "a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” The only thing that has apparently held this goal in check is our absolute failure to get a handle on Iraq.
I can't help but cast the Bush Administration as a group of kids, celebrating at a birthday party. Someone has strung up a Middle East piñata from the tree in the front yard and everyone is clamoring to take a swing at it. They're greedy for the candy inside (or in this case, oil and power), and the first blow has released a little trickle of treats. But the Bush kids are milling around, eager for the blow that will break open the piñata's belly. When the Middle East bursts open and spills all over the front lawn, they want to rush in and grab up as much as they can. Some will come away with their pockets full of ill-gotten gains, some will come away with bruises and scratches from the melee, and at the end of the day, the piñata will still be lying on the front lawn, its papier mâché entrails hanging out. As dusk falls, the sprinkler will kick on.
Do you hear it? You're standing on a deserted runway, but in the distance you hear a faint drone. It gets louder and then not merely loud, but present. The noise is all around you. It's in you, leaching into the fillings in your teeth, shaking at the cage of your ribs. When the B-52 breaks the clouds, it's nearly on top of you, and by then your body is in violent revolt. The sound waves shudder through your guts, compress your stomach until you think you're going to vomit. It touches down not twenty feet away in a wash of hot and cold air, boiling turbulence that snags at your hair and clothes. You're lucky to be alive. Unlike the people who saw the plane on its bombing run.
The rhetoric is the same. It's so similar you want to think Bush has made a sixth grader's error: Iran and Iraq look and sound so much alike.
Bush says, "Our struggle is not with the Iranian people. As a matter of fact, we want them to flourish."
Bush says, "Iranian people are proud people, and they've got a great history and tradition."In my time machine, Bush says, "The Iraqi people cannot flourish under a dictator that oppresses them."
(Thanks, Keith Olbermann.)In my time machine, Bush says, "Iraq is a land rich in culture and resources and talent."
In December 2002, I told everyone I knew: "After we invade Iraq, look for us to invade Iran and/or Syria next." People laughed. People said I was a little paranoid. They said, "We probably won't even invade Iraq." Fucking optimistic pollyannas. I felt like Cassandra.
I said, "Iran has more oil, and look at the map. It's conveniently located between Afghanistan, a country we already have troops in, and Iraq, a country we'll soon have troops in." People laughed. People said, "It's not about the oil. Besides, Iran isn't a threat to us." Yet. Iran doesn't look like a threat to us, yet.
Look, say all the media outlets now: Iran is providing explosives to kill American soldiers. It's meant to chill your blood. It's meant to make you angry. It's meant to make "not yet" into "right now." It's meant to prove me right.
For a change, I'd like to be wrong. Just this once.
I love Scrabble, even though I rarely win. I just can't bring myself to go for the big scores, because my focus is on producing the most obscure or amusing words. Guess that means I don't have much of a competitive streak, or at least that my idea of "winning" is somewhat different than the one defined in the game rules.
Today's word is morale. We hear it a lot in its more modern meaning of the mental or emotional state (with regard to confidence, hope, enthusiasm, etc.) of a person or group engaged in some activity; degree of contentment with one's lot or situation. (Thanks Oxford English Dictionary.) That meaning has only existed since 1800's, and we use it pretty vigorously these days, as we discuss the ongoing Iraqle Debacle. When politicians use it, they mean, "Are the troops happy? Are they feeling okay about the mission?" Those are valid questions, but increasingly, those are perhaps not the most important questions.
It may be time to look at the older meaning of morale, to consider its etymology. Our friend the OED offers this as the first usage of morale in English: The morals or morality of a person or group of people; moral principles or conduct. Now rare. Essentially, the word morale used to mean something very close to its root word moral. According to the OED, we just added the e to make it look fancy-like. With that in mind, let's ask ourselves, "How is troop morale these days?"
Let's see, we have US troops accused of murdering civilians. We have US troops confessing to the rape and murder of civilians. Recently we also have video of an incident in which US troops taunted and teased Iraqi kids by offering them water and then making them run to get it, and then not giving it to them.
So, how is troop morale? I'd say it's pretty low. I'd say the troops are becoming demoralized. (Demoralize is also a word that finds its roots in the French language, according to the OED: To corrupt the morals or moral principles of; to deprave or pervert morally.) Of course, as I know I've said before, it's the nature of war. You can't take a 19-year old kid from Alabama and send him to a foreign country with orders to kill, and expect that he's going to retain a hard and fast grip on all those barely remembered Sunday School admonishments to be as compassionate as Christ. After all, Jesus said to turn the other cheek, but he wasn't dodging IED's left and right, trying to decide which carload full of teenagers were armed. Plus, so the story goes, he was the son of God.
These kids aren't the sons of gods, and in their current situation, it's no surprise that they're losing their ability to tell the difference between wrong and right. War demoralizes. It has to, in order to avoid being a large-scale game of Red Rover. (I for one would support the substitution of Red Rover for war, but the military industrial complex can't figure out a way to make money off that.) The military has to shift a person's paradigm, has to make it okay to kill. Or the military has to find people who are already willing to kill, and we shouldn't be surprised at what those people are capable of. The library is full of books that can tell you what American soldiers became capable of in Vietnam. Now they're going to have to add more shelves to that section.
Meanwhile, we're just trying to get to that triple word score before somebody else runs out of tiles.
Don't you dare act surprised by the reports that Marines executed Iraqi civilians in random retaliation for a roadside bomb. Let's not pretend we didn't know it was coming. It's that old saw: those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Did we forget My Lai? Did we forget that for every man like Hugh Thompson, who was brave enough to intercede on behalf of Vietnamese civilians about to be massacred, there were dozens of men who participated in those massacres?
It's the nature of war and to our own peril we act shocked at its fulfillment. When we allow ourselves to act surprised by things like this, it's because we've allowed ourselves to believe in the myth of “noble war.” War may often be necessary; sometimes war may be the right thing to do. It has never been noble, because it has always required one man to kill another. War has always required men to murder the sons, fathers, brothers, and uncles of other people. Why should we act surprised if the culmination of that act is more murder--the murder of civilians? Many Americans have been pretending that war doesn't do this to people, and the media’s been complicit in that deception. Will we get so lucky that the lives of only 24 more innocent civilians will jar us out of fantasy land?
In discussing the difficulties of sending men into war, President Lyndon Johnson said, "War is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in this world."
There's an e-mail that's been floating around for months, which often has the subject line: The Iraq you won't see on the news! It features a handful of photos of US Marines doing "tender" things. Holding children, petting a stray cat, hugging a buddy.
I used to teach English Composition at Kansas State University in Manhattan. It's not far from Ft. Riley, where the Big Red One used to be based. After the first Gulf War--you remember, the one that was legitimate, that we gave up without taking out Saddam Hussein, because he was still our buddy...
It's happening again, as I knew it would. War has always made people behave monstrously, and no surprise. I don't know about the rest of you, but I was raised to think it was wrong to kill people. Murder was a sin, they told me, and yet you'll find plenty of war-supporters who'd like to have the Ten Commandments posted in all kinds of public places. You can't expect that a.) a person who thinks that killing is wrong will come out of war mentally okay, or b.) a person who thinks killing is pretty cool will not snap some xcellent pics of him and his buddies with some raghead they kanked. Those are the two kinds of people you end up with in the military--good guys who will end up with mental problems and guys with mental problems who will enjoy it.
