13 posts tagged “war”
A sow’s ear is not going to be made into a silk purse and a tragically mistaken war in Iraq is not going to be fashioned into any kind of victory worth winning. It was a blunder to go into Iraq and it is more of one to stay there.
We need to turn the mess created by George W. Bush and his administration over to the people that live in that part of the world. We have created enough enemies in the area and staying there only creates more.
The contention that our leaving Iraq would cause it to become a haven for terrorists disregards the fact that it is a haven because we are there. Also, if in our absence groups like al-Qaeda were more likely to establish a safe haven, then they already have them in those nations in the area in which we do not have a military presence.
The overwhelming majority of people of nations in the Middle East have no more of a desire to be taken over by terrorists than do an overwhelming majority of people in our country. Our continued occupation of Iraq promotes a grave threat to our nation and the longer we stay there the closer we inch toward antagonizing and radicalizing some unknowns that are going to light the final fuse that will bring massive destruction and chaos into our own land.
Fight them there or fight them here? George W. Bush has repeatedly justified his mistaken venture into Iraq by saying, THERE. Thus he proclaims to nightly-news watchers throughout the world that he is going to use Iraq as a killing field. In this shooting gallery of his choice, Bush enrages people and makes of them enemies that are not fond of losing via collateral damage their loved ones, their homes, their neighbors, their cities, and their lives.
If we cannot work with the nations within the Middle East and the world in establishing and maintaining a stable situation for citizens in those lands, then our faith in common man has been misguide and it is but a fortuitous quirk that this Great Experiment of ours has blundered along for this extended period of time.
To continue to “GO IT ALONE,” is to continue down the dead-ended path to our own destruction, and Pogo will be proven to have been right, “We have met he enemy and he is us.”
“Appease” is used as a pejorative term of weakness by those that advocates violence or the threat of its use in the solution of various kinds of disagreements--particularly those that involve conflicting interest between people of different nations.
The propagandists that use this term would like to claim that the world’s troubles with Adolph Hitler were in large part due to Neville Chamberlain traveling to in Munich1938 and entering into the Munich Agreement.
Well before September 1938, Hitler had completely consolidated his dictatorial control over Germany, and had ridden into Austria and taken over as a returning and liberating hero.
The rise of Hitler is not a lesson in appeasement, but one of slipping into being a nation of men and not law.
By using fear and the threat of foreign devils (axis of evil and WMDs comes to mind), a continuous barrage of propaganda, intimidation of the press, and with the support of a small but willing pack of sycophantic followers and opportunists, Hitler subverted the existing rule of law and crushed any opposition by claiming that those that questioned were unpatriotic, not good Germans, traitors or foolish appeasers—extraordinary means were needed in extraordinary times (and what’s the matter with a little water boarding?).
How did this happen? In part, as Edmund Burke suggested, “All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.”
But the forces that the good people of Germany faced were subtle and more sinister than they could ever imagine. The subversion of freedom was also so gradual that they never recognized a point of no return; by then anyone that did not go along was as much of an enemy as were the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, foreigners, and other evil doers.
After Hitler’s Germany came to an end, a majority of Germans could legitimately claim that they never really had seen it coming until it was too late and then there was nothing they could do. Too late, those that tried were the silent dead or missing.
As Justice William O.Douglas poetically cautioned, “As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”
And what about the small number of Germans that were loyal to Hitler to the end and those that to this day would beyond all reason defend Hitler and trumpet his cause again? They identify with their Man of Steel—the warp and weave of his nature is that of their own and no one can readily think of themselves as being rotten to the core.
Why didn’t the folks responsible for providing for the medical needs of our wounded service men and women tell the White House that things were not going well? Because Bush does not want bad news; he does not know how to get anything done and does not want anyone letting the public know there are problems. Everything is absolutely perfect on the Deciders watch and it is always some else’s fault anyway.
A whole bunch of people have learned the hard way that no news is good news. Those that have opened their mouths anyway have been trashed for their candor—smeared have been Paul O’Neill, Richard Clark, General Anthony Zinni, Michael Brown, Hans Blix, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Joseph Wilson, Colin Powell, and French fries to name but a few.
Like at Abu Ghraib, the usual suspects have been rounded up—anyone distant from the White House—and offered as sacrificial lambs of blame for not telling Bush what he did not want to hear. After all, he’s the Decider and not the Listener.
Hey, we got trouble with a capital 'B' and that rhymes with 'P' and that stands for 'propaganda.' So businesses as usual: hear no evil, see no evil, do no good.
God bless this brave man and his family--his is the face of war--we owe him so much.
Bush’s end game for Iraq is as irrational as the lunacy in Vietnam where a village had to be destroyed to save it. Bush will have his “surge” and thus have more killing and dying to prevent more killing and dying. At least until he can declare “mission accomplished,” blame the Iraqis, and hand the lingering mess over to the next administration.
When destruction is salvation, there is little rational need to bother differentiating between failure and success. But the game played by the self-righteous right is to place the blame for their failures onto unworthy others. This is well reflected by one of Bush’s sideline cheerleaders in the words that compared the necessity of prevailing in Iraq to the outcome of the conflict in Vietnam
“Had we never gotten in, and the same sort of thing happened in the end, it would have been all Southeast Asia's problem. However, once we committed ourselves, we had a duty to ourselves and to them to conclude it successfully.”
For those that would rather revise than learn from history, it is apparently never too early to set about its rewriting. Right-wing hawks are already explaining away the error of making war in Iraq—as has been done with the one in Vietnam. Their revised version of the Iraqi quagmire shifts responsibility away from George W. Bush and his Republican enablers and onto those that understand the folly of it all. How so?
These right-wing ideologues are determined practitioners of Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda technique of telling a lie over and over until it becomes an unchallenged version of history. Their portrayal of the Vietnam War as a cut-and-run disgrace is a good example. The revisionist’s telling and retelling starts with dissembling the reason for our entry in and withdrawal from Vietnam, and begs the question as to the lesson to be learned.
The confabulators insist that our exit from the Vietnam War was an avoidable defeat that damaged our nation’s long-term vital interests. They blame the loss on those that saw the war from its start to have been an unnecessary, life wasting, resource squandering, and reputation damaging blunder made worse by continued bullheadedness. Perchance it sounds familiar?
Though reason would suggest that victory or defeat in any war should be measured in terms of why it is launched, those that have revised the history of the Vietnam War avoid mentioning its purpose. Our entry into Vietnam was supposed to block the advance of communism as foretold by the Domino Theory. What is the latest explanation as to why President Bush took us into a preemptive war in Iraq?
The Domino Theory , that led us into Vietnam, contended that if a former Southeast Asian imperial possession were to become communist there would be a step-by-step advance of this doctrine across the South Pacific right to the shores of God only knew where. So when the French had their disaster at Dien Bien Phu and pulled out of Vietnam we went in to stop the dominoes from falling.
In portraying defeat as being at the heart of the Vietnam debacle, revisionists disregard the real and historic fact that we left and the dominoes never fell, an indication that we need not have gone into Vietnam in the first place. Thus, the mistake was not in getting out, but in ever getting in. Might we now be staying in Iraq to avoid getting out?
Just recently President Bush made a diplomatic invasion into Southeast Asia and says that while he and the First Lady were on a sightseeing ride through Hanoi, “Laura and I were talking about how amazing it is that we’re here in Vietnam.”
Even more amazing is the now-versus-then observation that Bush offered on this same historic visit to Vietnam: “the world that we live in today is one where they want things to happen immediately and it is hard work in Iraq.”
Hum, if “they” includes him and us, what should be made of someone’s willingness to launching a preemptive war that is taking longer and proving harder to stop than to start, and was to do one thing but now is to do another? And would the lesson from history suggest that it is better to end it sooner than later and maybe in the same way that Nixon did with the one in Vietnam?
In practical terms, Nixon declared victory and brought the brave troops home—neither seen as a hasty decision nor heard from the deck of an aircraft carrier. Following his 1969 election, President Nixon announced his Vietnamization program. It was to turn the war over to the South Vietnamese and start withdrawing American forces. By the early 1970s the troops were coming home at a rate of over 12,000 a month.
By early January of 1973, Nixon suspended American offensive action in North Vietnam and by the end of the month the Paris Peace Accords were signed by the governments of North Vietnam, South Veitnam, and the US. Nixon contended that our military purpose had been achieved.
Bush’s last ditch effort in Iraq looks like a mirrored image of the Vietnam misadventure: Iraqization with a surge in place of a withdrawal. Maybe it only looks confusing if one is on the outside trying to peer into this new looking-glass war. But rest assured that the Decider is getting well-targeted advice from the Mad Hatter, when he is not down in Texas hunting his friends.
But riddle the rest of us this Mad Hatter, if the dominoes that did not fall in Southeast Asia were to likewise not fall in the Middle East, will you and history’s revisionist make any noise about it?
The Iranians (Persians) are a remarkable people that acquired a democratic government in the early 1950s with the election of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. Its significance was marked by Mossadegh being named Time Magazine's 1951 Man of the Year.
Mossadegh was passionately opposed to the colonial domination of his people by foreign oil interest and thus nationalized the Iranian oil industry that was being exploited by British and American business interests.
This did not set well with those that had been profiting at the expense of the Iranian people, so in 1953 British interests maneuvered the CIA into engineering the overthrow of Mossadegh. The operation of the Iranian oil industry passed into the hands of a Western oil consortium, and Shah Mohammad Reza stayed on the throne and acquired dictatorial control over internal affairs.
Up until the revolution of 1979, Iran remained in attune to the outside geopolitical interests of the West, and the Shah stayed in power by means of a brutal secret police, the SAVAK. It operated secret dungeons, tortured the uncooperative, assassinated challengers, and kept oil-friends abroad comfortable.
Hey, if you want to make a buck, you got to keep the oil flowing. Just ask Cheney’s old company about that. You know, Halliburton, the Texas based company that got all of those no-bid military contracts for the war in Iran.
The Halliburton theme song must be “Don’t fence me in.” At least they seem to know how to play on both sides of the fence. Though the US has sanctions against Iran, as of 2003 Halliburton was still doing oil-related business with Iran. I don’t think that the oil is for French fries, do you?
We can greatly admire those from among us that step into harm’s way in defense of all of the rest of us.
We need not admire those that twist support for our brave troops to justify their questionable actions and judgment—particularly when what is proposed and excused mires our service men and women in a place of grave danger.
These magnificent members of our military stand and fight and do not hide behind anyone; the man that has sent them there should not try to hide behind them.
How long will Bush try to conceal his misjudgment behind their valiant service? In his State of the Union, he claimed we cannot fail in Iraq. The fact is that Bush already has. His war in Iraq is a failure and the task we now face it to pick up the pieces as best we can.
The failure is not that of our troops; it is that of a man who has misused their valor, dedication to duty, and precious lives. The failure is also that of those that are still willing to tolerate his disgracefully incompetent leadership.
The attempted fabrications of success that are intended to distort the horror that exist in Iraq will not change what is obvious; we have an incredibly incompetent president backed by a straggling band of sycophants. This man can only lead sheep--may his dwindling flock of followers have a nice bah, bah, bah.
In his State of the Union, George W. Bush said that we cannot fail in Iraq. The fact is that Bush already has. His war in Iraq is a failure and the task we now face is to pick up the pieces as best we can.
In reflection of the oft crass behavior of someone that had been brought up in favored circumstances, the late Governor of Texas, Ann Richards, once joke that George W. Bush had been born with a silver boot in his mouth.
In this vain, the State of the Union by George W. Bush and the Democratic Party response by Senator James Webb brings into contrast the life of a person that has never much been tested by anything and one that has.
While Bush was wandering around and avoiding military service to his country by safe membership in TANG, Webb was heroically serving in battle in .
Now Bush sends other people’s loved ones into the chaos and danger of , but is content to have his two daughters remain safely here at home. Webb has a son serving as a Marine in and wants all people’s loved ones out of the mess that Bush is willing to further entertain.
Even in a social setting, there has been a marked difference in the empathy that these two men display. When a reception was held at the White House for newly elected members of Congress, Webb, a critic of the president and his Iraqi War, respectfully kept his distance from the president. Even though cautioned to discreetly give Webb some space, Bush insensitively went directly up to Webb and asked Webb how his son was. When Webb responded that he wished that his son was out of , Bush brusquely said that he had not asked that. Thereupon Webb replied that his concern about his son was a private matter and turned and walked away.
We’ve got disagreements, lots and lots of disagreements: war, wages, immigration, stem cells, abortion, and what have you?
These disagreements, mainly on how we wish to be treated and how we would treat others, reflect a difference of opinion as to the nature of man qua man. By what we do and would have others do we vote for what we are.
As a child in home, neighborhood, school and church I was taught that we humans are inclined to be good. And as I would treat others I could expect others to do the same. I was to accept that I was not perfect, but neither was anyone else; we were all sinners that needed to walk as best we could within our own shoes, and reach out and try to help any stumbling others do the same. That seemed to work well where ever I did roam, and in other places where I heard that it was not working so well, one could find the exceptions that proved the rule. We tended to look for those exceptions within the frailty of our own humanity.
This America--that I have loved, served and benefited from so greatly--has been the place well described by that poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty—the one that suggests that all mankind yearns to breathe free. Along with a lot of other people of my generation, I assumed that our nation’s greatness came from how we would treat others. And since we were brave enough to treat others as we would like to be treated they would do the same.
When I read or am tempted to unleash a hate filled comment, I wonder if my thoughts about my land have simply been delusions, or have they been reflections of the faith that the Founding Fathers had and which grew and grew because of what free people will tend to do. And are the exceptions to people’s tendencies to do good to be found only with those that live beyond the borders of our land?
Was Washington foolish at when he let a defeated Cornwallis and his troops just freely sail away, or should he have put them to the sword? He could have followed the first shot of liberty heard round the world with another blast that let all of the planet’s lessers know that we were the master race of all mankind and destined by might of arms to remain ever so. It might have made George W. Bush’s task much easier, or maybe the place from which we ruled would have long ago ceased to be.
Of course this idea that the sinful children of God can thrive by doing unto others as they would have done unto themselves can at times seem so foolish, but I have though that it is what has truly made this land of ours the home of the brave and land of the free. In the past there have been empires just as mighty and maybe even more so, but their power and certitude never made them as good and as sweet as has this loving land of ours been for me and mine.
To me it is still worth the old college try to love our enemies by doing unto them as we would have done unto us. And what would we rather lose our lives or our souls? Is this not what Sacred Honor is all about?
