Category: War

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Defending the Invested Policy

Without the slightest doubt, the U.S. invasion of Iraq is a failure. Even if you give the most generous room for interpretation and the most optimistic spin on the future, nobody who advocated this strategy believed that 3,000 people a month would by dying by now in sectarian violence.

The lamest argument in defense of Bush’s Iraq strategy is that, if even more people die and more things are blown up, eventually, there might be a moderately stable democracy. Might. Moderately stable. Like who? Like what? How deeply will the families of dead Iraqi’s appreciate the blessings of their new democracy? Will they ask themselves, what is the point?

So, it is difficult to defend the strategy, if you want to confine the discussion to actual facts and issues. The solution is to describe the brutal sacrifices’ made by individual U.S. soldiers and then argue that it would not be honorable to not sacrifice more in order to ensure that George W. Bush never has to go on TV and say, “our policy on Iraq was foolish and it failed and we have made a bad situation much worse. We are now faced with making very difficult decisions. I am responsible for the wasted deaths of thousands of U.S. servicemen. Life sucks. I suck. I resign.”

Eventually, it Won’t be a Mistake

How the debate has shifted. It should tell you something very important about Iraq policy when the argument for staying is that, if we leave now, it will be an even bigger disaster.

The miracle is that George Bush gets to make this argument while casually skipping over the intermediate step, the one in between “piece of cake” and “cut and run”, and that step is, “we failed”.

The deck here is stacked against prudence. If the strategy of invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein was stupid, the only way to not have to admit it is to argue that if we keep making the same mistake over and over again, eventually it won’t be a mistake.

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On an Unimaginable Scale

Paul Stephenson, deputy chief of the Metropolitan Police in London, said the goal of the people suspected of plotting the attack was “mass murder on an unimaginable scale.”  New York Times, August 28, 2006

I guess now we know why the scale was “unimaginable”. It was unimaginable because only the police involved in this case could look at the evidence they had gathered and come to the conclusion that a major terrorist plot was actually in the making.

As always, over and over and over again, the headlines screamed TERROR! UNIMAGINABLE SCALE! BOMB FACTORY! HIJACKINGS! 10 or more planes!!! and so forth and so forth. It’s almost as if the police were desperately trying to convince you that all of the infringements of your civil liberties, all the excessive new police powers, all of that sold-out, smug, superciliousness on Tony Blair’s face– all of it was justified. Here they are– Al Qaeda plotting again!

Well, it could be Al Qaeda. They admitted right away that there was no real evidence of a link. Oddly, they admitted that there was no evidence at all, of a link to Al Qaeda, but they understood the media: every article I saw on the story included the phrase “Al Qaeda” mostly to acknowledge that no link to AL QAEDA!!! was found.

The paranoid reader immediately understands: of course it was Al Qaeda. They just haven’t found the proof yet.

As it turns out, there is not much evidence of anything else either, other than the usual story of young, devout and foolish Islamic fundamentalist boys plotting and bragging and conducting rather laughable experiments to see if they might actually be able to blow up a disposable camera. The “bomb factory” turns out to be an apartment where they stripped batteries and emptied sport-juice containers. One of them had a copy of a schedule of flights on his memory stick. There was no date. They had not even discussed possible dates.

There had not been a single successful explosion of anything. They had no weapons. They had no passports.

In one of their homes, they found a copy of a book– they have noted this, for the judge to consider as something material to the question of whether these people should be locked up indefinitely– they found a book called “Defense of the Muslim Lands.” Oh the horror!

They also found “jihadist” literature. Suppose that we Christians were suddenly under suspicion of plotting to attack Muslims around the world. Suppose they searched your house. Would they find any “Christian militant” literature? Would they find a link to James Dobson’s website which advocates defiance of the courts? Ah ha!

The security commissioner of the European Union, pleasantly named Franco Frattini, said the British decided to proceed with arrests because they had intercepted a message from Pakistan saying “go now”. A “senior British official” admitted that the message was not quite that clear.

British Home Secretary John Reid, at the time, told the media that attacks were “highly likely” and would be on an “unprecedented scale”.

If you can find some indication anywhere that this idiot was not making statements of unimaginable stupidity and unprecedented hysteria, please show me. Reid himself had to back down quickly once he realized, apparently, that he was about to destroy the tourism industry.

Are the Islamic boys guilty of something? I don’t know. If I was in a mood to be really, really generously broad-minded about what they were actually up to I suppose you could charge them with…. well, get serious. With what? Talking about conspiring to plot? Hating America?

The truth is– check the news stories– buried on page 5 or so– if you don’t believe me— the truth is this: they had no weapons, no bombs, no tickets, no actual date, no specific plan to commit any terrorist act. They just talked about how they hated America and Britain because of their decadence, and because of their foreign policies. That’s about it.

I understand– you don’t believe me. It’s too silly to be true. I won’t be offended if you go and check some newspapers first. Even the paranoid ones do generally repeat the official facts. So back to my point– I don’t think I would convict them of anything.

It doesn’t matter. The headlines did their work. More than ever more and more people are convinced that there are thousands of Muslim youths out there planning right now to blow up airplanes and drop anthrax on you and build nuclear bombs and kill you all. We must kill them first.

And more and more people think I’m crazy for actually insisting that even terror suspects are entitled to due process and a fair trial under the laws that have existed for years and years before there ever was a 9/11.

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Iwo Jima – the Monument

There is a statue in Washington D.C. based on Joe Rosenthal image of the men raising the flag atop Mount Suribachi. In the statue, the men are 32 feet tall. The guns are 18 feet long. The flag pole is 60 feet.

I’m sure someone thought this was a compliment to the men. More probably, that someone thought it was a compliment to war: these men are surreal, figments of fantasy, and war itself is an epic adventure of unreal proportions. That’s probably right– that’s how they sell young people– who actually have to go fight the war– on war. You will be bigger than life. You will be unreal.

The monument is an insult. The men were our size. They were us. What they accomplished was not epic or magical or unreal: they sacrificed their lives based on a perception of integrity in their leaders.

I’m pretty sure that the men who actually raised the flag on Iwo Jima would not be pleased with this monument. This monument is what we think they think we think of them. I’m not kidding. It’s a monument to the people who put up the monument, the guilty adulation of the those who did not have to actually set foot themselves on a battle field.

I haven’t seen it yet, but it sounds like “Flags of Our Fathers” is about this discrepancy too. It’s not an argument against the possibility of the necessity of war. It’s an argument against the idea that there is something noble and glorious about killing fellow human beings, for whatever reason.

But those who adore the culture of war must always retell the story so that military actions seem purposeful, honorable, and rational.

In fact, a good deal of war is the collision of failed strategies.

 

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Iwo Jima

When Hollywood decided to make a picture to honor native American marine, Ira Hayes, who helped raise the flag on the blood-drenched slopes of Mount Suribachi on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima, to portray Hayes, they chose…. Tony Curtis.

Well, heavens, you didn’t think they would actually have a native person portray Ira Hayes, did you? After all, don’t you want as many people as possible to see the movie? No one would finance it if you had an unknown native person playing a famous native person.  And of course he would be unknown: Hollywood did not have any “known” native American actors.

This was a weird era in Hollywood. It was quite common to have famous American actors portray famous or infamous native peoples, or Japanese, or Greeks, or Arabs. I don’t know if they figured most of us wouldn’t be able to tell the difference… or wouldn’t care. Shirley MacLaine played “Princess Aouda” in “Around the World in 80 Days”. Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, and James McArthur, among others, portrayed North American Native Peoples. Didn’t Brando even play a Japanese guy once? Sammy Davis Jr.  played a black guy once.

Things haven’t changed all that much: Renee Zellweger with a wobbly accent as Brigit Jones? In heaven’s name, is there not a single actress in all of Britain who could have played the part? Not one?

Iwo Jima is an island about 1200 kilometers from the coast of Japan. It is actually the top cone of a dormant volcano, and it’s about 8 square miles. Tiny, really. Actually, that “8” doesn’t sound right.

In 1945, the allies were able to send B-29 bombers all the way to Japan and back from the Marianas Islands, but no fighter planes could fly that far to accompany them. Iwo Jima could also provide a convenient landing zone for damaged planes, for repairs and refueling. The allied command felt they had to have Iwo Jima and it’s air fields. The Japanese generals knew what the American generals knew. They concluded that the Americans would want to take Iwo Jima.

According to Wikipedia, this rationale for the capture of Iwo Jima, was constructed after the island was captured, once the staggering scale of casualties became apparent. And there was no military consensus on the necessity of capturing Iwo Jima. In fact, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were split on the question of what the next phase of attack would be, and whether the navy or the army should be in charge.

Iwo Jima was not subsequently used, in any significant way, to provide fighter escorts for the B-29 bombers on their way to Japan, and it did not play a significant role in ensuring the safety of returning B-29s.

The Japanese built just about the most formidable defense imaginable for the island, consisting mostly of underground bunkers, caves, and tunnels. There were more than 22,000 soldiers hunkered down on the island, of which barely 1100 survived. Only 200 surrendered. They knew they were not there to live. The avowed goal of the defenders was to take 10 enemy for every one of their own. They fell far short of that: of 70,000 invading troops, 6,821 allied soldiers died and there were 26,000 casualties. I can’t tell from reading that if the 6,821 were included in the 26,000 or not. Either way, the Japanese did not remotely reach their goal.

The Americans invaded with a force of about 70,000, (though I see 90,000, and 110,000 elsewhere and here), which is a pretty overwhelming number. When you add in the technical and material superiority, there could not have been much doubt about who was going to win. Indeed, it appears the Japanese did not anticipate holding out for much longer than a few months– which, it turns out, was grossly optimistic.

I sometimes have a feeling that you could end all war if you could persuade all nations to agree that from now on, nobody under the age of 30 will be allowed to fight. What is it about 18-year-old males that makes them willing to die? I don’t think it’s just the belief in an afterlife– it happens in all cultures and religions. If I had been a Japanese youth in 1944, would I have agreed to defend Iwo Jima? Why? Pardon my disloyalty, Mr. Emperor, but life is good. Why should I throw it away? Here’s your uniform and gun.

They wouldn’t have liked that. Traitor. Yellow. Coward. That’s how they persuade you to throw your life away. But don’t worry: the movie will be out in a few years and you’re going to look glorious as you die.

There is an argument, from the American point of view, that it is right and good to serve in the army if it’s mission is self-defense, if you are fighting an aggressor. The argument holds up pretty well for World War II, but not so neatly for Viet Nam or Iraq.

And it doesn’t hold up as well when you consider that almost all wars are the result of the glorification of war, of the statues and the medals and the brass bands, and the culture that says you are truly a man if you are willing to kill and die for your country, and that threat must be met with threat, saber-rattling with saber-rattling, bravado and intimidation with bravado and intimidation

John Wayne, of course, did a film of the story of Iwo Jima. It does not seem to me a surprising thing that Wayne himself never served. How else could you make a film that finds war and the culture of war so really enchanting? This is not a film by someone who really, deep in his heart, hopes that there will never again be another war. This is a film by someone who believes no generation should miss out on the opportunity to make heroic “sacrifices”. Just me, thank you, and Dick Cheney and George Bush and pretty well everyone else in the current administration.

I believe it is possible to make a film that simultaneously argues for the necessity of a military, for a time of war, at least in self-defense, but, at the same time, acknowledges the howling horrific waste of lives, and the inevitable exploitation of young male testosterone-fueled bravado.

The Americans invaded with a force of about 70,000, (though I see 90,000, and 110,000 elsewhere and here),

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The Iraq Dollar Auction

Wow. I missed the shocking news — Saddam Hussein hated the United States and tried to think of ways to hurt it. ABC news with exclusive audio tape!

I saw that ABC News item. It wasn’t “news”. It was a tape they had acquired which did not provide any new information that was not already out there and widely known. In fact, the story largely substantiated the position that Saddam was not a real threat, and had no connection with Al Qaeda.

If you are watching the news, I presume you are also aware of the fact that Iraq is now near full civil war, and that the occupation is generating more new terrorists every day than Osama could have wished for in his wildest dreams, and that large Republican-connected corporations have been gleefully lining their own pockets while mismanaging the rebuilding of that pathetic little country, and that whenever a competent official emerges from the U.S. occupation administration, he says something truthful and is sacked.

I always find it strange that nobody seems to be demanding the simplest and most obvious measure of accountability from the Bush administration: tell us how long it will take and how much it will cost and how many people will die before you have what you promised us: a peaceful democratic Arab state in the Mid-east. So far, it is estimated to be over $20,000 per American household. How much would you say is too much, and how long, and how many lives, would you say is too many? $50,000? $100,000? And how long should the bulk of the U.S. military be tied up in Iraq? 10 years? 20 years? 50 years? Any reasonable person would want to know those things before committing to a course of action that will be almost impossible to extricate ourselves from, with decency and integrity.

Well, we know why nobody from the Bush administration will give us any kind of plan. If they did, it would immediately be apparent that the plan has failed. By saying “nobody can say how long it would take” and “it undermines the troops to insist that we have a clue about what we are doing and how much progress we are making” Bush can hope that some miracle will come along and save his ass from the embarrassment of having to admit, “we had no real idea, when we went in, of how difficult it was going to be to get out”. It’s a win-win proposition. If things go badly, it’s because we haven’t waited long enough. If things eventually go well, we knew it would.

Will anyone admit that Bush doesn’t know what he got into and has no clue how to get out? We are now into what John Nash (“Beautiful Mind”) called a “dollar auction”. You are bidding on a dollar under rules that require you to pay out even if you lose the auction. So, when you reach and pass the full “value” of the dollar, you have to keep bidding, because otherwise you still pay but get nothing. Yes, Viet Nam exactly.

Doesn’t matter to him, does it? He’ll be out cashing out in a couple years. He doesn’t actually receive suitcases full of cash from all those corporations and billionaires he has served so diligently the last six years… until he gets out of office. And then watch the payback– it should be absolutely glorious! No individual in the history of the U.S. has transferred so much wealth to so many investors, shareholders, and corporate leaders. The oil industry alone should be falling over themselves to reward him– look at the deal they got in the Gulf of Mexico!– but the pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, credit institutions,– they’ll all be rushing forward to thank the man who did so incredibly much for their profit margins (while doing virtually nothing for the economy as a whole or people who actually work for a living).

Meanwhile, an adult will have to take over the presidency and sit there and think: how long do we let this shit go on before we admit it was a huge mistake? And stop bidding? And the same adult will have to do something adult about paying bills around here. I don’t think anything Bush has done is quite as remarkably, shamelessly, outrageously childish as the handing over of billions and billions of dollars in national debt to the next generation. Some of his most fanatical devotees compare him to Jesus Christ, and they have something there: I’m watching this man walk on water right now. It’s amazing.

It’s hard to call an administration “corrupt” when it does, openly and shamelessly, what other administrations would do only in secret. The lobbyists now enter through the front door, proudly and glibly, and meetings that used to be hidden are now simply “secret”. The Bush administration actually invites corporations to write legislation for themselves. The same people who defend this government would be horrified at the idea of a labour union writing it’s own contract or a teenager making his own house rules or an actor directing his own movie– and perhaps should be. But that’s the way the Bush administration operates.

There are ideological differences, which can be argued endlessly, but then there’s simple competency issues, of which a clear vision eventually emerges.

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Tony Blair Bans Military Parades, Medals, and War Movies

According to the CBC, Tony Blair is finally going to do something I can agree with. He is going to ban the glorification of terrorism. From now on, it will be illegal to “glorify”– that’s the word they use: “glorification”– acts of terrorism.

First of all, let’s describe terrorism. Acts of violence with the aim of achieving a political or social objective? Violence directed at civilians? Violence used to further a religious cause? Let’s get the definition straight, because we don’t want the British occupation of the Middle East at the close of World War II to be classified as terrorism, because then, I suppose, we would have to ban “Lawrence of Arabia”, or “Cast a Giant Shadow”. And we don’t want the first American gulf war to be classified as terrorism, just because

What about violence for the purpose of obtaining material benefits or economic power? Like the U.S. inspired coup in Guatemala in 1956? And does this mean that General Pinochet of Chile will really be arrested and held the next time he visits Britain? Is it unsafe for Mr. Henry Kissinger to spend a weekend frolicking in London? “In Flanders Fields” glorifies acts of violence by British and Canadian conscripts in World War I. What was so different about those acts of violence, to further the aims of the British government of the day? That they were deceived by an elected government into believing that killing Germans had some kind of divine purpose?

Military parades essentially glorify the capacity of the government to inflict violence upon various enemies of the realm. Good. Let’s ban them, along with “Top Gun”, “Ballad of the Green Berets”, and “The Dirty Dozen”. Can we arrest Oliver North now, since he supported and “glorified” the activities of the Contras in Nicaragua when they were trying to overthrow the Sandinista government?

How about anyone involved in the Reagan administration’s support of — holy cow!– Osama Bin Laden, and the insurgency against the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan in the 1980’s?

Bust Margaret Thatcher for her passionate romance with British military might in the Falklands?

It’s a magic bus. Let’s all get on board.

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The Cost of the Iraq War

According to Harper’s Magazine, the projected cost of the Iraqi adventure will come out to about $20,000 per U.S. household.

That’s just the financial cost, of course. The cost in lives and limbs is far, far greater.

As with many large human enterprises that end in disaster, the actual costs are never known or described at the time the enterprise is embarked upon, because if they were, no sane person would approve of the plan. If George Bush were running for president this year and he promised to start a war that would cost every household $20,000, I don’t think most people would vote for him.

I’ve heard it argued that most people felt, at the time, that attacking Iraq was the right thing to do. That is why the Democrats– especially Hillary Clinton– sound so anemic right now. They can’t really take Bush to task about this– they voted for it too.

Were there reasonable people around who knew that attacking and occupying Iraq was going to cost so much at the time George Bush set out to do it. The answer is clearly yes. Not George Bush, no. Not anyone on his staff– except, dimly, Colin Powell– no. Not anyone in the Republican party, no. And, it is clear, almost nobody in the Democratic Party, which is why so few Democrats are now able to make hay of the horrible consequences of the stupid decision to invade and occupy Iraq.

But a lot of other people, including Canadians and Europeans knew that it was a bad idea. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien– probably not sure if he was doing the right thing at the time– declined to participate because a large majority of Canadians didn’t think it was a good idea. They were right.

The Americans are in a massive, unholy mess right now in Iraq. Bush keeps on insisting that there is light at the end of the tunnel, but I think that light is coming from a directorship at a large oil company after 2008, or the reflection off Karl Rove’s fleshy forehead.

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There is No War on Terrorism

Today, Oral Hatch, defending the right of the Bush administration to decide for itself when it is or isn’t in compliance with the law, stated this: “We are faced with a war unlike any we have ever been in.”

These words are spoken every day by Republicans and Democrats alike. I think they believe it. It sounds so solemn and important. We are nearly gods, defending innocent Americans in Peoria and Terre Haute from the hordes of invading fanatics. We will spend billions. We will sacrifice thousands of soldiers. We will spy on our own citizens. Because of this war.

There is no war.

There was one spectacular attack, on the World Trade Center, and there is the on-going hatred of fanatics in the Arab world for all things western, but the idea that we are in some kind of “war”, by even the most broad-minded definition of the word, is absurd.

Congress has authorized President Bush to “use force” to punish the people responsible for 9/11. Instead, he invaded Iraq. The U.S. has never declared war on either Afghanistan or Iraq. It simply announced it was coming. There are good reasons why it never did– most of them having to do with accountability and international obligations. It “justified” the “war” to the UN with lies.

A war is a battle between two or more nations. Who is the other nation? Al Qaeda? “Al Qaeda” sounds pretty cool but it doesn’t really exist, and even the U.S. government, while assuming it’s existence in almost every significant foreign policy statement, has never been able to show that a real international “network” exists. There are terrorists that know each other and sometimes work together. There is money flowing from some Arabs and possibly some Arab governments to some terrorists, but there is no coordinated structure on the scale of the IRA, for example. The U.S. and British governments have knowingly presented an image of this organization to the public that it must know is not true.

If this is a war, the United States has never not been at war. If you go through the history of U.S. involvement overseas from 1945 to the present, you will find that there was never a period when the U.S. was not involved in a bitter conflict of some kind with fanatical followers of this or that ideology (usually Marxism). Hell, if you include the Cold War, there was never a time in which unfettered dictatorial power was more necessary to keep all our Walmarts safe. If the relatively impotent Arab states are such a dire threat that the government is justified in making extraordinary violations of civil rights, then what would the threat of nuclear annihilation by the Soviets have called for? Joseph McCarthy?

The truth is that the U.S. has never been less at war than it is now. America’s fanatical Arab enemies can certainly mount a terrorist attack here and there, and a bombing here and there, but none of this is new or more intense than it was in the 1960’s or 1970’s or 1980’s. No threat to the United States today is more dire and consequential than the threat of the Soviet Union at he height of the cold war. Yet even Ronald Reagan never proposed the abridgement of civil liberties and freedoms that this government enthusiastically and energetically pursues.

The idea that this is “war” is bullshit. It’s a power grab by people with a real and fervent belief in authoritarianism, which they also fervently and bizarrely believe will save “democracy”, which is the election of us.

Copyright © 2006 Bill Van Dyk All rights reserved. January 20, 2006

Liar
There was a truly awesome moment at the Senate hearings on the issue. Senator Russ Feingold, one year ago, asked Attorney-General nominee Alberto Gonzales if the president could authorize wire-taps without a warrant. Gonzales solemnly declared that the question was hypothetical even though he knew full well that Bush was, in fact, already doing it. He lied.

From an administration that supposedly prides itself on honesty and integrity, Gonzales provided a mealy-mouthed response that essentially amounted to this: I wasn’t lying because you asked if he could do it in violation of the law. Since whatever Mr. Bush wants to do is legal because he says it is, it wasn’t in violation of the law.

That, of course, is not what Senator Feingold asked. He asked if the President could do it without a warrant, not if he could do it “illegally”.

The Republican majority on the committee prevented Gonzales from being “sworn in”.

Why, if they didn’t think he was going to lie, would they do that?

What exactly is a war?

The Administration keeps insisting that it is only spying on people who mean American harm. Logically, that’s like arguing that it should have the right to conduct summary executions of criminal suspects because they might be murderers.

It’s all beside the point: justice is about proving, in open court, that you have the right guy. The Bush administration has this tone about it— who needs proof? We know who they are. And if they weren’t guilty of what it was we thought they did, they surely thought of doing other things equally deserving of punishment.

Do you think they will ever put Khalid Shaikh Mohammed on trial? Do you think he will ever testify at any trial of any of the many “suspects” he is handing over to the FBI? That would mean he would be subject to cross examination. That would mean defense lawyers could introduce evidence and testimony about Khalid’s background, including his involvement in the Pakistani Military. That might not be very congenial to the Bush administration. Nor would it be useful, to Bush, to have Khalid discuss his torture sessions at the hands of the CIA in court.

The important thing is that you, dear American average citizen in Palos Park, Illinois, are feeling safe tonight.

 

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Ahmed Omar Abu Ali

And again, a conviction for terrorist activities, without any terror or activities.

Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was arrested for thought crimes in Saudi Arabia. We know what he was thinking– they tortured him to find out. Then they sent him to the U.S. where a federal court jury failed to stand up and shout, “screw you, George Bush, we still have some respect for freedom and the constitution here!”.

[added May 2008]

Nah, they didn’t. They said, by golly, only a guilty man would confess to terrorist activities while being tortured by the Saudis! Lock him up!

The FBI participated in the inquisition in Saudi Arabia– which is strange, because the FBI is responsible for domestic law enforcement. But what the hell– nowadays any government official seems entitled to go around the world and torture people, with the help of the Loyal Bush Clan, the Saudis.

Who you gonna call?  The FBI?

The Wiki Entry

 

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The Real War

Number of Americans who died in 9/11: 3,000

Number of Americans who have died of AIDS: 500,000

[added 2011-07]

Amount we will spend trying to prevent another 9/11: hard to say how much when you add in all the new weapons systems, all the health care costs for veterans, replacement costs for weapons used, etc., etc., etc., etc.: — certainly over $2 trillion. Afghanistan alone is approaching $1 trillion dollars, for which we will have the gratifying experience of seeing it swirl down a sinkhole a few short years after we inevitably leave.

Amount spent to stop people dying of AIDS: $150 billion