Category: War

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National Hysterical Orgasm

We are safe.

This is probably the least popular opinion I’ve ever posted here but I think the whole continent has gone nuts. And I mean really nuts. This is not just a case of the public or politicians getting a little carried away with paranoia and hysteria. It’s just a matter of idiocy on a grand scale. The world has not changed. We are safe.

What’s really going on? There was a massively successful terrorist attack on New York City. A lot of people were killed and a lot of property was damaged. That, folks, is about all we know so far. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. You think I’m nuts? What about the anthrax? What about the new threats? What about Saddam—isn’t he pointing his Scud missiles at us right now?

Everything aside from the initial attack is hype. CNN, which packages news about war, death, and destruction as entertainment, talks about nothing else. The only real news here is that otherwise rational people have completely lost their senses.

How often, for example, do you hear the actual number of dead? 10,000? 8,000? 5,000? It is closer to 4,000. That’s a big number, but it’s not 30,000, which is the number of body bags New York officials initially requested. Who made that judgment? Why hasn’t he been sacked?

It is getting comical. President Bush attends a ballgame in New York and we are given to understand that the holy and sacred Vice-President is being safely stowed away, in a Tupperware container somewhere near Camp David, I presume. It is an “undisclosed” location. Cheney himself probably doesn’t know where it is. Are we supposed to be reassured that the deputy sidekick of the unelected president of the United States is safe? For what? Comic relief? We’re supposed to be relieved that if something happens to George W., Dick Cheney will be in charge???

The anthrax? Do you know how many people have died from anthrax? Four. But we are going to spend about a billion dollars preventing a fifth victim.

What the hell does anyone really know about the anthrax attacks? The government is trying to set the all-time record in dissimulation and disinformation, but the bottom line is that nobody has brought forward even the slightest evidence that the anthrax letters came from anyone other than your usual all-American crackpot. I’m not saying that it’s not possible that some Islamic fundamentalist is behind it. I don’t think it’s likely, myself, but, unlike our noble leaders, I’m willing to admit that I don’t know. Until the FBI has some kind of proof, it is not only stupid but actually irresponsible to go around pointing the finger at anyone.

Every year, tens of thousands of people die at work and on the highway. But what is everyone terrified of now? Anthrax. Nobody is organizing massive numbers of safe-driving clinics, but everyone’s putting on rubber gloves when they handle the mail! How many people get injured or killed in hunting accidents, or accidents involving all-terrain vehicles, or fires, or incorrectly prescribed medicines? Way, way more than will be killed by terrorists in the foreseeable future.

According to the United Nations, 11 million children die every year of preventable causes. [NY Times, March 14, 2002] Nobody, yet, has sounded the alarm.

An actress– whom I never heard of– stated that she no longer opened her mail because of the anthrax scare. Aside from the absurdity of Osama Bin Laden targeting some second-rate unknown Hollywood actress, instead of, for example, Fort Benning, you have to realize that she didn’t say that her mail wasn’t being opened. In other words, good heavens, I’ll have my secretary risk her life instead…

President Bush and other officials have publicly linked the anthrax letters to Osama Bin Laden, while admitting there is no proof. This has the effect of focusing American anger even more intensely on a subject who seems more credibly linked to other terrorist acts. You get a muddying of emotions and intellect here. You get arguments in favor of harsh action against Afghanistan linked to vague feelings of hysteria towards the anthrax threat.

And what on earth is going on in Afghanistan? I thought there was a plan? The trouble is that most of the terrorists who crashed the planes into the World Trade Centre come from Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. According to Seymour Hersh and others, the Saudi Royal Family has been less than cooperative.

What’s really going on here? Not much, since the attack itself. But there are a lot of people with a lot of reasons why they want this “crisis” to be hyped as much as possible. From the cop putting in over-time guarding buildings that are absurdly unlikely to be targets of anyone, to the generals and the military suppliers who have enormous profits and power at stake.

I just watched a press conference in Washington at which the Mayor and various cronies discussed their response to the possibility of anthrax contamination at the local postal sorting stations. They are modeling their presentation on Giuliani’s highly regarded press conferences in New York. The people behind the mayor all look so very self-important and responsible. They’d like us to believe they are our noble leaders and fully in charge and competent. I’m starting to think there’s a bit of a contest here to get on TV and get your five minutes of fame and maybe get more funding and more staff for your department.

CNN, at this very moment, is using talcum powder to demonstrate that anthrax spores can leak through an envelope. Highly scientific. You go, oh my god, the powder is getting out! It’s everywhere! Run, run for your lives!

In London, Ontario, officials are searching the bags of three-year-olds attending the Children’s Museum. I’m sorry—with all due respect, I think these officials are idiots. Do they imagine Osama Bin Laden sitting in his cave in the mountains of Afghanistan and wondering if the suicide bomber he sent to the Children’s Museum in London, Ontario made it through yet?

In Peterborough, Ontario, an idiot school board cancelled a class trip to Holland to take part in a United Nations Conference.

Why? Because of the terrorism! What terrorism? What terrorism!? Are you mad! It’s everywhere. Planes are falling out of the sky! Bombs exploding everywhere! Anthrax in all the postal outlets…..

No. It’s hysteria, plain and simple, and God keep us out of the hands of hysterics. When a group of parents– with better sense than most–decided to send their children to the conference anyway (with proper chaperones and liability insurance) the school board, in a snit, decided to punish them by ordering teachers to give these students zeros for all assignments and tests missed.  How dare you make us look hysterical and paranoid?!

Well, you could argue that it’s simply good and wise to have more security than we used to have. The problem is that if you convince everyone to get hysterical, they lose all sense of reasonableness and proportion. Thousands of people die every year in this country, of disease, accident, neglect, and murder. We have accrued a widely shared body of wisdom about the relative immediacy and causes of these deaths. In a few short weeks, we have thrown all this common sense out the window. We go home and watch the cheesy and disreputable CNN and come to the conclusion that Osama Bin Laden is after us.

Now CNN is bringing on a professional “headhunter” to tell us which vocations are most at risk from terrorist attack.

I am getting roundly sick of idiot conservatives who see this whole crisis as an excuse to get rid of civil liberties and engorge the defense department with new high-tech toys. And I’m really getting fed up with conservatives who regard anyone who disagrees with their own personal views on how the war against Bin Laden should be run as patsies. “Oh, so you want to do nothing!” I don’t know of any liberal who wants to do nothing, but if you don’t go along with the current incoherent policies, conservatives can’t stand the thought that something not involving big explosions and blood-letting should even be considered.

The festering sore of the administration’s current policies is Saudi Arabia. It is becoming increasingly obvious to some that the Saudi’s may not only have provided 15 of the 19 hijackers, but they may actually have been paying off Osama Bin Laden for years.

Look, it’s not that complicated. Osama Bin Laden’s terrorists are not standing outside in Afghanistan waiting for American bombs to fall on them. Most of them are probably not even in Afghanistan. So you have the U.S. bombing one of the poorest and most unfortunate nations on earth. And you have the U.S. snuggling up to authoritarian leaders in Syria, Jordan, Iran, and Pakistan, all of whom faced potential insurgencies in their own nations.

Real police work…. How come the FBI can’t trace those letters? When they talk about funding needs for the agency, the bravado about how new, expensive technologies will enable them to magically apprehend criminals before they even commit a crime is invigorating. The reality, obviously, is more like Inspector Clouseau.

Some people have questioned the idea of bombing a country that is already in a state of near-collapse. Some conservatives have angrily retorted, basically, “how dare you?” Regardless of the strategic value of the bombing runs, and regardless of the fact that we are probably created an entire new generation of suicide-bombers among those very angry victims, you can’t ignore the fact that we have an immense military-industrial complex in the U.S. that is absolutely in lust with power and money. There hasn’t been a good war in a decade, while the military has been stockpiling weapons and delivery systems with unbridled but frustrated passion. This opportunity, for them, is a godsend, and I would wager that the desire of the military to use up as many bombs as possible and make frantic pitches for new weapons systems and more money, is without restraint.

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Bush – WTC II

So what exactly is George Bush Jr. going to do?

He’s already made a couple of major mistakes here. He declared that an act of criminal terrorism was actually an act of war. He has vowed to eradicate terrorism from the face of the earth. He has promised the American people that he will destroy evil in the world.

We’re all getting carried away here. It sounds ridiculous, considering the scale of the disaster, the World Trade Centre attack, but we are getting carried away.

First of all, it was not an act of war. You have to have two parties for an act of war and both parties have to be nations in some form or another. So far, what we have, is a tightly bound group of conspirators. We have about 20 men against the entire military and industrial might of the United States of America. If this was a war, it would have been over before it started.

Bush has yet to show the world any evidence of complicity of any sovereign nation.

By calling it an “act of war”, Bush actually diminishes the horror of what the fanatics did. If it’s an act of war, it falls into the category of Dresden and London during World War II, or Hiroshima, or My Lai, or any of dozens of other wartime atrocities that history tends to excuse because it regards them as examples of excess, not criminality.

On this issue, I consider myself harsher than Bush: it was an act of criminal terror. It was mass murder.

By calling it an “act of war”, Bush probably hoped to justify a vigorous and powerful U.S. response. The next question, of course, is what is that response going to be?

It seems to me that there are three major options.

  1. He can blame a particular nation and launch a full-scale attack and invasion of that nation.
  2. He can blame a particular person or group and launch a limited attack with the aim of killing or apprehending that person or group. Or…
  3. He can blame a network of organizations and political entities and launch numerous limited attacks on their bases and hideouts.

Is there some other viable option I missed? I can’t think of it. I tried to think of it because these three options aren’t really very good.

With his grandiose rhetoric, Bush has created high expectations. Americans are waiting to see a big development. Can he deliver?

Option 1 is hopeless. There are good reasons why the U.S. would not want to invade or occupy Afghanistan or Iraq or Yemen or whoever. It would take a long time, and there would be an enormous cost in lives. It would likely introduce instability into a potentially volatile region. It would create a large pool of new, future terrorists. It would create alarm and concern in China and Russia and Pakistan. If the U.S. occupied the nation, it would have to constantly contend with terrorists and insurrectionists.

It would result in disaster.  [2022-04-27: Looks like I was right about that.]

The Soviets couldn’t take Afghanistan. It is a nation of mountains and deserts, with no infrastructure left, after the Soviet Occupation, to destroy. An invasion would unite the fractious forces that are currently at each other’s throats, as well as recruit tens of thousands of Islamic volunteers from other nations, some of whom will try to bring the war home to America. Most importantly, it would destabilize Pakistan.

Pakistan has a bomb.

I can’t believe the U.S. will adopt this insane strategy.  [They did.]

Option 2 is a more attractive, viable option, but won’t be effective. It’s too easy for the targets to move and hide and avoid interdiction. If it is the option Bush chooses, expect a ton of spin on the results. We got them. We got most of them. We got a lot of them. But nobody is going to be able to pretend we got all of them, and the ones we miss will strike back with a vengeance. Two, three years down the road, someone is going to ask an embarrassing question: do you feel safer today than you did in 2000?

Option 3 will look the most impressive with a new CNN logo and theme music. Lots of maps and diagrams, showing a combination of missiles, bombs, and paratroops, taking out numerous targets, and making a mighty impression on the global reach of the all-powerful U.S. military.

Once again, I doubt it will be particularly effective, but it will look effective, and when terrorists continue to strike back, it can be made to look more like the results of having intractable enemies than foolish foreign policy. American allies in the region– Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt– can breathe a big sigh of relief as the Americans pack up their carriers and rush home.

What should they do?

They should launch a new era of activism abroad with a concerted effort to broker peace in Israel, and to promote economic development in democratic third world nations. The U.S. should sign the Kyoto accord and law of the sea treaties, and ease up on it’s demands in the areas of trade and intellectual property rights.

It should forgive huge amounts of global debt.

That last item would cost it a lot less than most of the military options.

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JFK WTC I

I keep thinking about the Kennedy assassination. It’s the only other event I can remember that parallels, in my mind, the impact of this catastrophe. At the time, people compared Kennedy’s violent death to Pearl Harbor, and the death of Roosevelt, so I guess that makes the lineage clear: Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt’s death, Kennedy’s Assassination, the World Trade Centre. In a league of their own.

Only four men died, initially, in the Kennedy Assassination– if you don’t count all those “mysterious” deaths of witnesses– but one was the youngest, brightest, and most forward-looking President in the history of the U.S. The others included one of the most baffling figures in American history: Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald allegedly also killed Officer J.D. Tippit (one of the most puzzling peripheral characters in this drama) and was killed, in turn, by Jack Ruby, who, in turn, died of cancer in prison.

It is to the eternal shame of the Warren Commission that it did not create a sensation with a detailed biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, who joined the Marines, helped service U-2 spy planes in Japan, spoke fluent Russian, defected to the Soviet Union, married a Russian, defected back to the U.S., wandered around Dallas and Irving, Texas, and New Orleans, in the company of CIA agents and provocateurs, anti-Castro Cubans, and gay gun-runners and erstwhile assassins, and whose best friend in Dallas was a strange ex-Nazi CIA informant George De Mohrenschildt. Lone nut? Are you kidding? He had the craziest social life in Texas.

I just played back a speech Kennedy made in Houston on November 22, 1963. Someone converted it to an MP3 and put it up for file-sharing. (I love the internet.) He talks about 1990– I’m not kidding. In 1990, we will need three times as many spaces at our colleges and universities. In 1990, we will have long since landed on the moon and will have embarked on a new phase of the space program (the shuttle?). He talked about big government programs that would benefit all citizens. He talked about human progress and development.

Shameless, wasn’t it? One of the hallmarks of this age is that most of us would heap scorn and ridicule on big government programs even though those programs included civil rights, our highways, the internet, our defense systems, NASA, and the near destruction of organized crime.

There was a lot of innocence and optimism. The government of the United States can set it’s mind to a seemingly impossible task– landing a man on the moon — Johnson followed with a war on poverty– and accomplish miracles. It is amazing to me that Kennedy succeeded is his most grandiose project– though he never lived to see a man on the moon. He even succeeded within his schedule, before the end of the decade.

Kennedy’s charisma and wit were extraordinary. He describes a new booster rocket used in the space program and mispronounces “payload” into “payroll”. He pauses a second and then says, “it will be the largest payroll too… who should know that better than Houston?” and the audience roars with laughter. It’s not just the wittiness of the remark, but his timing, his utter confidence and charm, and total command of the facts and detailed information– correct names, numbers, statistics, (which, like it or not, was also a remarkable ability of Bill Clinton.) You had the extraordinary sense that he was probably smarter than his advisers.

This was a man so confident in his own abilities that he allowed film-makers to follow him around the White House recording every moment of the day. Nothing was staged or phony– these were real meetings and phone-calls. There was an extremely circumspect, tense phone call to a segregationist governor. There were discussions about how to deal with the crowds of segregationists blocking school entrances. It was extraordinary. I have not seen footage like this of any president since.

Kennedy wasn’t remotely perfect, of course, and it’s hard to tell where he was going since his administration was cut short. But he made a number of “helluva” good decisions and judgments under enormous pressure (the Cuban missile crisis, dispatching the National Guard to Mississippi), and he was arguably moving towards withdrawal from Viet Nam because he believed that the government of South Viet Nam did not have the support of it’s own people (it didn’t). And while Hoover’s FBI, terrified or indifferent, had made no progress against organized crime in 20 years, Bobby Kennedy turned the crime families upside down. By the way– the wonders of the Internet age– you can download a lot of Kennedy’s speeches through Morpheus or other file-sharing programs (along with the Zapruder film)– quite amazing. Listen for yourself. Has anyone sounded that articulate, and that visionary, in a million years?

By 1972, Nixon was talking about how best to withdraw, and that was probably the greatest difference between Kennedy and those who followed him: he thought ahead. He didn’t want to allow himself to be put into the position of having to “withdraw”. He wanted the nation to be somewhere farther along in science and education and culture 20 years down the road. He knew that new technologies would remake industrial America if the education system provided the talent and skills needed.

He was talking about 1990. He was thinking about quagmire. He reluctantly accepted the Bay of Pigs invasion, planned during the Eisenhower Administration, but when it failed he fired the people who planned it and had assured him it would succeed (one of these was the brother of Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas in 1963). He initially did not think America was ready to step ahead on civil rights but when Martin Luther King forced the issue, he realized there was only one path to follow, because there was a future and you had to think about that.

I think most people intuitively understood that the Warren Commission was a sham. The Zapruder film was withheld from the public for ten years because it was bought by Time-Life which was managed by C.D. Jackson who was a friend to the CIA and who kept it away from the public, possibly because it didn’t show what the Warren Commission claimed it showed. Dan Rather, the fatuous old ass, did see the film and publicly claimed that it showed Kennedy’s head jerking “forward” with the last shattering bullet. Then he assured America that all was well and that the constitution had worked and the peaceful transition of power had occurred. I have a feeling that a Chilean Dan Rather spoke similar words in 1973 in Santiago, with kind words for Pinochet.

In spite of this tacit complicity with the coup, media coverage of the assassination was genuine and stunningly compelling, probably because they didn’t know how to do it yet. There was no “The JFK Assassination” logo, no theme music, no pimped-up collagen-faced newsreaders with their best-rehearsed tragic faces, as there was in September 2001. Reporters didn’t habitually encourage people to cry on camera. News organizations routinely waited for confirmation before releasing new details.

There was Cronkite with a catch in his voice as he announced the death, sitting at a makeshift studio, reading the news on paper as it was handed to him, removing his glasses. The difference was that Cronkite was a newsman, a real reporter, who understood the significance of the story. And those men behind him at the teletype: real people, not props. And there was the incredible KBOX radio broadcast, live from the route ” something has gone terribly wrong with the motorcade…”. It was a reporter who was not yet trained on how to “package” a tragedy.

Anyone who is old enough probably remembers that the impact of the Kennedy assassination on the world was as great, if not greater, than this WTC attack. People stood on street corners in stunned disbelief. They crowded around stores watching television. Complete strangers began talking intimately. Men bit their lips and wept and young girls wailed in grief.

And it was a similar loss of innocence. This young, vibrant, popular president who was almost certainly headed for a second term, was suddenly replaced with the master of the back-room deal (not that Kennedy wasn’t), the sly old Lyndon Johnson. Nothing against Johnson– I think he was a better president than people give him credit for though his decision to escalate the American commitment in Viet Nam was was his undoing– but he didn’t have nearly the vision of Kennedy, or acute sense of what could or could not be accomplished, and at what cost. Johnson was old-style party politics, with cigar-chomping brokers, party favors, and big campaign contributions from vested interests.

[2022-04-27: I amend this: Johnson actually passed several visionary, milestone pieces of legislation.  But he was absolutely underestimated on domestic policy, and disastrously wrong about Viet Nam.]

Most people probably felt they didn’t fully understand what had happened or who was responsible. But the idea that they would choose a man to be their leader and that their sacred right to do this was unabridged and incorruptible was skewered.

Johnson was defeated by Viet Nam, and Nixon by Watergate, and Carter by the “debacle in the desert” (anyone remember Ken Taylor). What is it with the U.S. and the Middle East?

I don’t know if it was Oswald alone or if Oswald even fired a shot. The paraffin test failed to pick up gunpowder on his fingers, and it seems a stretch to believe he was able to fire three shots, hide the rifle and remove his fingerprints, descend to the second floor and buy a coke before building manager Roy Truly and police officer Marion Baker ran into him in the lunch room.

I know the Warren Commission was totally concerned with convincing America that all was well and didn’t have the slightest interest in actually analyzing the crime. I know the autopsy was performed by a forensic pathologist named Humes who had no experience with gunshot wounds and couldn’t draw the correct conclusion until he was told what it was. But there are so many crack-pot conspiracy theorists out there that it’s hard to sort out the truth anymore. Most Americans seem to have come to the conclusion that there probably was a conspiracy. Someone changed the direction of history. Someone led us to Johnson and Nixon and Ford (who was on the Warren Commission) and Carter.

It wasn’t until Reagan came along that I think America realized it had finally emerged from it’s own quagmire, the nightmare of assassinations and wars and hijackings and oil crises, that seemed to have enveloped the 60’s and 70’s. They turned to Reagan after four smart presidents (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter) and the world, by coincidence, changed dramatically at the same time. The cold war was over. The internet age had begun. A new era of unparalleled peace and prosperity emerged.

The Kennedy assassination followed a decade of relative peace and prosperity, as did the WTC. Kennedy won the narrowest of victories over Nixon. We all know about George Bush Jr.’s margin. Kennedy seemed to be entrusted with a new decade of progress and technological marvels. Bush inherited the first surplus since… Kennedy.

Kennedy’s assassination, like the WTC, was captured on video (film) and live on radio. The world watched in stunned disbelief. America was relatively isolationist under Eisenhower, but Kennedy launched the Peace Corps and a new era of activism abroad (Ich bin Ein Berliner). Bush seems to have started his administration with a return to isolationism, rejecting international treaties and choosing to “go it alone” on several international issues.

And now, the U.S. embarks on a declared war on terrorism, which, for me, bears an awful echo of Viet Nam. I don’t know if the results will be the same or not. There is an impressive tone of optimism out there about America’s ability to defeat terrorism, and just because America was equally optimistic, in 1965, about it’s ability to save Viet Nam doesn’t mean the results will be the same this time. But I think any thoughtful person would consider the question.

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Go to Bed Crying for Scott Twaddle: He will be Your Inspiration

The United States Navy likes to take civilians on joy-rides on their submarines.

You can’t wait for your turn? You’ll have a long wait, unless you’re rich or famous, or well-connected. No, no, these rides are not for the people who pay for the submarines. These thrilling excursions are for people who, at a time of a threatening peace, are in a position to promote massive expenditures of your money on more, bigger, faster, deadlier submarines.

You see, there are a whole raft of deadly submarines out there, just waiting to whack us one with a big nuclear missile. These submarines come from our deadly foes, like… well, Britain might get mad at us someday. The Russians still aren’t fond of us, really. China? Someday they might well have a sub that comes back up after it submerges. And North Korea– rumour has it that they are plotting our final destruction at this very moment. So, yes, by all means, more $2 billion submersibles, please.

That’s why there are the joy rides. You see, Congress is not always as forthcoming with the money for these toys weapons deterrents as they should be. So they must be promoted. So if you are a Congressman and you and your famous or rich loved one would like a thrilling ride in a giant steel cigar, the navy will oblige.

But there are some limitations, my friends. If you and your significant other– one can’t imagine a submarine hosting Elton John and “friend”– go joy-riding together and the excursion happens to last more than a day, you are not allowed to bunk down together. Oh no, no, no! You must sleep in separate bunks. And the rules are spelled out in case you still don’t get it: no sex. We can’t have love on a submarine!

When the nuclear-powered attack submarine Greeneville hit a Japanese trawler, it was not out on a training mission as first reported. No, the training mission had been cancelled. But important visitors had been promised a ride so, at an operating cost of $25,000 a day, the navy obliged. The Greeneville was out on a joy ride. The Ehime Maru, the Japanese Trawler whose name barely rates a mention in the follow-up news stories, was out on a genuine training mission, teaching young people how to fish. They were out in the middle of a very big ocean. Then a nuclear-powered submarine on a joy ride bashed into their hull and sank them, and twelve people died.

The New York Times has published a lengthy article about the grief and despair experienced by the crew of the Greeneville! I may have missed a similar article on the families of the dead fishermen. I must have missed it. If I didn’t miss it, this weird apologia is a pathetic joke in extremely bad taste.

But if they ever published an article about the families of the dead fishermen, it is not listed in the links to this article. I’m afraid the suffering of these families did not rate the New York Times.

This article is interesting in a perverse way. I wouldn’t normally argue that the grief of the submariners or their wives should be completely over-looked or ignored. There is a place for genuine sympathy for crew members who didn’t make the mistake but worry about public perception that they were responsible for needless death.

We only honor them, after all, when they are responsible for needful death. We give them medals.

But this article attacks a perception that does not exist. Who out there, in his right mind, thinks that the working crew were responsible for this disaster? No one. We all know that it was the Navy brass that made the decision to go joy-riding, and the Navy brass that wanted visitors to experience the thrill and excitement of riding a death machine, and the commander of the sub who did not take adequate measures– measures that are normally required as a matter of policy– to ensure that no vessels were above them when they pulled their stunt.

The New York Times quotes a submariner’s spouse: ”

In 16 years here I’ve never faced that kind of crisis. It makes you get more loyal, more defensive. I’ve gone to bed crying for Scott Waddle. And his crew — it’s going to affect them for the rest of their lives.

One hopes she shed a tear or two for the families of the dead fishermen.

Why does the New York Times publish this drivel? Remember, we’re talking here about the poor submariners who got to sail back into port alive. Are you supposed to forget all about the Japanese fishermen and go, “oh, those poor submariners…”?

Well, we know why. Somebody got to the New York Times. I don’t mean in a sinister way. I mean that someone high-ranking in the Navy or government called an editor or the publisher at the New York Times and gave them a big lecture about how they were ignoring the sufferings of the poor crew and how they were needlessly damaging the reputation of the brave and courageous men of the armed forces. God help us, they might even have accused the New York Times of undermining NATIONAL SECURITY by giving needless focus to the families of the dead.

Like a rotting fish.

10 Years Later (2011)

How about that! Here it is about ten years later and all those people lamenting the fate of Commander Scott Twaddle… well, he’s now a motivational speaker. Here he is on Youtube.

Yes, people are paying a lot of money to hear Scott Twaddle twaddle about his astonishing courage in dealing with his own astonishing incompetence.  I hope part of his speech is about how people are so stupid that you can actually make a lot of money bragging about your biggest mistake.

Is this where Donald Trump got the idea of running for president?

You couldn’t make this shit up.

Sometimes I am truly flabbergasted by the turn of events… And other times, I am silenced by the unspeakable, incomprehensible absurdity of human behavior.

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Bob Kerrey’s Burden

If you haven’t already read Bob Kerrey’s “confessions” to the New York Times and CBS’ 60 Minutes by now, you owe it to yourself. It is a stirring, compelling story.

It seems unfair to summarize this riveting account, but the basic facts are important. In February 1969, Bob Kerrey, a Lieutenant, the commander of a Navy Seals Squad, led his men into the village of Thanh Phong in the Mekong Delta. Shots were fired. “Thirteen to twenty” unarmed women and children were dead.

That’s really all there is. Well, you know, there is of course a long story with it. No one can live with himself having murdered twenty women and children without have a long story about it. And I don’t necessarily mean that Kerrey excuses his actions. But I do mean that when you add a long story and you admit that you are confessing a terrible secret and the secret is that you murdered twenty women and children, the truth is that you believe that what you did was different in some way from what a cold-blooded murderer does but very, very awful, but different, but awful… well, how far back can you step, from the basic facts? On my first reading of the account published in the New York Times, it certainly struck me that Bob Kerrey was confessing to a very serious crime. Just above his confession is a link to a story about attempts to prosecute the men who set a bomb off at a church in 1963 in Alabama which killed four children. You understand: we are trying to prosecute these men. And I had to wonder, of course, if anyone is going to try to prosecute Bob Kerrey.

Kerrey tells us that the women and children were killed because someone fired upon them and his men returned fire, and when they examined the bodies, they found only women and children. But he admits that before they returned fire, and before someone allegedly fired upon them, they had already murdered an old man and an old woman and three children in a hut on the outskirts of the village. If there is ambiguity about what happened to the people in the village proper, there is no ambiguity about the actions of the men earlier. They were afraid that these villagers would reveal their presence to the others.  They were not soldiers: they were civilians.  They had to be silenced. They were murdered.

Gerhard Klann, who was with Kerrey that night, doesn’t agree with Kerrey’s version. Neither does Mike Ambrose, who was also there, nor a Viet Namese woman who claimed to have witnessed the incident. Pham Tri Lahn.

Klann says they were never fired upon. Instead, they rounded up the women and children and when they realized that the man they were looking for, a Viet Cong officer, was not present, they decided to kill the villagers. They did not want to leave witnesses to the earlier murder of the grandparents and three children, and they did not want any enemy in the area to know they were there. Of course, as the Times points out, firing your weapons would certainly give away some information about yourself.

Now, there are a lot of people out there who will immediately object to my use of the word “murder”. I would expect they would argue all or any of the following:

1. “civilians”– women and children included– were known to operate as part of the Viet Cong and sometimes killed unsuspecting U.S. soldiers, therefore, Kerrey was justified in treating them as a threat to their lives.

2. This was war, after all, so you have to accept civilian casualties. The normal rules don’t apply.

3. It was all a regrettable mistake, but not something you could compare to a deliberate act under entirely different circumstances. The men were justifiably frightened.

The trouble is that all Western nations agree that, even in hostile territory, the deliberate murder of unarmed civilians is not permitted. This is the military speaking– not some pie-in-the-sky liberal pacifist. This is the standard that German officers were held to at Nuremberg. This is the standard that the U.S. has publicly agreed to in treaties and protocols signed and ratified by the government. This is the standard we are holding above the thugs and murderers of Kosovo and Serbia.

The trouble is, the civilians were unarmed. They did not attack the soldiers. They did not call out for help from hiding Viet Cong commandos. They did as they were told. They waited for the men to complete their search. Then they were shot in cold blood.

The trouble is that even if Kerrey’s account is to be believed– that they were fired upon first and that they returned fire in self-defense– they still murdered the old couple and three children in the first “hooch” in cold blood. That is a war crime. That is cold-blooded murder.

And Kerrey’s account is troubling. If they were fired upon first and returned fire in a random, panicked spree of self-defense… why were all of the civilians killed? Were none wounded?

In the movie, “The Great Escape”, a German officer informs an American commander that a group of the escapees were killed while fleeing their pursuers. “How many,” asks the American, “were wounded”. The German officer, whom we are given to understand is a honorable man fighting for the wrong side (a typical myth of militarists everywhere: that honorable men can fight for evil causes and still be “honorable”) painfully admits, “none”.

We know exactly what he means. And we know why it is so troubling that Kerrey tells us that none of the unarmed villagers were “wounded”. This is the part of the evening that Kerrey, while claiming to have made a damning confession, refuses to discuss.

There are strange ambiguities in the world. We still prosecute Nazi war criminals when we find them. We’re trying to prosecute the murderers of those four black girls in Alabama in 1963. An international tribunal in Holland is trying to bring Milosevic and his cronies to justice for similar crimes.

We throw children and young adults into brutal prisons for long terms for smoking a harmless weed. We try to impeach presidents for having sex with women they are not married to. We ruin the lives of athletes and politicians and business executives who lie or cheat or harass.

In Viet Nam, on a dark night thirty years ago, a group of American men entered a village and murdered 20 civilians. I think Kerrey is genuinely sorry it happened. But so is everybody.

Why did Kerrey do it? Why is he talking about this now?

His given reason is the usual rationale for salacious talk-shows: to advance healing. To bring closure, of course. Peace of mind. You know. And prevent if from ever happening again. But one has to consider that Kerrey ran for the Democratic nomination for President once upon a time and, with Bush not doing anything to dispel the notion that he is the country’s luckiest bozo, might run again. Suppose he was considering running in 2004. Suppose he was worried about the scrutiny his war record would have received had he become the Democratic nominee. Suppose he thought it might be smarter to get it all out now. It’s never a scandal if it’s already public knowledge (Clinton’s stupid mistake was, of course, lying about Lewinski– not the sex itself). Heck, it might even help him. He would have his war record credentials (he served, didn’t defer, didn’t dodge) front and centre, and the confessional aspect of it all might have endeared him to the public I don’t know if that’s what Kerrey is thinking, but you’d be a fool to not tuck this possibility into the back of your mind somewhere and save it for 2004..

In an eerie echo of Viet Nam era propaganda battles, Kerrey now accuses CBS and the New York Times with “collaboration” with the enemy. Uh, Bob, this is 2001…. And Bob, it doesn’t dignify you to sling mud no matter how much you disagree with the information posted in the New York Times or on “60 Minutes”

Has the story taken an even uglier turn? Kerrey met with six of the seven members of his commando team on April 27th for a long, evening meeting. The ostensible purpose of the meeting was to get their stories straight. The six emerged from the meeting all agreeing that they had been fired upon first by the enemy before returning fire. They all denied that villagers had been rounded up and shot.

What is kind of strange here is this: Kerrey has admitted to an act that certainly should raise questions about criminal prosecution. Then he held a meeting with all the American witnesses– except for Gerhard Klann, who denies that shots were fired at the commandos– to coordinate their stories. If Kerrey had been charged, it would be illegal, of course, for witnesses to gather together to “get their story straight”.

Kerrey and the six commandos then issued a press release insisting that they had been fired upon first. Why should we believe this account? To contradict this story would be to admit to cold-blooded murder, and the six ex-commandos would not likely embrace any other alternative. I’m not saying that we know their statement is false. But no court of law in America would accept or even allow the testimony of six witnesses who met together prior to giving testimony in order to coordinate their stories.

It should be noted that there are problems with this story in any case. First of all, none of Kerrey’s men were wounded. Secondly, all of the villagers died in the first hail of bullets, according to Kerrey. They all died? Not a single survivor? Not a single wounded? This strains credulity.

Kerrey also initially denied that he had anything to do with the murder of an old man at a “hooch” (hut) at the outskirts of the village. Now he admits, “we used lethal methods to keep our presence from being detected”. Oh the euphemisms! This one smells. Try “we killed several villagers at the outskirts of Thanh Phong so they wouldn’t give us away.”

“The unanimous view of the six was that we were young men and we did what was right and what was necessary”. The defendants have spoken: they’re not guilty. Think about it. He can’t have it both ways. Either the civilians were killed in cold blood or you were shot at and there is no need for the “we were young” and the “right and necessary”. No need at all.

What has being “young” to do with it? What is he trying to excuse, for which we would be less forgiving if they had been “old”? 2008-05

One last note: Kerrey received a medal for this action. Think about that. No Viet Cong were killed. No military objectives were achieved. The raid was not even successful in any sense at all. But, by golly, you get medals for failure in the army.

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How Wars Start

Suppose for a minute that the Chinese regularly sent a spy aircraft down the coast of California about fifty miles from land. Suppose there was a collision between this plane and a couple of American fighter jets and an American crashed into the sea and the Chinese spy plane was forced to make an emergency landing in San Francisco.

The Americans, of course, would return the plane and the crew immediately, and apologize for accidentally colliding with the Chinese plane.

!

Obviously not. When a Russian pilot defected with his rare Mig-25 back in the 1980’s, the U.S. held onto the plane for a couple of years, until they had exhaustively analyzed it, and then politely returned it… with the wings on backwards.

The truth is that the Americans were spying on China and the truth is that the Chinese jet probably crashed into the Americans in an idiotic demonstration of bravado that Americans usually adore, as in movies like “Top Gun”. If only the Chinese pilot had been Tom Cruise, with lovely, horny Kelly McGillis waiting breathlessly for him back on the aircraft carrier…. all would have been well. We would have admired the macho, testosterone-soaked will of the groovy little spunky powerhouse pilot.

Are we sorry? No. I mean, we feel really, really, really, really bad, but we’re not officially, legally, diplomatically guilty of anything, so, no, we’re not sorry. Please give us our spies back.

The whole thing is really rather boring except as a demonstration of how macho politics can sometimes– not this time, but sometimes– lead to increased tensions and anger and shorter fuses and more macho pilots making bravado gestures and submarines playing chicken and diplomats issuing warnings and gestures and assholes like Jesse Helms calling for holy retribution and eventually war, and then you have to wonder if the baby sitting in the charred ruins of the bombed-out village really cares about whether George Bush Jr.’s weenie was really all that frighteningly big.

Back off, big boy, the missiles are on the way.

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The West Wing

Just about the only television show I watch semi-regularly nowadays is “West Wing”. And The Simpsons. But let’s stay with “West Wing” for a minute.

I have to note here though that the only reason I don’t watch very much television is not because most television is crap, though it is. The fact is that there is a lot of good shows on television too. The trouble is that there are way too many commercials. Did you know that the Dick Van Dyke Show, in the early 1960’s, was about 28 minutes long? The average sitcom today is about 20 minutes. Where did the other 8 minutes go? You need to ask?

In tonight’s episode of West Wing, the President had to make some fateful decisions about possible military action to rescue hostages in Columbia. The story, which parallels reality rather closely, develops after the government gives Columbia $15 billion to fight the drug trade. After a remarkable speech about the utter futility of the drug war, the waste of money, the 80% of the U.S. prison population that consists of drug users, and so on, the dialogue takes a turn on Viet Nam. One of the President’s top advisors warns that he should not repeat the mistake of Viet Nam, which was… what? What was the mistake? The advisor said the mistake was that the U.S. entered the war on the side of a corrupt and unpopular government, and that it did not have clear objectives, and did not have a clear exit strategy. That was the mistake of the Viet Nam War.

The West Wing is one of the few television shows that really is unabashedly liberal. Don’t believe for one minute all that nonsense from Conservative commentators on the so-called “liberal” media– it simply aint true. West Wing is the exception, not the rule.

But the advisor’s explanation about why the U.S. lost the war in Viet Nam buys into a conservative revisionist position that is itself a desperate attempt to rehabilitate the idea of U.S. subterfuge of foreign governments for its own self-interest.

The Viet Nam War began because the U.S. and France refused to accept the results of an election in 1956 which produced a socialist government of a united Viet Nam. With both French and American encouragement, a group of rebels seized power in the South and created a pro-capitalist regime. When the new regime proved unpopular– after all, the people elected the socialists– the U.S. was forced to step in to support the government, and fight a proxy war against the North Viet Namese government, which, reasonably, was determined to reunite the country.

Where did France go? Those silly Frenchmen! They decided that backing a self-seeking, corrupt, illegitimate government against the popular wishes of its own people was a losing proposition! The fools!

The North did not remain democratic, really, but we don’t know what would have happened if the South had not seceded and the U.S. had not involved itself. It doesn’t really matter– the fact is that the U.S. interfered in the domestic policies of a sovereign state and paid the price for it. That’s why they lost Viet Nam. It had nothing to do with unclear objectives. The objective was, in fact very clear: the maintenance of a pro-American proxy state in the region at whatever cost to civil rights and democracy. The problem was not that the Americans did not have an exit strategy: given the objectives, there was no need for an exit at all. And the problem was not that the government of South Viet Nam was unpopular and corrupt: that was at least partly a consequence of U.S. policy, not an impediment to it. Had the U.S. stayed out, chances are quite good that that corrupt government could never have sustained it’s position.

The writers and producers of “West Wing” should know better.

But it’s a great show. It’s subtle, sophisticated, topical, and relevant. That’s rare in television. What’s even more rare is the overt political nature of the program: it is quite frankly Democrat in perspective. The Democrats should be proud.

The Republicans, if they were really smart, would be working on their own television drama by now. On the other hand, they already have a dozen: Law and Order, NYPD Blue, and just about every other cop show on television. They almost all show that respect for civil rights and the assumption of innocence is an impediment to justice and fairness. They almost all propagandize for unlimited police powers. They almost all feed into the right wing paranoia that has led to the creation of America’s idiotic drug and gun laws.

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Not a Single Jew

“… the men who ran the studios had decided upon such a stringent policy of ethnic cleansing that throughout the whole of the Second World War, the words ‘Jewish’ and ‘Jew’ appeared in not a single film set in the States (with the exception, it pleases me to say, of the Epstein Boys’ Mr. Skeffington).” Leslie Epstein, Harpers, September 2000

That’s an amazing fact. Not a single film, except one. Of all the films that presented stories of inspiration and information, motivation, rationalization, and propaganda, not a single one, really, ever mentioned the Jews by name. Germany was our enemy because they started it, because they tried to rule the world, because they were the aggressors, and because they were not democratic. We had to stop them.

And, oh yes, they killed some Jews.

There were claims after the war, of course, that the West didn’t really know that the holocaust was happening until they rolled into the camps with their tanks and found the ovens. Now we know that Western governments, at least, knew what was going on. We know that because we know that the United States refused to bomb the train tracks leading to Auschwitz because, they said, they were beyond their bomber range. But then they went and bombed a factory nearby instead.

Under the Communists, Poland tried to turn the Auschwitz Memorial into propaganda by emphasizing that communists were killed there. Then Poland shook itself free of its Communist shackles. The Roman Catholic Church is trying very hard to restore it’s own power and authority in Poland. And now it has appropriated, or tried to appropriate, Auschwitz. The memorial emphasizes the deaths of Christian Poles who resisted Hitler.

The story of World War II is entirely different without the Jews. With the Jews, our children can be taught that the West was noble and righteous and heroically fought to stop the greatest act of inhumanity of the millennium. Without the Jews, World War II was just about power, like all the wars before it. England, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal– they had all tried to build empires. The difference was that Germany was strong enough to try to absorb England, France, Spain, Portugal and Italy into its own empire of empires.

The Americans look relatively innocent. They merely slaughtered the Indians and took Texas away from Mexico.

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The Tomb of the Unknown Fool

The Royal Canadian Legion has persuaded the government to pick up the interned body of a dead Canadian soldier from World War I and fly it back to Canada to be re-interred under a new monument in Ottawa. This monument will be called the “tomb of the unknown soldier” and will be reverentially saluted by all Legion members who, when they aren’t busy trying to prevent Sikhs from entering their pubs, like to parade around insisting that the only way to prevent another war is to arm ourselves to the teeth and adopt a belligerent attitude to all foreigners.

If I had the money, I would like to set up a counter-monument: the Tomb of the Unknown Fool. And I would demand a body too. There’s lots to go around. Millions.

Who says only the pro-war faction gets to haul bones around at taxpayers’ expense?

And I want a ceremony too: with a bunch of clowns and folk singers. We would sing songs, maybe even with bagpipes, and celebrate the fact that most people nowadays are smart and educated and would gladly refuse to travel to some rat and leech-infested bog in Europe to shoot at Germans or French or Italians for no other reason than that the Canadian Establishment, the owners and movers of capital in this country, said they should. To defend the motherland…. To preserve the nations’ honor…. To make the world safe for freedom and democracy…. Right.

The confusing thing about the issue, in the minds of most Canadians, is the fact that virtually everyone proclaims him or herself to be opposed to war, and visibly moved by the sacrifices of those brave young men who were shipped overseas to die on the alters of British and French Generals’ egos. It’s an apple pie kind of thing: who would NOT wish to honor men who gave their lives in war.

But the blurring of motivations here benefits the pro-war faction. Pacifists feel great sorrow, of course, for the loss of life in war, and in joining the mourning, respectfully, even feelingly, appear to affirm the political agenda of the Legion and the army bands.

Yes, everyone says he is against death and suffering and anguish. That means nothing. The difference is, the Legion and its followers are clearly quite willing to inflict suffering and death on others if it preserves something “pure” (and mythic) like “honor” or “liberty” or the heritage of our forefathers. Listen to the language with which they embellish the remains of that poor sucker: He was noble and proud and courageous and selfless and honorable. He may have been. Without a doubt, he was a sucker. He believed his government when the government said its cause was righteous. He trusted in his commanding officers even when they were complete fools. He obeyed orders without question, even when the orders were stupid.

What suckers! What foolish, gullible, ignorant people! What did the dead of WWI sacrifice their lives for? Which side was honorable and right and just? What were they fighting for?

General Motors and Exxon.

Goodyear and Rockefeller.

Dupont and Macy’s.

George Bush Sr., with toady Billy Graham at his side, proclaimed that the American-led armies of the Gulf War were fighting for democracy and freedom. Kuwait– you remember, don’t you?– had to be rescued from the forces of darkness. Right. Now we know that most of George Bush Sr.’s illustrations were lies.

They were fighting for Exxon and Shell and Amoco and BP and Texaco. It was the biggest tax subsidy of modern times: billions of dollars of military hardware, paid for by you and me. The Pentagon employed as security guards for oil refineries.

Who pays the price of war?

Who always pays the price of war?