trying on that wide angle lense

In respecting the sentiments of CMC, a patriot and warrior on Memorial Day, I was going to post the below at a later date. But I realized this debate is what Memorial Day is all about. I hope to hear similar debates, if hopefully better informed than I am, between the contenders for the highest office in this country. Too long we have been forced to listen to canned prepared 60 second speeches.



You think war is hell because soldiers die, soldiers come back with bad wounds, and some of them go crazy. You think that running around in a strange land shooting people is the ultimate sacrifice for your country. As horrible it is to point your gun at another man, as horrible it is to see life snuffed out all around you, as horrible as it is to see your brothers die around you, you do not know the hell of war until it reaches your mother’s doorstep. You do not know the hell of war, until you have to worry about a gang of soldiers coming into your house and raping and killing your family in front of your eyes. You may have seen all of these things, but that horror is not yours. You do not know the consequences until your home has been reduced to rubble and you go through the remnants to find your grannies dentures, because that’s all that survived the napalm. This explains why Europe is somewhat fearful of the trigger happiness the USA displays. They have in living memory destroyed everything around them. They did it themselves, have nobody to blame but themselves, but it does engender a sense of restraint. When this country invaded Iraq for the second time my mother called me to tell me that the man in black leather boots is walking again. She has the same visceral reaction to these kinds of events as you have on the Fourth of July. War is hell, and the sanctified version (where are the body bags?) that the American public is served with their daily dose of “we are the saviors of the world” should make you, a Vet, cringe. Or do you accept this little white lie as a small price to pay, truth as the collateral damage so to speak, in order to keep the home front in line?

Small countries around the world are constantly engaged in unspeakable atrocities, and the way the USA justifies going to war against her enemies is somewhat of a role model for them. How many times have you recently heard some little petty dictator call his political opposition terrorists and proceed to drop American made ammunition on them? He has as much right to do that as we had a right to go into Iraq. And how do you think that opposition feels when they pick up a dud that says “Made in the USA” in loud and proud letters? You think the USA goes into every conflict freeing some innocent peoples of their dictator. But if the best, the most moral, the most glorious, the most democratic, the most land of the free and home of the brave lends legitimacy to might over right you can be sure that all the little bad guys will follow our lead. Especially when they see how well the propaganda works in the USA. Of course it is not our fault that these little dictators follow our lead, but who else are they going to follow, especially since we do it so well?

You equate an error in judgment of whether we should go to war to an error of aiming the parachutists in WWII. Aren’t those two completely different shoes? Isn’t that comparing me buying orange juice instead of apple juice, as my mother asked me to, to her asking herself whether she should have a baby in the first place? I do believe that a decision to go to war or not is a little grander than reading a map incorrectly, although it would seem that the US Military in recent history can be accused of that as well. One could allow that the civilian leadership in this country is not very good at reading maps either, since they thought that Bin Laden was in Iraq – but we know that’s not what Iraq was about. If you are not mad at the Republicans for taking you into an unjustified war, at least you should be mad at the incompetence of the leadership of this war. I don’t know what the reason for their inability to consider historical campaigns are, and I don’t understand why their learning curve is so low that it took them 5 years to figure out that they are in a guerilla war, let alone how to deal with it, but I know that if I would put my life on the line for this shit, I would expect a little more skill from my leaders. When Kara Mustafa did not manage to take Vienna in 1683 the Sultan sent him a silken cord. Nobody is asking Rumsfeld to do anything but disappear into ignominy, and the least our current leadership could do is follow him and let some fresh minds work the problem.

So the USA has been messing with the Middle East for the last fifty years. I don’t understand how you think that gives us the right to go in there and bomb the place to smithereens. You know all the history of the former Secretary of Offense shaking hands with our current enemies, using the Afghanis against the Sowjets, installing the Shah in Iran, then turning around and setting Saddam Hussein on Iraq when they revolted against our puppets. The list is endless, and can be continued at leisure in South America without either justifying the current action, or actually being laudable. What would you say if Russia invaded Afghanistan tomorrow, and justified it by saying “Tovarisch, my grand daddy was fighting the mullahs and their American made MPs. We have been in that dusty, godforsaken joint for so long that in the beginning we had to use Camels to get around.” How about Cuba? What if China invades Taiwan, they certainly have been there a minute (if you measure it in millennia)? So does it give them the right?

And how did we go from justifying this invasion with “Them boys got WMD and Nerve Gas that will make your skin come off in bubbles” to “Saddam has been a threat to the governments around him for years” to “He killed the Kurds” to “Man, we been there for 50 years”. I hope you have a larger context in mind than just a temporal one. Because when I look at the justifications above, I see them all as fairly applicable to the USA. You know more about weapons in all shapes and sizes than I do. Tell me do we have stockpiles of nerve-gases? Do we have suitcase-sized nukes in violation of none-proliferation treaties? How many times have we invaded a country in the last 50 years, compared to Saddam Hussein and Iran? Are we going to fight wars in all places when they disagree with us just because we have built a base and hung around after the last ass-kicking?

If you have been involved with a region for fifty years, wouldn’t you hope that this, the best, the most moral, the most glorious, the most democratic [here insert more tiresome, patriotism inducing rhetoric used in each and every country around the world; Austria is the best country in the world because of our music and our mountains] country in the history of the world would do better than what we see now? If morality, right over might and most importantly history are on the side of the USA, on top of us being just absolute hot stuff, shouldn’t you demand better results than what has been delivered by a huge majority of Republican Presidents over the last 40 years? It can’t have been the Democrats’ weak FP since they fumbled themselves to only three victories in that time period. Somehow we always are told that these things take time. That just around the corner you can see the final solution to the problem. Ask me when this final solution will become real. And I will tell you that it will remain the mirage that it is until the day the oil runs out and the day Christian Fundamentalists get it on with Muslim Fundamentalists in some mythical battle to ring in the Apocalypse. Hopefully this will coincide, so that my Middle Eastern friends will only have to bury their families once. Of course by that time we will have found ample reason to be camped out in some other country that we just bombed back into the Stone Age. Did I tell you that you do not know the horrors of war until your sister is raped with the business end of a gun, so that she may never bear children to her rapists’ enemies?

Considering the results of voting a Republican into the White House all but three times these past 40 years, I will concede that I do not understand this country, in as much as the definition of crazy is expecting different results from repeating the same actions. I admit I do not understand crazy. You wonder why your friends, your sons and daughters die in distant places, you wonder why your treasure is spent on annihilation instead of edification, you wonder why the crazy people get thrown out of their asylums and the poor turned out of the hospitals (How The Gipper became so revered is beyond me, your blue collars are gluttons for punishment by the rich; at the most he played better poker than Gorbachev), you wonder why the rest of the world looks on in astonishment as you greet the end of the Cold War by building suitcase-sized nukes. I do not think that a Republican victory will happen again in 2008 because I have more faith in the mob-thinking of the masses, as I just do not see them being able to think as independently as you and those unidentified Republican pollsters. But if it were to happen it would send a great message to the rest of the world. That finally that horrible baby boomer daydream/nightmare, which has managed to vote a literal dynasty of Democratic Presidents into office, kept the poor Republican minority not only out of power but also forced to follow a weak FP and listen to lefty elitist mass-media propaganda is over. Oh, you say that only three Democratic Presidents were elected into office over the last 40 years? Well, then those Democrats surely must have been successful at running the joint behind the backs of the guys with the Veto Pen. A Republican electoral win would also send a message that this young nation is no longer naïve, altruistic and optimistic. That she has left behind that early childhood stage of blind trust in the goodness of others. That she has entered full blown puberty and must thus be given the freedom to act out for a couple of years. Unfortunately, she is not a harmless little teenager, whose worst action could be to mess up her own life because she didn’t know about condoms since her mum was busy either in the Women’s Power Association, or in her church. Instead and unfortunately, she is the 800 pound gorilla and liable to break some China and there is a lot of China to mess with. In due time she will come to sit at the family table, slightly remorseful over all the shit she put her poor parents through.

In the meantime how often will she bring the true horrors of war to the shores of foreign lands? Your claim to nobility, that you are not using your mincemeat-making arsenal (even though you say you are not superman - which one is it?) is so beyond me that I can’t even come up with an appropriate simile. How many Philippinos, Vietnamese and Iraqis need to die conventionally before you admit to yourself that merely not dropping your nukes does not make you civilized? You label Europe sophisticated, and somehow that is an insult, when you yourself are victim to the most fascinatingly sophisticated propaganda machine in the history of the world. You could throw a dart at a world map, you are welcome to use that terrorism map on your wall, and as long as you aim south of the equator you will most likely hit a resource rich country in which the USA installed and/or supported a regime of horrific proportions. In fact, we both know that some of the worst terrorists come out of those places. Yet you insist that we are doing it out of the goodness of our bleeding hearts. Wouldn’t it be intellectually and morally more honest to stand up and say “Yes, we run this joint as we see fit, and for the maximum profits of our people”? Because that’s what we do, and our outstanding standard of living is based on it. And that is the reason in a nutshell that this country keeps voting Republican. Deep down inside we are all selfish, and we want that cheap oil, the cheap gadgets from china and the lovely diamonds from the Congo. If only in a very small measure we reaped what we sowed on 9/11 I am mildly perturbed to think of the future reaping we will be going through. Of course we can always ratchet it up, fight a harsher war, build bigger bunker busters, chase them more, but will that create anything else but a spiral of violence? How did that work out for Israel so far? Do you want to put your child on a bus and worry if that bus will implode in some idiot’s righteous anger?

And yet you still believe that you are the savior of the world, because your government somehow manages to pull the freedom wool over your eyes when you should have been seeing the money trail all the way from your pocket to the war in the Middle East and back to record profits in the coffers of Exxon Mobile (the funniest thing is how surprised all the business analysts are now, at the news that those companies are not making billions of dollars anymore when a Democrat is about to be elected). Personally, I am going to throw up if I get another tax refund check because I was taxed incorrectly for the Spanish American War.

You like the guy like a wise man should like a fool. You can learn from him, but he will never learn from you. This is fine, as long as I want him to dance with some tribal leaders in Africa. But when I want him to consider the consequences of his actions in a place fraught with historical fault lines such as the Middle East, I would prefer a guy whose librarian wife forced a couple (of thousand) history books down his arrogantly uneducated throat. Yes, I think that a man who can’t form a straight sentence should not be running the world. In fact, I would be completely fine with having a guy at the helm that I can absolutely not stand. As long as I think he is smart and moral enough to do right by the world he can be the prick from hell. You think to be smart and eloquent is bad. As if stupidity guaranteed honesty and intelligence implied duplicity. I would prefer to think of the political class as duplicitous by nature, and if they all are that, let’s have one who has read a couple of books along the way. Since the Republicans over the last 40 years have not been able to supply that, let’s give the Democrats a chance to either proof me right, or you wrong for the next 40 or so years.