Christopher Hitchens seems to have completely lost the plot over Iraq, but I can’t help but check in and see what he has to say from time to time. Today it’s this: “John Kerry actually claims to have shot a fleeing Viet Cong soldier from the riverbank, something that I personally would have kept very quiet about. He used to claim that he was a witness to, and almost a participant in, much worse than that. So what if he has been telling the absolute truth all along? In what sense, in other words, does his participation in a shameful war qualify him to be president of the United States?… ¶ The Democrats have made a rod for their own backs in uncritically applauding their candidate’s ramrod-and-salute posture. They have also implicitly subverted one of the most important principles of the republic, which is civilian control over military decisions. And more than that, they have done something eye-rubbingly unprincipled, doing what Reagan and Kissinger could not do: rehabilitating the notion of the Vietnam horror as ‘a noble cause.’ ”
Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people → losing the Vietnam War all over again
In the International Herald Tribune, William B. Bader (who knows as much as anyone about how the Tonkin Gulf incident became the Tonkin Gulf Resolution), compares the path to war in Vietnam with the path to war in Iraq.
Link-o-rama Saturday:
- After declining in the post-cold war era of , global military spending is on the rise again — threatening to break the one trillion dollar barrier , according to a group of U.N.-appointed military experts… ¶ “The United States now accounts for about half of world military spending, meaning that it is spending nearly as much as the rest of the world combined,” says Natalie J Goldring, executive director of the programme on global security and disarmament at the University of Maryland.
- Karen Button sums up the war tax resistance argument in her essay Against Hegemony: When Bush Comes to Shove, Resist, Don’t Pay for People’s Death. “I didn’t know what to do. One thing became clear though: No matter how much I might protest the war, my money was being used to finance it. I was paying for people’s death. At that moment I decided I would not give the US government any more of my consent.”
- I’m fairly certain nothing good can come of this: US wants to build network of friendly militias to combat terrorism. The visual that comes to mind when I read this headline are a bunch of troops running about wearing bright yellow smiley-face helmets — “look! it’s the Friendly Militia! we’re saved!” But I’d imagine the reality will be something like contras, mujahideen or janjaweed — some hybrid of insurgents and mercenaries who occasionally take orders and supplies from Americans in mirrored sunglasses and who can do our dirtiest work for us without making us take responsibility.
- I haven’t had much good to say about John Kerry on this blog, but I will say that when I read his smart, bold and sincere testimony (which right-wing blogs insist is show-stoppingly treasonous) I think to myself “why won’t this John Kerry run for president?” The latest phase in the attack on Kerry’s Vietnam record is shifting towards an attack on this anti-war activist phase, and I’m curious to see whether Kerry will be defending or backing away from these statements and actions.
Michelle Goldberg, in Salon seems to be thinking along the same lines:
After writing about the mini-mutiny of a U.S. platoon in Iraq , I found this analysis of the state of U.S. armed forces in the closing years of the Vietnam War. Clearly, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet, this time around:
“Frag incidents” or just “fragging” is current soldier slang in Vietnam for the murder or attempted murder of strict, unpopular, or just aggressive officers and NCOs. With extreme reluctance (after a young West Pointer from Senator Mike Mansfield’s Montana was fragged in his sleep) the Pentagon has now disclosed that fraggings in (109) have more than doubled those of (96).
Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units. In one such division — the morale plagued Americal — fraggings during have been authoritatively estimated to be running about one a week.…
Bounties, raised by common subscription in amounts running anywhere from $50 to $1,000, have been widely reported put on the heads of leaders whom the privates and Sp4s want to rub out.…
As early as , however, an entire company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade publicly sat down on the battlefield. Later that year, another rifle company, from the famed 1st Air Cavalry Division, flatly refused — on CBS-TV — to advance down a dangerous trail.…
“Search and evade” (meaning tacit avoidance of combat by units in the field) is now virtually a principle of war, vividly expressed by the GI phrase, “CYA (cover your ass) and get home!”…
Symbolic anti-war fasts (such as the one at Pleiku where an entire medical unit, led by its officers, refused Thanksgiving turkey), peace symbols, “V”-signs not for victory but for peace, booing and cursing of officers and even of hapless entertainers such as Bob Hope, are unhappily commonplace.…
One militant West Coast Group, Movement for a Democratic Military (MDM), has specialized in weapons theft from military bases in California. During , large armory thefts were successfully perpetrated against Oakland Army Base, Fts Cronkhite and Ord, and even the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton, where a team wearing Marine uniforms got away with nine M-16 rifles and an M-79 grenade launcher.
Operating in the middle West, three soldiers from Ft Carson, Colo., home of the Army’s permissive experimental unit, the 4th Mechanized Division, were recently indicted by a federal grand jury for dynamiting the telephone exchange, power plant and water works of another Army installation, Camp McCoy, Wis., on .
It’s a fascinating look at a part of American history that is frequently overlooked both by the Vietnam hawks who think that the military was doing just fine if only the civilians hadn’t gotten in the way, and the Vietnam doves, who tend to overemphasize the role of stateside protest and play down the role of dissention in the ranks. Recommended reading.
“There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go. The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring a thousand non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.” ―Robert S. McNamara,
Daniel at Crooked Timber has done a bang-up job of answering the critics (“deniers” would be a better word for the bulk of them) of the Lancet study of mortality in Iraq. By coincidence, I was reading some Orwell yesterday, and found his “footnote on atrocities:”
It impresses me that a political sophisticate like George Orwell found this to be impressive; it’s so commonplace now that it’s hard to imagine a time when it would have been considered remarkable. American opinion over Iraq has certainly been a case in point. , it was the liberals and the Democrats in Congress who were making noise about Saddam’s human rights record and his pursuit of nuclear weapons. And it was the George Bush Ⅰ White House that refused to declare Iraq a gross violator of human rights and that lifted Congressional sanctions against Saddam, and it was the Republican Senators Bob Dole and Arlen Specter who were dispatched to Mosul to tell Saddam we were still happy to work with him.
, suddenly Bush Ⅰ was gravely reading aloud from Amnesty International reports, and the anti-war protesters for their part suddenly discovered a new concern for women’s suffrage in Kuwait.
During the long warm war in Iraq, the peacenik community sobbed and moaned over the children killed by sanctions-caused deprivation. (The more sober-minded wondered if Saddam might be persuaded to raise some milk money by renting out one or two of the palaces he’d built for his family.) As the war threatened to go hot in , “let sanctions work” was the new cry. Now, if the Lancet numbers are to be believed, the infant mortality rate in Iraq was nowhere near as bad as the sanctions critics believed — will you wonder if they fail to criticize the Lancet for its cover-up?
Addendum: See The Picket Line of for an update on child malnutrition and infant mortality in Iraq before and after the war.
And then there are the hawks, who dismiss the Lancet study with something half-remembered from Statistics 101 but who will throw out anecdotes and numbers about Saddam-era atrocities that are backed by nothing but the flimsiest guesswork or propaganda.
(They also claim angrily that the study was released when it was in order to influence the presidential election. Perhaps that much is true, but what influence did it or could it have been expected to have? If it had told a tale twice as bad, or ten times as bad, would any votes have switched? Would that I lived in a country in which such a report would influence an election.)
The fact of the matter is that the Lancet study, for all its imperfections, contains some of the best data we have about the effects of the war in Iraq, and it paints an ugly picture of the occupation’s toll. And yet, if you’d prefer this data did not exist — that is if you’d prefer the picture to be pretty — there are multiple ways to wish the data away that all sound (to one who is ignorant or not paying attention) very similar to a fervent and dispassionate striving for the facts of the matter. You’ll find them on your favorite pro-war web log.
“This kind of thing is frightening to me,” said Orwell, “because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world… In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable.”
Also coincidentally, and also during ’s lazy rainy day, I was reading Hannah Arendt’s essay Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers () and came upon this quote, which I find either prescient or naïve, depending on my mood:
Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality.
That essay is full of awful déjà vu moments that make me believe that among the tragedies of the Iraq War is that it represents a second American defeat in the Vietnam War: not only was that war a savage sacrifice of life to bureaucratic hubris and cold ideology, but now even the hard lessons that the United States bought so expensively with its money and its reputation and its blood have been utterly forgotten, squandered, and repudiated like so many other ugly facts.
More grab-bag material:
- You can now visualize the U.S. war fatality statistics in Iraq in two new ways:
- Obleek’s Flash animation moves forward in time at a pace of ten days per second , and peppers a map of Iraq with dots, where each one “indicates the geographic location that a coalition military fatality occurred.”
- A Palm Beach Post map turns this around, and shows where in the United States each of the American fatalities from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan came from (at least those who hailed from the contiguous 48 states).
- Robert F. Hawes Jr. got my attention with his summary of a Twilight Zone episode:
revival of the Twilight Zone series featured an episode entitled “Button, button”, based on a short story by Richard Matheson. In the story, a gaunt, black-clad gentleman arrives uninvited at the cramped apartment of a financially destitute couple and presents them with a tempting though somewhat ominous offer. He gives them a simple wooden box with a clear plastic lid overtop a large red button — the type of nondescript contraption teens might build in a high school Woodshop class — and explains their options: 1) Don’t push the button. Nothing happens; the man will come back tomorrow to claim the box. 2) Push the button and get $200,000 — tax free — and someone will die. “Who?” the wife asks. “Someone you don’t know,” the man replies. He then leaves them to think about it. The husband decides it’s unconscionable, but the wife wants to go for it. After all, what is the death of someone they don’t know? People die all the time, don’t they? Maybe a bad person will be the one to die. “And maybe it’ll be someone’s newborn baby,” the husband counters.
In the end of the story, after much deliberation, the wife decides that they’re owed this and pushes the button. Nothing happens immediately. Then, later in the day, the gaunt, black-clad gentleman returns with a briefcase full of cash. He gives the couple their money and takes his box back. The wife asks what will happen now and the man replies: “The button box will be reset and the same offer will be made to someone else… someone who doesn’t know you.”
- Those of you who have been intrigued by my mentions of freeganism and its potential for a lifestyle of radical frugality may be interested in the Dumpster World discussion board, where dumpster divers from all over the place share their wisdom. It’s not all “do you think this meat is still good?” — there is a lot of discussion of restoring and repairing discarded furniture and appliances and other such topics as well.
- How’s our great national flashback coming along? Read the transcript of the President assuring the world “We will not be defeated. We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw.”
- David Morris at Alternet reviews some of the history behind (Economic) Independence Day.
Apparently Gandhi wasn’t the first one to try swadeshi in a campaign to break free from the British Empire:
Before we declared our political independence we declared our economic independence. All things English were placed on the blacklist. Frugality came into fashion. Out of the First Continental Congress in New York came the embryonic nation’s first Chamber of Commerce. Given the current policies of the Chamber, it might be useful this July 4th to recall its first campaign slogan, “Save your money and you can save your country.”
Bostonian Sam Adams, the fiery leader of the movement, knew that frugality was not enough. To become truly independent, America had to produce at home what was previously imported from England.
Members of Boston’s Whig Party demonstrated their patriotism by nursing tea leaves and mulberry trees in their gardens. New England farmers were exhorted to convert their oak plains into sheep pastures and produce enough wool to clothe every American. Colonists were urged to abstain from eating lamb or mutton in order to encourage American woolen manufactures.
In less than a year the boycott had so disrupted Transatlantic trade that thousands of British workers lost their jobs.
- And, going back a bit more into American history, Murray Rothbard makes a very interesting investigation of Pennsylvania’s Anarchist Experiment — when the Pennsylvania colony was “in a de facto condition of individual anarchism, and seemed none the worse for the experience.”
Dubya told the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that if he had been in charge instead of those paisley-mod-podged pansies Nixon & Kissinger, the United States would not have stopped fighting the Vietnam War.
His audience, of whom we can expect many would have been maimed or killed had today’s Dubya been in charge at the time, apparently having grown soft since their service days, were unable to roust themselves to frag the speaker.
Dubya brought this up in the course of comparing the Vietnam War with the Iraq War (I kid you not), his logic being that the reason the former has such a bad reputation is that we stopped fighting it, and he doesn’t intend to repeat that terrible error this time.
The Democrats, baffled once again by Dubya’s masterful rhetorical ju-jitsu, immediately reacted by disparaging any comparison between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War.
“President Bush’s attempt to compare the war in Iraq to past military conflicts in East Asia ignores the fundamental difference between the two,” [Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid] said. “Our nation was misled by the Bush administration in an effort to gain support for the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, leading to one of the worst foreign policy blunders in our history.”
Iraq’s prime minister, Ngô Đình al-Maliki, was unavailable for comment.
