You and whose army?

It's Memorial Day weekend again in the New South. It's nice to know they've finally accepted a holiday they once loathed. Of course it was Decoration Day until 1967 and after I was grown and had a family. It was as you know, about decorating the graves of Union Soldiers and after the next horror of the Great War, the graves of the 117,465 American dead: a day of solemn reflection.

But by 1967, the year before they changed it to Memorial Day to make it more compatible with our imperialism at the height of the senseless horror in Vietnam, it was about Dad's cremated Hamburgers and Indy; parades and patriotic hoo-ha, but perhaps it's because I now live in the South, it's taken on a new tone. Perhaps too, it's because I live in an area flooded with retired military folks filled with their own importance and those employed by the notorious Military- Industrial Complex -- but my in-box is once again flooded with glorious stories about our glorious military and the glorious things they do. A good part of them are hoaxes and of course there are no mentions of our heroes of My Ly 4 or Abu Ghraib or of the recent glorious heroes who accidentally slaughtered 30 or so civilians using robot planes in air conditioned comfort from halfway around the world.

No, what I get are bogus stories about Marines rescuing babies on 9/11/01 and how it is the Veterans" we owe our freedom of religion, press, speech and the rest of the rights we've had abridged because of the martial spirit of the times -- not the constitution, the courts or the Government of the United States.

Have we forgotten that the biggest enemy of freedom on this continent was the American South? Was anything we can call our own freedom at risk in most of our wars? Andrew Jackson's slaughter and deportation of the Seminoles? the use of Federal troops in slave raids into Florida? The Mexican War? The Spanish American War? The war against Philippine independence? What kind of threat to our freedom of speech necessitated suppressing free elections in Vietnam or the killing of two million civilians? What threat to our freedom of Religion was posed by Iraq? What threat were flower carrying kids in Ohio that they needed to be shot in the back by American troops? Were the troops driving armored vehicles down Chicago's State Street in 1968 there to support our right to assembly or to shut us up?

It' s not that I have any disrespect for veterans, living or dead, but our Constitution wasn't written by the Generals, no foreign power is any threat to it and that we still pay any attention to the Bill of Rights owes as much to the "activist" courts and the ACLU as to anything else. It owes nothing whatever to the Tea Bag flag wavers who hate government power unless it's carrying guns. It owes nothing to Macho flag wavers from John Wayne to Bomb-bomb McCain.

Memorial day has become an encomium not to dead soldiers; an expression not of profound grief. It's not a day when we mourn our losses or of any remembrance of the horror of war and militarism, but to celebrate living veterans, sing praise to the Armed forces and to the glory of war itself. It's a day we now use to decorate ourselves, congratulate ourselves on our military prowess and this in a country that's been fighting all my life but hasn't been on the winning side of a war since 1945. It's a day too often used to obscure the real threats to freedom with red white and blue bunting and it's good to remember that the same folks crowing about military defense of freedom are quite happy to require anyone with tan skin to carry proof of citizenship at all times, quite happy to give the local police the power of Federal Marshals and to forget all about warrants and probable cause. What army is going to protect us against our own smug racism, bigotry and expansionism?

A strange kind of honor

Is David Frum having his "mission accomplished" moment?

" Israel may have to retire its title as the only democracy in the Middle East. With Sunday's free and fair national election, Iraq joins the honor roll as one of the very few Islamic democracies,"

wrote Frum on CNN.com today. If so it would be a strange kind of honor indeed, a ravaged, broken country with millions exiled, tens of thousands -- perhaps over a hundred thousand dead; a country cleansed of Christianity, where an election required massive military support and during which, dozens of people were killed.

Sure, it was an election that may actually reflect the will of the voters, but an election that could only be held because of the military might of an occupying invader; an election to pick a government that does not have the strength to run the country or to rebuilt it. Isn't it a bit premature to be portraying this as a "vindication" of George Bush's attempt to find al Qaeda training camps and Chemical weapons factories capable of attacking the United States within weeks? Is this somehow the conclusion of one of the longest and most costly wars in American history; a war which continues and the end of which is not yet in sight?

Certainly there is some hope for an eventual state of stability, but no assurance whatever as to what course a stable, self governing Iraq would take if not held at gunpoint. Certainly it's not time to have the Frum orchestra playing rhapsodies to a dishonest promise of the coming comity of nations and holding up Iraq as a model of enlightened and liberal democracy capable of spreading a Western model of government all over the Middle East. Can it be any more than dishonest when that still distant prospect is, at this point, the product of the wish to believe and more likely to be a fatuous dream than an accomplished mission?

David Frum is telling us that a distant shimmering mirage that never seems to get any closer as we move toward it is really a garden of Democratic Eden only steps away and that the unsubstantiated vision justifies having wandered in the desert wilderness for nearly a decade seeking one elusive promise after another. I wonder if, like the Moses he seems to think he is, he'll have to settle for seeing it from afar for the rest of his life.

Ron Paul -- in the tradition.

Why does Ron Paul have to sound so damned reasonable? Why does he sound so much like I did in the late 60's? The party he somehow belongs to has been telling us we can't afford anything but wars for as long as I can remember and most of them, including the metaphorical war on drugs have produced no discernible benefit to our security or prosperity. Since much of the equipment we bought at irrational prices isn't suitable for any threat facing us, why the hell don't we stop doing that and spend the money on health care?

“Even though I have my ideal system I would like to see, with the government out completely — because that would be a much better system — that’s not going to happen. I’m realistic.”

Pragmatic, realistic, flexible and non-dogmatic? Stop it Ron -- you're killing me!

"I would cut from these trillions and trillions of dollars that we have spent over the years and bring our troops home so that we can finance it [health care].” Said Paul on CNN

Is that Dylan I hear in the background? No, not really, but it's about time that someone from the GOP, even if he's not really one of them, mentioned those trillions and trillions when complaining about the Democrats' big spending, and it's stunning to hear approval for Obama's curtailment of the F-22 fighter program at least as a first step. Of course he believes we can eventually wean ourselves away from such government health care programs and says "freedom" will produce better coverage than a bureaucracy.

Having worked for many years for insurance companies I see their bureaucracies as more expensive, less honest, more reckless and sometimes quite malignant, so I'm not so sure I agree. Still Dr. Paul is certainly not a war lover, has the courage to say it out loud and that's novel. All in all, when he described RonPaulSingles.com (”We put the ‘love’ in revolution”) the dating website for Paulistas on American Morning yesterday:

“It sort of fits a famous slogan that I sort of liked, which says ‘Make love not war,’"

I was inspired to dig out the John Brown gladiator sandals I used to wear back in the day. The times they are a'changin' you know.

Training the Nazis

“I hate Arabs more than anybody, for the simple fact I’ve served over there and seen how they live, They’re just a backward people. Them and the Jews are just disgusting people as far as I’m concerned. Their customs, everything to do with the Middle East, is just repugnant to me.”

says Forrest Fogarty. He's an Iraq War veteran and a lifelong Nazi. Despite being covered in Racist and Nazi tattoos and despite having been expelled from High School for overt and unrepentant racism; despite his public support for ridding the US and Europe of non-white races, despite the fact that regulations forbid it, the US military has trained him in weapons and tactics he hopes one day to use in a race war.

Writing in Salon.com, Matt Kennard tells us in Neo-Nazis are in the Army Now that Fogarty left the US Army in 2005 with an honorable discharge and was asked to re-enlist. He is apparently not a unique case and a DHS report outlines how as the military has had to scrape the bottom of the recruitment barrel, issuing waivers for criminal behavior, militant extremist groups have benefitted from the increased hate and frustration - and the government's willingness to train current and potential hate-group members.

It's become very difficult for Americans to criticize the military and the image of our "warrior" heroes fighting for freedom is a sacred icon, as it often becomes when our government has to hide and distract from the lies and distortions and cover-ups behind an unneccesary and probably illegal war, but it seems to me that another of the victims of George Bush's War, along with the Iraqi people, is our military and its reputation. It's bad enough that we've abused their patriotism and dedication, left too many wounded by the side of the road without adequate care and benefits, but have we trained and disciplined another generation of domestic terrorists to carry out a racist, hate-based mission?

Remembrance of things past

I've been browsing around my early posts at random, partly in response to today's "holy shit" market reports. I wanted to see how much if any of my laments, prognostications hysterical warnings have been accurate. After about three and a half years of this, I don't remember writing much of what I wrote but of course I have been predicting a dire recession almost from the start, along with continued heartache in Iraq and several other things that got me in big trouble with some readers back in the Republican majority days.

Ok, so some of my tongue-in-cheek predictions: like an invasion of Venezuela and the bombing of Iran seem, fortunately, to have been gutter balls, but of course the recession has not been. Back in January of 2006, one young man chastised me severely for saying the economy was in trouble, the armed forces stretched too thin, the Iraq enterprise becoming mired in corruption and oil prices on the way up. What do you know? he asked. It became a heated exchange, bleeding over into his blog where I was called demented, a Marxist and the rest of the standard litany. He was in his 20's and shortly to go off to war and simply couldn't believe I was anything but a fool for hoping he came back in one piece.

I still don't know whether he did or not. His blog, A Soldier's Diary, was abandoned a long time ago and of course we were stretched too thin, the prosperity the Republicans were preaching turned to dust and rubbish, the corruption bled off billions. I would love to know what happened to him and whether he is still a believer.

Of course all those who laughed themselves sick about suggestions that massive borrow-and-spend policies would be a disaster, that massive tax cuts would drive us into irrecoverable circumstances and would produce no more of the prosperity than it ever had: those who insisted things were great, from Limbaugh to Fox News; those who talked about "victory" and the lack of patriotism of "liberals" who were somehow ruining the markets with negativity aren't going to remember what they wrote either. The condescending comments about my doubts concerning the Americanization of the Middle East and the sheer military genius of Bush and his "surge" are still there in the years of comments, written by people I don't hear from any more, or who have changed their names or found new things to snicker about or to attribute to "liberals."

War: forever isn't enough

We're all distracted at the moment what with the conventions and America's obvious descent into theater of the absurd as millions of Americans obey the hypnotic suggestion and suddenly decide they're in love with a small-minded fundamentalist Alaskan with a dead bear in her office.

What better time for George W. Bush to craft his legacy, or rather to cram his legacy into any of our orifices he can? To put it succinctly, George wants Congress to affirm that we are in a permanent state of war with the Taliban and al Qaeda and since the next president and the next will be the sole decider of what those organizations are and whether they still exist as a threat, we will be assured of limitless, never ending, yet totally unwinnable war and a Republican boot on our neck.

Of course the eternal and undefinable enemy will always exist and so will the emergency war powers of the Republican Caesars as the Republic fades into rewritten history.

Listening to generals

La guerre! C’est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des militaires.

-Georges Clemenceau-

I beg to differ. I think it's far more likely that if our Iraq adventure had been planned by military men instead of the neocon know-it-alls, the mission would indeed have been accomplished, or very nearly so, quite some time ago, or perhaps we wouldn't have begun. Those Generals who will speak out today seem to mirror the opinions of the most severe and early critics of George's "war on the cheap." Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seems very frustrated by the inability to send more troops into Afghanistan, where corruption and violence are escalating and the Taliban is regaining lost territory. Too bad George didn't listen to the Generals right from the beginning instead of firing any who questioned his genius.

In the early days of this blog, I was resoundingly excoriated by a young sergeant about to be deployed to Iraq. I was absolutely wrong in my suggestion that the US military would be stretched too thin to be able to deal with the country that aided the people who attacked us. I was wrong to suggest that the justification for the war was based on false information, because we civilians didn't share in all the secret information the government had. There weren't gong to be enough casualties to worry about, he said condescendingly and most of all, there was no sign whatever of impending economic worries as I had suggested in my "elitist left" way. I hope he has survived to reconsider his confidence.

But yes, we need to elect a president who will listen to the military, or at least to those who have been through wars and have learned that it's not at all like High School sports. Our next commander in chief needs to listen to the Generals rather than weeding out those who question his tactical genius. Back when Dick Cheney was selected as Bush's running mate, the media made much of his assertions that civilian control of the military was essential. We didn't realize that this extended to making strategic and tactical and logistical decisions based on personal profit and political expediency. Cheney was billed as the man who would reverse the profligate military spending of Clinton, who would dress down the generals and downsize the Pentagon. Cheney has survived, but I doubt he ever reconsiders anything. Indeed, with oil at $147 for a barrel, his mission has been accomplished.

John McCain in his new role of victim is making much of his qualifications as a military man, but judging from what I've heard he seems to be listening more to The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth people (and spending their money) than to guys like Mullen. Why dropping bombs and spending years in a jail cell qualify him for expertise in world affairs, military planning, strategy and anything else I don't know, but it's plain to me that we do have to leave quite a bit more to the generals then we have been doing and we have to have a president who listens, who asks questions first and then decides whether to pull the trigger.

Fifty gallons of crap in a ten gallon hat

Dick Cheney. Is he wearing that idiotic hat to cover up his horns or is he just reminding us that Nixon may be dead, but the cowboys are still in control?

Using a captive audience of Coast Guard Academy graduates to promote the idea that occupying Iraq is a "war on terror," Cheney persists in insinuating that because it is a war, it can be won and that because it is a war, to desist would be surrender, betrayal and dishonor. Because it is a war, anything we do is justifiable except to to pay for it.

The relentless cramming of the occupation of Iraq into this battered, stretched and sorely abused metaphor of war, the relentless evocation of cheap comparisons to every conflict since Rameses II rode into Kadesh, still stirs the souls of war lovers, a couple dozen of whom, calling themselves "a gathering of eagles," showed up "to support the troops" in some fashion far, far beyond my ability to comprehend.

"We're proud of our government," said one of the eagles.

I won't put words in anyone's mouth, but I would love to have asked him what it would take to turn that pride into shame, or indeed if anything could. I would love to ask whether he would feel pride if we sent troops to club baby seals and dishonor if they were forced to leave any alive. I would love to ask how defending a dishonorable act could be honorable; but of course I don't speak their language or follow their thought processes and I'm sure the answer would be less meaningful than the screeching of birds.

Watch and weep

Many of us are going to get a government handout this month; you know, the kind of thing the Republicans have usually treated as another form of the Socialist Plague when the dollars are directed toward indigent children. For a good number of those recipients, that money will go not to purchase the Japanese cars, Korean televisions and Chinese everything else that we're being told is an economic stimulus plan that will prevent the recession that has already happened. For most, I think, it won't go to pay down the crippling debt or to pay for needed medical care, but to buy gasoline; the indispensable substance of a nation with the poorest public transportation system in the civilized world.

Our Bushtopia can always find a way to get you to buy oil, no matter who suffers in the process and they're very good at making it sound like patriotism. Of course real patriotism has little to do with lapel pins or stupid looking plastic flag holders clipped to SUV windows or yellow "Support the Troops" ribbons, and while you're pouring your government handout into the tank of your 7000 pound monument to fashionable folly, remember who is suffering and dying so that you can exercise your plastic patriotism.

Remember the men and women living in dirt and filth and blood for year after year until they either die or are discharged with a "personality disorder" like shrapnel in the skull, so as to deprive them of decent medical attention and the support they deserve. If you want -- if you really want to see how Uncle Scam treats our "heroes" when they return home to wait to be sent back for another 15 months watch this video. Watch all ten minutes of it and consider taking the hush money George is sending you and using it to defeat each and every Republican candidate with the gall to support this sham government and its sham war. Use that money to make sure not one of these criminals gets another term; these thugs who get free medical care, large pensions and all they can squeeze from the suffering citizens, abused soldiers and victims of American aggression. Watch it and weep.

Still full of it after all these years

I tuned into CNN just now to find the haggard face of George W. "commander guy" Bush stripped of it's sneering cockiness, but asserting that Iraq is where the US was just after our revolution. I turned it off. He's still full of it after all these years.

Iraq is not a country with a parliamentary history. It does not have a government founded on a concept of certain inherent and inalienable human rights or founded on the concept of the sovereignty of the people rather than obedience to the dictates of a God chosen leader. The infant United States was not a country laid waste, not a country where various religious and political sects were being blown apart by their rivals and most importantly our revolution freed us from an occupying imperial power; it didn't have its government and treaties and laws and business arangements dictated by an army of infidels.

Iraq isn't a self sufficient nation engaged in passionate debate among learned proponents of humanism. Jawad al Maliki isn't Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin or James Madison or anyone similar. Our nation in its infancy wasn't having it's resources syphoned off by corrupt warlords, it's leaders weren't being assasinated, it's churches weren't being blown to bits. In fact nothing in the present circumstances of Iraq has any similarity to the phantasmagoria we have been and are being given by George W. Bush and his familiars.

The strain of keeping up a the shifting series of phantasms, illusions and deceptive appearances, as created by the imagination of the Neo-cons has clearly begun to show. This is not the same man giving us that tired story. One can speculate that he isn't sleeping or that he's drinking again and both guesses may be right, but to me the real horror isn't seeing a crumbling, delusional president, but the idea that he may soon be replaced by one with the same disconnected convictions and freshly charged batteries.

Where's the Baloney?

I used to travel fairly often and I always made it a point to learn some useful words and phrases when going somewhere where English or German weren't helpful. Where's the bathroom? How much is that? and too much! probably head my list of most used items. Of course the problem with such partial skills is that one can't always understand the answers.

When asking how much relative to the cost of our invasion and occupation of Iraq, the answers vary and the answers are as confusing as the dialects one encounters traveling in China. "It's only half a trillion or so" say those who wish to minimize it for purposes of maintaining some political attitude. Others like Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University public finance Professor Laura Bilmes may give you a much higher figure that adds perhaps 600 billion in interest payments, possibly another 300 billion to replace and repair the military infrastructure. In fact they give us a total of 3 trillion, which is far harder to sweep under the GDP - and of course the meter is still running. According to Zachary Coile at the San Francisco Chronicle, The White House has not disputed these numbers that show Bush's war so far is second only to WW II in cost making it the second most expensive war in the last hundred years - at least. That makes it ten times more expensive than WW I, 3/5ths of the cost of WW II and yet it has so far failed to eliminate the inchoate and disparate movement that killed 3000 Americans over 6 years ago.

Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor writes in their new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War

"The best way to think about it is: What could we have done with $3 trillion? What is the best way to spend the money, either for security or for our national needs in the long run? The stronger the American economy, the more prepared we are to meet any threat. If we weaken the American economy, we are less prepared."

With perhaps half our National Guard resources committed in Iraq, is our ability to deal with an other and larger terrorist attack less that it would otherwise have been? Can we really dismiss this kind of cost as a serious detriment to our economic future?

It's hard to think that this cost hasn't weakened us, it's painfully humorous to remember how the administration punished people for suggesting that it would cost as much as two to three hundred billion. Rumsfeld called it "baloney"

I guess English is still well enough understood in the US that I don't have to learn the phrase "where's the baloney?" In fact I don't have to ask the question, I know where it is already.

Cross posted from The Impolitic

Just call it war

Hell is murky.—Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and
afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our
pow'r to accompt?—Yet who would have thought the old man to
have had so much blood in him?

Macbeth Act 5, scene 1



Frankly, I'm not as disturbed by the images of torture and mayhem perpetrated by American "warriors" as by some of the public response you can see at Wired.com where Abu Ghraib photos have been published. It's the ones that argue "this is a war and in a war. . ." and the ones that say "but these are Muslims and they would be happy to eat your children, yada, yada" that make me most ashamed to have any association with this self righteous and evil nation. They've made me evil too; Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld and their puppet George Bush. I'm part of it because all I do is complain. I don't risk losing my life to end it, nor even my freedom. All I do is blog and go about my life of comfort and safety.

I got a video in my e-mail yesterday. I don't know whether it was staged or real, but it showed some US military personnel walking through an airport while people stood up and applauded. No one could have been thinking of the archive of pictures on view at UnderMars.com They aren't returning from a parade ground, but from hell and a hell the United States of America created with eagerness and enthusiasm and lies.

Men with plastic bags on their heads being beaten, smiling "warriors" posing with corpses, a man's severed penis in a mousetrap, blood and pain and shit; these are things many Americans think "you do in a war" even though you started the war and of course anyone caught up in the grinder is promoted to the ranks of the "terrorists" who bombed New York even though they didn't.

So clap when you see our soldiers; I'm sure nearly all of them are good people, but don't call them warriors. Warriors take scalps, soldiers are responsible for their actions. Warriors represent themselves, soldiers represent us and when there's blood on their hands, it's on our hands too and remember, when John McCain tries to tell you this is noble, this is about protecting your sainted mother, your back yard barbecue and your civil rights - it isn't. It's about water up the nose, the cattle prod up the ass, bloody teeth spilling out like corn from a popper; it's about rape, about shit and piss and blood on the floor being wiped up with the flag we're supposed to worship like some tawdry pagan idol.

It's about millions of homeless innocents, about a lost generation of uneducated children brought up in terror and squalor and hate. It's about people whose crime was fighting for their homes being tortured like John McCain who once was tortured by those whose homes and children he was destroying. It's about evil. It's about me and about you justifying it all by just calling it war.

Veterans day

"In their sorrow, these families need to know — and families all across our nation of the fallen — need to know that your loved ones served a cause that is good and just and noble,"

said George Bush yesterday. No it wasn't at Arlington as tradition and duty would suggest, but back "home" in Crawford at the American Legion Hall where his latest vacation wouldn't be interrupted.

Yes, they need to know that. They need to know that so much that they will believe it when it is manifestly untrue and George is there to milk grieving mothers for support by lying about why their children died.

"Their sacrifice will not be in vain."

said the man of leisure, whose family grows richer by the dayand whose boots cost more that what we pay to families in Iraq whose children we have murdered; said the man whose policies have our future teetering on the brink of recession and our grandchildren already in debt and our reputation lost and our leadership lapsed. In our sorrow, we need to know who profits by it, who brought it about, who fights to maintain it, who lies to pass the blame and on whose shoulders rests the shame.

Their sacrifice has brought us torture, murder, rape, the displacement of millions and the death of hundreds of thousands who will never have the chance to tell us how much they love freedom. How hollow such words sound from the man who has been given everything and given his loyalty to profiteers and foreign powers while sacrificing nothing except our sons and daughters.

Dwell time

They call it dwell time; the amount of time at home between military tours and our troops aren't getting nearly enough of it. That's what an Army Captain told Joint Chief Chairman, Admiral Mike Mullen at his recent stop at Fort Sill, OK.

“That year we’re back, it’s just not good enough.”

Mullen has been hearing a lot of that sentiment both in the US and at stops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“She has put her whole life, her whole career, and everything, on hold for me. ... And now I have to say, honey, I just got back, but we’re moving. And when we get there, I’m gonna leave again" Said a Captain of his wife's efforts to return to college. "I can do that. That’s what I do,” the captain said. “But when it comes to hurting my family, sir, it’s repulsive.”

“Family considerations don’t play a part in the assignment process.” That's what another officer was told and that's what made him decide to leave the service.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, some coddled political warriors like Mel Martinez (R) FL have been telling us that what these men and women who have been fighting for 5 years want is disgraceful to the troops and Commander Guy, who tells us so often that we have to give them everything they need, save adequate equipment, pay, medical benefits and time off, isn't interested in hearing "phony soldier" talk like that.

Mullen himself says: “I am not willing to see the United States military return to the kind of challenges that we had when I was young. We’ve got to figure out a way to make sure that family considerations are very much in play."

Just the kind of America-hating talk you'd expect from a guy who thinks our troops are real people rather than painted tin soldiers.

I expect that he will soon be corrected by true Americans like Rush who would most assuredly be over there himself save for his anal problem.

We don't need another hero

The English language isn't what it used to be. It's not as much the expression of a culture but more and more a tool for manipulation. Take the word hero. It used to connote a doer of bold and noble deeds; someone favored by the divine, but as with most things these days, the requirements have been dumbed down and conferring the title of hero is a way to make the exploited seem, well, less exploited.

The guy who runs into a burning building to save someone else can fairly be called a hero but what about the guy who unwittingly holds the door for the guy who runs in to pillage the place before it all burns up? Is he a hero if he's killed so that others may steal during a fire that was set for the purpose? Most people wouldn't say so; they'd say he was a victim and the law would agree, but if we talk about soldiers and not firefighters, everyone is a hero now.

I was struck by an article in the Miami Herald this morning about Staff Sergeant Lillian Clamens, wife and mother of three, killed in Iraq by a missile. Lillian was a personnel clerk only three days away from coming home to her family. Her three children have already bought the costumes for the Halloween party planned to celebrate her return. Her husband, a logistics manager for the Army ROTC program seems stoic, or so the Herald plays the story. They're all heroes, you see and heroes don't cry and consequently neither should we. We should celebrate the heroism of another senseless death, another casualty of the Neo-con crusade to make the world free for exploitation by the rich and corporate; another destroyed family, three more orphans because of a colossally mismanaged power grab by a government that never sheds a tear unless it has to pay for some kid's medical insurance or old person's medicine.

Maybe it's OK to be stoic; to act as though it was important that men and women are dying, but it's not OK for us to pass by it all, to absolve ourselves by calling her a hero, to pretend her children aren't crying, because she's a hero, that we haven't lost one of our own forever, because she's a hero, because soldiers are warriors and warriors are heroes even if they die for someone else's ambitions, our arm chair patriotism and our apathy.

What have we done to ourselves if fathers and mothers, sons and daughters and husbands have to believe that our government hasn't got the blood of their families on their hands and in their wallets; what has become of a nation that it can't cry for someone's mother, someone's wife? What of a culture that has to hide contempt for what they know is wrong; hide grief for what they know is a tragedy behind the cult of Bush and the myth of the warrior hero?

Down with the Armenians, up with the war!

So let me get this straight, Mr. Gates. We all know that the 1915 killings of Christian Armenians by Muslim Turks happened and that such mass exterminations of ethnic groups are genocide, but we can't allow Congress to call it Genocide because we need to depend on the Turks in our fight for whatever it is we're fighting for in Iraq. Turkey after all is warning us of "grave consequences" if we call a spade a spade and we know that Turkey has been spending a fortune in the US. giving grants to universities if they refrain from teaching the history of the Armenian genocide. Best just to give in to them, say our otherwise fearless leaders.

The Gates and Condoleezza show appeared on CNN this morning, to plead the indefensible case of the Turkish government and to advise that we give in to their threats. It's just another way Bush's war has made us the allies of evil and the cohorts of corruption. Anything; anything at all to keep that war going. It doesn't matter if we lie, cheat, steal or murder or who we ally ourselves with. Just keep the war going.

Take these medals and. . .

I guess he has no immediate plans to run for office and that's good for Josh Gaines, a 27 year old Iraq war veteran who announced his plans today to mail his medals to Don Rumsfeld. Since he did nothing, says Gaines, to protect our country or to further the Global War on Terrorism, he doesn't deserve them.

“I’m going to give those back because I truly feel that I did not defend my nation and I did not help with the Global War on Terrorism. If anything, this conflict has bred more terrorism in the Middle East.”

Gaines, according to Army Times today spent a tour of duty in 2004 and 2005 guarding two military bases and issuing ammunition to soldiers. He never fired a weapon.

Of course one doesn't need a weapon to shoot oneself in the foot and the man has reason to resent the Army for having discharged him "less than honorably" for smoking cannabis after his return from Iraq; to help him, as he says, to sleep. It's a shame of course, since I essentially agree that demolishing Iraq and presiding over the smoking ruins isn't protecting the United States and is creating more hatred towards us than anything else, but his gesture will only provide fodder for the war lovers who would like to dismiss all dissenters as dopers, misfits and fringe elements. It would hardly take the Swift Boat Veterans a moment to sink him with their wake.

I realize that Americans need faith that we're always in the right and our wars are always part of the good fight and I know that all soldiers are heroes save those with the courage to question the ruler, but like at least one man who served with him said, I'm also proud of him and I wish there was less pride in submission and obedience in the ranks. I wish that more generals could give their real opinions and I wonder what Colin Powell has to smoke to sleep at night.

To draft or not to draft

I keep running into conversations centering around ending the Iraq war by instituting a draft. Doesn't anyone remember Viet Nam? The kind of people who support wars without particular concern for the cause or effect also support obedience as a virtue. The draft creates the draft dodger and the draft dodger becomes an effective straw man to use against many forms of protest, disagreement or even rational discussion.

The sons of Senators will not be drawn into dubious battle, they will either find deferments or medical problems or will do supervised and fictionalized tours far from the fray, like George W. Bush. It will be your kid or mine or maybe you sent to Baghdad.

Certainly no amount of public protest and demonstration will soften the resolve of those who think in terms of hard and soft, tough and weak, since they admire George for ignoring the people who employ him. It doesn't seem all that long ago to me that we had countless people demonstrating against another brutal, pointless and probably illegal war: business leaders, veterans, clergymen and other pillars of the community, all of whom were nicely dismissed as hippie draft dodgers or "Peaceniks" simply because there was a draft.

This war won't end until we are rid of the Bush crime family and the old Nixonians and neocons they associate with. Until we learn not to jump to take up arms every time some dimwit beats the war drum; until we learn not to identify with the kind of people we customarily elect, we will be in the same position we are in now every few years as a new crop of patriotic fools arises. A draft won't change a thing.

Hostages, martyrs and liars

If William Randolph Hearst had had television, I'm sure it would have been necessary for the US to attack some crumbling empire less pathetic than Spain's. As it was, the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor was the 9/11 of its time that allowed the media and McKinley to contrive a reason to bring freedom and American values to Cuba and the Philippines and annex the country of Hawaii.

If Fox News and Freedoms Watch.org had been there, I'm sure they could have challenged France or Germany or England, if not all three. Hearst didn't have slick Ads using one-legged Judas goats to lead more people to martyrdom and he didn't have the families of the fallen to persuade us that to die a martyr for commercial interests and a president's ambition is sacred.


The lesson of the 1960's, for me, was that any war is sacred and once it's begun, reasons for its continuation will arise. Protest is bad because it decreases the morale of those being martyred for the cause that may not be questioned. Now as in the dear dead days of Vietnam, we have people who want to hold our democratic process and free speech hostage so that they can maintain the comforting illusion that their sons and daughters, fathers and mothers died for a noble cause. So it is that Merrillee Carlson, national chair of Families United for our Troops and Their Mission, went on Fox News to protest the use of the names of the dead in a protest against the continuation of the War for Oil.

"When somebody goes and abuses our son's courage and heroism by using it in this manner, it just strikes right to the heart and causes such pain that is unbelievable"

said she to Tucker Carlson. I'm sure her son had courage and he may or may not have been a hero; he may have thought George's oil grab really was a cosmic Manichaen struggle between Good and Evil, but my need to believe that and Merrillee's differ. Indeed if she believes he was abducted by aliens because it eases the pain, it is not America's problem nor is it America's duty to kill more and more and more so that she can sleep at night free from the suspicion that it was George W. Bush and his gang of Neocons who abused his courage and heroism, not the rest of us.

More gasoline for the fire please

Some things don't change. The US has a long history of supporting tyranny of the worst sort as long as it wasn't communist tyranny and as long as a country like Saudi Arabia with it's ritual beheadings, mutilations and brutal repression is willing to sell us oil, we will continue to give them weapons, even if some of those weapons might walk over the border into Iraq and shoot us in the bum.

It's looking like the 20 billion dollar arms sale to Saudi Arabia is a done deal and there has been no talk of any requirement on the part of the Saudis to reform anything or to stop fomenting anti-American religious fervor, much less to put a halt to murdering their daughters for things considered normal in the real world. Saudi Arabia is a medieval country, but a medieval country that owns a big part of the Bush Crime Family; owns them so solidly that they can call our occupation of Iraq illegal when Americans are condemned for saying it. It's a medieval country that practices a degree of oppression almost unimaginable here, yet you won't hear any member of the Bush Crime Family telling us the world would be better off with a Saudi regime change or with some sort of Democracy. Instead we've made them the largest client of the US arms trade so that they can more effectively resist reform, practice Wahabbism and preach Jihad in the rest of the world.

In an e-mail to Raw Story, Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, said

“I believe that the $20B arms package just announced – and the diplomacy accompanying it – is a complete refutation of the Bush/Rice policy of refusing to coddle the autocracies of the Middle East,” Wilkerson said. “Because we are afraid of Tehran, we are willing to fund massively regimes whose interests are not only counter to our own but who are actively engaged in covertly undermining U.S. interests, from supporting anti-U.S. elements in Iraq to building and funding thousands of madrassas in volatile places like the Federally Administered Territories in Pakistan.”

I disagree in part. I think the Bush policy has been to coddle and protect their friends whether or not those friends mean our country well or ill. I think the Saudis see us as loathsome but profitable customers who will be replaced with bigger customers in due time, but Wilkerson is right that we are aiding and abetting our enemies.

If Bush somehow dreams that other mid-East nations can be persuaded to defeat and annex Iran if we sell them enough weapons and that we would benefit from it, then he is more of a dangerous idiot than I imagined. Add this story to the proposed sale of Iraqi oil to Israel and it is a public relations disaster that will surely fuel more insanity and terrorism and hatred.

There has been much written about the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton having made it hard for him to deal with emerging terrorism. I think that Impeachment may be the only remaining option for saving us all from the apocalypse Bush is hell bent to provide us.