Two More Wars in the Offing?

It's no secret—or should not be any secret—the Republicans and conservatives like war. Well, maybe that's not a way of phrasing it that they'd agree with. How about, they are more prone to favor the use of military force?

That is why we've been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a loss of over 4000 American lives—arguably in both cases for at best a very unclear purpose. Supposedly America is always trying to export "freedom"—meaning, presumably, its brand of democracy—to other countries, whether they want it or not. Iraq is not and is not going to be a democracy after the American model, and heaven only knows what can be accomplished in Afghanistan, where we cannot even free the country from the influence of war lords.

Anyway, those are wars that commenced, and that fact cannot be changed. I must acknowledge that the US has supposedly largely exited from Iraq, thanks to a Democratic president—whether or not we have left the country any better off. (For one thing, I'd like an update on whether the Iraqi people yet have reliable, 24-hour electrical service, or whether they feel secure outside of their homes.)

So really, there is only a point in talking about the future. Currently Republicans and other "hawks" (we don't hear that word much, anymore) want the US to attack Syria and Iran. President Obama evidently is not very keen on doing either one; but if a Republican gets elected president in November, we may indeed find ourselves in the midst of yet another war.

The US has an all-volunteer military services. I don't understand why young American men want to join the military and go and fight. Evidently they feel they are being patriotic and "serving their country"; but when America has not been clearly attacked by these countries; and when the connection between these wars and America's welfare is similarly not clear; I have to think they may be misguided. (Remember, George W. Bush sold us on the Iraq war by falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein was developing "weapons of mass destruction." Many other wars, such as the Vietnam War, were also based on lies.) Those in Iraq who were attacking American troops did not view Americans as their saviors but as foreign invaders.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

War Creates a Climate Hostile to Liberals

In the last decade we've seen the "9/11" attack and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and possibly we can add Libya). The terrorist attacks and the wars have given a boost to a brand of conservative, hawkish patriotism that does not want to brook any criticism of America.

After 9/11 we saw lots of cars flying American flags. Where I live, and where we have many older people who tend to be conservative, you can still see cars flying American flags. Time was, any car flying the American flag was the President's car or the car of an American ambassador abroad.

So 9/11 stirred up a lot of patriotism. I think partly it was an expression of defiance to the terrorists but also perhaps sort of having a chip on America's collective shoulder. Just as my sister, living in Germany with her US Army husband around 1955, wore a Jewish star around her neck, sort of saying, "I dare you to discriminate against me—because I'm American, we whipped your Nazi, anti-Semitic ass, and now we're occupying your country."

As a bit of a digression: The wars we've been engaged in have produced a lot of "Support Our Troops" decals and bumper stickers on cars—and they're still there. I'd like to reply to the "support our troops" crowd that I support the troops by advocating bringing them home. Certainly they'd be safer that way and we'd save all the human suffering of war injuries and deaths. On the other hand, it's undoubtedly true that some soldiers want to be "over there." Some will say they want to defend their country--but my feeling is that that's based on incorrect ideas. It's not clear to me that the US invaded Iraq because our country was being threatened (remember, the "weapons of mass destruction" were never found).

Being engaged in a war calls up patriotism. This is fine except that, along with that patriotism there often can be an intolerance of criticism of the country. I remember during the Vietnam War I was told things like, "We don't need your kind in this country," and "Why don't you get out of the country if you don't like it?" People were saying, "My country, right or wrong"—which I thought was a well-nigh appalling idea. Quite recently, in response to a comment I wrote on Huffington Post, I was called "commie"--which if nothing else strikes me as a rather anachronistic term. I thought the McCarthy Era was long past and that we had stopped calling people "commie."

You can view the current climate in this post-9/11 US as an upsurge of patriotism. But it might be that America has moved to the Right. One of my professors used to be fond of saying that the prevailing philosophy is a pendulum that continually swings between liberal and conservative.

And now I learn of some of the things that were said by the Republican Presidential candidates in their most recent debate. They strike me as militaristic, chest-beating comments. (We used to hear the terms hawk and hawkish, in the Vietnam War era.) Mitt Romney mentioned that attacking Iran should not be out of the question, and Cain said he wants to bring back waterboarding of prisoners or detainees:

But Cain also provided one of the most striking moments when he argued in favor of the use of "enhanced interrogation" -- including the now-rejected technique of waterboarding -- in the fight against terrorism, a proposal that is likely to outrage many who thought the era of American-sponsored torture was over.

"I will trust the judgment of our military to determine what is torture and what is not torture," Cain said. Asked about waterboarding in particular, he replied, "I would return to that policy. I don't see it as torture, I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique." [HuffPost: Politics]

(To again digress: I have to comment on that term. My reply to Cain is that "enhanced interrogation technique" was an abominable euphemism coined by the Bush administration simply to call torture by some other name. Politicians know very well the power of words, the power of a name, that what you call something matters. When the United States was supporting anti-government fighters in Nicaragua during the Reagan administration, they were "freedom fighters." Whether people fighting against their government are "freedom fighters" or "rebels" simply depends on whether our government views them as on our side or not.)

I wish I could figure out why advocating cruel things like waterboarding and capital punishment seems to correlate with holding a number of other views. Is it a matter of very general personality type or world view? In an earlier post I mentioned a student who called himself a libertarian and was defending property rights to the degree that he favored punishing a man who stole a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. Extreme conservatives like that--in my view, at least--have no humanity, no empathy, or no imagination that would enable them to see themselves in the other person's shoes.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Americans Are Lucky

We here in America are lucky. But maybe not (in my opinion) for some of the reasons usually given.

From earliest times, America was to be a haven and refuge, a new and better society. One of the earliest colonies in what became the United States, that in Plymouth (Massachusetts), established in 1620, was founded by members of the Puritan sect who left England to escape persecution-- and, incidentally, once in the New World set up a theocracy which was anything but religiously tolerant. (Just as a couple of examples, Roger Williams was expelled from Plymouth for having and spreading ideas that the government did not like. Anne Hutchinson was expelled because she and her preaching were deemed unorthodox.)

For much of America's history, there was a sense--quite often expressed--that this new land was special. It was given to the newer arrivals to tame the wilderness, to civilize the "savages." America was seen as "the new Eden," a chance for mankind to make a new start with divine blessing, free of many of the Old World's problems such as religious intolerance, bad governance, and so forth. Many immigrants came to the United States also to make a fresh start in their personal lives, sometimes even to shed their identities and take on a new one. (A bit like Australia, some early arrivals on the shores of America were criminals who had been sentenced to "transportation" and who sometimes made a fresh start in America and even became materially very successful.) It was seen as a matter of divine dispensation: God was giving Mankind a second chance.

But this has to be viewed, today, as myth-making, so that's not what I meant in the opening sentence. I mean we have been spared much of the human misery like, for example, the starvation and homelessness that is going on in Somalia. We have had our Civil War and it cost a shocking number of lives, but many of the earth's peoples have endured decades of civil warfare that has created far more widespread suffering.

Look at the poor people of Vietnam, who not only suffered killing of their civilian population and destruction of their homes and crops and livestock during the Vietnam War; but are still suffering today in the form of birth defects as the result of the defoliant Agent Orange that was sprayed on their land during that war. Not to mention that American soldiers during Asian wars--in Vienam just as earlier in Korea--left behind "war babies" who do not find social acceptance in those countries because of their mixed race and have to live their lives with that stigma.

India, despite astonishing progress, still has shocking poverty among literally millions of its people. China, despite its economic miracle and the prosperity of its urban population, still has much true poverty among its rural population.

I don't wish to make our Civil War or the War of 1812 or the French and Indian War mere footnotes; but in more modern times America has not suffered any war on its own soil. We have poverty and we have problems, but a majority of Americans since the Depression generation have not suffered in the manner that enormous segments of humanity have.

I am not a flag-waver at all, and I am the last one to take an America-can-do-no-wrong attitude. I just want to point out that we, compared to great masses of humanity, have been comfortable and secure, and spared a great deal; and we just don't know what the sad lot is of so many humans.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

Leaking of "Secret" Info Not Always a Bad Thing

I don't think that the leaking of classified or otherwise secret documents is necessarily a bad thing. Often, the White House and the Pentagon use their classification power, not to keep information from the "enemy" that would damage our national security. That power is as often, or more often, used simply to keep the public in the dark about mistakes, failures, and lies of the Pentagon or the White House.

It's part of the arrogance of the government and their power to manipulate public opinion that they've been using for decades. They are smart and we are dumb. That justifies keeping information out of the hands of us, the public.

If anybody remembers the era of the Vietnam War, there were multiple examples of the purposes for which government secrecy was used. For one thing, the Pentagon did not want the news media to be able to show images of the bodies of soldiers who'd been killed as they arrived back on U.S. soil. Why? Because when people are more vividly shown the cost of war, in the form of the bodies of dead soldiers, they are more apt to oppose war.

Also in the Vietnam era, the so-called Pentagon Papers were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. In 1996, twenty-five years after that leak occurred, the New York Times wrote that the Pentagon Papers

demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance.*

Wikipedia says,

The papers revealed that the U.S. had deliberately expanded its war with carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam, and Marine Corps attacks, none of which had been reported by media in the US . . . .

But the most damaging revelations in the papers revealed that four administrations, from Truman to Johnson, had misled the public regarding their intentions.**

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein
________
* Apple, R.W. (1996-06-23). "Pentagon Papers". New York Times. Quoted in Wikipedia s.v. Pentagon Papers.

** Wikipedia, s.v. Pentagon Papers.

Patriotism, Identity, and Self-Worth

There seem to be two types of people, at least as regards one parameter. One group is those who would criticize America, or who at least do not feel America should be beyond criticism. The other group bristles at attacks on America and sees them as unpatriotic and even treasonous.

The first group may be very aware of wrongs committed by the U.S. government. Examples might be the terrible treatment—some might even say genocide—of the Native Americans, a lot of it as the result of official policy of the national government. Other examples might be the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the so-called My Lai Massacre in which Vietnamese civilians were fired on and killed by American troops during the Vietnam War. Early reports of this last event were at one point labeled "Communist propaganda" and totally untrue—even though it turned out that there was good documentation that the events had indeed occurred.

During the Vietnam War, I personally learned how emotional some people would get over any suggestion that the war was wrong or that America or Americans were wrong in what was being done. I didn't get spat upon or clubbed, myself; but I received a lot of unkind words when my ideas, on the one pole of this issue, were heard by someone at the other pole.

People tend to derive at least some of their feelings of self-worth from institutions or entities that they identify with: their school, their community, their country, even a sports team. Maybe these identifications are substitutes for, or vestiges of, very ancient identification with one's clan.

Whatever the ultimate psychosocial origin of this need to identify, people may feel personally attacked when they perceive the things they identify with as being attacked.

Another way to view it would liken it to religion and one's deities. Look at the issue that has come up from time to time—again most notably during the Vietnam War years—of so-called "flag desecration." In the 1960s, protesters against the Vietnamese War burned American flags. Those who strongly opposed such acts tried to get a Constitutional amendment passed prohibiting flag burning. (The U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled in 1989 and 1990 that flag-burning was not punishable as a criminal act.)

The root of the word desecration is secr-, which is the same element as in the word sacred. In other words, if something can be desecrated, you are considering it to be sacred. Is the American flag sacred, or should it be? Note that the word sacred or desecrate seems to point to a blurring of country with religion. Some might argue that to make the state into a god is idolatry. (There may be a fine line between symbol and idol.) I think that many right-wing regimes have indeed tried to make the state a god, and the country's leader a near-divine figure. Think of giant portraits of Chairman Mao, or look at certain African countries where there is a cult of the national leader which strives to elevate him to the near-divine. Roman emperors and Egyptian pharaohs were regarded as divine.

In any event, our country might rank right up there with the religion or deity or church that we identify with (if in fact we do). These things are part of our identity. We derive our sense of worth from identifying with the best (strongest, etc.) country, with the true (or most charitable, oldest, etc.) religion.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein

U.S. Involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan

Before the Vietnam War ended, some 56,000 American soldiers had been killed, to say nothing of a perhaps-unknown number—but hundreds of thousands--of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. Plus enormous suffering and property damage—loss of families' homes and environmental devastation.

And what was gained in return for all this loss? If anyone can still recall, or even care, 30 or 40 years later, the purpose of the Vietnam War was supposed to be to keep South Viet Nam from being taken over by the communists of North Vietnam. And what happened in the end, after all that loss? No one seems to like to think about it, but Vietnam was reunified. In other words, the North Vietnamese did in fact take over the South, the very thing the war was supposed to prevent. So, to put it very plainly and even harshly, the war was for nothing. But no one wants to dwell on the fact that many American lives were sacrificed for, in the end, no purpose.

During the Bush years I kept thinking of parallels between the Vietnam War and the Iraq war. In both wars, Congress and the American Public had been manipulated by the White House and the Defense Department into supporting the war by means of false and distorted information. It became clear that the danger to America from Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" was trumped up. (And Colin Powell, who was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, has said he regretted the speech he gave to the U.N. about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" because he was unwittingly basing it on incorrect information.) Plus, another reason the Government used to try to sell the war, the link between Saddam Hussein and al Quaeda, was also very dubious.

So the original rationale for the war was very questionable. Yet once Hussein was toppled, we had to keep Iraq from descending into a religious civil war. Thus we are still there, after—what is it now, eight years? And we no longer even hear the statistics on how many Americans have been killed in Iraq. Last I heard, it was over 4,000, but that was quite a while ago.

And there's Afghanistan. How many Americans could immediately and clearly tell me why we are fighting in Afghanistan? Waging a war against the Taliban in Afghanistan might have a little more direct connection to the security of the U.S. than was the case with invading Iraq. But again, consider this: The Russians left Afghanistan in defeat and the U.S. succeeded them. It's too similar to the U.S. taking over in Vietnam after the French withdrew in defeat. It's a very sad fact that the lessons of history are not learned.

Living in an area which is in some ways rather conservative—it's pretty much believers in "God and Country"—I see a lot of bumper stickers saying "Support Our Troops." Since I was opposed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq from the very beginning, some people would say to me, Well, you can support the troops even if you don't support the war.

I have a problem with that logic. I'd say Yes, I agree—if the troops were all there involuntarily. Then they'd just be poor pawns, as was the case in the Vietnam War. However, remember that we do not presently have a draft. Every Army soldier, National Guardsman, Marine in Iraq is a volunteer. Many of these men enlisted because they felt their country called, and they should respond. That's putting the best construction on it—rather than saying, for example, that their belief that they were defending their country was based on incorrect information they had been fed by the Government.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein