- We've all met them, people who stubbornly hurl themselves
in the wrong direction, stopping only when they violently collide with
reality. It is a painful way to learn, but those afflicted with the disability
seem unable to learn in any other way.
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- This way of learning characterizes much of America's
effort at foreign policy since World War II. I was forcefully reminded
of this by a news story with its searing memories of Vietnam.
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- It now appears that part of the 101st Airborne Division,
members of a so-called Tiger Force unit, dropped grenades into bunkers
where women and children hid and shot farmers without warning. They killed
blind peasants and old men. These events happened in 1967, comparatively
early in the war and about a year before the well-documented mass murder
by members of the United States Army at the village of My Lai. No one knows
how many innocent people the Airborne slaughtered. One surviving member
of the unit is quoted saying he killed so many he lost count. Although
investigations were conducted, they went nowhere, and it only now that
we learn of the horror.
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- The full story of American savagery in Vietnam will perhaps
never be told. We have had other glimpses of it, as for example when former
CIA Director William Colby, responding to a titanic power struggle inside
the CIA, revealed Project Phoenix, a secret program for the mass murder
of civilian leaders regarded as sympathetic to the enemy. There were the
revelations about a number of individuals engaging in barbarism, most notably,
former Nebraska Senator and Medal of Honor winner Bob Kerrey having been
part of a butcher-civilians operation.
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- The so-called Tail-Wind affair, whose discovery cost
some very reputable journalists their jobs, is now consigned to the ever-handy
conspiracy bin, but intelligent skeptics can hardly doubt that with all
the other savageries of Vietnam, a secret operation to poison-gas American
prisoners of war cooperating with the enemy is totally plausible.
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- To this day, thousands of American veterans attend meetings
or counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder, the bureaucratic term
for minds deranged by the horrors they saw or inflicted. War is always
full of horror, but in the midst of the brutality in Vietnam, it dawned
on many that the war served no good purpose and that most of its victims
were civilians. The military draft sent a lot of people to Vietnam who
weren't suited to
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- the business of serious killing. And while the number
of Americans killed was small for a long war, it still proved too many
for people enjoying ice cream and beer at ballgames.
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- For years after Vietnam, Americans talked of the war's
lessons, but just what lessons were those? For a while, many believed the
lessons might concern the values of the Bill of Rights, words so often
abused as hollow marketing slogans. America's armed forces would never
again be sent to kill and torture for colonial interests.
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- But that was a hasty conclusion, as we see in Iraq. America
perfected its technology for killing and terrifying so that at least for
a small county, it is able to overwhelm fairly quickly. Relatively few
American soldiers die, those that do are professionals, and the whole thing
is quickly over.
-
- Of course, there is a deep and jagged pit along this
smooth-sounding path to military dominance, and it has to do with occupying
and rebuilding a country, how you assume responsibility for tens of millions
of new dependants. No people on earth today is less inclined or qualified
for this task than Americans. You only have to look at the individualistic,
selfish, and impatient nature of American society itself to understand
why this should be so. The word dependant in America often is used as a
term of abuse.
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- Recall Richard Nixon's "madman theory" of the
early 1970s. Nixon was trying to pressure the North Vietnamese in Paris
for a settlement, and he deliberately spread the idea that he was a madman,
quite capable of doing something irrational, and that it would be better
for everyone to reach a settlement before he did so. The context that gave
his suggestion force included his shattering bombardment of civilians in
North Vietnam and Cambodia, as well as nightmarish programs like Project
Phoenix, started under him.
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- I'll set aside the fact that Nixon truly was something
of a madman - for, apart from his lifelong career of promoting divisiveness,
intense hatreds, and suspicions, who else but a genuine madman relishes
being credited as one? In the end, Nixon was outfoxed by the Vietnamese,
and America lost a major war. A decade of shameful destruction, vast resources
consumed, rage, and riots were for nothing.
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- This did not go unnoticed by the American establishment
- the Bushes, the Cheneys, the Rumsfelds, and all the other arrogant, insatiably-rapacious
people who've given you war in Iraq. Their major lesson from Vietnam -
apart from the unreliability of conscripts, the need for tight news control,
and the need to improve the efficiency of killing with high-tech weapons
- was that threats not acted upon were useless. This lesson comes packaged
with a new release of the error-riddled Domino Theory: that a decisive
demonstration of power in the Middle East would serve to stabilize the
area. The Democrats' regrettable Wesley Clark, among others, has pontificated
along these very lines.
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- Lost in the armchair toying with other people's lives
and countries you might think is the fact that Nixon's threat was nuclear,
but actually it is not lost. Bush wants to develop and deploy a new generation
of compact nuclear weapons, the implication being that these somehow would
be useable, as for such wholesome crusade tasks as "bunker busting."
Please recall, the main bunker busted in the first Gulf War was the Al
Firdos bunker in Baghdad packed with over four hundred civilians who were
roasted alive by two "smart bomb" direct hits.
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- Vietnam truly was a twentieth-century version of burning
witches, the witches in that case being communists rather than people who
were either demented or senile as in the witch-burnings of a few centuries
ago. Powerful people in the 17th century understood that witches were superstitious
nonsense, but they used the phenomenon to their own purposes. We've almost
run out of communist witches, so now the crusade has been redirected against
evil spirits far less well defined, terrorists.
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- Not that there is no such thing as genuine terrorists.
Of course, there are. Terrorism - from the Sons of Liberty and the Klu
Klux Klan to black street gangs and camouflage-obsessed militia-nuts -
is a rich part of American history. Please note that it has not been dealt
with by blowing up whole neighborhoods of innocent people.
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- The communist-panic after World War II was promoted and
manipulated by the America's establishment, that ruthlessly ambitious segment
of American society that does not consist solely of Republicans. American
liberals today often seem unaware that Democrats like Robert Kennedy gladly
played energetic and nasty roles. The establishment sought the immense
bounty of new military contracts, forced access to other peoples' resources
and markets, and the swaggering sense of exercising vast power throughout
the world. Note that the communist-panic began with the precipitous decline
in military spending after the world war and with the opportunities for
expansion represented by the sudden decline of former colonial powers.
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- At the end of the Cold War, there was a tendency for
military expenditure to slide in real terms. America's current terror-panic,
manipulated and exploited relentlessly by Bush, and always echoed by Sharon
for his own dark purposes, serves almost identical ends. The average American
cannot even grasp the unholy amounts of money now changing hands to almost
no good purpose.
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- I once described a scene in the wake of 9/11 where some
Americans in a bar hooted and pumped their arms at the television image
of ships equipped with cruise missiles, as though the ships or the missiles
had the slightest relevance for individuals bent on killing others through
their own suicides. That televised image comes pretty close to symbolizing
Bush's entire policy on terror. He has spent tens of billions of dollars,
killed many thousands of innocent people, and made many Americans feel
intimidated in their own country, but he has done little to end the threat
of terrorism. He may even have increased its long-term prospects.
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- Terrorism predates modern history, and it generally comes
as a result of great and oppressive injustice against a definable group
of people. Short of ruthlessly repressing the group of people from whose
ranks terrorists are drawn - something attempted many times, as, for example,
by Cromwell in Ireland or Stalin in the Soviet Union - violence offers
no effective solution.
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- Even Cromwellian repression fails over the long term,
Ireland being a potent example. An oppressor eventually tires of repression.
It may well have been some such dark thought that helped motivate Hitler
in history's greatest bloodbath, the invasion of the Soviet Union and the
simultaneous start of the Holocaust (27 million and 6 million victims respectively).
He demanded utter ruthlessness in these vast murderous enterprises. The
people whose wealth and resources he was seizing, would not get the chance
ever to become terrorists.
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- Bush's policy is partway along the path of repression,
a virtual copy of Sharon's policy in Palestine, but has Sharon ended terror?
Does Sharon not almost weekly become more violent and desperate, recognizing
the futility of all he has done to date?
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- Bush's prospects and opportunities are in some ways even
more limited than Sharon's, despite the immense and terrible power at his
disposal. Although Al Qaeda was a relatively small organization - and nothing
has come to light that contradicts an early conclusion that Al Qaeda, though
dispersed and having some allies, was no bigger than a Chicago street gang
- Bush's tactics have created waves of sympathizers and new enemies, likely
even more determined through their confrontation with such a bully. He
is not opposed by a group of people confined to a tiny place like Palestine.
Rather, he faces opposition in many forms in many countries with mobility
across continents. You can't just bomb it all.
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- The more verbal blunders Bush and his associates make
- consider the idiotic statements made recently by Lt. Gen. William Boykin,
a man associated directly with secret activities in places like Pakistan,
to gatherings of American Christian fundamentalists - the more Bush's efforts
come to be viewed as broadly anti-Islamic. The word blunder here is only
appropriate because such statements are errors in managing public affairs.
They are not blunders in a more basic sense: these nasty, narrow people
do believe what they are saying, and although that belief is not what launched
Bush's crusade, it undoubtedly motivates many along the way.
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- Terror is one response of those with terrible grievances
who lack effective conventional means to fight for them, although if you
listened to Bush you would think there were mobs of natural-born terrorists
out there, ready to kill for no reason other than jealousy at America's
great good fortune and beneficence. As in the case of Northern Ireland,
terror can only be ended by redressing the grievances, and even then, great
patience and tenacity are required.
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- A general military action against terror is an insane
concept, too destructive and unfocused to have predictable results. You
cannot fight beliefs or grievances with armored divisions. You can only
have vengeance that way, but vengeance can hardly be called policy and
is unworthy of a great power claiming high ideals.
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- The example of Sharon's brutality just couldn't offer
a clearer lesson. The Palestinians have immense grievances that virtually
the entire world recognizes as legitimate. Assassinate all the leaders
you please, bulldoze all the homes and shops and orchards you can, bomb
and shoot civilians time after time as reprisals, the grievances not only
remain, they are intensified. The ultimate danger in a situation like this
is that Sharon's frustration will drive him to move beyond Cromwell.
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- And so, too, Bush, but note that I use his name only
as shorthand for that much bigger thing, the pitiless greed and arrogance
of a large segment of America.
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