Deferring on non-essential matters

At the Daily Howler, Bob Somersby, arguably the most important voice of the Progressive left, explains exactly why building of the Muslim Community Center at the Park51 location (the so-called Ground Zero) might be a very bad idea. Arguing with an unyielding logic and citing precedents set by Martin Luther King, Somersby writes:

Some people think that building at the current proposed site could lead to years of cultural warfare. They think this could put the lives of Muslim-Americans at risk. They think this could undercut the vast amount of good the proposed community center could do at some other site.

If those people are right, building at the proposed location might set back the efforts of people like Imam Rauf to continue folding Muslim Americans into the broader American fabric—a very good goal. If they are right in this assessment, why would we want to go ahead with the proposed location?

...

If you read Stride Toward Freedom, you will see that Dr. King endlessly deferred, on points which weren’t essential, to people who were massively wrong on the larger questions. He repeatedly deferred to leaders of Montgomery’s white community—to the mayor; to the police commissioner; to the bus company; to white business leaders. He deferred on non-essential points, even as he kept pursuing the larger goal of defeating legal segregation and “social oppression.” He didn’t choose to stand and fight every time the other tribe annoyed, offended or opposed him. He didn’t do that because he was a deeply serious person. ...

Dr. King knew that, if you fight every non-essential fight, you will likely lose out in the end, especially if you’re opposing entrenched power. And Dr. King wanted to win. He wasn’t trying to please the rubes by accepting every possible fight.

(my emphasis)

Thank you, Bob Somersby.

Snap shots from the family album

The weather here has been so nice this past week or so. I've started walking again and decided to put in five miles split into two halves, two and a half miles each. I'll probably cover less distance than that, almost certainly less, but ever since I started walking seriously for exercise back in the early 90's, I've been a counter of paces; one, two, three, four; two, two, three, four; ... three-hundred-seventy-two, two, three, four; etc. There was a time when each of my steps was a yard. I verified by pacing off yardage markers on golf courses, and would also check out my walking mileage thus calculated with the car's odometer. But I'm far heavier now, my legs are thicker, and I'm much older. Time takes its toll. So, what I'm really trying to do is work up to 10,000 paces each day.

I saw and heard this as I approached the crest of a hill about 3/4 miles (660 paces) into the jaunt. Two dogs came running and barking from south side of the house on the Northwest corner of that intersection where a woman was doing yard work. The sound of a car approaching was enough to convince me to stop, and besides, a yield sign for me sealed the deal. The car made a sharp turn into the driveway of the house and I could it was being driven by a boy, probably late teens. The dogs switched course no longer running towards me but circling back towards the car. The tone of their barking had changed too, from one of annoyance, to one of joy. The woman was calling to the dogs to come back to her.

A soldier exited the passenger door and walked around the front of the car heading to the south side of the house. The car's driver had a huge grin on his face. As the woman turned the corner and could now see the driveway and the soldier, she shrieked with joy and gratitude, "Oh my God!"

"Hi mom," the soldier gently said, as they rapidly walked towards each other and embraced.

I smiled, feeling very happy for them both.

The scene reminded me so much of the story my mom has told about the first time my uncle, 1st Lt James Raymond Hockett returned home from his first tour of duty in Vietnam. Jimmie made the secret plans with the youngest of the sisters, my mother, to pick him up at O'Hare Airport and then drive him home. He gave strict orders that this was to be a secret operation, and mom obeyed. Grandma Verna was startled, overjoyed, excited to see Jimmie, all the while ANGRY at mom. "Why didn't you tell me he was coming home?" she wanted to know.

Only within the last five years or so did I learn from my mother that later, when Grandma Verna had become a gold star mother, that she told mom that if I got a low lottery number, she should send me to Canada. Having lost her only son to the war. She was determined to lose none of her grandsons to the war.

Clearly, what she most feared was not that if "we" didn't fight "the commies" over "there" then "we" would have to fight "them" "here." Nor did she fear the stigma that would attach to her oldest grandson being a draft evader as much as she feared losing another of her boys to god-forsaken, god-awful war.

Only the American people have the power to end invasions and occupations of the middle east (and Africa, and South America, and the beat goes on and on and on and on and on). This is reality. Only the American people can amass the political will to stop the fighting. When a majority of the politicians come to fear getting voted out of office then these cruel, brutal, destructive, criminal wars against an enemy that has no army, that has no navy, that has no air force, that has no tanks, that has no air planes, will end.

Armies win wars, and armies lose wars. But governments start wars, and governments end wars.

The enemy most feared by the US government is the people of the United States. Interestingly, this is the enemy most feared by the corporate elite. It is enough that most of the population is very much aware of how close they are to losing their job, to losing their home, to becoming poor, and thus that the majority internalize their fear, or direct it at "radical Islamsts" or "immigrants" or "liberals" or "the homosexual agenda" or those who would preach or practice "social justice."

Divide and rule, as effective a means of governance as has ever been hatched to permit the rich to get richer while the poor get poorer; while the have's and the have not's and the have more's ultimately are robbed by the have-lots-of-yatchs (otherwise known as the never-will-have-enoughs).

The road to serfdom is being paved upon long forgotten dreams of people whose fathers were able to support a family of 6, own a home, and be the sole income provider while holding down a decent-paying union job with good benefits, or, whose fathers were able to support a fmily of 6, own a home, and be the sole income provider because of the job he was able to get based on the college education he got that was paid for by the G.I. bill.

Those were the days my friend
When and where did they end?
And why did not the dirges sound
The day, the music, died.

Before we engage our military power

In Diplomacy For a Crowded World, George W. Ball cited the following as a lesson that should have been learned from the American invasion and occupation of Vietnam:

Before we engage our military power in a foreign land, we should make quite certain that we comprehend the nature of the struggle and the play of the forces it represents. More over, we should appraise our actions not only as we see them but also as they are likely to be viewed by other nations - and particularly our friends and allies.

...

Even if we had given our military a free hand, our effort would still have failed because there was no adequate indigenous political base on which our power could be emplaced. And that provides another lesson we must learn if we are to avoid the same mistakes a second time.

South Vietnam was never a nation but an improvisation - a geographical assignation for what Charles De Gaulle once described as a piece of "rotten country."

Snippets of dialoge from Babylon V

I used to watch Babylon V with my son and nephews. J. Michael Straczynski wrote 92 of the shows' 110 episodes. Week in and week out, the writing soared with a force achieved only by the best poetry.

While engaged in the continuing spring clean up of the Black Hole of Calcutta, otherwise known as my bedroom, I found these snippets of dialogue from a show I watched on 17 August, 1995.

All life is transitory, a dream.
We will come together in time.
If I don't see you here again,
I will see you in a little while,
in the place where no shadows fall.


Faith manages.


As a young man, you were quite amusing.
You treated every situation as if it were a test.
Sometimes, the test is not to find the answer,
but to see how you react when you find there is no answer.


We honor the memory of those who are no longer with us.
We reach out in faith and hope and charity.
In that way, their passing will have meaning.

White collar crime is the most corrosive of all

While doing my spring cleaning today (that would be spring cleaning, 1992), I found some hand-written notes dated 7 Novermber, 1990, I had taken from Ramsey Clark's book Crime in American.

Society cannot hope to control violent and irrational antisocial conduct while cunning predatory crime by people in power continues unabated. Any nation that wishes to prevent crime must be conscious of the whole range of criminal activity.

White collar crime is the most corrosive of all crimes. The trusted prove untrustworthy; the advantaged, dishonest. It shows the capability of people with better opportunities for creating a decent life for themselves to take property belonging to others. As no other crime, it questions our moral fiber.

When police crime occurs, it too brutalizes. Where police protection is purchased, it corrupts. Anyone who experiences such things or believes that they happen will have little confidence in the law or its enforcement. Where can he turn? If he lives in a world of brutality he will be brutal. If he lives in a world of corruption, he will be corrupt. Police, however professional, can never hold the respect of the people when they must endeavor to enforce laws the public will not obey.

Of the many faces of crime, the most tragic is never recognized by many. Millions fall victim to the cruelest of all crimes which takes its toll in miserable, empty and wasted lives. It is the crime of power over impotence – the crime of a society that does not insure equal protection under the laws. It is a crime against people who have no rights – the crime of a society which seeks to maintain order without law. From it grows most crime of violence and much property crime.

Things have changed ...

In Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience, Gabriel Kolko writes of:

The bipartisan consensus on foreign policy which had existed since 1950 and had been the single greatest accomplishment of the Truman administration, permitting continuity in the application of U.S. power in the world. It had been dearly bought not merely with doctrines of nearly every conceivable nature but also with a greatly enlarged defense budget, which built a pork barrel, and an ideological constituency, for expansion and military spending. Despite nuanced differences over defense matters and diplomacy, that unity among executive, Congress and public was the greatest precondition for the continuity of postwar foreign policy. (pp. 121-122)

The defense budget continues to be enlarged and the pork barrel continues to be filled. There remains an ideological constituency (military-industrial-congressional-infotainment complex) for invasions and occupations of all stripes (more commonly called wars - but invasions and occupations are far more technically correct terms).

No longer are there "nuanced differences over defense matters and diplomacy." There are politically calculated partisan differences. Much of the support given to Obama was based on his "promise" to "end the war in Iraq". He had read the mood of the voters, as evidenced by Democratic mid-term victories in the 2006 elections, to be against the war in Iraq, and thus did he did he state he stood against that war.

The implosion of the financial and housing markets which became impossible to ignore by August, 2008 pretty much sealed the done deal for Obama, even though he chose to be a standard bearer for GWB's TARP program, thus clearly aligning himself with the Wall Street interests. It was very important that he signal to them that he would be worth their "investment" of campaign dollars.

But in order to have credence with the military-industrial-congressional-infotainment complex, Obama decided he would need to be a war partisan to show his bona-fides as a war monger. And thus did he promise to make Af-Pak "his" war.

As in all of Obama's efforts to establish bipartisan agreement, this too has failed him. The military doesn't like him (they would have been far more comfortable with McCain) and neither does Fox News. Obama's anti-war constituency has become very skeptical of his rhetorical double speak. The emperor has no clothes. (And the empire is running around pretty nekked also.)

In so many ways, things have changed, not one wit from the days of Nixon's fall. As Kolko writes:

The core of Washington's eventual political problem was the contempt of the decision makers for the Congress, press, and public - a manipulative relationship that was to produce a deepening mistrust that was to culminate in Watergate and the collapse of the congressional-executive unity. (pg 122)

Prepare for the fall.

Truer words are seldom spoke or wrote

Over at Counterpunch, Ron Jacobs reviews David Zirin's latest book: Bad Sports, How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love. The following quote form the Jacobs piece is a more useful elucidation of the path that the too-big-to-fail corptocracies in America have been following for the last few disastrous year:

The pursuit of profit is the primary motivation for professional sports teams just as it is for Lockheed Martin or the Bank of America. It doesn't matter how that profit is made--TV revenues and overpriced tickets, imperial war or the selling of derivatives--just as long as it is made. The customer is not important, only their money. Once they no longer have any money, those customers become as expendable as a bank employee after a takeover. Then, when corporate failure seems imminent because of these profitmaking activities, taxpayer money is provided to help said corporation continue its same pattern.

Your tax dollars - hardly at work

The following excertpted material comes from Pratap Chatterjee's book Halliburton's Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War.

In June 2004, another group of whistle-blowers came forward to testify before the Committee on Overishgt and government Reform at the U.S. House of Representatives, but Tom Dais refused to allow them to speak, so Waxman placed the testimony on his Web site.

One testimonial came from Mike West, who said that prior to Halliburton/KBR, he had been working as an area manager for Valero Energy with a yearly salary of $70,000. "When i heard about a chance to earn more with Halliburton, I called them up," he said. "After just a few minutes, the woman said I was hired as a labor foreman at a salary of $130,000. I didn't even have to send in a resume."

When he arrived, West explained he was paid despite the fact that he had no work. "I worked only one day out of six in Kuwait," he explained. "That day, a supervosor told me to operate a forklift. I explained taht I didn't ahve a license, or any experience, to operate a florklift. The response was: 'It's easy and no one will know."

When West got to Camp Anaconda in southern Iraq, he ways that he didn't have any work to do. Nor did most of the other thirty-five workers. The supervisors told them to walk around and look busy. Then they went to a camp in Al Asad, where they had only one day of work out of five days. They were told to bill for twelve hours of labor every day. From there, his group was sent to Fallujah for six weeeks, where once again he had almost no work to do except help with security and follow Iraqi workers around to make sure they cleaned the toilets properly.

"One day, I was ordering some equipment," West said. "I asked the camp manager if it was okay to order a drill. He said to order four. I responded that we didn't need four. He said: 'Don't worry about it. It's a cost-plus contract.' I asked him, 'So basically, this is a blank check?' the manager laughed and said, 'Yeah.' He repeated this over and over again to the employees. ... As a Halliburton employee, I was disappointed by all of the company's lies and disorganization. As a taxpayer, I'm disgusted by all of the money spent by Halliburton to pay employees to do nothing."

Do you remember when

Do you remember when Presidential candidate could run on a platform to END a US war and win the election? It's happened thrice in my lifetime.

Eisenhower vowed to end the fighting in Korea. And he did it! Pretty damn promptly too once he assumed office.

Nixon claimed to have a secret plan to end the American invasion and occupation of Vietnam with honor, no less! And the plan was so secret, he never shared it during the election campaign, nor after taking office. However, a mere four years and 20,000 dead American soldiers later. (Of course, some Vietnamese died in the interim also, but, as any student of American history is well aware, their dead don't count; only ours do.)

A pattern emerges. A republican Presidential candidate can run on a platform of ending an unpopular war and win the election.

Well, there was another time when a Presidential candidate ran on a platform of ending a war and won the election. That would be in 2008, when Hope, and Change, and Yes We Can, ran - and promised ... to end the War in Iraq because, we we needed to take the fight to Al Queda (perhaps the Taliban to) in the Af-Pak "theater." Besides, when you are fighting a "War on Terrorism", moving the fight from one country to another is NOT the ending of the war upon "those who would wish us harm", but merely a continuation of more of the same.

So, I take it back. It has not happened thrice, only twice.

I guess the only hope of ever ending the war on terrorism is to elect a Republican President. But, we must make sure that it is a Republican President who promises to end the war on terrorism (and having a secret plan up his sleeve, ala Nixon, will really NOT be good enough).

The Democrats ought to be terrified of a Republican Presidential Candidate who would promise to stop fighting the war on terror. (And just use the policing forces of the world to bring terrorists to justice.)

I'd vote for that candidate. Well, I'd really want such a candidate to have the credentials of an Eisenhower. To wit, have been a real former army general who actually WON a war against a real enemy.

Here is what winning a war looks like: take Japan and Germany as models. In winning the war against Japan and Germany note the following:

(1) U.S. forces continue to occupy those countries to this very day, 65 years after the BIG one ended.

(2) U.S. oversaw the writing of the respective constitutions.

(3) The populations of the defeated countries accept U.S. occupations without waging insurgency upon the U.S. armed forces.

I'd vote for such a candidate in a heart beat.

The list of such candidates is quite short. David Petreaus is not upon it.

No more combat troops in Iraq

Watched the early part of the bland President Obama's speech on Tuesday. Wondering if I am alone in my assessment that this address lacked the vim, vigor, and vitality of his "yes we can" campaign stump speeches, and wondering further why that might be. Is it possible that he understood full well the depths lies he was feeding to the American people? That he has no real enthusiasm for spewing such obfuscations? Or perhaps that the weight of the burdens of his office are hanging ever more heavily upon him?

The particular lie I address is that he, as promised in his campaign, had withdrawn the last of the "combat troops" from Iraq. Message to President Barack Obama: Thanks to the revolution in military affairs as perceived by for SecDef Donald Rumsfeld, ALL American troops are combat troops. Such functions (formerly performed by the army) as feeding the troops, cleaning up after the troops, installing lodging, electrical systems, and installing a whole host of Americanized shopping venues for the troops, installing latrines and emptying the latrines for the troops etc., etc., have been contracted out to Halliburton on a "cost plus profit" basis. The purpose of this "revolution in military affairs" is so that the US soldier can focus on fighting.

While the MISSION of the remaining 50,000 US troops may be limited to the further training of the Iraqi Army, that in no way means that these troops are not combat troops.

Perhaps this rhetorical slight of mouth will convince the Obama Kool-Aid drinkers that he hath kept his campaign promise; the throwing of "red meat" to his base. Although the throwing of spoiled bologna is, to my view, a more apt metaphor. What Obama has primarily given to his voting base (as opposed to the constituency which must be placated, the banksters, insurance and pharmacological interests, and the real estate industry) is the kind of thing that trickles down when a man stands facing a urinal. Which was pretty much always the point of trickle down economics.

As for the promise that there will be a complete withdrawal of US troops from Iraq by the end of 2011? The phrase "US troops" is weasel words. Even IF US troops have all withdrawn from Iraq, who will be left to provide security for the Green Zone which houses the largest "embassy" in the world? Mercenaries will be the answer. Welcome back Blackwater (Xe), welcome back Vinnell, et al.

All this reminds me of one of the two most well-known Native American expressions from my boyhood (the other "ugh", upon reflection, would be an entirely appropriate response to the Bland One's address): President Obama speaks with forked tongue.

And, one way or another, amongst the haves, the have nots, and the have mores, we are all pretty much forked. Although, for the have yatchs, provided they have been prudent enough to keep the Bernie Madoffs of the investment worlds away from their fortunes, these times continue to be, a continuation of pretty good times, rolling triumphantly ever quicker apace along the road back to serfdom.

Enemies, many enemies

In one of my fondest memories intersect empire, literature, media, solitude, nature, asphalt, and urban and mountain landscapes. It was the mid-70's and I was listening riveted to one of Chicago's then three classical radio stations driving up Lake Shore while returning to my apartment on the North side in a spring down pour very late one Friday night. That evening's feature was a reading from Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King. The movie starring Michael Caine and Sean Connery would be released that summer. I saw the film for the first time with three dear friends at a large theater in the city. We gentlemen wore sport coats and ties. The ladies wore fancy dresses. The times were different then, and too the cultural sensibilities.

I've viewed the film often since, enjoying it most when I watched it with my boys; my son Adam, his cousins Nathan and Scott, and Nathan's half-brother Graham. It made an impact on Nathan at least, because he would later ask me to play and sing The Minstrel Boy on the piano.

One of my favorite scenes occurs after the two fortune seekers, Peachy and Danny, have endured a grueling mountain climb through blinding snow and emerge to a pastoral setting and meet Billy Fish, a Ghurka soldier trained by the British in India, who speaks both English and the native tongue. Billy Fish, acting as interpreter puts for their proposition: to help the local leader fight and conquer his enemies.

"Ask him if he has enemies Billie."

"Enemies. Yes. Many enemies," comes the reply.

Thoughts of that exchange occurred while reading this AFP article in which enumerations of the numerous enemies the U.S. is fighting in its support of its puppet Karzai government. Included amongst the enemies in Afghanistan are:

1. Taliban Fighters
2. The Taliban (also Taliban)
3. Low and Mid-level Extremists
4. Insurgents
5. Islamist Insurgent Groups
6. Militants
7. Taliban Movement
8. Taliban Foot Soldiers
9. Hardline Taliban Supporters
10. Taliban Leadership
11. The Militia
12. Hizb-e-Islami Afgahnistan
13. Radical Insurgent Groups
14. Senior Most Taliban Leaders

The important people named in this article include

Hamid Karzai: Afghanistan President
Robert Gates: U.S. Secretary of Defense
Zabihulla Muhjahid: spokesman for "The Militia" (see above)
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar: leader of Hizb-e-Islami Afghanistan (see above)
Zubair Sediqi: spokesman for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
Hillary Clinton: U.S. Secretary of State
Barak Obama - U.S. President


From the article, we are told that the Afghanistan President announced an "ambitious" plan to offer money and jobs to "tempt" (bribe) the Taliban fighters to "lay down their arms," in other words to surrender. The money to pay the bribes will not come from the Afghanistan coffers, but will be "Western-funded." Reading between the lines, the U.S. will be doling out cash. Karzai seems willing to spend unlimited amounts of American money to buy the peace as he later states "we must have peace at any cost."

The hopes are that this plan will "quell" the "crippling insurgency."

The use of "quell" here is interesting. The Miriam Webster online dictionary gives two meanings:

1. To thoroughly overwhelm and reduce to passivity
2. quiet, pacify

Since the insurgency is crippling, and "an increasingly deadly rebellion" has been waged since the U.S. outed the Taliban government in 2001, we can conclude that the second sense of quell is intended. Therefore, the long-term potential for success of this program of bribery would seem to rest upon whether or not the insurgency is fueled because of money issues.

We are later learn that "the Taliban will not sell themselves for cash" nor will they negotiate with "this government" (i.e., they do not recognize the Karzai government to be legitimate) and that the militia's goals include enforcing an Islamic government and the withdrawal of foreign troops.

The requirements of one of the "other radical Islamist group(s)" to come to negotiations is similar: unconditional exit of all foreign forces, new administration in charge for a year, permanent cease-fire, freeing of political prisoners.

U.S. Def Sec Gates calls the Taliban part of the "political fabric" of Afghanistan but demands that their future role contingent on a present surrender (laying down of weapons) in order to prove that they want a "role in Afghanistan's future." Clearly this segment of the Afghanistan political fabric is playing a very serious part in Afghanistan's present.

We are also told of U.S. Sec State Clinton has a long-term non-military strategy for stabilizing Afghanistan and Pakistan which "complements" President Obama's troop escalation strategy and apparently also complements Karzai's announced non-military bribe strategy (which will certainly enhance the coffers of the corrupt Karzai regime.)

The picture presented is of a group of committed fighters who are causing serious damage. Their goal is to boot out the U.S. and NATO troops and removing the present Afghanistan political administration.

The bribery strategy sounds like the Petraeus plan implemented in Iraq to make the troop escalation there look like a "success" on the basis of the ex-post facto basis of reduced violence.

Nowhere do we see mention of the 100,000 plus mercenaries (contractors) already in Afghanistan, nor any mention of the CIA paramilitary. Nor do we see the amount of money to be used as bribes, nor the period over which the bribery plan is scheduled to be in effect.

Nor do we see any estimates of the size:

The Taliban
The Taliban Movement
Taliban Fighters
Taliban Foot Soldiers
Taliban Leadership
Hardline Taliban Supporters
Senior Most Taliban Leaders

Nor are we told of the number in Afghanistan of

Radical Insurgent Groups
Islamist Insurgent Groups

Nowhere do we find the size of Hizb-e-Islami Afgahnistan.

There is no quantification for the numbers of

Low and mid-level extremists
Insurgents
Militants
The Militia

What we are left to conclude, however, is that we have enemies; many enemies. Enemies, thy names are legion.

Larger than the continental United States

Common Dreams featured this piece by John Gibbons Time to pull the plug on the bottle water swindle from the Irish Times

Plastic is one of the world’s most chronic pollutants. A colossal floating mass of waste trapped in the north Pacific gyre between Hawaii and Japan is estimated to contain more than 100 million tonnes of a floating soup of plastic, some of it there since the 1950s. The contaminated area of ocean is larger than the continental United States.

Nor is this problem specific to the Pacific. The UN Environment Programme calculates that every square mile of the world’s oceans contains an average of 46,000 pieces of floating plastic. More than one million sea birds a year die from ingesting plastic. This toxic cocktail makes its journey full circle to humanity via contamination of the marine produce we in turn eat.

Almost too painful to think about.

Somebody was always invading somebody in our God-forsaken world

I was in seventh grade for the school year 1963-64. In November, art class was interrupted by the announcement that President Kennedy had been shot. In the spring Mr. Saint John, the English teacher, gave us an in-class creative writing assignment with a choice among four or five topics. I chose to write about the soldiers in a war somewhere with the hero of my story jumping on a grenade to save the lives of his fellow soldiers. This sounds like a movie I probably saw. The culture had obviously prepared me to consider such sacrifice as worthy. To question at that time just why it was the who it was that we would have been fighting never would have entered my mind.

Slightly more than six years later in the summer of 1970 my friend King and I watched the lottery drawing that determined who would be drafted into the military. The accident of our births sheltered us. To question at that time just why it was the who it was that we would have been fighting never would have entered my mind, despite my Uncle Jim having been killed in combat in Viet Nam.

Flash forward to August of 2002, and it was clear to me that the United States would invade the sovereign nation of Iraq. Based on what I had absorbed in the intervening years about such undertakings, my gut told me that a much larger military force than the US then possessed would be required. In November of 2002, my son would turn 18. And then, and only then, did I ask just why it was that we would be waging war upon the Iraqi people.

By any traditional measure, I had received a very fine American education. But the system had failed to provide me with the tools to ask this basic question: what purposes and whose interests are served by the waging of such wars?

An American educational system designed to teach critical thinking skills in the arena of life and death would have them reading material such as the following, which I read in Retrieving Bones: Stories and Poems of the Korean War, an anthology edited by W. D. Erhart and Philip K. Jason. The passage below is excerpted from the book The Secret: An Oratorical Novel, written by James Drought who served in the military from 1952-1954.

The unfortunate thing that I discovered next, in the years of the Fifties, working like a slob for the finance company, not much different from the slobs I was trying to pump some money out of―was that the fat-cats are not content to exploit us, bleed us, work us for the rest of our lives at their benefit, but they want us to win them some glory, too. This is why every once in a while they start a war for us to fight in. Like everybody else, I suppose I read about the North Koreans invading the South Koreans, and just like everybody else―including the South Koreans it turned out later―I just didn't give a shit. Somebody was always invading somebody in our God-forsaken world and I couldn't keep up an interest in who was taking over who. And I can tell you this: I sure as hell didn't think this invasion was a threat to me, my family,my country, or even the whole goddamn world. But Harry Truman did. He decided that Americans―under the age of twenty-five of course, which left out him and the Congress and the businessmen and doctors and teachers and scientists and ministers―that we were going to defend South Korea. “We'll teach those bloody Communists!” Harry said, waving goodbye to the troop-ships, and Congress agreed and began appropriating all kinds of money to pay the businessmen for weapons and war materials―plus a profit, of course. It's a funny thing, but a lot of the experts saw we were surely headed for a Depression if it hadn't been for the Korean War; and the shot in the arm that this war gave to production to business and even to religion―since right away everybody returned to church to pray for their brave sons overseas―was something that the fat-cats had to have or they might have gone under and suddenly become poor folks like the rest of us―a situation they were quite ready to try anything to avoid. So suddenly we were at war, although the term applied was a little more subtle―”a police action,” Harry called it; but still it was the same old thing, the flag-waving in the newspapers and on the movie-screens, the speeded up draft, the processing centers, the crazy uniforms, the guns, the firing ranges, the squad-training, the troopship―and then war, death, murder for all under twenty-five, while Congress resounded with virulent speeches, much chest-thumping, and the artists began to “soul search,” and the businessmen pocketed the profits, as did the elderly war workers, the housewives, the physically unfit, the “professional patriots,” and the grey-haired ministers who gleefully led their flocks again in something worthy praying about. Again the fine and free Americans were being inflated with death. Oh, there was much band-playing and march-tingling and “we'll-kill-them” shouting, and everyone including General MacArthur predicted the war would be over in a few weeks. The military journals explained “Korea will be a useful testing ground for our young field commanders,” and everyone expected to gain something―except, that is, those under twenty-five. And even for these younger souls, slipping into their uniforms provided them at a tidy profit, there were voices like old Ernie Hemingway's which told them that war gave them a once in a million chance, a way to test their manhood, their courage, and all that was in them. You can tell how great you are, the young were informed, by how willing you are to give up your life, to charge the blazing guns for your for your buddies and for your country, and when it is over you will never be afraid again, because you will have discovered yourself. Nobody mentioned what those would discover who lay ripped open after the battle, bleeding, dying, dead from monstrous wounds.

An eloquent maker of promises

Howard Zinn on Obama's Nobel Peace Prize:

People should be given a peace prize not on the basis of promises they have made – as with Obama, an eloquent maker of promises – but on the basis of actual accomplishments towards ending war, and Obama has continued deadly, inhuman military action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Reminded me of an evaluation of Timothy Geitner from Capitalism: A Love Story (paraphrased)

He's failed at every job he's ever held.

So why does he hold this important position?

Because he tells people what they want to hear.

A teller of pleasing tales.

Would you want to wager your life's savings?

At Counterpunch, William Blum asks an excellent question:

As to the US leaving [Iraq] ... utterly meaningless propaganda until it happens. Ask the people of South Korea — 56 years of American occupation and still counting; ask the people of Japan — 64 years. And Iraq? Would you want to wager your life's savings on which decade it will be that the last American soldier and military contractor leaves?