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Banging Your Head Into Walls
by John
Chuckman
Dissident Voice
November 1, 2003
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
John
Chuckman lives in Canada and is former chief economist for a large
Canadian oil company. He writes frequently for Yellow Times.org and other
publications.
* Several
Steps Closer to Armageddon
* Hope Against
Hope: Supporting Wesley Clark is a Wasted Opportunity
* The
First Two Years of Insanity
* The
Perfumed Prince and Other Political Tales
* A
George Will Follies Review
* The
Painful Horrors of Political Autism
* Enron-Style
Management in a Dangerously Complex World
* The Real
Clash of Civilizations: Liberals Versus the Crypto-Nazis
* Banality,
Bombast, and Blood
* Through A
Glass Darkly: An Interpretation of Bush's Character
* Of
Blair, Hussein, and Genocide