A buddy of mine we called R, spent a year in the Navy off the coast of Vietnam begrudgingly helping the US launch jet planes to strafe the people and countryside of Vietnam. He joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War as soon as he got his discharge papers. He and I spent many an hour talking politics, books, and women over the years. One conversation occurred when we were somewhere in California’s Central Valley on Veterans’ Day. As we sat in the shade of some trees in Salinas and sipped surreptitiously on a quart of Rainier Ale, R began talking about friends of his from his Navy days. After all, noted R bitterly, this is our day. He continued by noting how much better vets were treated after they were dead. Shit, he said, you even get a decent burial. And a freakin’ American flag to go with it. When you’re in their goddam uniform, you ain’t no better than a maltreated dog who they’re trying to kill. If you get out alive, they just want you to go away. Especially if you have an ailment that can be attributed to their war. R eventually married and helped raise two children. When he was around fifty he was diagnosed with a disease related to the war that was exacerbated by his reckless lifestyle in the years immediately following his discharge. He met an untimely death a few years ago while waiting for a transplant. He did get a decent burial. And a freakin’ flag.
There are many more men and women who were in the military with their own stories. Some have better endings than others. No one makes it through unscathed. Some just hide their scars better. That’s what a friend who did veterans counseling before he died told me. Washington’s latest wars have produced a new crop of these men and women. Although the wars may be different, the wounds are equally painful.

Often left unsaid when the media writes about returning veterans and their trouble adjusting to civilian life is how a veteran’s loved ones are affected. If one wishes to maintain the vocabulary of modern war, then the appropriate label for the lovers, partners, parents and children of the returning soldier would be collateral damage. Think of a cluster bomb. If the returning veteran is a casualty of the explosions that occur on original impact, then the veterans’ families and loved ones would be those who are the casualties that occur from the bomblets that detonate later. Of course, this scenario of injury and death is also replicated among those whom the imperial army has attacked many more times over.

Author and antiwar organizer Beverly Gologorsky wrote a book a couple years ago titled Things We Do To Make It Home. This book was recently released in paperback by Seven Stories Press. It is a beautifully wrought story of a group of Vietnam veterans, their lovers, families and friends set in the 1990s. Twenty years after their return from the jungles of Nam the world they live in is still littered with the veterans’ experience in combat. Like so many of their real-life comrades, the men in the story have left much damage in their wake. Simultaneously, there is a love that binds them all together. That same love reaches across the lines between suburb and city while it tears relationships into remnants barely held together by threads of memory. There is no blame here, despite the desire to find somewhere to place the despair and anger resulting from the demons that define the lives these men have lived. The women who have loved them despite their better sense, the hopelessness the men hide with drugs and alcohol and the children who wonder where there father really is even when he’s sitting in the same room are portrayed with an emotional and spiritual depth the reader won’t find in newspaper reports about veteran suicides and PTSD statistics. There isn’t a lot of hope in this novel, despite the optimism voiced by some of its characters. These are men who know they were screwed and can’t seem to figure out how to get past the war they were sent to fight. Nonetheless, they go on living life as best as they can while often unaware of the pain they cause–a pain directly related to the guilt they feel because of the injury they caused to those their commanders called the enemy while fighting Washington’s war.

I had another friend named Loren. Like so many others, he was drafted into the Army against his will. When he got his orders to go to Vietnam, he took a truck from the motor pool where he worked and ran it through several gates and a couple of parked cars in the Officer’s Club parking lot at the Colorado Army base he was stationed. He did six months in the stockade and was thrown out of the Army. He celebrated by going to a rock festival and ended up in Berkeley. His father didn’t speak to him for years, but it was worth it to Loren just to have avoided the war. After reading Things We Do To Make It Home, one wishes once again that more soldiers would follow Loren’s example and just refuse to fight.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

— Voltaire

Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?

Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He’s holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize.

Somalian civil society and court system are so devastated from decades of war that one wouldn’t expect its citizens to have the means to raise serious legal challenges to Washington’s apparent belief that it can drop bombs on that sad land whenever it appears to serve the empire’s needs. But a group of Pakistanis, calling themselves “Lawyers Front for Defense of the Constitution,” and remembering just enough of their country’s more civilized past, has filed suit before the nation’s High Court to make the federal government stop American drone attacks on countless innocent civilians. The group declared that a Pakistan Army spokesman claimed to have the capability to shoot down the drones, but the government had made a policy decision not to.¹

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, behaves like the world is one big lawless Somalia and the United States is the chief warlord. On October 20 the president again displayed his deep love of peace by honoring some 80 veterans of Vietnam at the White House, after earlier awarding their regiment a Presidential Unit Citation for its “extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry.”² War correspondent Michael Herr has honored Vietnam soldiers in his own way: “We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.”³

What would it take for the Obamaniacs to lose any of the stars in their eyes for their dear Nobel Laureate? Perhaps if the president announced that he was donating his prize money to build a monument to the First — “Oh What a Lovely” — World War? The memorial could bear the inscription: “Let us remember that Rudyard Kipling coaxed his young son John into enlisting in this war. John died his first day in combat. Kipling later penned these words:

    “If any question why we died,
    Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

“The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the legislature.” — James Madison, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 2, 1798.

A wise measure, indeed, but one American president after another has dragged the nation into bloody war without the approval of Congress, the American people, international law, or world opinion. Millions marched against the war in Iraq before it began. Millions more voted for Barack Obama in the belief that he shared their repugnance for America’s Wars Without End. They had no good reason to believe this — Obama’s campaign was filled with repeated warlike threats against Iran and Afghanistan — but they wanted to believe it.

If machismo explains war, if men love war and fighting so much, why do we have to compel them with conscription on pain of imprisonment? Why do the powers-that-be have to wage advertising campaigns to seduce young people to enlist in the military? Why do young men go to extreme lengths to be declared exempt for physical or medical reasons? Why do they flee into exile to avoid the draft? Why do they desert the military in large numbers in the midst of war? Why don’t Sweden or Switzerland or Costa Rica have wars? Surely there are many macho men in those countries.

“Join the Army, visit far away places, meet interesting people, and kill them.”

War licenses men to take part in what would otherwise be described as psychopathic behavior.

“Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him.” — Colonel Potter, M*A*S*H

“In the struggle of Good against Evil, it’s always the people who get killed.” — Eduardo Galeano

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a Taliban leader declared that “God is on our side, and if the world’s people try to set fire to Afghanistan, God will protect us and help us.”⁴

“I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.” — George W. Bush, 2004, during the war in Iraq.⁵

“I believe that Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him. That is a source of strength and sustenance on a daily basis.” — Barack Obama.⁶

Why don’t church leaders forbid Catholics from joining the military with the same fervor they tell Catholics to stay away from abortion clinics?

God, war, the World Bank, the IMF, free trade agreements, NATO, the war on terrorism, the war on drugs, “anti-war” candidates, and Nobel Peace Prizes can be seen as simply different instruments for the advancement of US imperialism.

Tom Lehrer, the marvelous political songwriter of the 1950s and 60s, once observed: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” Perhaps each generation has to learn anew what a farce that prize has become, or always was. Its recipients include quite a few individuals who had as much commitment to a peaceful world as the Bush administration had to truth. One example currently in the news: Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres which won the prize in 1998. Kouchner, now France’s foreign secretary, has long been urging military action against Iran. Last week he called upon Iran to make a nuclear deal acceptable to the Western powers or else there’s no telling what horror Israel might inflict upon the Iranians. Israel “will not tolerate an Iranian bomb,” he said. “We know that, all of us.”⁷ There is a word for such a veiled threat — “extortion”, something normally associated with the likes of a Chicago mobster of the 1930s … “Do like I say and no one gets hurt.” Or as Al Capone once said: “Kind words and a machine gun will get you more than kind words alone.”

The continuing desperate quest to find something good to say about US foreign policy

Not the crazy, hateful right wing, not racist or disrupting public meetings, not demanding birth certificates … but the respectable right, holding high positions in academia and in every administration, Republican or Democrat, members of the highly esteemed Council on Foreign Relations. Here’s Joshua Kurlantzick, a “Fellow for Southeast Asia” at CFR, writing in the equally esteemed and respectable Washington Post about how — despite all the scare talk — it wouldn’t be so bad if Afghanistan actually turned into another Vietnam because “Vietnam and the United States have become close partners in Southeast Asia, exchanging official visits, building an important trading and strategic relationship and fostering goodwill between governments, businesses and people on both sides. … America did not win the war there, but over time it has won the peace. … American war veterans publicly made peace with their old adversaries … A program [to exchange graduate students and professors] could ensure that the next generation of Afghan leaders sees an image of the United States beyond that of the war.”⁸ And so on.

On second thought, this is not so much right-wing jingoism as it is … uh … y’know … What’s the word? … Ah yes, “pointless.” Just what is the point? Germany and Israel are on excellent terms … therefore, what point can we make about the Holocaust?

As to America not winning the war in Vietnam, that’s worse than pointless. It’s wrong. Most people believe that the United States lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, by poisoning the earth, the water, the air, and the gene pool for generations, the US in fact achieved its primary purpose: it left Vietnam a basket case, preventing the rise of what might have been a good development option for Asia, an alternative to the capitalist model; for the same reason the United States has been at war with Cuba for 50 years, making sure that the Cuban alternative model doesn’t look as good as it would if left in peace.

And in all the years since the Vietnam War ended, the millions of Vietnamese suffering from diseases and deformities caused by US sprayings of the deadly chemical “Agent Orange” have received from the United States no medical care, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official apology. That’s exactly what the Afghans — their land and/or their bodies permeated with depleted uranium, unexploded cluster bombs, and a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals — have to look forward to in Kurlantzick’s Brave New World. “If the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan eventually resembles the one we now have with Vietnam, we should be overjoyed,” he writes. God Bless America.

One further thought about Afghanistan: The suggestion that the United States could, and should, solve its (self-created) dilemma by simply getting out of that god-forsaken place is dismissed out of hand by the American government and media; even some leftist critics of US policy are reluctant to embrace so bold a step — Who knows what horror may result? But when the Soviet Union was in the process of quitting Afghanistan (during the period of May 1988-February 1989) who in the West insisted that they remain? For any reason. No matter what the consequences of their withdrawal. The reason the Russians could easier leave than the Americans can now is that the Russians were not there for imperialist reasons, such as oil and gas pipelines. Similar to why the US can’t leave Iraq.

Washington’s eternal “Cuba problem” — the one they can’t admit to

“Here we go again. I suppose old habits die hard,” said US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, on October 28 before the General Assembly voted on the annual resolution to end the US embargo against Cuba. “The hostile language we have just heard from the Foreign Minister of Cuba,” she continued, “seems straight out of the Cold War era and is not conducive to constructive progress.” Her 949-word statement contained not a word about the embargo; not very conducive to a constructive solution to the unstated “Cuba problem,” the one about Cuba inspiring the Third World, the fear that the socialist virus would spread.

Since the early days of the Cuban Revolution assorted anti-communists and capitalist true-believers around the world have been relentless in publicizing the failures, real and alleged, of life in Cuba; each perceived shortcoming is attributed to the perceived shortcomings of socialism — It’s simply a system that can’t work, we are told, given the nature of human beings, particularly in this modern, competitive, globalized, consumer-oriented world.

In response to such criticisms, defenders of Cuban society have regularly pointed out how the numerous draconian sanctions imposed by the United States since 1960 have produced many and varied scarcities and sufferings and are largely responsible for most of the problems pointed out by the critics. The critics, in turn, say that this is just an excuse, one given by Cuban apologists for every failure of their socialist system. However, it would be very difficult for the critics to prove their point. The United States would have to drop all sanctions and then we’d have to wait long enough for Cuban society to make up for lost time and recover what it was deprived of, and demonstrate what its system can do when not under constant assault by the most powerful force on earth.

In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the first 39 years of this aggression. The suit held Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. In the ten years since, these figures have of course all increased. The sanctions, in numerous ways large and small, make acquiring many kinds of products and services from around the world much more difficult and expensive, often impossible; frequently, they are things indispensable to Cuban medicine, transportation or industry; simply transferring money internationally has become a major problem for the Cubans, with banks being heavily punished by the United States for dealing with Havana; or the sanctions mean that Americans and Cubans can’t attend professional conferences in each other’s country.

These examples are but a small sample of the excruciating pain inflicted by Washington upon the body, soul and economy of the Cuban people.

For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an “international pariah.” We don’t hear much of that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the General Assembly on the resolution, which reads: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”. This is how the vote has gone:

How it began, from State Department documents: Within a few months of the Cuban revolution of January 1959, the Eisenhower administration decided “to adjust all our actions in such a way as to accelerate the development of an opposition in Cuba which would bring about a change in the Cuban Government, resulting in a new government favorable to U.S. interests.”⁹

On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”¹⁰ Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo.

1. The Nation (Pakistan English-language daily newspaper), October 10, 2009.
2. Washington Post, October 20, 2009.
3. Michael Herr, Dispatches (1991), p.71.
4. New York Daily News, September 19, 2001.
5. Washington Post, July 20, 2004, p.15, citing the New Era (Lancaster, PA), from a private meeting of Bush with Amish families on July 9. The White House denied that Bush had said it. (Those Amish folks do lie a lot you know.)
6. Washington Post, August 17, 2008.
7. Daily Telegraph (UK), October 26, 2009.
8. Washington Post, October 25, 2009.
9. Department of State, “Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba” (1991), p.742.
10. Ibid., p.885

Earlier that year, in June 1969, the largest radical organization (Students for a Democratic Society–SDS) in the United States at the time fragmented during a tempestuous national convention in Chicago. This split was the result of a hardening of political stances and disagreements over lifestyles. Primary among the political disagreements were those over the war in Vietnam and the role of the African-American struggle for liberation. The dominant argument over lifestyle concerned the role of youth in the movement and the political meaning of the burgeoning youth counterculture. These issues loomed large in the minds and hearts of the hundreds of thousands of politically minded youth in the late Sixties and it was appropriate that they would be played out at the national convention of the country’s largest radical youth group.

The three groups claiming the SDS mantle were the Progressive Labor Party, the Revolutionary Youth Movement, and the Weatherman organization. The name “weatherman” was from the line “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” in Bob Dylan’s 1965 song “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Weatherman would go on to become not only an underground group dedicated to its version of armed struggle, it would also become the most well known of the three SDS remnants. This was due to its headline grabbing actions–an explosion in a NYC townhouse that killed three of its members, freeing LSD guru Timothy Leary from a California jail, setting off bombs in the U.S. Capitol and Pentagon in protest of military actions by the United States against the people of Vietnam and Laos, and its support of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

By October of 1969, Woodstock and its accompanying euphoria had come and gone. The major antiwar demonstrations planned throughout the United States–the Moratorium scheduled for October 15th and the National Mobilization to End the War scheduled for November 15th –were the focus of virtually every antiwarrior in the country. Local organizers sat at tables in shopping centers and universities, and spoke to community and student groups urging people to make their opposition to the murder going on in their name known. John and Yoko Ono Lennon penned and recorded “Give Peace a Chance,” and President Richard Nixon told the press that he would be unaffected by any demonstrations against his policies. As it turned out, Nixon and his advisers decided not to attack Hanoi with nuclear weapons after the massive protests of October and November (which attracted more than two million people to both days of protest across the country), fearful that a revolution would break out in America. It was a revolution the ultra-left hoped for, but would never see.

Meanwhile, the ultra-left, which included most of those who had attended the SDS convention that June, were organizing protests of their own. Weatherman was calling people to Chicago for a series of offensive attacks on the state and its symbols in an attempt to “bring the war home”. RYM had split off from Weatherman and were planning a series of mass demonstrations in Chicago at the same time. Both groups then planned to attend the November protest in D.C. The Weatherman demonstrations became known as the Days of Rage. Despite the organization’s hopes, these protests involved no more than 1000 people and succeeded primarily in alienating the group from much of the left, at least for the time being. RYM had a bit more success: their final demonstration attracted around 5000 students and workers and the support of the local chapter of the Black Panther party.

This chapter of the Panthers was led by the charismatic Fred Hampton. Hampton was a young man, barely 20, and had been active in civil rights organizing since junior high and was high on the list of Panthers who would assume the chairman’s position should Huey Newton remain in prison. His leadership in Chicago had turned the Panther chapter there into one of the party’s strongest and most cohesive. Besides the standard Panther program involving free breakfasts-for-kids and Panther schools, Hampton was working on creating the first Rainbow Coalition-a coalition he hoped would include the Latino Young Lords, the working-class white Patriots and the street gang, The Blackstone Rangers. To put it bluntly, the possibility that this proposed coalition might take hold scared the pants off the local, state and federal government, who did their best to sabotage the negotiations that would bring the Rangers into the group. This ultimately included the December 4, 1969 death squad murders of both Hampton and Mark Clark-a member of the Illinois state Panthers. As court testimony later proved, these murders were planned and executed by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies working together. These assassinations were part of a concerted effort by the FBI and other government agencies to destroy the Black Panther Party.

Musically, the Rolling Stones were touring the country promoting their new album Let It Bleed , another of their adventures in reworking North American blues and folk idioms into hard-driving rock and roll. The song of the summer had been Honky Tonk Women, which appeared on the album as a boozy country funk. Perhaps the most important song on the platter, however, was Gimme Shelter, a blistering indictment of the world of war and greed. Of course, the Beatles had their own record out as well. Abbey Road appeared in record stores on September 26 and blasted to the top of the charts. A bit more whimsical than the Stones’ album, it did include a somewhat acid-drenched song written for Timothy Leary’s run for the governorship of California–Come Together.

Two days after the Hampton-Clark murders, the Rolling Stones ended their tour at the Altamont Raceway in California, closing out an all-day festival which included Santana and the Jefferson Airplane, as well. The Grateful Dead were scheduled to play after the Stones that night but changed their minds when the festival careened towards chaos near the stage after a gun-wielding black man was murdered by members of the Hells’ Angels motorcycle gang. This act was the final violent act of a very violent day– a satanic reflection of August’s Woodstock fest. The Dead had hired the Angels as security believing that the band’s past history with the bikers would pay off and the festival could be run without any real cops near the stage. Unfortunately for all, the Angels who showed up to work that day were mostly hopeful prospects eager to show how tough they could be and ready to kick anybody’s ass who dared defy their authority. As it turned out, anybody included members of the Jefferson Airplane along with various concertgoers. The concert ended after the Stones’ set and forever jaded the counterculture–it’s innocence defiled. The new dawn heralded by the Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick at the beginning of the Airplane’s Woodstock set had become a wintry night. A night which would extend into the seventies and, some would argue, until today.

As Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter wrote in his first song about the Altamont concert, New Speedway Boogie, “One way or another, this darkness got to give.”

Cronkite reported on location during the Vietnam War, and of course for years made no waves, and was no more trustworthy than other reporters who managed to stomach what was being done to that beautiful Buddhist society of ancient cultural roots.

Following Cronkite’s editorial report during the Tet Offensive that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Johnson’s whimper reminds us that Cronkite was for years not reporting the real conditions in South Vietnam, not reporting the deceptions that led to the creation of the puppet government, not reporting Eisenhower’s and the South’s refusal to hold promised elections, not reporting that Ike confessed that U.S. WWII ally Ho Chi Minh would have won by 80% had the pan-Vietnam election not been blocked, the rampant corruption at every level, the brutal French colonial history, the carnage from years of bombing the delta. Cronkite and CBS acted like servants and sycophants of our government, dutifully trumpeting almost every lie and distortion passed to them by the Pentagon and White House.

During the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Cronkite was anchoring the CBS network coverage as violence and protests occurred outside the convention, as well as scuffles inside the convention hall. When Dan Rather was punched to the floor (on camera) by security personnel, Cronkite commented, “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs here, Dan.”

Cronkite would have never in thousand years have called the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force, crucifying the agrarian French colonial population of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, “a bunch of thugs.”

Now, as in Walter Cronkite’s lifetime, major humanity is still in a fight for a billion lives against the military and banks of the Anglo-American Empire, with the EU, NATO and Japan in tow, China and Russia going along for now, the Third World watchful and apprehensive. Conglomerate owned satellite powered media is not on the side of major humanity, but the tool and protection of its capitalist governance.

But Walter Cronkite’s death should not be an occasion of our criticizing him for what he was not. Nor for propaganda to make media be seen as trustworthy. Walter worked in corporate media, a regular guy, pretty much in mainstream. He was no Gandhi, no Nelson Mandela, no Martin Luther King Jr. or Albert Einstein, who were trustworthy and always honest about imperialist foreign policy, but Cronkite did have a few moments of realization that U.S. use of military in foreign policy was less than sane.

The deceased deserve their rest in peace, with some respect for their contributions. Commercial media hype to distract us from conglomerate owned media’s mission of war-mongering, support for empire and predatory global financial hegemony is obvious, insensitive and inappropriate to our mourning the passing of a fellow human being.

As if that weren’t enough, I’m reading how some 83 people, mostly civilians, were killed and over 50 injured in three drone attacks within 12 hours in Lataka, South Waziristan.

The first strike killed several suspected Taliban. Later, a second drone fired three missiles into a crowd of funeral mourners.

One of the wounded commented: “If the Taliban are bombing the mosques and America is bombing the funerals, what is the difference between them? We are stuck between Taliban and US attacks and when we are killed, not only no one cries for us, but also we are dubbed militants.”

Since August 2008, over 40 US drone strikes have killed at least 410 people. US troops in neighboring Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy unmanned drones in the region.

The use of armed drones is a particularly cowardly form of warfare. These lethal “assets” are computer-controlled from the comfort and safety of an armchair a hundred miles away and guided by dodgy “intelligence”. Or, if the truth be known, no intelligence at all. The Israelis use them extensively in Gaza to unleash death and destruction on civilian targets by remote control. Engines for Israeli drones are believed to be supplied by a British manufacturer, although the government here pretends not to know the truth of the matter.

This trend in ’sofa slaughter’ has many variations. For example, during the 40-day siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 2002 the Israeli Occupation Force set up huge cranes on which were mounted robotic machine guns under video control. Eight defenders, including the bell-ringer, were murdered, some by the robotic guns and some by snipers.

The US and its allies are just as callous in their treatment of civilian prisoners. The British authorities deal with their casual killings by offering £4,500 in compensation, showing how cheaply we value the life of ‘Johnny Foreigner’. And when it comes to prisoner abuse the Israelis, whose every cruel excess the West defends, don’t even spare children, according to various reports.

Something very chilling can take hold of uniformed thugs — I won’t call them soldiers because what many of them do is not proper soldiering — in a war zone; and in the days before high-tech weaponry like drones and robotic machine guns they happily indulged their blood-lust by murdering civilians at close quarters. If you haven’t heard of the My Lai massacre, brace yourself.

In 1968, 150 men of Charlie Company, a US infantry unit, were sent on a ‘search and destroy’ mission into the South Vietnamese village of My Lai. Four hours later more than 500 civilians — unarmed women, children and old men — were dead. Charlie Company hadn’t encountered a single Viet Cong. Nevertheless the unit, led by Lt. William Calley, rounded up villagers and machine-gunned them until the dead lay five-deep.

When Calley spotted a baby crawling away, he grabbed her, threw her back into the ditch, and opened fire again.

Helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, flying over the area, was so sickened by what he saw that he landed his machine to shield villagers from the troops and began rescuing survivors. He ordered his gunner to open up on any American soldiers who continued to shoot civilians.

Some of the dead were mutilated by having “C Company” carved into their chests; some were disemboweled.

Official reports said the My Lai operation was a stunning combat victory, and General Westmoreland congratulated the men on their bravery.

The American people didn’t learn the truth until 18 months later . . . and then only because a Vietnam veteran, after hearing about the incident from friends who had served in Charlie Company, wrote a letter to his congressman and other prominent officials, including President Nixon.

An army photographer produced pictures of the carnage. Then freelance reporter Seymour Hersh managed to interview Calley and splashed the story over the front pages of American newspapers.

26 members of C Company were charged with criminal behavior but not convicted. Calley himself was eventually court-martialed and sentenced to life imprisonment. After serving just three days he was moved to a comfortable apartment under house arrest, on Nixon’s orders. He was paroled three years later.

Hersh said that many in Charlie Company “had given in to an easy pattern of violence” and were totally blind to the humanity of the Vietnamese people. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

My Lai was one of many atrocities committed in Korea and Vietnam. Military training in those days set out to dehumanize not only the enemy but the local civilian population as well. Army culture encouraged its so-called soldiers to think they could treat them like garbage.

Has anything changed? The conduct of the Americans and their close buddies the Israelis is remarkably similar. They are the pacesetters (though not the only practitioners) in savagery and the casual art of killing Johnny Foreigner. It is now done at arm’s length — by remote video control or at the end of a sniper’s scope-sight or by DU tank shell, or from 35,000 feet. No need to personally check the situation on the ground, or look your unarmed victim in the eye, or get your hands dirty. No need to count the bodies afterwards or clear up the shredded and vaporized remains.

Apparently these high-tech killers, their commanders and their political masters have convinced themselves that everyone they don’t like is sub-human.

I’m reminded of a blistering attack by a church minister in Oklahoma after the shock-and-awe onslaught on Iraq, the point at which he discovered that his faith had been hijacked by fundamentalists who claimed to speak for Jesus but whose actions were anything but Christian.

“When you live in a country that has established international rules for waging a just war, build the United Nations on your own soil to enforce them, and then arrogantly break the very rules you set down for the rest of the world, you are doing something immoral,” he said.

”When you claim that Jesus is the Lord of your life, and yet fail to acknowledge that your policies ignore his essential teaching, or turn them on their head, you are doing something immoral.

”When you act as if the lives of Iraqi civilians are not as important as the lives of American soldiers, and refuse to even count them, you are doing something immoral.

”When you claim that our God is bigger than their God, and that our killing is righteous, while theirs is evil, we have begun to resemble the enemy we claim to be fighting, and that is immoral.

“We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.”

It was the sweltering summer of 2003. My friend Dan and I were exploring parts of Southeast Asia. The SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic was winding down, but, in the last few months, a new strain had apparently emerged, characterized by fever, diarrhea, respiratory duress and a high fatality rate. Several folks in remote Cambodian villages had succumbed to the affliction, perishing in fits of coughing, choking and delirium. Locals were sacrificing pigs and chickens and standing up straw effigies near their hut doors to ward off menacing spirits. Dan and I were teasing the edges of a still unstable plague zone and we didn’t even know it.

In Thailand, SARS was never mentioned. We never even saw anyone in surgical masks. We didn’t realize it was still lingering in the region until we attempted to enter Cambodia. At the Poi Pet border crossing station, we flashed our passports and began the travel visa application process. We were the only visitors in the facility.

When we paid for our visas and exited the station, we were accosted by three machine gun-wielding representatives of the Cambodian military. In broken English, the shortest one explained that, due to the SARS outbreak, we would be required to submit to a supervised SARS quarantine. If we coughed or sneezed or exhibited any symptoms of pneumonic complication, we would be held pending further medical examination or turned away outright. Dan looked at me and shrugged.

The SARS quarantine staging area was simply twenty grimy, plastic lawn chairs tucked under a tarp at the rear of the station. We dropped our backpacks and grabbed chairs. The two silent machine gun-wielding soldiers monitored the process.

For the duration of the quarantine, Dan and I tried to remain solemn. A couple of times Dan began to betray the hint of a smile, but he wisely kept it under wraps. It’s exceedingly dangerous to scoff at, laugh about or appear amused by the crude customs or processes you encounter in the Third World. Especially when your immediate point of contact has an AK-47.

On the other side of the Cambodian border lay Typhoid, Hepatitis, Japanese Encephalitis, Malaria, AIDS, organ harvesters, human traffickers and the ghosts of hundreds of thousands of Khmer Rouge victims who lay slaughtered in the Killing Fields. It seemed ironic to me that the Cambodians could be worried about Dan and I bringing anything dangerous into their country. But we Yanks had secretly brought the Vietnam War there in late 60s and early 70s, and our bombing raids had probably killed as many Cambodians as the Khmer Rouge. We were lucky they even gave us travel visas.

When our twenty minutes were up and we had neither coughed nor sneezed or even cleared our throats, the shortest soldier returned and smiled. “Welcome to Cambodia,” he said. We loaded up our packs and crossed the border.

There was a 500-yard buffer zone between the border and the taxi station where an army of poor Cambodians had already begun to fight over who would transport us. Ahead and off to our right we saw a little girl in school uniform walking with a backpack over her shoulders. She was the only other person in the buffer zone.

She stopped suddenly and dropped her backpack. She unzipped the main compartment, removed a book, and then raised it over her head clutching one side with both hands. Then, swiftly, surely, she drove it toward the earth in a guillotine motion. When we edged closer to see what she was doing, she replaced the book in her backpack and picked up her victim with one hand. It was a 6-inch black scorpion. She placed it in her backpack and went on.

As Dan and I neared the taxi mob, the cacophony of broken English sales pitches became an unsettling din and the image of the girl holding up the scorpion gave me mild pause. The scorpion was a strange omen. Not the image I wanted to contemplate before I entered a nation still filled with millions of undetonated land mines, thousands of which would be lining both sides of the muddy red highway we would be taking to Siem Reap. One out of every 200 Cambodians was an amputee.

I still wanted to see the mysterious ruins of Angkor Wat, but there was a little less steam in my stride. Six-inch scorpions and six million land mines. SARS was the least of our worries.

“You know her and her parents will have that for dinner,” Dan said.

“Yeah,” I replied. And then the taxi throng was upon us.

The US military has sent shock troops, which also donned helmets and flak jackets — anthropologists, sociologists and social psychologists, with their own troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. By the end of 2007, American scholars in these fields were embedding with the military in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a Pentagon program called Human Terrain System (HTS), which evolved shortly thereafter into a $40 million program that embedded four or five person groups of scholars in the aforementioned fields in all 26 US combat brigades that were busily occupying Iraq and Afghanistan.

Two years prior to this, the CIA had quietly started recruiting social scientists by advertising in academic journals, offering salaries of up to $400,000. The military’s goals for the HTS was to have them gather and disseminate information about Iraqi and Afghani cultures. These embedded scholars, contracted through companies like CACI International, work in the project that is described by CACI as “designed to improve the gathering, understanding, operational application, and sharing of local population knowledge” among combat teams.

This new form of psychological warfare is deeply disturbing. Throughout my five years of reporting on the occupation of Iraq, when I’ve asked Iraqis what they feel the most damaging aspect of the occupation is, I have been told that the occupation is “shredding the fabric of Iraqi society and culture.”

Anthropology, in particular, has been referred to through history as the “handmaiden of colonialism,” thus putting anthropologists, at least those with a moral conscience, on guard against anything that smells like exploitation or oppression of their subjects. Roberto Gonzalez, an associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University and leading member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, told Time magazine that the militarization of anthropology will cause the field to become “just another weapon … not a tool for building bridges between peoples.” Anthropology has core professional ethics standards that require voluntary, informed consent from subjects, and that anthropologists do no harm. How likely do you think these will be adhered to by the flack-jacket-wearing, gun-toting, embedded anthropologists working directly with regimental combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan?

In an article titled “When Anthropologists Become Counter-Insurgents,” published in September 2007, and co-authored with David Price, author of the book Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Abuse of American Anthropology in the Second World War, Gonzalez and Price wrote:

Although proponents of this form of applied anthropology claim that culturally informed counter-insurgency work will save lives and win ‘hearts and minds,’ they have thus far not attempted to provide any evidence of this. Instead, there has been a flurry of non-critical newspaper accounts in publications including the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor that portray these HTS anthropologists as heroically serving their nation without bothering to report on the ethical complications of this work. Missing are discussions of anthropologists’ ethical responsibilities to disclose who they are and what they are doing, to gain informed consent, and to not harm those they study. Portraying counter-insurgency operations as social work is naive and historically inaccurate.

In fact, David Kipp of the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas describes HTS teams as a ‘CORDS for the 21st Century’-a reference to the Pentagon’s Vietnam-era Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support project. The most infamous product of the CORDS counter-insurgency effort was the Phoenix Program, in which CIA agents collected intelligence information used to ‘neutralize’ (read assassinate) suspected Viet Cong members. Between 1968 and 1972, more than 26,000 suspected Viet Cong were killed as a result, including many civilians.

Kipp’s comparison of HTS and CORDS begs a series of ethical questions which have gone unanswered. If anthropologists on HTS teams interview Afghans or Iraqis about the intimate details of their lives, what is to prevent combat teams from using the same data to one day ‘neutralize’ suspected insurgents? What would impede the transfer of data collected by social scientists to commanders planning offensive military campaigns? Where is the line that separates the professional anthropologist from the counter-insurgency technician? Although the answers to these questions are not clear, the history of anthropology should give us pause. During World War II and the Cold War, US military and intelligence agencies tended to use anthropologists’ work to help accomplish immediate goals, and discarded all other information that was counter to their beliefs or institutional models.

Adding credence to the points made by Price and Gonzalez is the fact that one of the top ten US defense contractors, Science Applications International Corporation, which has been operating in Iraq since the beginning of the occupation, describes anthropology in its job advertisements as a “counter-insurgency related field.”

Marcus Griffin, an anthropology professor, while preparing to deploy to Iraq at part of an HTS team, boasted on his blog, “I cut my hair in a high and tight style and look like a drill sergeant … I shot very well with the M9 and M4 last week at the range … Shooting well is important if you are a soldier regardless of whether or not your job requires you to carry a weapon.”

Nevertheless, proponents of the program attempt to dismiss any ethical dilemma encountered by the embedded scholars. Montgomery McFate, a Navy anthropologist, described HTS as an effort to anthropologize the military, not militarizing anthropology, told Time, “The more unconventional the adversary, and the further from Western cultural norms, the more we need to understand the society and underlying cultural dynamics.”

The program is nothing new, neither for the US empire nor other empires throughout history. As far as the US empire project is concerned, there were two programs from the Vietnam era that involved anthropologists.

Project Camelot, in 1965, organized by US Army intelligence, recruited anthropologists to assess the cultural causes of war and violence. Despite the misleadingly benign sounding name, the project used Chile as a trial run while the CIA was engineering the election of Eduardo Frei as president in 1964 to prevent the election of Socialist leader Salvador Allende.

The second program from that era, known as CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support), was formed to coordinate the US civil and military pacification programs in Vietnam. CORDS used anthropological data to map human terrain and identify individuals and groups that the military believed were sympathizers of the Vietcong, who were then targeted for assassination.

It is easy to imagine HTS teams in Iraq being used to exploit existing fault lines between Sunni and Shia, Kurd and Arab, and even differences within each group, in order to invoke the classic divide-to-conquer strategy. For example, the Sahwa (US-created and -backed Sunni militia) clashing with the US-backed Maliki government in Iraq is a classic example of Iraqis being effectively turned against one another so as not to unite against the occupier.

Another example would be the effective creation and exploitation of the myth of sectarianism in Iraq, which has lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and threatens to do so once again.

Documentary filmmaker Jason Coppola is directing and producing a film titled Justify My War. In the film, an introspective Coppola explores the question of rationalization of the wars being waged by our government, from Wounded Knee to Fallujah. I asked Coppola for his perspective about the ongoing use of anthropologists by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This seems to be the most powerful weapon against indigenous cultures today. Much more powerful than F-16s and M-1 tanks. We see how well it worked against our own indigenous culture. You need to know a people before you decide what can corrupt them, what can be used to confuse, divide and conquer them. The strongest defense against occupation is an undivided, culturally rooted people, but empires don’t like that.”

Commenting on experiences from his recent trip to Iraq, Coppola adds, “A country can rebuild itself after an invasion, but it is much more difficult to rebuild a culture after it has been invaded. I realized this seeing young girls walking the streets of Sadr City, on their way to school in their traditional hijab carrying their books in a backpack with a blond-haired, blue-eyed Barbie design on it. Confusion is sewn throughout the Iraq occupation, nobody trusts anybody. And as I looked up in Baghdad or Fallujah or Sadr City, and stared at ‘Apache’ helicopters flying overhead … I couldn’t help but to think — mission accomplished — certainly for the Apache people. But what about the Iraqis? We still don’t know.”

Price and Gonzalez, along with several other scholars, felt the problem serious enough to have formed the Network of Concerned Anthropologists and drafted a “Pledge of Non-Participation in Counter-Insurgency” to boycott anthropological work in counterinsurgency and direct combat support operations. They took their stand against “work that is covert, work that breaches relations of openness and trust with studied populations, and work that enables the occupation of one country by another.”

Similarly, in October 2007, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association issued a statement that warned its members that activities such as involvement in the HTS program are likely to violate the code of ethics. As it should have, for it is impossible to imagine the lethality of a massive conventional military coupled with unconventional scholarship made into a weapon for use in combat, as it is in the ongoing US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Diana Block’s recently published book Arm the Spirit: A Woman’s Journey Underground and Back is the personal tale of one such supporter. A white North American women involved in the feminist, lesbian and gay rights and new left movements in the United States of the 1970s primarily as a member of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC), Ms. Block joined forces with other white North Americans to support the endeavors of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN ) in its endeavor to free Puerto Rico. Her support resulted in several years underground as the result of her partner’s entrapment in an FBI sting operation. The tale she tells in these pages is the story of those years and the decisions and circumstances that brought her to them. It is also the story of her family’s lives underground. For those who were involved in or at least paid attention to the left in the 1970s and 1980s there will be descriptions of moments that jog the memory. For those that didn’t, this will open their eyes to the reality that existed within Ronald Reagan’s morning in America.

This is a very political book. It is also a very personal book. It is about lives determined as much by one’s political beliefs as they are by personal emotions and about the juncture between the two. It is about very political people in an apolitical time. Many of those who had been involved in the antiwar and antiracist moments of the 1960s and 1970s were moving their lives into more conventional arenas that involved making money and buying things. Others, meanwhile, had drifted deeper into the life of the street and poverty, leaving their political personas behind in the daily struggle to survive. Meanwhile, the men and women involved in leftist groups like Prairie Fire Organizing Committee were existing on the fringes of US society trying to figure out how to maintain a political relevance. It may have been that existence on the outside that colored the decisions they made: going underground when they maybe should have involved themselves in a more public type of organizing; adopting immovable positions that alienated them from other groups with similar agendas, to name a couple such decisions.

Block’s memories of that period are consistently evocative and occasionally emotionally wrenching, compelling the reader to stay glued to the text. Her reflections on the thoughts about how the decisions made by her and her partner Claude Marks affected the lives of their children and families reveal caring and thoughtful parents whose politics are motivated by a love as deep as the love they have for those closest to them. They also provide an insight into the difficulties involved in living a life of resistance inside the belly of the imperial beast that is the United States. To put it succinctly, it is safe to say that Arm the Spirit is about the multitude of forms love takes: familial, romantic, comradely and revolutionary. It is also about the difficulties we face trying to meet the ideals these loves represent, especially when they come into conflict with one another.

Besides the aforementioned political and emotional realities revealed in this book, there are the descriptions of daily life on the run. Periods of normalcy when you and your family are as normal as the neighbors next door interrupted by days and weeks of uncertainty tinged with fear after your picture makes the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted. Joy and tears as you wrestle with how much information you should share with your maturing child.

Genuine friendships made under assumed names that must be broken when the presence of the law gets too near. The frustrations felt because your political self can not speak out when the Empire attacks for fear you will be recognized and taken away in chains. The decision to finally give up your underground status and face the courts. The period of adjustment to once again using your family name and living as the person you couldn’t be while underground.

Politically, Block’s experiences as a revolutionary and a woman lead her to a conclusion perhaps best expressed by the writer and revolutionary Margaret Randall: that the inability of almost all twentieth-century revolutionary movements to develop a feminist agenda contributed to their failure to evolve new and equitable forms of power sharing that might have helped keep them alive. The period of adjustment mentioned in the previous paragraph provokes some other interesting observations by Block. Foremost among them are her observations regarding the changes in the progressive movement in the 1970s and the movement today, especially her remarks that much of the work formerly done by organizations with no financial portfolio now being done by what she calls the nonprofit industrial complex.

The shortcomings of this movement are even more apparent today as funding for these nonprofits dries up in the wake of the economic shocks throughout the capitalist world. This factor doesn’t even touch the political timidity of many of today’s organizations–a timidity certainly influenced by their need to gather money from beneficiaries of the very system whose excesses and wrongs they hope to remedy.

One other insightful observation is that, despite the multitude of single issue movements and organizations, many of the groups and individuals involved have no underlying philosophy to bind these issues together and present a systemic analysis that would propel the struggle for economic and social justice forward. Although Block does not examine this much further, it is clear that she sees the need to develop and provide that analysis as part of the role of her and others involved in the struggles of the latter half of the twentieth century. After all, the fundamentals of that analysis are the same as those the left has always referred to. The economic crisis of capitalism and the wars of Washington make that clear.

The music ranged from British dance hall ditties to folk tinged ballads with some serious hard rock in between. Then there was the John Cage/Stockhausen mishmash of sound called “Revolution #9”. A counterpart to the other song titled Revolution (known as “Revolution #1”), “Revolution #9” was meant to be the chaotic sounds of revolution as conceived by John Lennon. At times reminiscent of a political protest and other times more like a football game, the entire collage reminds many listeners of a trip on LSD. “Revolution #1″, on the other hand, represented a debate going on between the Beatles, within John Lennon’s mind , and in the larger society over the merits of revolutionary change and the forms any such change should take. Chairman Mao and dogmatic cadres or Fabian-like evolutionary change spurred by a revolutionary change in consciousness. Of course, this latter possibility was also open to interpretation. Would this change in consciousness be towards the “new man” that Che Guevara wrote about or would it be the new consciousness Timothy Leary spoke of and Charles Reich would attempt to denote in his 1970 book The Greening of America?

The Beatles didn’t have the answers. Indeed, they were asking the questions like everyone else. However, in the convulsive year that was 1968, when all the pillars of what already was were being challenged, there were many who did think the Beatles had the answers. One of these was the aforementioned Charles Manson. His conclusions regarding the tunes “Helter Skelter” and “Piggies” combined with a racist and apocalyptic vision fueled an exceptionally gory spate of Hollywood murders and a particularly surreal series of spectacular trials. White Panther John Sinclair, meanwhile, wrote an open letter to John Lennon regarding the latter’s apparent hesitation regarding the political upheaval and dramatic shift to the left among the youth of the world. The letter was responded to by Lennon and was read by millions of readers in underground newspapers across the world. To be more precise, the letters concerned the single release of the song and not the album release. This difference was essential, primarily because the lyrics that read

But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out

On the single version, go like this on the album version

But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out (in).

The latter version obviously showed some ambivalence on the part of the Beatles (or at least John Lennon) regarding an approach that ignored the fact of the violence being used against the protesters. One other aspect of Sinclair’s argument had to do with these lyrics:

You say you’ll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it’s the institution
Well, you know
You better free you mind instead

It was Sinclair’s contention that both the institutions and one’s mind needed to be freed. Lennon eventually came around to a mode of thinking considerably closer to Sinclair’s. In fact, he helped spearhead a campaign to get Sinclair released from prison after he was sentenced to ten years for giving a narc one joint of marijuana.

But the four songs mentioned above were not the album. “Back In the USSR” poked gentle fun at the American rockers who celebrated the United States as the greatest place to be while conveniently ignoring its legacy of racism and war. “Julia” is a beautiful poem to Lennon’s mother, his first son and even Yoko Ono—the “ocean child” of the lyrics. “Blackbird” is a song about Rosa Parks and her refusal to move when ordered to do so by the realities of American apartheid. As we all know, that refusal was a pivotal movement in the struggle to rid the nation of that disgrace. George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was inspired by an epigram of the I Ching and is one of the most beautiful songs ever composed by a Beatle. Ad infinitum. I’ll let the reader fill in the spaces regarding the rest of the selections on this double disc.

Everyone had (or has) their favorite Beatle. Mine was always John Lennon. Similarly, everyone has their favorite Beatles song(s) and album(s). Without a doubt, mine is the White Album.

Robert Richter, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, and political director for CBS News from 1965 to 1968 recently wrote in Bomber Pilot McCain: War Heroism or War Crimes? published by Institute for Public Accuracy, October 15, 2008, writes,

I will never forget how stunned I was when Gen. Telford Taylor, a chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two, told me that he strongly supported the idea of trying the U.S. pilots captured in North Vietnam as war criminals — and that he would be proud to lead in their prosecution.

Richter notes that

McCain has repeatedly invoked his record in the Vietnam War during the campaign, but that the effect of bomber pilots like McCain and of the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign has not been sufficiently scrutinized.

An ardent opponent of the Vietnam conflict, Taylor spoke with me in the fall of 1966 when I was looking into producing a documentary on this controversy for CBS News, where I was their National Political Editor. While he did not mention any pilot’s name, then U.S. Navy Lieut. Commander John McCain, who was captured a year later, would have been among the group Taylor wanted to prosecute. …

Taylor’s argument was that their actions were in violation of the Geneva conventions that specifically forbid indiscriminate bombing that could cause incidental loss of civilian life or damage to civilian objects. Adding to the Geneva code, he noted, was the decision at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two: military personnel cannot defend themselves against such a charge with a claim that they were simply following orders.

The charge that U.S. pilots also had bombed hospitals and other civilian targets, turned out to be correct and was confirmed by the New York Times‘ chief foreign correspondent, Harrison Salisbury.

In late 1966 Salisbury described the widespread devastation of civilian neighborhoods around Hanoi by American bombs: ‘Bomb damage … extends over an area of probably a mile or so on both sides of the highway … small villages and hamlets along the route [were] almost obliterated’. …

In one of his autobiographies McCain wrote that he was going to bomb a power station in ‘a heavily populated part of Hanoi’ when he was shot down. …

Don’t expect the Vietnam government to release any records of how many men, women and children were killed or maimed during the twenty-three bombing sorties of pilot John McCain. The Vietnamese have put the generations of war behind them now and look to the future and the enjoyment of their lives, after suffering under years punishing economic sanctions by a vengeful U.S. government and its allies.

It is up to decent Americans to use their imaginations as to the results of McCain’s bombings, and also to consider that McCain presently runs in an election for the presidency of his nation; his aerial attacks were meant to assure that Ho Chi Minh would never have such an opportunity. Four years before young pilot McCain began what would be his 23 bombing of Hanoi, Eisenhower had confessed in his Mandate for Change that Ho, the hero of his country would have won 80%+ of an all Vietnam election, had Ike not had it blocked.

Media sponsored adulation of McCain, the bomber pilot, makes this lover of the Vietnamese people and their culture want to vomit.

Yours truly, whose near one hundred Vietnamese students in Hanoi all lost family – “killed by the Americans,” they would admit with unaccusing Buddhist equanimity — finds it difficult to stomach conglomerate media’s incessant hailing as presidential candidate John McCain as a hero along with any and every politician who ’served’ in what Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. condemned as a crime against humanity and a most shameful stain on America’s history.

This author currently lives in a neighborhood where people hold champion Muhammad Ali in their hearts for his refusal to dishonor his country. Ali refused compulsory military service during the genocidal war in Asia though he had his title of World Champion taken away from him as punishment.

What to make of the contradiction of public opinion that, on the one hand, respects Ali for his now honored moral uprightness in being against the U.S. war on Vietnam, and on the other hand. is intimidated into going along with the establishment’s need to honor a Senator who was shot down while following orders that constituted a war crime in the eyes of so many of his fellow citizens; citizens who know that “only following orders” does not excuse manslaughter as described in treaty obligations that automatically become an extension of the law of the land and the constitution.

Principle IV of the United Nations adopted Seven Nuremberg Principles reads,

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

P.S. One might suspect that former-pilot John McCain, having the memory of he himself confessing to war criminality, has been feeling some apprehension over the past seven years regarding the almost daily reported killing of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, then in Somalia and recently in Pakistan by U.S. air-strikes.

With a famed bomber pilot as its candidate, Republicans, especially, have avoided this topic. During their nominating convention, the Afghan government was insisting that 90 of their civilians were killed the week before in a single strike, as many as 60 of them children — the deaths verified by U.N. investigators.

Civilian death is a non-issue for the candidates, though it just goes on and on — yesterday, Associated Press reported eighteen Afghan women and children killed. Neither candidate can afford to be seen as critical of America’s military.

That Senator McCain and the ghost of Nuremberg Trial Chief Prosecutor Gen. Telford Taylor could have been sitting beside this writer as he watched, on the eve of the Republican convention, the August 31st 60 Minutes program “Bombing Afghanistan“:

The president of Afghanistan demands that the U.S. military curtail its use of air strikes against insurgents in his country because they are killing too many civilians.”

“There’s this macabre kind of calculus that the military goes through on every air strike, where they try to figure out how many dead civilians is dead bad guy worth,” says Marc Garlasco, who knows the calculus of civilian casualties as well as anyone.

At the Pentagon, Garlasco was chief of high value targeting at the start of the Iraq war. He told 60 Minutes how many civilians he was allowed to kill around each high-value target.

[Glarlasco speaking on camera in his high-tech studio of control panel screens showing coordinates of targets and air craft in a number of countries:]

“Our number was 30. So, for example … If you’re gonna kill up to 29 people in a strike …, that’s not a problem,” Garlasco explains. “But once you hit that number 30, we actually had to go to either President Bush, or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.”

Garlasco says, before the invasion of Iraq, he recommended 50 air strikes aimed at high-value targets — Iraqi officials.

But he says none of the targets on the list were actually killed. Instead, he says, ‘a couple of hundred civilians at least’ were killed.”

Americans have long become inured to the discomfort of that slightly squeamish feeling that accompanies the frequent and lightly unsettling report of the day’s toll of civilians killed in such an such small country by a U.S. air force strike.

Anyone else confused about the plausible innocence of Marc Garlasco and his team of controllers and pilots as they continue to ‘take out’ their permissible toll of 30 or less men, women and children per air attack within those victims’ own country — all ordered by each officer in the chain of command reaching up to the Vice President and President?

Is it possible that today’s multi tiered slayers of Afghanis, Iraqis, Somalis, and Pakistanis from the air, as well as pilot McCain, yesteryear’s air-born slayer of Vietnamese, are all unaware of Principle IV of the United Nations Seven Nuremberg Principles? Let’s read it again:

Adopted

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

To pose the question: “how many dead civilians is dead bad guy [or knocked out power station] worth” is in itself already self-incriminating.

For all the exoneration of the military from sinning against the Fifth Commandment provided by the cooperating clergy of organized religion with devilishly convoluted theories of ‘Just Wars’, those who would intentionally kill civilians just to have a chance at scoring a spectacular hit, still have to contend with those of us who know the common secular laws which apply equally to all, including those of skewered conscience, lacking in mercy and insensitive to “do not do unto others what you would not have done unto yourself.”

We must add, that those who bomb innocent men and who themselves have brothers and fathers, those who bomb women and who themselves have wives and sisters, and those who bomb children and have children of their own, are truly to be pitied.

For be the innocent men, women and children they bombed Vietnamese, Afghani, Iraqi, Somali or Pakistani (To mention other nationalities bombed might disturb the focus of this article), the bombers, who, whether wantonly, dutifully or cavalierly abandoned morality and discounted lives of others as collateral damage, failed their families and their countrymen, and in failing their victims, failed themselves as human beings made in the image of God.

Swallow hard, and pity him most, however, who, though having reached his maturity in age, still pretends to believe himself to have acted as a good soldier who followed orders under extenuating circumstances and therefore was and remains above the law and above criticism and prosecution. He might just be elected President of the United States of America.

By the way, General Telford Taylor, Counsel for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi War Criminals passed from our ever more lawless world on May 23, 1998.

I was trying to catch a bus to Tabay, just a half hour outside of Merida, and I didn’t want to carry the Sunday tomes the other papers offered with glossy mags and advertisements stuffed inside what is essentially a fluffy journalistic taco. Diario Vea is dependably lightweight on Sundays as it carries no advertising other than the lackluster government ads that seem to be the paper’s major source of income. Vea, as it’s known, is a left paper run by Guillermo García Ponce, rumored to be an old Communist who has lined up behind Chavez. Indeed, Vea is the only pro-government paper available in Venezuela, and that was the real reason I wanted to read Diario Vea today. Experience has taught me that US media shows and government lies broadcast as gospel have a life of maximum one week before reality bleeds through the cell doors where it’s locked away and tortured by those same media conglomerates and lying government. Keep in mind that five or so corporations control 90% of all we hear, see, read and, ultimately, therefore, think. Those five corporations form our opinions for that crucial first week after a story, which is about when the alternative media, like Diario Vea, have a chance to pick up the real story and get at the truth concealed by the “facts.”

Such has been the case this week in the wake of the “dramatic rescue” of Ingrid Betancourt, the three U.S. mercenaries and ten or so soldiers and police flown by helicopter into Bogotá while U.S. presidential candidate John McCain coincidentally toured the country. The whole event, even as broadcast here in Venezuela on government television stations, had the look and feel of an event staged for the screen and today’s Diario Vea points out that the reason was because it was, indeed, an event staged for the screen and the “facts,” which remain unacknowledged by the mainstream press in the U.S. and Colombia, tell a very different story from the media’s fairy tale version of the event.

The story entitled “There was no such rescue but a media ’show’” that appeared in today’s Diario Vea was drawn from the work of Bolivarian Press Agency writer Narciso Isa Conde and the Popular News Agency of Venezuela. According to the article the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) had agreed to turn over Ingrid Betancourt and the other hostages to Swiss and French negotiators who agreed to arrange to pick up the hostages from various locations in two helicopters. The Colombian military got wind of the upcoming release and took control of the helicopters. The collusion of the U.S. in the media spin, while yet to be proven, is quite likely, especially since McCain just “happened” to be in the neighborhood and would be able to take the spotlight in a crassly opportunistic attempt to boost his pathetic presidential campaign.

And so the “rescue” ironically turned out to be a hostage taking in reverse in which the FARC’s goodwill gesture was blindsided for the glorification the paramilitary, drug-dealing President Uribe and his friend, John McCain, as the armed forces of Colombia seized two civilian helicopters full of prisoners, who had, in fact, been released, and not “rescued.” But presidential vanity wasn’t the only thing behind this media show. The mainstream media leaked what may have been the major motives. In the July 5 edition of the Houston Chronicle, Bennett Roth writes, in a story entitled “Hostage rescue (sic) will likely reinforce U.S. ties” that the media show, which Roth calls a “commando operation,” will “strengthen . . . security ties with the United States” with Colombia. The article quotes Riordan Roett of Johns Hopkins as saying that the non-event of the “rescue” “validates to a great degree Plan Colombia.”

In an AP story on the same page, a headline announces that “Chavez [is] left on the sideline” by the “bold rescue,” and that the Venezuelan leader “could do little more than phone congratulations to President Uribe,” as if Chavez’s role as a world leader consisted only in his work to free FARC hostages. The article ends with a statement by Betancourt, that with “the help of our neighbors” the FARC could be shown “that there’s room in Latin America to win power the democratic way.”

So much for the lessons about this “bold rescue” from the perspective of the U.S. press and Ms. Betancourt. Colombians who have suffered terror and worse at the hands of the narco-government of Alvaro Uribe with his media shows and many other Latin Americans who have watched the civil war in Colombia for many years know otherwise. In this same issue of today’s Diario Vea there is an exclusive interview with Nicolás Rodríguez Bautista, “Gabino,” the commander of the National Liberation Army, Colombia’s other major guerrilla, composed of revolutionary Christians, Marxists and workers from the oil fields and others. He reminds readers of Diario Vea that the last time leftists lay down their arms and took up legal paths of political struggle, the Colombian state and oligarchy murdered six thousand militants, beheading the legal left of Colombia. For Gabino, Chavez can play a much greater role in the conflict as mediator, despite his recent calls for the Colombian guerrilla to what appears to be an unconditional surrender. “His declarations are no obstacle to his being a facilitator for peace in Colombia. His essential role as ruler and his status as leader on the continent hasn’t changed.”

So far the U.S. press, unfortunately including much of the alternative media, have largely gone along with the “official” version of events in Colombia, a story in which a “terrorist” guerrilla insurgency has plagued the country with irrational kidnappings, drug dealing and massive violence which can only be defeated by the combined forces of the U.S. and its faithful sidekick, the Colombian government.

Nevertheless, Diario Vea presents a very different picture of the country. As the interview with Gabino highlights, it is the paramilitaries, allied with the government and oligarchy of Colombia, that have been most involved in the drug trade and the violence, including kidnappings. Since Uribe has been in power, over four hundred union activists have been killed by those same forces. In defiance of international law, the Colombian military has bombed Ecuador to kill members of the FARC and the government still offers no guarantees of protection to a legal left. Hopefully in the future media in the U.S. will follow suit with Diario Vea and Venezuelan news agencies and do a more critical analysis of the joint fabrications of the U.S. and Colombian governments.

Finally, almost forty years after another young man emerged from a defoliated jungle with a bizarre skin condition to father a son with strange, canoe-shaped feet before he, himself, succumbed to cancer, the US will know what should be done to make amends. Sixteen years after that man’s son produced a daughter of his own, afflicted with the same canoe-shaped feet, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world is finally getting down to the business of deciding whether or not it might have an obligation to help families like these. I have to wonder how the results of that million dollar study will ultimately benefit the generations of individuals and families afflicted with birth defects and early cancer deaths, who live in the poverty that still lingers following decades of US-imposed embargo, superimposed upon years and years of war. Will the proposed $14 million project to isolate a patch of dioxin-soaked ground at the Da Nang airport bring them any solace?

I’ve been tagging along recently with a group of American college students affiliated with the SUNY Brockport Vietnam Program as they make their Thursday morning home-visits to families of disabled children here in Da Nang. The students are studying to be social workers, so they do what they’ve been trained to do: they sit down with families and ask them questions. Then they listen.

Two weeks ago, we sat and listened to the diminutive mother of the canoe-footed girl tell us how sad she was that her daughter, a serious and dedicated student, could not attend high-school. The school, she said, was too far to walk to, and the mother was not able to balance her daughter safely on the back of her bicycle in order to take her there. (Her daughter’s canoe-shaped feet not only prevented her from walking without wooden crutches, but also made it impossible for her to pedal a bicycle herself.) A kind friend who lived next to the school, she said, had offered to let the daughter stay with her so that she could more easily attend school but, alas, that was impossible.

“Why is that?” asked a student.

“Because,” confided the mother, “my daughter cannot stand without her crutches and so cannot shower and attend to her ‘personal hygiene’ without my help.”

Being the only physical therapist in the room, it fell to me to suggest that, perhaps, the girl might sit down on a plastic chair when she showered and that, if a hole were cut in the seat of the chair, it might allow her to attend to her own hygiene when she used a typical “hole-in-the-floor” Vietnamese toilet.

The mother’s jaw dropped and the father beamed. As we departed, they each pumped my hand vigorously, smiling broadly. What had happened? Somebody sat down and listened to their story and made a simple suggestion. And, because of that, a sixteen-year old, third-generation victim of Agent Orange might go to high school.

We didn’t need a million dollar study. All it took was a few American college students and one middle-aged American PT, listening to one family’s story. Why is that so damned difficult? We didn’t even have to buy the plastic chair.

Michele Barrett’s new work from Verso titled Casualty Figures takes a look at the lives of five men who fought for the British military in the First World War and suffered some form of shell shock. The five vignettes that make up the bulk of the text include passages from the men’s letters home to family and loved ones. They also include brief sections of unpublished accounts by the men themselves regarding their battle experiences. Those experiences included battles where 10,000 of the German enemy and 3,000 British soldiers died in one battle. The stories also tell of men being holed up in trenches for days on end with nothing but corpses to keep them company and other tales of battlements being built from the corpses of the enemy. They relate moments of realization by the individuals portrayed that the war itself was pointless and served no soldier’s interest, no matter who he was fighting for.

The two most interesting men portrayed by Barrett are Bombardier Ronald Kirth and Air Vice Marshall Sir William Tyrell. After Kirth refused to obey an order to bombard a church, he was demoted to a lower rank and loses his leave and some of his rations. This experience and his experience that caused the death of a friend when they were bombarded while manning a pill box led him to become a pacifist. The death of his friend and the events immediately following the bombardment when Kirth was catapulted several meters into the air caused Kirth to experience total amnesia. That episode would be the first of many such experiences. Realizing that he would not have suffered this if he hadn’t been in the pill box (or the war), and understanding that the amnesiac episodes are his brain’s method of coping with that he saw and felt, Kirth became opposed to all wars.

Tyrell, on the other hand, saw his bout of shell shock as a weakness that he must destroy by becoming tougher and more military-like. The rest of his life was spent doing exactly that, both in his professional military life and his personal life. The stories of these two men vividly illustrate the nature of a society steeped in militarism and its effect on individuals subjected to the militarists’ propaganda and institutions. Likewise, the stories of the other three — two who died young and a third who lived within himself until he died — show the effects of those who fight the militarists’ wars for whatever reason. Indeed, it is these three who may be more typical than either Kirth or Tyrell.

By telling these stories, Barrett brings home to the reader the pointlessness of modern war and the damage it inflicts on the survivors. Looking through the lens provided by Barrett’s selection of these five men’s stories, the reader is reminded quite graphically of the consequence of one of humanity’s bloodiest adventures in human slaughter — World War I, the war to end all wars. Many of the men who ended up dead from wounds in World War I nowadays survive similar wounds thanks to medical progress. Unfortunately, this fact only seems to make war more palatable to the politicians, generals, arms manufacturers and powerbrokers that depend on it for their livelihood.

Long Shadows is a book similar to Casualty Figures in that it relates the stories of men (and two women) who served in the military. The difference, however, lies in the fact that the individuals in Long Shadows decided to use their experience and the trauma it caused to work towards opposing future wars of power and empire. It wasn’t always an easy path to that decision for these folks, but it is one that all of the individuals writing in this collection believe to be the best one they could have made. The nineteen veterans whose thoughts and memories appear in this book are all members of the Madison, Wisconsin Clarence Kailin chapter of Veterans for Peace, an organization of veterans with over 120 chapters throughout the United States. The collection’s writers include a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, vets of World War Two, the Korean War, the war in Vietnam, an Israeli-American vet, and veterans of the Middle East and Asian wars that began with Desert Storm in 1990.

Evocative and often heartwrenching, these stories are a collection of epiphanies by men and women who discovered through personal experience how terrible and pointless war really is. While many of them are now pacifist, one or two are more specific in the wars they oppose. Specifically, they oppose wars of empire and conquest, while supporting the right of people to defend themselves from invasion and occupation. Coming from all walks of life — wealthy, poor, farmers, city dwellers, progressive and reactionary, white skinned and black — each of the individuals underwent a transformation either during their wartime service or in the years succeeding it that brought them to a point where they felt the only option was to speak out no matter what the cost. Some, like WW II vet Charles Sweet, came to this decision because of their children. Others, because of their need to deal with personal demons and guilt. One or two never would have predicted while they were serving that they would join the ranks of the antiwar protesters. Still others, like Will Williams, needed to find a place to transpose the anger within himself (an anger growing from the racism he experienced as a black American) into something positive.

If you don’t tear up at least once while you read this book, then you are not capable of tearing up. Whether it’s a veteran telling the story of seeing his buddy die or his attempts to deal with the torture and wanton killing he either took part in or was unable or unwilling to stop, the emotional level of these memories left this writer drained. Some of the vets herein were diagnosed with PTSD, but most were left to deal with their demons on their own. Still, the book is not all wretched sadness, Indeed, it is the hope for a more peaceful future growing out of the struggle these men and women have joined that is the overriding message in these pages.

As the friend of several members of living and deceased Vets for Peace, I responded immediately and positively to a request to review Long Shadows. Having grown up in a military family during the Vietnam era, I think I understand something of what it is like to buck the expectations of relatives and society and take a stand against the military and its purpose. For those who actually wore the uniform to reject it and the brainwashing and come through that intact is worthy of respect. To use those experiences in support of preventing others from becoming veterans is even more noble. That, I believe, is the primary intention of the men and women appearing in this book. That is also why you should share this book with those currently serving or considering such a move. It might convince them to change their mind.

For the next five or so years, Carl Oglesby devoted a good portion of his life to SDS and opposing the war in Vietnam. His opposition was based on his belief that the war was contrary to the ideals of the country he lived in. This belief was common among many of the war’s opponents who believed it to be a mistake. Oglesby took it a step further, however, and realized that the war was more than a mistake. He concluded that it was systemic. From there he began to organize. His work took him to southern Vietnam on a factfinding tour, Paris for a War Crimes Tribunal, and even to Cuba. Although his recollection of the positions of members of the War Crimes tribunal do not jibe with essays written at the time, this might be attributed to Oglesby’s use of memory over recorded history—always a potentially dangerous substitution. In between, he lived in several cities in the United States and met hundreds of people from many walks of life.

Recently, his memoirs of the period, titled Ravens In the Storm, were published by Scribners. The book is an interesting read that chronicles Oglesby’s political life during the period and his opinions of the organization and the greater movement that he worked in. For those who were involved with SDS and other New Left organizations during the 1960s and early 1970s, there will be moments when you find yourself disagreeing with Oglesby’s impressions. There will also be times when you find yourself in total agreement. No matter what, the book is an honest and insightful chronicle of the time and its politics. Oglesby was always a presence. His brand of politics was what former Vice President Spiro Agnew might have characterized as radical-liberal. He was never a Marxist, but Marxism informed his analysis.

The book opens with an innocence that is slowly lost as the war grinds on and the repression against the movement against it intensifies. By the end of 1968, Oglesby finds himself isolated from the very organization he helped build. His continued belief that there was still room for dialog with members of the war establishment was met with scorn and disdain by most of the rest of the SDS leadership and he was drummed out of the organization. This belief does seem almost naïve by that time, given the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy earlier that year. To Oglesby, however, the alternative of a Marxist-Leninist revolution being offered by his comrades—among them many future Weathermen—was unreal and based on frustration and anger, not on a clear assessment of the political reality. To his credit, he acknowledges that he misread the true intentions of the counterintelligence programs (Cointelpro) being used against SDS. He thought they were merely collecting data, not trying to destroy the group. The future Weathermembers and many others knew better, even though their response was apparently just as wrong as Oglesby’s diagnosis.

Like many former SDS members, including some former leaders of the Weather Underground, Oglesby blames Weather as much as he blames Cointelpro for the demise of SDS. Although I personally believe this explanation ignores the role of history and replaces that role with personalities, I must admit that Oglesby does the best to make a case for his position. One can still hear the bitterness he felt at his dismissal by the leadership cadre and his disdain for their politics and arrogance. To his credit, there is little vindictiveness on these pages, just what remains of the bitterness. The story of the demise of SDS will always be one that provokes spirited discussion. However, there is no longer any need to take a side in the argument. Instead, we should learn from that episode and the rest of SDS’s history. Ravens In the Storm is a valuable and interesting addition to that history from an important member.

Ravens In the Storm is a book about the battles against the evils of war, racism and US imperialism. It is also about the internal battles of an organization that formed to fight those evils. Heartfelt and impassioned, the story Oglesby tells on these pages is instructive and hopeful. It is also occasionally tragic. The quixotic struggle of a generation of US residents to end a terrible, immoral war has always been a good tale that should inspire. Mr. Oglesby’s version does not fail. In fact, it excels. His ultimately even-handed description of the rise and fall of SDS has it all—innocence, anger, paranoia, police repression, friendships made and friendships unmade. Those who were there can read it, remember and learn. Those who weren’t can read it and learn.

My dad picked me up after the fair closed down. After we had packed the exhibit in the trunk of his station wagon, we got in the front seat. On the way from College Park, MD to our house in Laurel, MD—about ten miles away—we listened to the speech by President Johnson where he told the nation that he would not “seek or accept the nomination” for his party’s candidacy for the presidency. After a brief discussion with my dad about what this meant and why it happened, we turned to a conversation about the differences between FM and AM radio. Then he told me that he had been given orders to go to Vietnam. I didn’t say anything while he told me when he thought he would be leaving and what it meant for the family. He never mentioned whether he thought what he would be doing there was right or wrong. When we got home, I talked with my parents for a few minutes and went to bed.

The next day in Social Studies class the teacher talked about how remarkable it was that Lyndon Johnson had decided not to run for reelection. From there, he segued into a conversation about the elections. After a quick show of hands regarding who we supported, he asked me why I supported Gene McCarthy. I told him it was because he wanted to end the war in Vietnam. In fact, McCarthy was calling for a negotiated settlement with the northern Vietnamese and the NLF while everyone else (except for maybe Bobby Kennedy) was still talking about some kind of victory. There was only one other person in the class who supported McCarthy. Two or three others supported Bobby Kennedy, who had entered the race only days before. Most supported either Humphrey (who was LBJ’s replacement) or Nixon. On the playground at lunch that day, one of the Nixon supporters called me a faggot because I supported McCarthy.

Three days later, April 4, 1968, I was watching TV with my older sister when the graphic before a breaking news bulletin flashed across the screen. I walked over to the TV and turned up the volume. (There were no remotes back then.) A talking head came on the screen and announced that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot in Memphis. My sister and I looked at each other. We knew this was something big. I sat down to watch the incoming news while my sister put our younger siblings to bed. I knew that King had been in Memphis supporting a strike of sanitation workers and that there had been trouble at one of the marches. When our parents got home, I told my father what had happened. He sat down for a few minutes and watched as news reports filtered in about angry blacks gathering in different parts of Washington, DC. That night, I listened to WTOP–the all news station in DC– relay reports on the growing insurrection in that city and around the nation. When I got up to deliver my newspaper route the next morning, the front page was covered with banner headlines and full color pictures of the assassination and the angry response.

The following week, our family attended a cookout at a neighbor’s house down the block in our lily-white middle class suburban development. Most of Maryland was under curfew, gun sales were forbidden and liquor sales had been stopped in DC, Baltimore and several counties. While I ate beans, salad and burgers from the paper plate I had loaded up, some of the adults conversed about the murder and the insurrection. The remarks I heard from some of the neighbors changed my impression of them forever. I had never heard such racist remarks before except from some of the working class toughs who wore their hair greased back like early Elvis and smoked cigarettes while hanging out in front of the Peoples Drug Store at the local shopping center. If I learned one thing that night, it was that the ignorance of racism knew no class boundaries. The names they called Martin Luther King and the suggestions they had for the local police to “keep order” in the black section of town were reminiscent of the Klan literature one of my newspaper customers gave me almost every time I collected his month’s payment from him. Literature that I threw away after reading it the first time and being repulsed by the hatred therein.

After the King assassination I began to read the newspaper much more carefully. Not just the sports section like before, but all of the news sections as well. Prior to that, I had skimmed the front page and the local section, but had never really read anything too carefully. As the presidential campaign heated up, I switched my allegiance to Bobby Kennedy. His ability to gather huge crowds no matter where he showed up—West Virginia one day and Washington, DC the next—was impressive. He had somehow figured out how to speak to people on a different level than all of the other candidates and he said he was against the war. Meanwhile, I had discovered another newspaper that told a completely different story. That paper was Washington DC’s first underground paper, The Washington Free Press. A friend’s older brother who went to the University of Maryland used to give me his old copies when he was done with them. Somewhere not very far from the boring suburban redneck town that I lived in there was something going on that was both new and connected to the revolution I was certain had to be happening somewhere. It had to be happening because the Beatles were singing about it, the Rolling Stones seemed to have joined it, and the Free Press reported it. I didn’t understand why they didn’t like Kennedy or thought the elections were bullshit but I wanted to find out why.

When Bobby Kennedy was killed I was watching TV with my sister once again. I remember feeling angry, sad and bitter all at the same time. After he was killed I gave up on the elections for a while. No more passing out campaign literature at the shopping center or door to door. There was nothing left to do but wait until the convention and hope some kind of miracle happened that would stop the war. A war my dad was heading off to in a few short months. In late July we took a family vacation at a beach near Norfolk, VA. My father was getting ready to go to some kind of school there that was required before he went away to Vietnam. The name of that school? Air War College. You don’t have to guess what the general course of studies was. After a week, my older sister and I returned to Laurel. I delivered my newspapers, mowed lawns for the neighbors and hung out with my friends listening to music, reading, and watching TV. It was one of those nights of TV watching when another news bulletin flashed across the screen. Soviet troops had invaded Czechoslovakia. This was a year for news bulletins. I followed this event with interest because I was secretly hoping that the Czechs truly could find some kind of humane alternative to both Stalinism and monopoly capitalism, even if that terminology was unknown to me at the time.

Not long after that night, I began watching the coverage of the Democratic Convention in Chicago. I recall a sign shown on television that said “Welcome to Czechago.” Those few nights of watching cops beat the shit out of people and politicians showing their true colors—be they fascist in nature or on the side of the protesters—did more to educate and radicalize me than pretty much anything I had ever read or would ever read in my life. The angry repartee between William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal on one of the networks gelled in my mind along with pictures of tear gas, bloodied reporters, people chanting “The whole world’s watching,” and my mom crying because her country was falling to pieces. When my dad came home for a weekend, he tried to convince me that the protesters were wrong and that voting was the way to solve the country’s problems. I was not convinced.

By this time, Detroit Tigers pitcher Denny McLain was getting closer and closer to a mark not reached by a major league pitcher in many seasons. He was approaching thirty wins. Although I had given my heart to the Red Sox the year before, I tried to watch or listen to every game McLain pitched. If it wasn’t on TV and I couldn’t get the game over my AM radio via the nighttime skip phenomenon that somehow brought the games to my transistor, then I reconstructed the box scores the next morning before I delivered my papers. When the World Series came around, I was pulling for Bob Gibson and the St. Louis Cardinals. I loved to watch Gibson pitch even though he had beat the Red Sox the year before.

Meanwhile, in school we were composing a scrapbook for the elections. Each of us had to choose either Nixon or Humphrey for our scrapbook and fill it with materials related to the campaign. I chose Humphrey, even though he was for the war, he wasn’t Nixon. When it came time to turn in the scrapbook, I covered the front of the binder with “Dick Gregory for President” stickers. My teacher was not happy. She yelled at me and asked how I could support someone who opposed the war when my dad was on his way over there. I snidely suggested that the answer was obvious and ended up being sent to the counselor. He yelled at me and told me to get my head out of my ass. I left there thinking that he should do the same.

On election day we watched the final returns come in over the television in our social studies class. There weren’t any exit poll projections back then. The news people actually let the election run its course. When Walter Cronkite said that Nixon had won I had a feeling that the world as I knew it was over. In fact, it was only getting worse. The difference was now I was aware of it. I didn’t hit the streets in protest for another year but I was already there in my heart and soul.

World Champion Muhammad Ali is an honest American hero of the “Vietnam War,” correctly called “The American War” by the Vietnamese who managed to survived it.

Ali had the courage to stand up for an upright America even though it did not exist (except maybe in the minds of still segregated Afro-Americans). Ali inspired thousands to resist being drafted, and the 125,000 who fled to Canada rather than be invaders and killers of innocent foreigners in their very own country, they too, are in a sense veterans and Americans we can be truly proud of.

Tears of joy come to one’s eyes when one sees a newsreel of young Ali firmly saying that he would not participate in an unjust war against the Vietnamese. Ali is as much a veteran of that war as those who did participate in that violence of genocidal terrorism against a nation of people who had been an ally of America against the Japanese and Vichy French who occupying its homeland.

How many veterans knew anything about the country they were willingly going to bomb and shoot people in? Ignorance has never been an excuse before the law.

Shall they be honored in 2007 for their ignorance then, and for the killing they managed to get done in a war now euphemistically explained away as ‘a mistake’? Oops? Any thought to the millions that were high altitude carpet bombed, napalmed, ‘searched and destroyed’, massacred?

A ‘mistake’? For sure! Because America lost, and was eventually thrown out. But not an honest ‘mistake’, and of course, no reparations paid out to the victims of America’s ‘mistake’, nor even public apologies given.

Sure, Americans can blame the insidious, relentless and deceptively inclusive anti-communist war propaganda by media, naively thought to be free and uncontrolled by the military-industrial conglomerate complex.

But lets remember, boxer Ali, actress Jane Fonda, minister Martin Luther King Jr., professors like MIT’s Noam Chomsky, and millions people across the United States and the world were not fooled in the least.

Millions beautiful Vietnamese men, women and children — every one of them is worth remembering on Veterans Day as well. Maybe even more so, because they died in their own country, most in their own towns, many in their very own homes because the veterans honored on Veterans Day came to their country, armed and uninvited.

Vietnam veterans should most certainly be remembered, but remembered and respected as home-side victims of an illegal, monstrous and pitiless American war upon an Asian colonial population.

Members of the Veterans For Peace and Vietnam Vets Against the War organizations hold the Vietnamese they were ordered to fight in high esteem with painful feelings of regret and compassion. And they have deep compassion for themselves and their fellow veterans who were made to follow immoral orders, and usually didn’t have the presence of mind, education or courage to refuse to follow such orders. They were not able to serve their country well, nor any humanitarian cause of freedom, and certainly not their own human conscience.

Veteran, now Senator, McCain who flew 23 bombing missions knowing that Eisenhower had written in his book that if there had been an all Vietnam election (blocked by Ike himself), that Ho Chi Minh would have won by a plurality of more than 80%. McCain just followed military orders, as an unthinking automaton?

Veteran and presidential candidate, John Kerry, who said he killed a South Vietnamese before realizing it was wrong during his reenlisted tour of duty. He then went before Congress to denounce U.S. war crimes. But his nomination ceremony thirty years later Vietnam Vets paraded to thunderous applause — the “Vietnam War” had become heroic again.

Muhammad Ali did not need to go to Vietnam to know it was wrong, and he has never changed his mind.

Former Governor, Senator, now President of New School University, Bob Kerrey, who on “60 Minutes” was exposed by his own point man of having had his Seals gun down 19 young women and children, after seeing to the throat cutting of an elderly man and his family, accepted a medal for doing it, under a report of “enemy successfully killed.” It never occurred to this now highly placed educator to pull the media into the dock it had placed him in, decades after originally teaching him merciless and indiscriminate anti-communism.

Did these three now highly placed American veterans serve their country and countrymen when they killed Vietnamese in Vietnam? They all had a good college education, which must have included a history of colonialism, especially the brutality of French colonial subjugation of the Vietnamese. They must have known that Ho Chi Minh was decorated by our OSS as a dedicated ally of ours against the Japanese and Vichy French. They must have known that Truman, against Roosevelt’s promise, had brought a new French army back in US ships to fight an 8-year war against our former allies, the Vietnamese. All this, because Ho Chi Minh was a communist? Not so likely. A top cabinet minister of the French government in Paris was also a communist, but that was OK.

Veterans who loved their country enough to know what the fighting was about is one thing. Veterans who risked their lives fighting for injustice and against human respect, blindly following leaders pretending to be what they were not, is quite another.

How do the Viet vets react to the recent U.S. sponsorship for World Trade Organization membership for the very same Communist Government of Vietnam they fought to destroy with a resultant loss of life second only to the Holocaust?

The world has become increasingly complicated and yet the U.S. cartel of a conglomerate mass entertainment media is increasingly reductive, simplistic and self-righteous, hypocritically praising democracy it does not practice. We must become intolerant of those who work to make war acceptable, even attractive to their audiences.

Torture or not to torture has been a news item recently. Americans seem to have lost their sense of right and wrong, as they did during the Viet war when they had difficulty in judging Lieutenant Calley of Mai Lai Massacre fame

Shuttering anguish is what veterans feel for leaders who knowingly sent them to kill (and die, though dying is less tragic than wrongly killing), for a wrong cause. Especially galling, when veterans have to listen to praise for any of the six presidents who oversaw the killing in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia (and other places). These presidents betrayed the trust both the military and their country placed in them, yet even after CIA files released incriminates them, commercial media goes on praising these presidents as fine and likeable fellows.

Fully awakened Americans would like to help rehabilitate veterans who “served” in “mistaken” wars by turning this nation around toward morality and historical honesty, and forgoing pompous and ridiculous attempts to praise themselves indiscriminately, announce our intention to arrange at least some compensation to Vietnamese for our now admitted “MISTAKE”!

Put ourselves in their shoes. The shoes of Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, and now Iraqi, Afghan bereaved families. Could we even imagine such bombings upon US towns and countryside? We can improve the whole world and ourselves with such imagination.

What happiness such a moral awakening would occasion. Is this not perhaps still possible, even under capitalism, despite its nature for expansion and world domination? How wonderful if America could take a time out and recognize the suffering of the non-American victims of its many wars and CIA crimes in third world nations while Champion Muhammad Ali is still alive and with us as a continuing American inspiration.

Gareth Porter: I don’t know that I have the authority—that’s subjective. I think I have the right background, though: the curiosity of the historian to figure out what actually happened—to solve mysteries or puzzles—in terms of American policy, specifically, policy towards war; and then, International Politics. I have an interest in policy on a theoretical level. I studied under Hans Morgenthau at the University of Chicago. Morgenthau had turned against the Vietnam War by then. I considered myself a realist, taking the idea of the Balance of Power seriously—that nation-states act in terms of power relationships. That was really the only way to understand the behavior of states in international politics. Obviously, that played a role in the way I looked at, in retrospect, the Vietnam War.

GC: Perils was published in 2005. Would you describe the theme, or themes?

GP: There are really two interrelated themes.

When I began my research, I understood that power relations had something to do with the road to war in Vietnam. But, it seemed, the pertinent literature had ignored that. I had a strong sense from my reading of Cold War history, specifically of Vietnam, and particularly my editing of a two-volume documentary history of the Vietnam War back in the late 70s—I had an intuition that the Communist world was much weaker than had been reflected in the history of the Vietnam War, and the Cold War. I began my research convinced that was a key to understanding how and why the US stumbled into war. That was my first theme: that power relations matter, that there was not a real balance of power between the US and Soviet Union during this critical period from 1954 to 1965, but, rather, a profound imbalance in which the US strategically dominated the Soviet Union. It’s clear that the Soviet Union was very much on the defensive. And the US, on the offensive, had a freedom of action the Soviets didn’t have. And that played a key role in shaping US decision-making on Vietnam.

The second theme, which I discovered as I read the documents, is that there was a big difference in the responses to Vietnam between Johnson and Kennedy on the one hand and their national security advisers on the other. I go back to Eisenhower and I concluded that he was totally opposed to intervention, but that a number of people in his administration were pro-military intervention. So, there was a conflict there as well.

GC: But Ike handled it better?

GP: Eisenhower was very strong dealing with national security issues, very self-confident. He was able to quash any pressures for war. But, in the case of Kennedy and Johnson, there were inexorable pressures from the key national security officials of their administrations to commit US forces in Vietnam.

GC: What accounts for this difference between the perspectives of the president and his own advisers?

GP: National security advisers define their role as managing US power. That’s the main thing they do, whereas the president, inevitably, has a broader range of issues. He has to put the advancement of US power interests alongside other issues. He’s much more sensitive to the costs of committing forces.

GC: And the president is always balancing his own perception of domestic politics.

GP: That, of course, is true, and it can cut both ways. In fact, what I conclude with both Kennedy and Johnson is that domestic politics was part of the pressure on them to make an accommodation with their national security advisers in taking steps towards war.

GC: Your book depicts the tension between policy-making on the one hand, and “reality” on the other. I’m not talking about the kind of reality some Bush administration hack told reporter Ron Suskind that the U.S., as an empire, had the power to define; rather, about the kind that can bite us on the ass when we’re not paying attention. For example, after 14 months of struggle with his own advisers, Johnson agrees to bomb North Vietnam. But, in the interval, two new realities had emerged which would change the outcome. Can you tell us what happened?

GP: Between the beginning of the bombing and the build-up of ground forces, the Viet Cong had become much stronger than the national security advisers had anticipated; they were able to advance much farther and faster against the South Vietnamese army. Our advisers had assumed that the Communist forces in the south were not strong enough to advance dramatically without help from the north.

Second, when the U.S. began its build-up of ground forces, the assumption was that the threat of even heavier bombing, including the threat of the use of nuclear weapons, would deter the North Vietnamese from countering. That again was a profound under-estimation of the determination and capabilities of the North Vietnamese. Basically, there were two fundamental miscalculations, based on the notion that US supremacy, at the strategic and at the conventional power level, would ensure that the United States could fight a low-level war and keep it from getting out of control.

GC: Others have written about the bureaucratic nightmare that endures through changes of administration and/or party. But, I don’t think anyone has documented the twists and turns as well. Your 403-page book has over 120 pages of notes, bibliography and index. And I think the vital role of your book lies not only in helping us to understand that murky and parlous era, but in providing a template for understanding our present crises … Can you talk a little more about how politics enters into policy-making? I’m thinking about the notion of collective responsibility.

GP: Right. That’s an idea I feel strongly about.

The assumption that diplomatic historians of the US have shared–I would say almost universally–in writing about Vietnam is that the Constitutional power of the president is absolute in making war. The idea that the president does not make the definitive decision to go to war is so outside the realm of possibility that it’s dismissed. I think there’s a perfectly logical explanation for that: diplomatic historians write within a paradigm in which it’s assumed that policy-making is guided by the Constitution, that there’s a logical relationship between legal responsibilities on the one hand and political reality on the other. That’s why it’s so difficult for them to imagine that the president is really not the critical force in powering the US towards war.

In 1962, before the Cuban missile crisis, but after Kennedy had failed to take strong action against Castro and the Soviet Union when it was discovered that there were Soviet military personnel in Cuba, the Republicans then mounted a very politically effective campaign, through the media and through Republican spokespeople to attack Kennedy for being soft on Communism and weak in the face of this alleged threat from the Soviet power on our doorstep. And, there’s no doubt that Kennedy was chastened by this. And that played a role in his taking such strong measures in the Cuban missile crisis, in a sense to risk nuclear war (although we now know that he had taken steps to make sure that would not result). Kennedy felt strong political pressure, he felt his presidency could be weakened by Republicans in a situation where they could attack him on a key issue of national security. I think that caused him to feel he had to have his own national security advisers fully on board to impress the public that he was not making any policy moves to avoid the use of force in Vietnam that did not have the full support of his top national security advisers. The same thing was true, even more so, for Johnson because he was even deeper into a situation where choices were either to face the “Who lost South Vietnam?” syndrome, or to send troops. In that situation, he felt the need, even more than Kennedy, to have his top national security advisers—the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff—at least neutralized if not supporting him.

GC: That’s how politics works vis-a-vis the two-party system. But, you describe another phenomenon—the way politics are internalized inside an administration, so that Kennedy had to worry about his own people; you cite examples where Averill Harriman, for example, was practically sabotaging some of Kennedy’s efforts to open new channels of communication with the North Vietnamese. So, I wonder if you could focus on the role of the national security bureaucracy. Where do they come from? What are the origins, the operation and evolution? Most Americans do not perceive that our government works this way. How did it happen?

GP: This is the reality that dawned on me as I was researching this book. We have been virtually unaware of the extent to which the national security bureaucracy has taken on a crucial degree of power over policy; in effect, over issues of war and peace. It’s both military and civilian in character. Both are extremely important to the power we’re talking about. They’re both able to maneuver, to use methods to pressure the president, to narrow his options so it’s more likely he’ll accept their options.

We know that there are historical cases where the military leadership has been against using force—more so than civilian leadership. But in the case of Vietnam, it’s very clear: the military leadership, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon, the top officials in the State Department and National Security Council officials were all leaning towards military intervention. The question is precisely the one you ask: What’s the character of this political entity which developed during the Cold War, which has sprung up as a major power center that did not exist before the Cold War and which exercises so much influence over policy? My key concern is that the national security bureaucracy does not act in the abstract interest of the US, or the American people–although I think it believes it does—but, rather, in ways that further the personal and institutional interests of the advisers themselves.

GC: The implications of which are enormous, illusion-shattering …

GP: It means that the military services are concerned with maintaining and adding to their missions in a war; and when there’s an opportunity to fight a war where they feel they can accomplish those ends, they will do so. For individuals who are heads of bureaucracies—the State Department, the Defense Department, the National Security staff of the White House—they have a personal agenda to advance or expand the power of the US and to thereby add to their own status, their own prestige, their own political positions, their career c.v.’s, and various personal interests. That causes officials to push American power forward.

GC: We think that we have a balanced system, that we have checks and balances between the three branches of our government. But, in fact, the balance within the executive branch, which has become the most powerful, the most important in this age of the imperial presidency—that balance is very tenuous.

GP: Very tenuous, indeed. And, this is one of those occasions when we can skip forward, and note how the relationship between the president and his key national security advisers under the Bush administration represents a caricature of a president who is under pressure from his advisers to go to war.

Now, Bush, of course, is not Kennedy and he’s not Johnson. He’s much more willing to be manipulated. He’s a man who has no experience in foreign policy, who knows nothing about foreign policy and is really not interested in learning; therefore, he leans on his advisers far more heavily. So, even though Bush is ideologically attuned to the neo-conservatives, he is nevertheless subject to the manipulation of these officials who have their own agendas. And, we see in the case of the neo-conservatives the clearest example of a group of national security advisers who came into office with their own idea of what they wanted to accomplish—a very ambitious goal. And we have an exaggerated version of the kind of dynamics that I describe in our march to war in Vietnam.

GC: I’d like to continue to probe this bureaucratic nightmare, this meta-government. You said this began with the Cold War. I might put it back even further in the Roosevelt Administration; but, a long time ago I read that Truman had established the National Security State, and that we were no longer a republic. Do you care to dive into that?

GP: I think it’s true that the beginning of a policy of exploitation of a power advantage began in the Truman Administration. It was not so self-evident as it was during the Eisenhower Administration, where I show that in the first Indochina crisis of 1954, Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles were acutely aware of the great advantage that they had over the Soviet Union and China, and very clearly exploited that to pressure the Communist side—the Soviets, Chinese and Viet Minh—to accept a settlement at the Geneva Conference of 1954 that certainly did not reflect the local power balance within Indochina. But, I would say that it was during the Truman administration that we had this huge military build-up which put an enormous distance between the US and Soviet Union. It was that obvious power gap that gave the US an incentive to act more aggressively.

I think what you’re referring to is that the institutions—the military structure, the military bases network—existed essentially by the end of World War II, that we were already in most of these bases, particularly in East Asia then. So it was a result of that war that the US was able to exert the kind of power it did—particularly in East Asia, where the Pacific Ocean became virtually an “American Lake”. I agree that the problem began even before the Cold War, but then it was exacerbated as soon as the US carried out the first major military build-up before the Korean War, which accelerated during that war.

GC: If the process you describe is correct, concerning this government by bureaucracy, what does that tell us about our democracy? Is our president anything but a figurehead?

GP: It depends on the individual. There’s no doubt that individuals who end up in the White House, because of their background in becoming politicians, have been, since Eisenhower, individuals who are more readily willing to accommodate these institutions—particularly the military. Given their incredible power—again, I refer primarily to the military services—without somebody who is extremely determined, with a firm idea about how to prevent these institutions from being able to implement their own agendas, the president is not going to be successful in holding out against them. I think Eisenhower was the last president who was even partially successful in resisting the pressure of the military. And, of course, the military services were associated with a very powerful industrial lobby which worked through Congress. You have not just a military-industrial complex, but a military-industrial-Congressional complex. And when Eisenhower uttered his famous injunction about the military-industrial complex, he was not talking about some abstract principle; he was talking about something he had personally experienced. They had tried to force Eisenhower to go along with their own preferred national security policies, in terms of budget and programs, and Eisenhower had rebuffed them. But, they attacked him mercilessly. The representatives of the air force, in the Senate, particularly, were very critical of Eisenhower. They accused him of being soft on Communism and soft on the Soviet Union. And he never forgot that, and that was an expression of great bitterness on Eisenhower’s part.

GC: The final speech, the—

GP: The January, 1961 speech.

GC: He gave that—wasn’t it the day before he left office?

GP: It was either the day before or two days before. It was his final word as president.

GC: His parting shot … But he was also safe when he made that statement—

GP: (Laughing.) Yes. He made that from the safety of an almost-finished presidency.

GC: Okay … I’d like to transition to WHERE WE ARE NOW! Of course, there’s always an ebb and flow between past, present and future, but, it seems to me, the Kennedy Administration is transitional in various ways. For example, you write that Kennedy was planning “a strict timetable for withdrawal of US troops” while maintaining “a public rhetorical stance of staunch opposition to withdrawal.” He was saying one thing while planning another. Kennedy, like Johnson after him, feared the political consequences of being accused of losing Vietnam. So, I’m wondering: What games are they playing with our heads now? Must we not take everything that Bush, Cheney, Gates, Rice say with a mountain of salt? Concerning our policies in the Middle East, of what should we be especially doubtful?

GP: I would go even further than that, to say that it’s almost inherent in the nature of national security policy that any time a government becomes involved in asserting its power, regardless of its ideological bent—whether extreme right, centrist, or in the case of Lyndon Johnson, even centrist-liberal—you must assume that there will be a huge gap between what is being presented to the public as the rationale for policy, as well as the intentions for the policy, and what is actually being done and the reasons they are being done. I believe that this is of the essence of any government involved in a worldwide assertion of power and is maintaining the kind of military presence and effort to exert political dominance that the US has tried to exercise in the last several years. And, I have every reason to believe that assertion of power will continue in the next administration—which will undoubtedly be Democratic. So, I’m saying we should anticipate that it is virtually inevitable that the next administration will be far more similar to this administration than different, and that these administrations are involved in the exercise of power abroad leads inevitably to the need to lie to the public. Because the president and his advisers have a mixed agenda: on the one hand, they have what they would actually like to accomplish; and they find that they can’t do it, and they can’t admit it. Then they try other things, but still in the guise of doing the thing they promised to do originally. And all the while, they have to invent rationales which are never quite what the real reasons are.

GC: And our entire system of political campaigning and primaries and so forth—it’s not a very effective way to measure these guys and how they’re going to interact with the bureaucracy and with their own officials. It doesn’t provide the public insight or access to the way the system is really operating.

GP: Well, you’ve given me the opportunity I was hoping for to talk about what I think is the greatest challenge facing progressives in this historical era, which is the need for, but the absence of, an anti-imperialist movement. In order to have such a movement, there has to be a much higher degree of consciousness about the nature of the problem of imperialism–of empire–than there is today.

There is enormous antagonism towards the war in Iraq, and enormous anxiety about going to war in Iran. If you look at polling data, Americans are overwhelmingly anti-imperialist; they don’t want to use military force to extend, or even to maintain, power abroad. They also favor a very sharp reduction in military spending. They want to shift the balance of US policy away from the military and towards diplomacy. But this polling data has not translated into an understanding of what needs to be done to turn around the US government and the US political system. And today, we’re at the beginning of another presidential election cycle, and you have, in my mind at least, only the weakest sort of check on Democratic candidates–who at this point, whoever wins that Democratic nomination is odds-on favorite to become president. There is no present system to hold these candidates accountable on critical issues. Once in a while someone will ask, “What’s your position on getting out of Iraq, or going to war with Iran?”—but we also need to know that a candidate understands the issues that go beyond Iran and Iraq. How are we going to prevent the next war? No one is asking. That’s what concerns me about the political system at present: we have no instrument, basically, for holding political leaders accountable for having a program to prevent future Iraqs, Vietnams, and, I may say, future Irans, as well.

GC: We want to hold them accountable. I also wonder about holding ourselves accountable. How can we train ourselves to be more perceptive readers and listeners? Obviously, books like yours help. I’m wondering: which authors do you read? Who have been your mentors?

GP: At the present stage of my life, what I have been trying to do is to continue to solve the puzzles of what is really going on beyond the façade of secrecy and lies that every consumer of news in this country faces. And that’s a full-time job. So, if you ask me who I’m reading in terms of theory and explanation—I have read Chalmers Johnson’s books, and found them useful, useful data. But, this is not something that’s going to give us the key to unmasking the current developments in policy on the current wars; nor does it give us a clear path to what to do about the empire that Chalmers Johnson describes. So, my answer is that I don’t think that we have the literature we need, that provides a guide to this problem. We’re at Ground Zero intellectually. We need a new organization that seeks to arrive at a common understanding of the basic problem as the basis for action. I think that’s the beginning. I don’t have any answer as to how that’s to be done, but I do think that’s what we need.

GC: Okay, so—

GP: It could start small. It could start with a few dozen people—that would be great. But right now there’s nothing, even at the smallest level, that is focusing–not on organizing demonstrations or writing articles—but on coming up with an analysis of the structural problem of these overweening, permanent powers which are really uncontrolled at this moment—and what can be done politically to address that.

GC: And I very much respect your focus upon the structures and processes of power … I know that you’ve had an argument with a friend of mine who stressed that what you’re really perceiving is the way the Corporate State works—the corporate structure. And, what you call the imperial forces–he would ascribe that to corporatocracy. How would you explain your differences?

GP: This, of course, is an argument that I’ve had with a number of people, who do, in fact, hold to the traditional Left analysis which regards US imperialist policy as a function of corporate interest. I don’t quarrel with that as an historical explanation of much—most—even all—of US expansion abroad in the 19th and 20th century. I do think, however, that the nature of the US national security bureaucracy has changed so radically since the beginning of the Cold War as to force us to re-evaluate the relative importance of corporate interests on the one hand and bureaucratic interests on the other—insofar as the use of military force is concerned, and the maintenance of political-military positions abroad. As military power becomes the central issue in national security policy abroad, that inevitably brings into play the self-interests of these bureaucracies—which, I do insist, have autonomous power. The military bureaucracy does not take its cues about policy in the Middle East or in East Asia from Wall Street. They have their own agenda, which is very clear—all you have to do is read all of the documents that come out of the Pentagon and the military services. Each of the military services has its own distinct agenda, and then they have something that represents a compromise among them. And their interests are to assure that they will not have to shrink, that they will continue to grow in terms of budgets and programs, but, most important, that their missions for fighting wars will grow. That’s their business! Their business is to be prepared to fight the war. In some circumstances the military has an interest in fighting war; in other cases, where the war that is being proposed is not one where their mission fits, they’re probably going to oppose it.

I think this is the kind of analysis we have to make to seriously address the power and autonomy of these institutions, and to devise strategies to deal with them.

GC: You’re actually moving now in the direction of my closing questions; especially when you talk about the military branches each having their own agenda, and having an overall agenda–and that being separate from where Wall Street wants to go … My final questions are about current events. During this Halloween month, I wanted to touch upon General Sanchez’s recent comments about the War in Iraq being an endless nightmare … In Perils you describe a metamorphosis that occurred between the mid-50s and mid-60s concerning the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—how they became much more political. And you’ve spoken about that politicization today. But, it seems to me, Bush has made a deliberate attempt to openly politicize our military; he’s raised the ante and the level of danger in doing so—to use Petraeus and others to advance the administration’s political goals. Has Bush opened a new can of worms?

GP: Bush hasn’t opened the can of worms. I do think, however that he has … well, once you become involved in a long, highly politicized war which has become unpopular at home, the generals in charge of that war invariably become political figures. I think you see this in the case of General Wesley Clark, who was politicized. These post-Cold War wars give rise to political agendas. Petraeus represents the highest evolution of that phenomenon. The degree to which Petraeus and his underlings in Baghdad are directly tied by a political umbilical cord to the White House is unprecedented.

Equally interesting is the conflict within the military leadership. You have on the one hand the Petraeuses/Odiernos in Baghdad directly doing the bidding of the White House–not only in Iraq, but their take on Iran. On the other hand, you have the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Commander of CENTCOM (the Central Command), Admiral William Fallon, who have asserted a degree of independence from the White House, particularly in light of the threat of war against Iran, but also on the Iraq surge, as well. So, clearly, the President cannot completely control the military leadership, although he has tried to put the people he wants in place. Fortunately, in this case, Robert M. Gates put into position of CENTCOM commander Admiral Fallon, who is really very independent-minded and is much more known for his emphasis on diplomacy rather than on war-fighting. Now you have both an unprecedented degree of responsiveness by the command in Baghdad to White House direction, and, on the other hand, an unprecedented degree of resistance to the main lines of White House military policy on the part of both the Joint Chiefs and the key field commander. That’s a very important set of terms and I don’t know where that ends up. My analysis is that both Petraeus and Fallon and the Joint Chiefs can exert a degree of influence in the areas that they directly control—Petraeus on Iraq and Fallon on Iran. You can’t carry out a war against Iran without Fallon’s okay; and there’s a real question as to whether he’ll give it. In effect, we’re dependent on military leadership to hold off a significant threat of war with Iran—which would be the worst possible disaster this country and the world could face; I think the most serious disaster since World War II in American foreign policy.

GC: I agree … So, it’s encouraging to hear that there are some rational heads in—

GP: It is encouraging that we have some rational, uniformed, military leaders. But it’s discouraging that we’re dependent on the military to restrain Bush and Cheney rather than being able to depend on an opposition party—which has utterly failed in that role.

GC: Our situation reminds me of that classic movie, Seven Days in May … Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas—where the nation is—it’s a McCarthyesque, paranoid atmosphere; the movie takes place during the Cold War–and they’re looking to the generals to save them. So, it’s setting up something very dangerous …

GP: It is dangerous. And I think we must be very conscious of the need to do something in the coming years to re-establish the reality of a civilian, domestic set of restraints on the executive power to make war.

GC: Three final questions about current events … You talked about Iran. In that same part of the world, Turkey is a major, regional power. Since we always have to look for the hidden motives of our political actors, one wonders what they’re up to now. I’m in favor of the genocide against the Armenians being labeled genocide, but why now? This seems an especially idiotic act of a craven and idiotic Congress. Is this how our Congress wants to end our involvement in the Middle East—by sabotaging our ally?

GP: I, frankly, am not on top of why Congress has acted this way. Of course, I feel strongly that there is an important principle at stake in acknowledging the genocide against the Armenians. I find the Turkish attitude towards that as odious as the American attitude about refusing to recognize its war crimes in the past.

GC: Or genocide against the Tribal Peoples?

GP: That—and, even more recent crimes of war. So, you’re right that the timing of this is suspicious. I know that under the Republican-controlled Congress, this same measure was repeatedly rebuffed, with the Turkish interests giving support to key members of Congress, including Republican Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, to make sure this would never pass.

GC: You’re saying they made a deal with Hastert?

GP: Hastert and others were lobbied by Turkish interests. No doubt this took the form of very handsome pledges of political support.

Turkey plays a two-faced role in the Middle East today. On the one hand, they continue to be a US ally—with strong military ties; on the other, the government is now an Islamic government, and no longer responsive to American direction. Therefore, the Turkish government is in a position to play a much more independent role now. This is not your father’s Turkey!

There are different policy issues here where Turkey may exert important influence, one being whether Turkey will take military action against Kurdistan, which the US would strongly oppose and whose influence on the overall situation of the US occupation of Iraq is not clear. The other side of it is that the US has wanted Turkey to support its policy towards Iran, and I think the two sides are diverging. Turkey’s interests are not America’s in militarily pressuring Iran, much less using Turkish airspace or territory to launch an attack against Iran. Turkey is going to play a role that is at least in part cutting against the militarist, expansionist interests of the government now in power in the US.

GC: Another Janus-faced nation is Pakistan. I should mention we’re talking the day after Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan after eight years in exile—her return greeted first by jubilant crowds, and then an explosion that at last count had killed and wounded over 500 people. What’s your prognosis for that troubled, nuclear-armed nation?

GP: First of all, I think one must ask the obvious question, Cui bono? The likelihood that there’s a connection between that bomb and the military interests who want to prevent Bhutto from returning to power is obvious. I think the interesting question about Pakistan, in terms of US policy, is why the Bush administration was so cozy with the military dictatorship for so long—long after it was clear that the Pakistani military was playing footsy with the Sunni extremists in Waziristan, the pro-Al Qaeda, pro-Taliban religious parties on the Afghan border. That became very clear after Al Qaeda’s leadership was forced to flee from Afghanistan into Pakistan, and they quickly found comfortable locations under the protection of not just the local extremists but the Pakistani Intelligence Service as well. This has been known to US Intelligence for a long time. So, the question of why the Bush administration continued to cover for Musharraf for so long is one that I’m looking at and trying to answer. And I haven’t yet.

US interests in anti-terrorism, as well as democracy in Pakistan, should have led to being much less cozy with Musharraf, and putting pressure on the government to move back to some degree of competitive politics. After all, it’s exactly those religious parties that hold sway in Waziristan who have been the main political allies of the military in elections in Pakistan. Our natural allies in Pakistani politics, in terms of our anti-terrorism and anti-Al Qaeda interests, regardless of the weaknesses of the Pakistani civilian political elite–they are the natural allies of the US and not the military.

GC: Are we seriously interested in democracy, or is it an interest in ostensible democracy?

GP: I think it’s an ostensible interest. I don’t think any US administration, except for the Carter Administration, has ever really been interested in democracy as a separate priority—not serving another power interest. And again, I think this was Carter’s own predilection; we know the national security bureaucracy was generally opposed to that. Again, the national security bureaucracy does not support democracy in and of itself, does not support democracy for democracy’s sake. It supports it when it thinks that it can advance another power agenda in so doing.

GC: Last one, or two … You’ve spoken about your feeling that we’re going to have a Democratic President in 2009 and that the Democrats to a man, or woman, are saying that they won’t commit to troop withdrawal from Iraq and that they’re not going to take any cards off the table vis-a-vis Iran—a nuclear option included. On the other hand, you also mentioned your belief that we have rational people in uniform—Fallon, in particular—who are grasping all the dangers and are a real counterforce for any stupid actions. So, what’s your prognosis for Iran?

GP: I go back and forth, and I believe that it isn’t useful to speculate whether it’s more likely or less likely that this administration will attack Iran before the end of its term. For the following reasons: I don’t think Bush has made up his mind; it’s still an open question. And, at least in theory, we all ought to exert our utmost force to prevent this from happening, rather than regarding it as inevitable either way. I don’t think it is inevitable either way at this time.

GC: What would you like to say about Israel?

GP: It comes in as another vested interest in the political system which has now supplanted, for the Democratic party, the traditional military-industrial complex as the primary force impelling the Democrats to go along with the use of force, both in Iraq and against Iran. I don’t believe that any of the three major Democratic candidates are saying that all options must be on the table because they’re beholden to any military-industrial interests. It’s very clear that this is solely because of being beholden to AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. This becomes a factor that skews the political debate, one that skews even the future of US policy. And we know that, not AIPAC per se, but the interests of pro-Israeli neoconservatives have seriously skewed policy under the Bush administration. So, you have two related problems, both having to do with the extraordinary influence that pro-right-wing Israeli interests have played in influencing US foreign policy. This has become an issue that rivals the national security bureaucracy that I’ve focused on. It would be irresponsible to deny or ignore it.

And, I must say, I’ve noticed over the past couple of years, a rapid rise in bitterness in this country toward the Israeli lobby. It has become a major political phenomenon not to be ignored or minimized. Potentially it has a side to it that could become anti-Semitic, even though the analysis that points to the dangers of the degree of influence that these pro-right-wing Israeli interests have had is indisputable. But, looking at the population of the US—300 million–you’re going to have a lot of people who have found out about this Israeli lobby who will express in their own way and from their own background the kind of bitterness that cannot be healthy for this political system. I think we’re going to have both a rise in consciousness on the part of those people who are reasonably objective about this, and, also, you’re going to have inevitably—because of the degree to which AIPAC has been so powerful in Congress and the neoconservatives were so powerful in the executive branch, there is going to be a backlash which is not going to be much fun.

GC: I agree. And I think that’s one thing that people like you—acute critics and analysts … that’s a role … and I think one of the aspects of that role is to make it clear about the differences within Judaism, within the Jewish community in the US … about the spectrum of ideas and views. Because you find extremely progressive, internationalist-thinking people within the Jewish community, and you also find the Zionists and the crazies. I’ve come to be suspicious even of that term, “anti-Semitic.” I think we have to be very clear that it’s anti-Zionism, it’s Zionism that we’re talking about, and constantly stress that.

GP: Absolutely, and I think that it’s so important to have progressive Jews who are in the forefront of this, who can speak very clearly about this—and I know some are, obviously. That’s really what needs to happen—more and more political partnerships in which progressive Jews are in the forefront of making that kind of distinction. What I’m saying is that we might as well face the inevitability: there are going to be plenty of people who will not make that distinction–unfortunately.

GC: I agree … And I thank you for an enlightening interview.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative historian and journalist specializing in U.S. national security policy. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service and for The American Prospect magazine, and he has a blog on the Huffington Post. He has a Ph.D. in international politics and Southeast Asian studies from Cornell University and has written four books on Vietnam and the U.S. war in Indochina. The most recent of those books, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published by University of California Press in 2005.

Then as I read and listened to the responses from mainstream pundits — most of whom missed the real insights to be gained by analyzing the U.S. invasion of Southeast Asia and the relevance of that history to our invasion and occupation of Iraq — I realized a whole lot of allegedly smart people need to see the film.

But the real mark of the film’s value is that everyone — even those of us who think of ourselves as well-informed with a critical framework — can learn much from Solomon’s analysis in the film and his book by the same name. At a time when it’s more crucial than ever to understand the post-World War II era in which the United States became a permanent warfare state, Solomon’s film and book hone in on one of the key features of that project: The propaganda aimed at us in the United States is as important to that military-industrial project as the guns trained on people in the Third World.

The goal of that propaganda is to get people to believe a claim that is contradicted by all of history and contemporary experience — that the objective of the United States in its military interventions around the world has been not to expand and deepen economic domination (which has been the goal of all other empires) but to bring peace, freedom, and democracy to the world. U.S. officials are not the first in world history to assert such noble motives for such inhuman policies (just ask the Brits), but never has that claim been made so relentlessly, with so much help from allegedly independent journalists.

“War becomes perpetual when it’s used as a rationale for peace,” Solomon says in the film, and then goes on to provide ample evidence of how the justification for perpetual war has been manufactured, packaged, and sold. If it weren’t such serious business, the producers’ collection of sound bites from presidents — Democrats and Republicans alike, all mouthing some version of “We seek peace” — would be comical. From Korea through every conflict up to Iraq , the rhetoric is remarkable similar, as are the real aims and the deadly consequences of the policy.

Solomon’s target is not just the politicians, however, but the journalists who become the vehicle for selling that story. His work reminds us that even when journalists seem to be reporting critically about failed war policies, they almost always implicitly endorse U.S. officials’ underlying claim about the desire for peace and democracy.

While the film covers all the conflicts in the post-WWII period, it is the Vietnam/Iraq parallels that are most chilling. One of the most crucial to remember — in defiance of the distorted revisionist history that suggests the U.S. public lost its will to support the Vietnam War because of relentlessly critical news coverage — is that journalists were largely supportive of the war in the early years. Not until the failures on the battlefield were too obvious to ignore did the media coverage abandon the administrations’ propaganda line.

The producers of this film have used archival footage brilliantly, and one of the most illustrative clips is of Walter Cronkite in 1965 climbing into a B-57 to go along on a bombing run. In the breathless fashion typical of so much war reporting, Cronkite extols the virtue of the airplane and the thrill of the mission. Viewers see him get off the plane and say to the officer he’s about to interview, “Well, colonel, it’s a great way to go to war.”

After the Tet Offensive in 1968 Cronkite would declare the war “mired in stalemate,” and so he’s remembered as a critic of the war. But like most of the press corps he first was enthusiastic about U.S. power, and even in that famous 1968 broadcast he didn’t challenge the basic propaganda story about the so-called Communist threat.

That segment also reminds us that journalists have long expressed a giddy, almost childlike, fascination with the increasingly high-tech weapons with which these wars have been fought. Journalists, it seems, are always suckers for machines that go fast and blow things up. Solomon suggests that there’s “a kind of idolatry there. Some might see it as a worship of the gods of metal.” This technology fetish reached unimaginably sick levels in the 2003 invasion of Iraq , when the news media flooded us with high-tech graphics and retired military officers offering commentary.

Solomon reminds us that for all the talk about precision weapons, the percentage of deaths that are civilians has climbed steadily from 10 percent in World War I to almost 90 percent in Iraq . He describes how “an acculturated callousness” to the effects of massive bombardment has built up in our society, facilitated to a large extent by journalists who are more likely to focus on how a weapon works than what it does to victims. One of the film’s most poignant scenes comes when images of those victims are shown over the voice of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld waxing eloquent about the unprecedented humanitarianism of this “precision” bombing.

But back to Vietnam and Bush’s bizarre analogy, in which he suggested that the United States’ mistake was not invading another country to block a popular leftist government that had been on the verge of winning a fair election. No, it turns out that our mistake was leaving an immoral and unwinnable war too soon.

When I asked Solomon last week for his reaction to Bush’s comparison, he pointed out that Bush was invoking a familiar “stab-in-the-back theme” to assert that a lack of resolve at home undermined the military effort, to bolster the idea that with continued support, “this time the USA can, and must, see the war through to its appropriately triumphant conclusion.” But the possibility of such a victory in Iraq is about as likely as it was in Vietnam , in large part because each war was morally bankrupt from the start.

It was the same game during the Vietnam War, Solomon said, pointing to news footage from War Made Easy of a network TV announcer saying, “Appealing for public support for his peace policy, Mr. Nixon said, ‘The enemy cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans,’ he said, ‘can do that.’”

Perhaps we have not really been defeated and humiliated by either the enemy or ourselves, but by leaders who have created this warfare state and journalists who have helped sell it to the public. War Made Easy is a useful tool for progressive educators and activists who want to redefine peace and end a state of perpetual war.

* War Made Easy was produced and distributed by the Media Education Foundation. For their entire catalog, go to:
http://mediaed.org/.

* The film is available for home viewing and for use as an organizing tool. For details on ordering, visit here.

* The film is also playing in select independent theaters. For information on locations, visit here.

* Solomon is also the author of the recently released book Made Love Got War: Close Encounters with America ’s Warfare State. For more information on that book, go to: www.madelovegotwar.com/.

* For more information on Solomon and his syndicated column, go to: www.normansolomon.com/

Despite all the differences, the deep parallels between the two war efforts inform us that the basic madness of entrenched power in our midst is not about miscalculations or bad management or quagmires. The continuity tells us much more than we would probably like to know about the obstacles to decency that confront us every day.

The incredulity and numbing, the frequent bobbing-and-weaving of our own consciousness, the hollow comforts of passivity, insulate us from hard truths and harsher realities than we might ever have expected to need to confront — about our country and about ourselves.

Of all the words spewed from the Pet Crock hearings with General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, maybe none were more revealing than Petraeus’s bid for a modicum of sympathy for his burdens as a commander. “This is going on three years for me, on top of a year deployment to Bosnia as well,” he said at the Senate hearing, “so my family also knows something about sacrifice.”

There’s sacrifice and sacrifice.

“It is as bad as it seems,” longtime activist Dave Dellinger told a gathering of protesters outside the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach as it prepared to re-nominate a war-criminal president. “We must achieve a breakthrough in understanding reality.”

I listened, agreeing. But it was, and is, easier said. How do we truly grasp what’s being done in our names, with our tax dollars — and, most of all, with our inordinate self-restraint that tolerates what should be intolerable?

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From an Oval Office tape, May 4, 1972: “I’ll see that the United States does not lose,” the president said while conferring with aides Al Haig, John Connally and Henry Kissinger. “I’m putting it quite bluntly. I’ll be quite precise. South Vietnam may lose. But the United States cannot lose. Which means, basically, I have made the decision. Whatever happens to South Vietnam, we are going to cream North Vietnam…. For once, we’ve got to use the maximum power of this country … against this shit-ass little country: to win the war. We can’t use the word, ‘win.’ But others can.”

By mid-1972, U.S. troop levels in Vietnam were way down — to around seventy thousand — almost half a million lower than three years earlier. Fewer Americans were dying, and the carnage in Vietnam was fading as a front-burner issue in U.S. politics. Nixon’s withdrawal strategy had changed the focus of media coverage.

The executive producer of ABC’s evening news, Av Westin, had written in a 1969 memo: “I have asked our Vietnam staff to alter the focus of their coverage from combat pieces to interpretive ones, pegged to the eventual pull-out of the American forces. This point should be stressed for all hands.” In a telex to the network’s Saigon bureau, Westin gave the news of his decree to the correspondents: “I think the time has come to shift some of our focus from the battlefield, or more specifically American military involvement with the enemy, to themes and stories under the general heading ‘We Are on Our Way Out of Vietnam.’”

The killing had gone more technological; from 1969 to 1972 the U.S. government dropped 3.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, a total higher than all the bombing in the previous five years. The combination of withdrawing U.S. troops and stepping up the bombardment was anything but a coincidence; the latest in military science would make it possible to, in President Nixon’s private words, “use the maximum power of this country” against a “shit-ass little country.”

In December 1972, Nixon delivered on his confidential pledge to “cream North Vietnam,” ordering eleven days and nights of almost round-the-clock sorties (Christmas was an off day) that dropped twenty thousand tons of bombs on North Vietnam. B-52s reached the city of Hanoi. During that week and a half, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg later noted, the U.S. government dropped “the explosive equivalent of the Nagasaki A-bomb.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Visiting Baghdad near the end of 2002, I looked at Iraqi people and wondered what would happen to them when the missiles arrived, what would befall the earnest young man managing the little online computer shop in the hotel next to the alcohol-free bar, who invited me to a worship service at the Presbyterian church that he devoutly attended; or the sweet-faced middle-aged fellow with a moustache very much like Saddam Hussein’s (a ubiquitous police-state fashion statement) who stood near the elevator and put hand over heart whenever I passed; or the sweethearts chatting across candles at an outdoor restaurant as twilight settled on the banks of the Tigris.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

That winter, movers and shakers in Washington shuffled along to the beat of a media drum that kept reporting on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a virtual certainty. At the same time, millions of Americans tried to prevent an invasion; their activism ranged from letters and petitions to picket lines, civil disobedience, marches, and mass rallies. On January 18, 2003, as the Washington Post recalled years later, “an antiwar protest described as the largest since the Vietnam War drew several hundred thousand … on the eve of the Iraq war, in subfreezing Washington weather. The high temperature reported that day was in the mid-20s.”

The outcry was global, and the numbers grew larger. On February 15, an estimated 10 million people demonstrated against the impending war. A dispatch from Knight-Ridder news service summed up the events of that day: “By the millions, peace marchers in cities around the world united Saturday behind a single demand: No war with Iraq.” But the war planners running the U.S. government were determined.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

During one year after another, the warfare intensified in Iraq. And an air war kept escalating. The U.S. media assumed that almost any use of American air power was to the good. (Exceptions came with fleeting news of mishaps like dropping bombs on wedding parties.) What actually happened to human beings every day as explosives hit the ground would not be conveyed to the reputedly well-informed. What we didn’t know presumably wouldn’t hurt us or our self-image. We thought ourselves better — incomparably better — because we burned people with modern technology from high in the air. Car bombs and detonation belts were for the uncivilized.

One of the methodical quirks of U.S. Air Force news releases has been that they consistently refer to insurgents as “anti-Iraqi forces” — even though almost all of those fighters are Iraqis. So, in a release about activities on Christmas Day 2006, the Air Force reported that “Marine Corps F/A-18Ds conducted a strike against anti-Iraqi forces near Haqlaniyah.” The next day, it was the same story, as it would be for a long time to come — with U.S. Air Force jets bombing “anti-Iraqi forces” on behalf of missions for “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in order to “deter and disrupt terrorist activities.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In my kitchen is a dark-red little carpet with black designs, imported from Baghdad. I bought it there one afternoon in late January 2003 at the bazaar (not so different, to my eyes anyway, from the market I later visited in Tehran). My traveling companion was a former high-ranking U.N. official, Denis Halliday, who had lived in Baghdad for a while during the 1990s before resigning as head of the “oil for food” program in protest against the draconian sanctions that caused so much devastation among civilians. Denis was revisiting some of the shopkeepers he had come to know. After warm greetings and pleasantries, an Iraqi man in his middle years said that he’d heard on the BBC about a French proposal for averting an invasion. The earnest hope in his voice made my heart sink, as if falling into the dirty stretch of the Tigris River that Denis and I had just hopped a boat across, where people were beating rugs on stones alongside the banks.

Often when I look at the carpet in the kitchen I think that it is filled with blood, remembering how one country’s treasures become another’s aesthetic enhancements. I had carted home the rolled-up carpet and less than two months later came “shock and awe.” Now, more than four years afterward, the daily papers piled up on the breakfast table a few feet away tell of the latest carnage. I don’t think the rug has ever given me pleasure since the day it unfurled across the hardwood floor. It hasn’t been cleaned since presumably it soaked up the Tigris water during its last washing. There’s blood on the carpet and no amount of trips to the dry cleaners could change that.

Macbeth, Act V, Scene 1:

“Out, damned spot! out, I say! … What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? — Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? … What, will these hands ne’er be clean? … Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”

* This article is adapted from Norman Solomon’s new book Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State. For more information, go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com.

Speaking to the only audience likely to greet him sympathetically, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Bush lectured, “One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields.’”

Does Bush honestly believe anyone will buy this hogwash? That the aftermath of the war was worse than the war itself, when U.S. bombs, bullets and napalm exterminated millions? The U.S. would have stayed longer, too, if a growing rebellion within its armed forces hadn’t compelled the military brass to inform politicians that the war simply couldn’t be fought any longer.

As Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild, pointed out, Bush “overlooked the 4 million Indochinese and 58,000 American soldiers who paid the ultimate price for that imperial war. And the myriad Vietnamese and Americans who continue to suffer the devastating effects of the defoliant Agent Orange the U.S. forces dropped on Vietnam.”

Even foreign policy establishment types were appalled by Bush’s speech–albeit because they fear Bush had managed to contaminate U.S. policy in the Middle East with the “Vietnam syndrome,” which limited popular support for U.S. intervention for decades after America was kicked out of Vietnam.

Anthony Cordesman, a former Defense Department official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Bush’s account “was history written by speechwriters,” adding that “I think most military historians will find it painful because in basic historical terms, the president misstated what happened in Vietnam.”

Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland said the speech invites “examination of the mounting damage that Bush’s approaches to the war in Iraq and to national security in general are doing to U.S. institutions in an American society that has significantly changed since 1975,” the year the U.S. pulled out as North Vietnamese troops overwhelmed the U.S. puppet government in South Vietnam.

Of course, Bush’s intention was to blame the “killing fields” of Cambodia under Pol Pot, the murderous Stalinist dictator, on the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam–and imply that similar violence would ensue in Iraq if the U.S. left.

But the fact is that Pol Pot was able to seize power in large part because the U.S. had fomented a failed right-wing military coup against the Cambodian monarchy. And not long after Pol Pot came to power, he became a secret ally of the U.S. and China to put military pressure on Vietnam.

The Cambodia analogy was too much for the Los Angeles Times editorial board. “Killing fields?” it wrote. “Iraq’s already got them: A dozen or two corpses are found dumped in the streets each morning, and bombs go off daily. Boat people? Two million Iraqis have already fled the country, and perhaps 50,000 more leave each month. Could it get worse? Absolutely. But can we stop it?”

However, the LA Times, like most mainstream media, glossed over who’s responsible for the vast majority of the killing in Iraq–the U.S., whose invasion caused at least 500,000 deaths according to a John Hopkins study that is now several years old.

The Media also ignored the other historical falsifications and distortions in Bush’s speech. For example, Bush equated the totalitarianism of imperial Japan and, later, the “communist” bloc with al-Qaeda today–as if the military threat of small armed groups are on par with some of the powerful states in the world in their day.

Then came the mythmaking about the U.S. role in the Pacific, which Bush portrayed as spreading democracy and freedom–first in the occupation of Japan following the Second World War, and next by waging war on the Korean peninsula to create a state allied to the U.S. in the South.

“[E]ven the most optimistic among you probably would not have foreseen that the Japanese would transform themselves into one of America’s strongest and most steadfast allies,” Bush said, “or that the South Koreans would recover from enemy invasion to raise up one of the world’s most powerful economies, or that Asia would pull itself out of poverty and hopelessness as it embraced markets and freedom.”

In fact, the U.S. “liberated” Japan by dropping two atomic bombs on it–entirely unnecessary militarily, but politically useful in sending a warning to the USSR, then looming as its main rival in the postwar world.

The U.S. occupiers of Japan suppressed militant trade unions and the left while fostering a corrupt political machine in the Liberal Democratic Party that has dominated the country ever since. Today, Washington is supporting the buildup of the Japanese military and a revival of right-wing Japanese nationalism in order to pressure China.

Bush’s other example of spreading democracy in Asia, South Korea, doesn’t pass the laugh test. Following the end of the Korean War in 1953, the country was an authoritarian U.S. puppet state, ruled by the military for long stretches. Democracy came to South Korea not because of the U.S., but in spite of it–because of mass strikes and protests in the 1980s that finally forced the regime to concede democratic elections.

Bush’s claims about “markets and freedom” conquering “poverty and hopelessness” in Asia are equally lacking in credibility. One decade ago, the East Asian economic “miracle” crashed, pushing millions into extreme poverty in Indonesia, Thailand and other countries. Today, two of the most dynamic market economies in East Asia aren’t U.S. models of liberal democracy, but the one-party states of China–and Vietnam.

Nevertheless, there is a connection between the U.S. war in Iraq today and its battle over domination of the Pacific with Japan, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Whatever their ideological window dressing or popularity, all of these wars were waged to extend or consolidate U.S. imperial power.

One of the main political difficulties for Bush in selling the Iraq war has been to give it the ideological coherence of the “good war” against Germany and Japan or the Cold War against the USSR and its allies.

But re-fighting the war in Vietnam–rhetorically, of course, since Bush avoided actually going there–hasn’t helped him.

The hostile response to Bush’s speech should have been another nail in the coffin of his Iraq policy–now rejected by 75 percent of the country–on the eve of the September report by military commanders on what has taken place since the “surge” of U.S. troops announced at the start of the year.

Instead, the Democrats are letting Bush get away with recycling the same lies that presidents used to prolong the war in Vietnam. Bush talks about the surge producing “success on the ground,” “tactical momentum,” and yes, a “turning point”–and the Democrats back away from withdrawal proposals to embrace “success” in Ramadi, as Hillary Clinton would have it.

“The sad fact is that this war has created stasis in American politics,” wrote Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. “If Bush doesn’t budge, he is likely to be able to continue his approach–even if a majority of the country has turned against it and even if there is no political reconciliation in Iraq.”

This is because while Bush’s Iraq policy may be unpopular, the wider aims of the war–greater U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil–are shared by both political parties.

All this underscores the importance of the real lessons of Vietnam: that the mightiest occupying imperial army cannot subdue a nationalist resistance forever, and that to be effective, the antiwar movement in the U.S. must mobilize independently of the politicians, and build within the ranks of the military itself.