An American Tragedy
Robert McNamara’s passing reminds us that “the best and brightest” often are the most tragic characters in the Shakespearean world of politics. To read Tim Weiner’s magnificent obituary is to understand the depth of that tragedy.
The war became his personal nightmare. Nothing he did, none of the tools at his command — the power of American weapons, the forces of technology and logic, or the strength of American soldiers — could stop the armies of North Vietnam and their South Vietnamese allies, the Vietcong. He concluded well before leaving the Pentagon that the war was futile, but he did not share that insight with the public until late in life.
McNamara had gotten his reputation for a “right-sizing” turnaround at the Ford Motor Company. I am sure that when Jack Kennedy brought him into the Pentagon, he was thinking the same techniques could be applied to the bloated bureaucracy of the Defense Department. But like the Soviet Nomenklatura, the beast could not be tamed and then the senseless War in Vietnam made cutting budgets impossible. By the end of his term, defense budgets had doubled. The Cost of Empire was never to come down again.
Will the tragedy of the Military Industrial Complex bloated influence continue to haunt us and our children for another generation?
There are some famous stories about “intellectual honesty”, stories mostly of prominent Victorian scholars who were proved wrong and admitted their career-long errors. Mr. McNamara stands with those people who were once so strong yet later stronger enough to say, “I was wrong”.
His tragic story, in sum, argues for, not against, civilian control of the U.S. military.
But we’d better be careful, even now. The new president is collecting the best&brightest, and cocking poses as if to shove his hand into the skirt pocket of his suitcoat…
Shit happens.
There are some famous stories about “intellectual honesty”, stories mostly of prominent Victorian scholars who were proved wrong and admitted their career-long errors. Mr. McNamara stands with those people who were once so strong yet later stronger enough to say, “I was wrong”.
His tragic story, in sum, argues for, not against, civilian control of the U.S. military.
But we’d better be careful, even now. The new president is collecting the best&brightest, and cocking poses as if to shove his hand into the skirt pocket of his suitcoat…
Shit happens.
…And there were all these other Best&Brightest who understood the nature of the runup to and futility of that undeclared war, and spoke and wrote about it, and were ignored or vilified as “traitors” and were shouted down. Just like with the current undeclared wars. Because we humans like the idea of killing each other in the name of Freedom or the Forces of History, and because we are trapped by our tribal natures into forcing everything into categories that obscure and don’t even remotely fit. Blinding us to what’s really going on, in all its complexity. Generals saying “I” — that’s Big “I,” underscored and in boldface — “have met The Enemy, and he is mine.” Little players figuring out how to make off with entire pallet-loads of $100 bills. The entire “procurement” and “logistics” machinery cranking away on specs and special deals and plain old fraud and bribery. “Intelligence services” serving up propaganda in place of honest and competent and thorough analysis. The idiocy of forcing every geopolitical quirk into the Iron Maiden of “threat analysis.”
But in the end, who fucking cares? Pain and fear are sensations that somebody else feels. Life is cheap and transitory, I don’t care whether you’re brown or yellow or white, unless you are in the Inner Circle where self-importance and personal aggrandizement and the myth of “management” and all those other things that made McNamara and Rumsfeld and suchlike thrive, behind the screen of “patriotism” and “fighting for our freedom.” Or at least using the latter as an excuse to cover a drive for hegemony.
Shit does happen, but a lot of it happens out of some behaviors that may be just great for the individual or a few people in the short term, but kind of non-survival for the human species.
But maybe that actually is a GOOD thing, from the threat-qualified viewpoint of a whale or manatee or harp seal or cod or shark or…
…And there were all these other Best&Brightest who understood the nature of the runup to and futility of that undeclared war, and spoke and wrote about it, and were ignored or vilified as “traitors” and were shouted down. Just like with the current undeclared wars. Because we humans like the idea of killing each other in the name of Freedom or the Forces of History, and because we are trapped by our tribal natures into forcing everything into categories that obscure and don’t even remotely fit. Blinding us to what’s really going on, in all its complexity. Generals saying “I” — that’s Big “I,” underscored and in boldface — “have met The Enemy, and he is mine.” Little players figuring out how to make off with entire pallet-loads of $100 bills. The entire “procurement” and “logistics” machinery cranking away on specs and special deals and plain old fraud and bribery. “Intelligence services” serving up propaganda in place of honest and competent and thorough analysis. The idiocy of forcing every geopolitical quirk into the Iron Maiden of “threat analysis.”
But in the end, who fucking cares? Pain and fear are sensations that somebody else feels. Life is cheap and transitory, I don’t care whether you’re brown or yellow or white, unless you are in the Inner Circle where self-importance and personal aggrandizement and the myth of “management” and all those other things that made McNamara and Rumsfeld and suchlike thrive, behind the screen of “patriotism” and “fighting for our freedom.” Or at least using the latter as an excuse to cover a drive for hegemony.
Shit does happen, but a lot of it happens out of some behaviors that may be just great for the individual or a few people in the short term, but kind of non-survival for the human species.
But maybe that actually is a GOOD thing, from the threat-qualified viewpoint of a whale or manatee or harp seal or cod or shark or…
Good on you again, JTM. If you really want to know the heart of war, a lie about human violence, then get to know this man, Robert McNamara. He lays it out plain. His is our story. And you could change that story, going forward. He’d like a lot. So would I do.
Good on you again, JTM. If you really want to know the heart of war, a lie about human violence, then get to know this man, Robert McNamara. He lays it out plain. His is our story. And you could change that story, going forward. He’d like a lot. So would I do.
Excuse me: I’d meant to say that “he’d like THAT a lot.”
(By the way, I have warrant for that assertion, but my reasons are unimportant now. I pray that Bob McNamara at last rests in peace.)
Excuse me: I’d meant to say that “he’d like THAT a lot.”
(By the way, I have warrant for that assertion, but my reasons are unimportant now. I pray that Bob McNamara at last rests in peace.)
Excuse me: I’d meant to say that “he’d like THAT a lot.”
(By the way, I have warrant for that assertion, but my reasons are unimportant now. I pray that Bob McNamara at last rests in peace.)
McNamara had the courage to say, “I was wrong,” I grant him that, but that was after a million or more Vietnamese died, and 58,000 Americans, and his admission came decades after the whole thing was over and done with. My response to his admission was “DUH.” We were dead flat totally unmistakably irrevocably wrong about Vietnam. From Kennedy through Johnson to Nixon. And the result was a mountain of corpses.
It would have been far more courageous to say no, and resign if necessary. And then say, publicly, “I believe this war is a terrible mistake.” He would have been villified and mocked and scorned as a Jimmy Carter pantywaist by flag-waving-anal-wart-draft-dodging-”other-priorities” chickenhawks for the next 40 (or 4000) years, but he would have been right. And his hands would have been clean.
Vietnam and its consequences, including the precedent that allowed Goober and Strangelove to goose-step into Iraq on a Halliburton flatbed full of Freedom Fries lies, are too colossal and costly a mistake to forgive.
McNamara had the courage to say, “I was wrong,” I grant him that, but that was after a million or more Vietnamese died, and 58,000 Americans, and his admission came decades after the whole thing was over and done with. My response to his admission was “DUH.” We were dead flat totally unmistakably irrevocably wrong about Vietnam. From Kennedy through Johnson to Nixon. And the result was a mountain of corpses.
It would have been far more courageous to say no, and resign if necessary. And then say, publicly, “I believe this war is a terrible mistake.” He would have been villified and mocked and scorned as a Jimmy Carter pantywaist by flag-waving-anal-wart-draft-dodging-”other-priorities” chickenhawks for the next 40 (or 4000) years, but he would have been right. And his hands would have been clean.
Vietnam and its consequences, including the precedent that allowed Goober and Strangelove to goose-step into Iraq on a Halliburton flatbed full of Freedom Fries lies, are too colossal and costly a mistake to forgive.
McNamara had the courage to say, “I was wrong,” I grant him that, but that was after a million or more Vietnamese died, and 58,000 Americans, and his admission came decades after the whole thing was over and done with. My response to his admission was “DUH.” We were dead flat totally unmistakably irrevocably wrong about Vietnam. From Kennedy through Johnson to Nixon. And the result was a mountain of corpses.
It would have been far more courageous to say no, and resign if necessary. And then say, publicly, “I believe this war is a terrible mistake.” He would have been villified and mocked and scorned as a Jimmy Carter pantywaist by flag-waving-anal-wart-draft-dodging-”other-priorities” chickenhawks for the next 40 (or 4000) years, but he would have been right. And his hands would have been clean.
Vietnam and its consequences, including the precedent that allowed Goober and Strangelove to goose-step into Iraq on a Halliburton flatbed full of Freedom Fries lies, are too colossal and costly a mistake to forgive.
This conflation of Vietnam and Iraq is really undeserved. The commonality, if any, is the same old same old: this country, ever ready for war, had better choose its wars more advisedly, and democratically. There are huge and inconvenient differences between Vietnam and Iraq, and a whole cohort of undergraduates has been taught to blur those distinctions. But the common note is the rush to war. When next we see it, we would do right to resist and question.
This conflation of Vietnam and Iraq is really undeserved. The commonality, if any, is the same old same old: this country, ever ready for war, had better choose its wars more advisedly, and democratically. There are huge and inconvenient differences between Vietnam and Iraq, and a whole cohort of undergraduates has been taught to blur those distinctions. But the common note is the rush to war. When next we see it, we would do right to resist and question.
This conflation of Vietnam and Iraq is really undeserved. The commonality, if any, is the same old same old: this country, ever ready for war, had better choose its wars more advisedly, and democratically. There are huge and inconvenient differences between Vietnam and Iraq, and a whole cohort of undergraduates has been taught to blur those distinctions. But the common note is the rush to war. When next we see it, we would do right to resist and question.
Amen, Hugo.
Although I seem to recall hundreds of thousands out on the streets of Manhattan, in the lead up to Iraq, protesting before the war was even begun. Resisting and questioning, it seems, is never enough.
I’d like to sing “won’t get fooled again” except, of course, that we all will.
Amen, Hugo.
Although I seem to recall hundreds of thousands out on the streets of Manhattan, in the lead up to Iraq, protesting before the war was even begun. Resisting and questioning, it seems, is never enough.
I’d like to sing “won’t get fooled again” except, of course, that we all will.
Amen, Hugo.
Although I seem to recall hundreds of thousands out on the streets of Manhattan, in the lead up to Iraq, protesting before the war was even begun. Resisting and questioning, it seems, is never enough.
I’d like to sing “won’t get fooled again” except, of course, that we all will.
I think the great moment in Errol Morris’s The Fog Of War, is the one cited in Tim Wiener’s obituary, when McNamara acknowledges that he and Curtis LeMay were war criminals, and that the only thing that prevented them being prosecuted was victory. Morris overlays images of the bombing of Japan with the names of US cities of comparable size – and it’s only then that most people realize what the bombing of Japan actually meant.
People focus on McNamara’s mistakes with Vietnam as though they came along as a sudden glitch in an otherwise brilliant career. But the heedless rush to prosecution of the war was built on a pattern of behavior and thought from decades earlier. McNamara was a mass murderer long before Vietnam. He felt – as many do – that the ends justified the means in the Second World War, and heaven knows given the things the Japanese were doing to foreign civilians he probably felt a kind of moral equivalency was appropriate.
But as we have seen more recently, with black sites and Guantanamo, the moral equivalency argument never works. If you can convince yourself that the mass murder of enemy civilians is justified once, chances are you’ll be able to do it again. Bombing Vietnamese civilians didn’t matter for McNamara, because bombing Japanese civilians hadn’t mattered, either.
He was a strange man. I think Morris’s documentary is the finest thing he’s ever done. I’ll watch it again tonight.
I think the great moment in Errol Morris’s The Fog Of War, is the one cited in Tim Wiener’s obituary, when McNamara acknowledges that he and Curtis LeMay were war criminals, and that the only thing that prevented them being prosecuted was victory. Morris overlays images of the bombing of Japan with the names of US cities of comparable size – and it’s only then that most people realize what the bombing of Japan actually meant.
People focus on McNamara’s mistakes with Vietnam as though they came along as a sudden glitch in an otherwise brilliant career. But the heedless rush to prosecution of the war was built on a pattern of behavior and thought from decades earlier. McNamara was a mass murderer long before Vietnam. He felt – as many do – that the ends justified the means in the Second World War, and heaven knows given the things the Japanese were doing to foreign civilians he probably felt a kind of moral equivalency was appropriate.
But as we have seen more recently, with black sites and Guantanamo, the moral equivalency argument never works. If you can convince yourself that the mass murder of enemy civilians is justified once, chances are you’ll be able to do it again. Bombing Vietnamese civilians didn’t matter for McNamara, because bombing Japanese civilians hadn’t mattered, either.
He was a strange man. I think Morris’s documentary is the finest thing he’s ever done. I’ll watch it again tonight.
I think the great moment in Errol Morris’s The Fog Of War, is the one cited in Tim Wiener’s obituary, when McNamara acknowledges that he and Curtis LeMay were war criminals, and that the only thing that prevented them being prosecuted was victory. Morris overlays images of the bombing of Japan with the names of US cities of comparable size – and it’s only then that most people realize what the bombing of Japan actually meant.
People focus on McNamara’s mistakes with Vietnam as though they came along as a sudden glitch in an otherwise brilliant career. But the heedless rush to prosecution of the war was built on a pattern of behavior and thought from decades earlier. McNamara was a mass murderer long before Vietnam. He felt – as many do – that the ends justified the means in the Second World War, and heaven knows given the things the Japanese were doing to foreign civilians he probably felt a kind of moral equivalency was appropriate.
But as we have seen more recently, with black sites and Guantanamo, the moral equivalency argument never works. If you can convince yourself that the mass murder of enemy civilians is justified once, chances are you’ll be able to do it again. Bombing Vietnamese civilians didn’t matter for McNamara, because bombing Japanese civilians hadn’t mattered, either.
He was a strange man. I think Morris’s documentary is the finest thing he’s ever done. I’ll watch it again tonight.
I hated McNamara – he cost a whole lot of good people, on both sides, lost their lives almost solely because of his hubris and ego. And Obama and Co. are heading in the same direction. Or perhaps it is a situation where Napolean’s Maxim about malice and incompetence applies.
Still, the world is a better place without McNamara.
I hated McNamara – he cost a whole lot of good people, on both sides, lost their lives almost solely because of his hubris and ego. And Obama and Co. are heading in the same direction. Or perhaps it is a situation where Napolean’s Maxim about malice and incompetence applies.
Still, the world is a better place without McNamara.
I hated McNamara – he cost a whole lot of good people, on both sides, lost their lives almost solely because of his hubris and ego. And Obama and Co. are heading in the same direction. Or perhaps it is a situation where Napolean’s Maxim about malice and incompetence applies.
Still, the world is a better place without McNamara.
no, woodnsoul, we’ve need of more, not fewer, McNamara’s. That’s bitter, but true. Because we’re the big bullseye, the big target at which every tinhorn shoots (consider the lesser Korea), we are forced to consider our own defense, physically, as well as the defense of the values we wish both to claim and to project. Does that strike you at all as an interesting effort, or would you rather poo-poo it as somehow, conviently, excessive?
What’s your call? Because, as I see it, like it or not ours is the remaining superpower and we had better conduct ourselves across the globe in a manner that bespeaks our originary and best convictions. That we don’t do so, is something about which I think we all agree. But that we could possibly do so is a matter I happen to hold open for discussion.
no, woodnsoul, we’ve need of more, not fewer, McNamara’s. That’s bitter, but true. Because we’re the big bullseye, the big target at which every tinhorn shoots (consider the lesser Korea), we are forced to consider our own defense, physically, as well as the defense of the values we wish both to claim and to project. Does that strike you at all as an interesting effort, or would you rather poo-poo it as somehow, conviently, excessive?
What’s your call? Because, as I see it, like it or not ours is the remaining superpower and we had better conduct ourselves across the globe in a manner that bespeaks our originary and best convictions. That we don’t do so, is something about which I think we all agree. But that we could possibly do so is a matter I happen to hold open for discussion.
no, woodnsoul, we’ve need of more, not fewer, McNamara’s. That’s bitter, but true. Because we’re the big bullseye, the big target at which every tinhorn shoots (consider the lesser Korea), we are forced to consider our own defense, physically, as well as the defense of the values we wish both to claim and to project. Does that strike you at all as an interesting effort, or would you rather poo-poo it as somehow, conviently, excessive?
What’s your call? Because, as I see it, like it or not ours is the remaining superpower and we had better conduct ourselves across the globe in a manner that bespeaks our originary and best convictions. That we don’t do so, is something about which I think we all agree. But that we could possibly do so is a matter I happen to hold open for discussion.
no, woodnsoul, we’ve need of more, not fewer, McNamara’s. That’s bitter, but true. Because we’re the big bullseye, the big target at which every tinhorn shoots (consider the lesser Korea), we are forced to consider our own defense, physically, as well as the defense of the values we wish both to claim and to project. Does that strike you at all as an interesting effort, or would you rather poo-poo it as somehow, conviently, excessive?
What’s your call? Because, as I see it, like it or not ours is the remaining superpower and we had better conduct ourselves across the globe in a manner that bespeaks our originary and best convictions. That we don’t do so, is something about which I think we all agree. But that we could possibly do so is a matter I happen to hold open for discussion.
I don’t know that I agree with that, Woodnsoul. McNamara did some terrible, terrible things – things we have executed foreigners for when they’ve been on the losing side.
On the other hand, he came to recognise, and repent. I can’t say I can forgive him, but I can’t say as how I’m pure enough myself to say the world is better off without him.
Perhaps, as Jon has suggested, he’s akin enough to a Shakespearean character to serve as a lesson to the rest of us, who may not be as brilliant as McNamara but also fortunately may not sin quite as much. For good and evil, he made a powerful mark on the 20th century.
I don’t know that I agree with that, Woodnsoul. McNamara did some terrible, terrible things – things we have executed foreigners for when they’ve been on the losing side.
On the other hand, he came to recognise, and repent. I can’t say I can forgive him, but I can’t say as how I’m pure enough myself to say the world is better off without him.
Perhaps, as Jon has suggested, he’s akin enough to a Shakespearean character to serve as a lesson to the rest of us, who may not be as brilliant as McNamara but also fortunately may not sin quite as much. For good and evil, he made a powerful mark on the 20th century.
So now we have a government…and a president…who won’t stop kids trained on video games from killing people at weddings by remote control. Joysticks and launch buttons…what fun! Just zapped another one!
Hey, Hugo, here’s a thought:
If the USA did not exist, would North Korea having nuclear weapons matter? If it did, who would it matter to?
(Just as an aside, I consider Great Leader Kim one of the more reprehensible figures of our – or any – age. I’m just curious as to why North Korea is a particularly American problem).
One of the problems with seeing oneself as a superpower is seeing any dimunition in that power as a bad thing. As Jon has indicated, if we’re to reign in the Military-Industrial Complex, we’ll need to be prepared for the idea that not everything is a problem that requires a military solution.
Hey, Hugo, here’s a thought:
If the USA did not exist, would North Korea having nuclear weapons matter? If it did, who would it matter to?
(Just as an aside, I consider Great Leader Kim one of the more reprehensible figures of our – or any – age. I’m just curious as to why North Korea is a particularly American problem).
One of the problems with seeing oneself as a superpower is seeing any dimunition in that power as a bad thing. As Jon has indicated, if we’re to reign in the Military-Industrial Complex, we’ll need to be prepared for the idea that not everything is a problem that requires a military solution.
Hey, Hugo, here’s a thought:
If the USA did not exist, would North Korea having nuclear weapons matter? If it did, who would it matter to?
(Just as an aside, I consider Great Leader Kim one of the more reprehensible figures of our – or any – age. I’m just curious as to why North Korea is a particularly American problem).
One of the problems with seeing oneself as a superpower is seeing any dimunition in that power as a bad thing. As Jon has indicated, if we’re to reign in the Military-Industrial Complex, we’ll need to be prepared for the idea that not everything is a problem that requires a military solution.
Hey, Hugo, here’s a thought:
If the USA did not exist, would North Korea having nuclear weapons matter? If it did, who would it matter to?
(Just as an aside, I consider Great Leader Kim one of the more reprehensible figures of our – or any – age. I’m just curious as to why North Korea is a particularly American problem).
One of the problems with seeing oneself as a superpower is seeing any dimunition in that power as a bad thing. As Jon has indicated, if we’re to reign in the Military-Industrial Complex, we’ll need to be prepared for the idea that not everything is a problem that requires a military solution.
> Because we’re the big bullseye, the big target at
> which every tinhorn shoots (consider the lesser
> Korea), we are forced to consider our own defense
Everyone worries about their personal defence on occassion. Not everyone thinks it appropriate to murder the innocent nor create and pro-actively enrage enemies in its name.
Robert McNamara was murdering swine and good riddance to him.
I am not impressed by old men sitting comfortably in their own homes, having denied that opportunity to millions of others, regretting their evil.
The time to be, and do, right is when it matters and has practical effect for others.
Sometimes I feel the real fear in powerful politicians at more nations having access to nuclear weapons and effective delivery thereof is a fear of accountability – that they can be included in any punishing retaliation for their crimes.
> Because we’re the big bullseye, the big target at
> which every tinhorn shoots (consider the lesser
> Korea), we are forced to consider our own defense
Everyone worries about their personal defence on occassion. Not everyone thinks it appropriate to murder the innocent nor create and pro-actively enrage enemies in its name.
Robert McNamara was murdering swine and good riddance to him.
I am not impressed by old men sitting comfortably in their own homes, having denied that opportunity to millions of others, regretting their evil.
The time to be, and do, right is when it matters and has practical effect for others.
Sometimes I feel the real fear in powerful politicians at more nations having access to nuclear weapons and effective delivery thereof is a fear of accountability – that they can be included in any punishing retaliation for their crimes.
Hugo, there may be describable differences in the “details” of “the Enemy” this time, “the Enemy” always being really the same mental construct from conflict to conflict, whatever side you happen to be born on or desert to, with different-shaped horns and fangs and claws and skin tones appended. “We” always know who “We” are, mostly because of that pasteboard image of The Enemy with all our own worst tendencies projected onto it.
But the MONEY, all that MONEY, that great flood of debt-created MONEY, that so many people figure out such neat ways of dipping into, and the well-paid fascination with testing out really cool weapons, and marching around in uniforms with lots of medals, and displaying your battle flags with their Presidential Unit Citation streamers, and talking the great language of “battle space” and “force alignments” and all that shit that gets turned into some kind of pseudo-science in places like War Colleges and Service Academies and all the feeder shit-shedders in all the educational institutions and businesses of all types that see a chance to make an unaudited buck and even if they get caught, like Boeing and a bunch of others, they pay a little blutgelt and because they are “indispensable to the national defense,” back they go into the same old game! (Hint: good safe place for your investment dollars — always a growth industry, little fear of competition or regulation or scrutiny or price pressure.)
And all the “pseudo-patriots” hold that guys buying stuff for SoCom who take huge kickbacks are just “serving the mission,” so they are nol-prossed, as the US Attorneys like to say. Whatever value that the managers of imagery manage to assign to that weird construct, “the mission,” in the public mind. And deserve a pass as a result. And a lot of people have been called on their casual and metronomically repetitive use of the words “Victory!” and “Success!,” to define their terms, and the best they seem to come up with is the definition of pornography — “I know it when I see it”– and how dare you question my Loyalty to Liberty and Freedom, sir?
Maybe you know what “Success” in Iraq or Afghanistan is? Maybe just the downward management of expectations as “we” leave without even all the oil “we” were going to steal to pay for the whole thing? And hundreds of thousands of more dead people with friends and buddies and relatives here and there, who then want to keep the Flame of Hatred and Enemy-Think alive, because of their losses
and because that’s what they and their culture have become wired to do. It’s not going to be the instillation of any communal thinking or civic virtues — the great “Success” in Iraq was supposedly the stratagem of bribing Sunni militias to serve as US “force extenders.” And isn’t it fascinating that apparently some significant fraction of “roadside bombs” are planted as kind of a franchise operation by people with no other incomes in a war-ravaged economy with 25% “official” unemployment,who really have no horse in the race at all, just ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive. And still we persist in our reductionist “understanding” of what-all is shakin’. With comfortable and convenient categories that completely miss the essence of things.
I read an article once that added up the total cost of killing all the gooks we killed in Vietnam, and divided that by both the reasonably well researched number of dead ENEMY people, and the reported numbers in the “body counts.” The first quotient was something like $650,000 spent on weapons and men to kill every ENEMY combatant and civilian, and if you divide by the “body count” number you still get $350,000 or so. I can’t help but wonder, in light of all those “Made in Vietnam” dirty-Commie shirts and pants on the racks in Target and Walmart, whether it might have been a lot more effective to just dump even a fraction of that much money into making life better for the peasants who were sucked into the vortex, either under the Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh narrative or the even darker one spun under things like the Phoenix program.
But hey, there’s no unauditable and unprosecuted PROFIT in that scenario, is there? And “we” still left how many billions worth of infrastructure and weapons and other bought-in-the-USA stuff when “we” left in ’73, punching the last desperate gook clients in the face to keep the bailout airlift from being impossibly overloaded by our “clients” and “stooges,” having blown it by supporting another right-wing, CIA-friendly dictatorship that facilitated drug trade and destabilization and all the other stuff? (Sound at all familiar?)
And “we,” in the inevitable failure of the neocon petropolicy, will be leaving another big bunch of taxpayer-IOU-acquired war toys in places like Afghanirakistan.
So you don’t have Catholic and Buddhist and Cao Dai, you got Shia and Sunni and Kurd and Persian and Pashtun and all those other “tribes with flags.” But you do have a bunch of people combining to peddle the old lies about “Fitting and Sweet and Proper to Die for the Father (Mother)(Home)land, while indulging a whole set of self-gratifying and very expensive (for the species as a whole) phantasms and fantasies.
And I can’t get over the really neat part of one little corner of all this: “we” gave or sold millions of pounds of high-explosive ordnance to Hussein when he was “our” repressive-dictator “friend” against the Crazy Iranians who were crazy in part because of the way “we” stuck “our” dirty little fingers into their politics and helped thereby to grow the power of the clerics and the meme of Jihadicide. And then “our” great war-planners, in setting up their order of battle and “battle space” and “power projecting force distributions,” didn’t bother to secure or destroy those same armaments when they were in known locations. And now “our” troops are being blown up by IEDs and EFPs made from those same MADE IN THE USA bombs and artillery shells. And nobody ever mentions that, now do they, in the narrative thaqt keeps us all whipped up about all those “terrorists” who are going to rape our daughters and pollute our precious bodily fluids and Destroy Our Way Of Life, all taken as Gospel truths by the minds that get their news from sources like the National Enquirer (“Enquiring Minds Want To Know!”
The Fog Of War looks like a Pestilence to me.
But hey, what do I know?
McNamara was wrong in almost every decision he made – and he paid no consequences for them – none.
The world is a better place without him, IMO.
And yep, we have similar issues going on right now. It seems we’ve lost our compass, our soul and our way.
Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from him, as there is with all failures – but I don’t see that we have learned it.
Yes, well, we bear the burden of our greatness, sure. But our greatness is that we get better over time. We are still self-directed, and self-correcting. We learned to lament our abuse of Native Americans, and of Southeast Asians, for example. In general we wish other nations well. Given our might we are unique in this way. We musn’t shrink from this, as there is not another nation as self-enlightening as ours, and we are the biggest and most forgiving bully on the block. Yet we can throw the gauntlet at any moment, and sometimes do so, so it seems that we should strive to inform and withhold ourselves. That, in a nutshell, is quite a collective project. I’d give my left one to help with that project–the thought of a really informed American is so appealing–but yet the realist in me says that it’s a fond hope, and that we’ll continue our record as the rank warmongers we wish not to be.
…and keep it up, JTM. I swear you’re onto something…
…and keep it up, JTM. I swear you’re onto something…
To say that Vietnam and Iraq have differences is to say that Hitler and Stalin had differences. Obvious but irrelevant.
The biggest and most important similarities are just what you said: a rush to war, an undemocratic process. I would throw in plenty of “patriotic” hysteria along the lines of “our freedom will be taken away from us if we don’t force a corrupt, violent US-backed regime on them instead of a corrupt, violent Russian-backed regime.” Strikingly similar to “my marriage will be destroyed if gay marriage is made legal.”
And you can throw in a fair amount of piggies-at-the-trough war profiteering too.
The similarity in end result included huge butcher bills, huge financial bills, and long-term resentment of America and its hypocritical rhetoric about liberty and justice and freedom.
Other than that, yes, they’re totally different.
To say that Vietnam and Iraq have differences is to say that Hitler and Stalin had differences. Obvious but irrelevant.
The biggest and most important similarities are just what you said: a rush to war, an undemocratic process. I would throw in plenty of “patriotic” hysteria along the lines of “our freedom will be taken away from us if we don’t force a corrupt, violent US-backed regime on them instead of a corrupt, violent Russian-backed regime.” Strikingly similar to “my marriage will be destroyed if gay marriage is made legal.”
And you can throw in a fair amount of piggies-at-the-trough war profiteering too.
The similarity in end result included huge butcher bills, huge financial bills, and long-term resentment of America and its hypocritical rhetoric about liberty and justice and freedom.
Other than that, yes, they’re totally different.
To say that Vietnam and Iraq have differences is to say that Hitler and Stalin had differences. Obvious but irrelevant.
The biggest and most important similarities are just what you said: a rush to war, an undemocratic process. I would throw in plenty of “patriotic” hysteria along the lines of “our freedom will be taken away from us if we don’t force a corrupt, violent US-backed regime on them instead of a corrupt, violent Russian-backed regime.” Strikingly similar to “my marriage will be destroyed if gay marriage is made legal.”
And you can throw in a fair amount of piggies-at-the-trough war profiteering too.
The similarity in end result included huge butcher bills, huge financial bills, and long-term resentment of America and its hypocritical rhetoric about liberty and justice and freedom.
Other than that, yes, they’re totally different.
Jon,
My answer to your last question: Yes.
Jon,
My answer to your last question: Yes.
Jon,
My answer to your last question: Yes.
Jon,
My answer to your last question: Yes.
I suppose I should clarify my answer. This is not my definitive answer, but my guess. As a retired Air Force officer, I have to be careful with comments like these, else folks might conclude that I hope we are saddled with a nearly unbearable burden of military “preparedness” for generations to come. The simple fact is that the Congress, which resembles a wholly-owned subsidiary of Lockheed-Martin or Boeing, will never willingly reduce military budgets unless it happens in someone else’s constituency. And Obama has not shown a great deal of spunk in dealing with the dilemma of military budgets so far. Maybe when he gets through saving the global economy.
I suppose I should clarify my answer. This is not my definitive answer, but my guess. As a retired Air Force officer, I have to be careful with comments like these, else folks might conclude that I hope we are saddled with a nearly unbearable burden of military “preparedness” for generations to come. The simple fact is that the Congress, which resembles a wholly-owned subsidiary of Lockheed-Martin or Boeing, will never willingly reduce military budgets unless it happens in someone else’s constituency. And Obama has not shown a great deal of spunk in dealing with the dilemma of military budgets so far. Maybe when he gets through saving the global economy.
But what you say in regard to Vietnam War expenditure holds true for all foreign aid. The dirty, horrible not-so-secret of foreign aid programs in most western countries is that they’re less about funding poor nations than they are about providing government sponsorship for industry programs of the funding nation, exercised in the foreign one.
That is to say, if the USA had disbursed $350k to each and every Vietnamese, it would have been done through US programs that funded Bechtel or similar to build bridges or roads or whatever, and provided minimal money to the client country.
You think it was a coincidence that McNamara went to work for the World Bank? The World Bank is mostly just an extension of US industrial power.
My ex spent many years working in Foreign Aid in the Pacific. He made a lot of money, enough to buy a two million dollar house in Sydney, and his direct clients in the governments of those countries got a lot of trips overseas paid by the companies that had contracts in those nations. Some of their kids had college tuition paid by the US, UK, Australian or Canadian companies funded under those programs.
Most of the people in those nations got little from those programs. Some of them – especially the ones involving software – cost ten times what they would have cost in the USA.
Foreign aid is – often, but not always – as corrupt as the Military Industrial Complex Jon rails against. It’s not about foreign aid – it’s about aiding local companies working in foreign territories.
But what you say in regard to Vietnam War expenditure holds true for all foreign aid. The dirty, horrible not-so-secret of foreign aid programs in most western countries is that they’re less about funding poor nations than they are about providing government sponsorship for industry programs of the funding nation, exercised in the foreign one.
That is to say, if the USA had disbursed $350k to each and every Vietnamese, it would have been done through US programs that funded Bechtel or similar to build bridges or roads or whatever, and provided minimal money to the client country.
You think it was a coincidence that McNamara went to work for the World Bank? The World Bank is mostly just an extension of US industrial power.
My ex spent many years working in Foreign Aid in the Pacific. He made a lot of money, enough to buy a two million dollar house in Sydney, and his direct clients in the governments of those countries got a lot of trips overseas paid by the companies that had contracts in those nations. Some of their kids had college tuition paid by the US, UK, Australian or Canadian companies funded under those programs.
Most of the people in those nations got little from those programs. Some of them – especially the ones involving software – cost ten times what they would have cost in the USA.
Foreign aid is – often, but not always – as corrupt as the Military Industrial Complex Jon rails against. It’s not about foreign aid – it’s about aiding local companies working in foreign territories.
If I ruled the world…
My thought on that “foreign aid” thing is that of course you are right, the oligarchs as we so glibly call them always figure out how to hide the kleptocracy behind some comfortable facade, whether it’s Bechtel or Blackwater or “our” sneaky-petes.
My notion on distributing that money to the Vietnamese peasant population would have involved B-52s and “cluster bullion.” As I understand it, one of the most convenient ways of “saving” and moving money in SE Asia is in the form of little gold bars not much bigger than a stick of gum. If the goal was to “defeat the Communist government of North Vietnam,” I have to wonder whether putting little silk parachutes on little gold bars and showering them over the countryside might not have had the desired effect. Much more likely that trying to “bomb them back into the stone age” and “destroying villages in order to save them” and walking into a long dark tunnel and seeing a light in the distance and telling ourselves that “victory is at hand” and denying that the light is the headlamp on an express train coming right at us.
Our culture works fundamentally off the notion of the “superiority of arms,” works hard to crush human aspirations to do morally better and edge toward real freedom and stability, and pretty much ignores the resilience of human motivations toward what the locals view as maybe better than what they’ve got. Battista and the Shah and Karzai and even Hussein when he was our buddy are the ones who get favored-nation wealth transfers.
I always like to look for biological parallels — and am always struck by how much like cancer the present disease called “government” is — figuring out how to hide from the health-giving activities of the immune system, stealthily tricking the rest of the body into building new arteries to direct ever more of the lifeblood to the tumors, draining every other tissue and organ down oh-so-daintily to extract the last little bit of fat and then protein from the skeletal carcass of the old body politic.
Too bad testimony like yours gets buried in the gabble-gabble of Rushspeak and the “patriotic” claptrap peddled to the Beercan Betties and Joe Bobs of the world.
Lockheed-Martin — “We never forget who we’re working for.” TM
Hey, WTF, I say — looks like a long or maybe not so long danse macabre to me.
Some days I almost think it would be a act of true charity and mercy if those people who just created human sperm out of stem cells (Feminazis, take note if you haven’t already– Males are quickly on the way to being totally dispensible) and built new copies of the 1918 influenza virus and store up the “eradicated” smallpox, and Ebola, and other biological beauties against the need to “counter threats” from the shithead scientists who do the same for whoops and giggles on the other side of some arbitrary national or tribal border, don’t just give in to the impulse to see “What would happen if like those African bees we brought into South America to increase Eurobee honey production, we let some of this stuff loose by design or misfortune?”
I knew a multitalented person of science with the skills and now the tools to make most any kind of nasty genetic material or virus or prion. That genius offered, in a moment of wine-induced candor, the notion that humanity is only a plague species and has forfeited any claim to survival. And that the best thing that could happen to this beautiful blue planet would be a virus or other pathogen that was readily transmissible via all kinds of vectors and dispersion and was invariably fatal only to humans, was turned loose to finish the job we have (without conscious intention) started on ourselves. Yeah, I know the notion has already made it into the plots of several action novels.
And do we remember that one of our “leadership’s” responses to 9/11 was to convene Clancy and Brown and a bunch of other “visionists” from Hollywood and the NYT best-seller-fiction list to brainstorm what “Osama,” that convenient boogeyman symbol for all the little diverse cancers that we in our idiocy choose to lump into the category “terrorist” and facilitate their merging like the drops of the shattered liquid-metal autonomous-robot assassin from “Terminator II,” might do next.
Truth: stranger than fiction, but it’s not something we want to look at too closely. Gets in the way of our comfortable and profitable mental constructs.
The salient question is what influence, if any, will Robert McNamara’s life’s work, particularly his late acknowledgement that “we were wrong”, have going forward? The cynic in me doubts that it will have any impact at all on senior level policy makers.
With respect to Jon’s question, “Will the tragedy of the Military Industrial Complex bloated influence continue to haunt us and our children for another generation?”
Major General Smedley Butler, USMC addresses the prospect best in his 1935 book “War is a Racket”. A Wikipedia summary follows
“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
I wonder how the magic of the Internet could be applied toward removing instead of reinforcing the scales over The Public’s eyes…
Wish us luck, right? With all those people who think it is their God-given right to feed off the foolishness of the rest of us, while they busily design and build those “really good aircraft” and “autonomous battle robots” and bio-weapons and all that other Really Cool Stuff, and sneer at anyone who calls the “wisdom” of “defense” into question?
1948: The War Department
1949: The Department of Defense
because what sane person could be against “defense?” unless they looked a little closer and saw what that projected label was actually concealing…
And who can believe anything a guy named “Smedley” might have to say? (It’s so easy to impeach perceptive and sincere and honest people, any more.) Maybe it’s easier to believe a guy named Singer? If you want a little bedtime reading and are less interested in employment and investment opportunities than the survival of the species, try perusing “Wired for War” and Singer’s other books if you haven’t already.
JT,
Gen Butler was one of the first to call public attention to the MIC.
You might find his chronicling of WWI profiteers interesting. Scroll down to the bottom third of the following link (he did his research!) http://www.rationalrevolution.net/war/major_general_smedley_butler_usm.htm
Is there a similar analysis of our Middle East excursions?
Roman-Many thanks for the link. I’m just arriving at 1914 in my book. It was so timely.
“If the USA did not exist, would North Korea having nuclear weapons matter? If it did, who would it matter to?”
Beijing. They are in range and scared witless of a nuclear NK.
Roman, I am one of those “history majors” with no useful skills to my name except a penchant for picking up on whatever’s bad and evil in the world. I’ve thought of writing my own book, “What’s Wrong With Practially Everything, And Why It’s Never Going To Get Any Better.” But what’s the use?
Gotta love them Krupses and Speerses and USX’s and Atlas and Hercules Powders, if you’re an investment banker. To bring Gen. Butler’s numbers up to date, I guess all one has to do is change a few names and add three zeros behind each of the numbers…
See, JTM, what good has come from McNamara’s passing? This string attests to his fruitfulness. It’s ironic, sure, but with McNamara irony is built in.
We were smart to knock off the pile-on and to move on to the building upon, this man’s corpse and corpus. Throughout Western theology one finds a common predicate: that the bad cannot come from the good. Yet the good can come from the bad. That’s redemption.
Like it or not, we redeemed Mr. McNamara here. For many years all he wanted was redemption. He rightly construed himself as an example of the limits of intellectual honesty uninformed by moral conviction, and he held himself up as a kind of living flaw. If we’re to make peace and not war, then we’ll obviously have to learn to forgive those we perceive as enemies.
Quick and dirty on war as racket in the modern age:
http://www.jenandzu.com/downloads/costofwarflyer.pdf
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf
http://economycollapse.blogspot.com/2009/06/cost-of-war-in-iraq-and-afghanistan.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article3419840.ece
http://www.cfr.org/publication/15404/
http://www.progressiveaustin.org/resource.htm
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ed_encho_080312_as_general_smedley_d.htm
Meanwhile, meanest SOB of the 20th Century, Allen Klein, shuffled off the mortal coil without more than a back page pass. IMO, that is how evil should pass: without notice or note.
http://www.beatlemoney.com/beatles6870klein.htm
That site is a fascinating read about the money in the Days.
So, let’s let them take care of Korea.
And Mr. Taplin, in case you haven’t run across this one yet…
House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power
They are, Rachel. That’s why we’re having any luck at all. NK is their client. SK is ours. We can’t get out of the Chinese Handcuffs and neither can they but their fingers are stuck further in because they would have the most to lose the fastest.
JTM, I recommend that you investigate Girardian Theory, an inquiry into the nature of human violence and especially of war.
Alternatively, you might prefer ethology, an anthropologist’s study of informative animal behavior. If that sort of thing is more your cup of tea, then sample Melvin Konner.
These are two routes to an understanding of the violent impulse–sometimes, it seems, the violent imperative–in human beings. If we understand, perhaps we can change.
JTM, has anyone done the math on dollars per kill in Vietnam or Iraq? I think the mini gold bars might be just the thing. And send them all the execs at the MIC companies to use as slaves in their gardens, too.
Jesus, Rick. I never thought of you as yet another American case of arrested development. That’s just adolescent jibe. What is the point of that? What do you hope to advance in that way?
The point is that it may have been cheaper to just pay them off rather than kill them… And who was profiting from all the Napalm and B-52 bomb drops?
My underlying belief is that living well and ethically, providing real help for those abroad who are in need, and not letting bastards in the MIC buy politicians would probably be a hell of a lot better…and more effective…in winning hearts and minds. Never mind my flip remark about sending the Cheneys of our world over to spread night soil…though on further reflection, it might not be such a bad idea at that…
Hey, Rick — Not altogether sure where you are coming from in your 3:21 post. Snide or sympathetic?
I would like to suggest that maybe all the folks invested in the current mode of thinking and “projecting power” could “do the math” on the costs of any “successful” or “victorious” conflict the US military and its industrial partners have gone off into, possibly excluding WW II.
My guess is that the quotient would come off as “undefined” or as an “imaginary number,” since division of any huge number (taken as present and future tax obligations of the folks at home) by “zero” doesn’t work, at least on any calculator I have access to.
If the intention was on the snide side, I would offer to rest my case that humanity has so thoroughly succumbed to tribal and violent impulses as to demonstrate either a Darwinian shortfall of massive dimensions or just a simple old death wish, by offering the all-too-common ‘net exchanges of hostile verbal fire between people nominally even of the same tribe.
As far as bucks per kill in Irapakifanistan, cost estimates by the CBO put this “war on terror” on a par with the Vietnam thing, and “we” killed a shitload more people then than we’ve managed to do in this one — to date — so I would just have to guess that the “dollars per kill” would be a lot higher.
And maybe you have heard some sensible statement of “our side’s” goals against which “victory” and “success” and “mission accomplished” could be measured that is something more than the body counts we are getting from the MSM every day and at various milestones (1,000 dead GIs, 2,000, 4,000, but who’s counting?)
I’ve been trying to listen, and all I hear is the sound of artillery shells and “smart bombs” and the droning of drones, Reapers and Predators, with their little clutches of Hellfire steered by war gamers from back in Kansas. And the rasping breath of grunts toiling up those rocky slopes to “draw fire” from the people whose land they are trampling.
Kill ‘em all, and let God sort ‘em out. Isn’t that where we always get to?
There’s something to be said for the other side, though. For example, today the feds complained of cyber-attacks coming from North Korea, meaning China. We make nice about the fucking Chinese government all the time, but meanwhile they’re the ones–the government, not the people themselves, necessarily–they’re the ones who have nuclear-tipped North Korea and have armed that puppet to infest our information infrastructure.
Do we still care, here, about America’s information infrastructure? Do we value it at all? Do we suppose that North Korea came up with any of this shit on its own?
My point is merely that it might actually be better business to spend the war bucks on foreign aid. Unless, that is, the Daddy Warbucks MIC folks just couldn’t figure out a way to get rich off of people who are doing fine and perhaps even like us… War seems to be good for military industrialists, and it has ever been so. Somebody probably did very well on helmets, spears, and crucifixes for the Romans.
Am listening to an audio book of David Halberstam’s “The Coldest Winter”, (and though late to the party here – 41 comments and counting) I have to comment on Len’s assertion that the Chinese would be/are scared of NK having atomic weapons.
Because it’s an audiobook, I can’t easily find the exact passage, but Halberstam’s narrative of the backstory to China’s entry into the Korean War included a line where Mao was asked whether he was afraid of the American’s because they had the bomb, and he replied something to the effect of “No, China has it’s bomb; one million men.” I suspect the current croup of Chinese leaders probably feel pretty much the same way with regards to Little Kim. If he was to turn on them, they would absorb the hits, then swallow the whole peninsula. Same principal Stalin used to carve up the German’s easter front. Suck all their superior technology deep into the country, then engulf them with bodies.
America keeps losing the inane colonial wars it starts because the American People are not willing to throw in the bodies they way they were in the Civil and Second World Wars.
Mind, I think that’s a good thing, otherwise we would be the new Nazi’s fighting for our corporate masters. But, there was a time when we were among the nastiest sob’s on the block. Dresden and Tokyo lost more civilians to the fire storms than Nagasaki, or Hiroshima, so we certainly had the potential.
Korea would have the willingness to throw lives at the Chinese, and a few bombs, but they are very aware that they don’t have enough of either to really intimidate The People’s Republic.
P.S. For those of you who haven’t had a chance, I can’t recommend “The Longest Winter” highly enough. He was the man who made “Best and the Brightest” a catch phrase (as well as a great book); good historian, great writer.
But Ken,
“China’s entry into the Korean War”? It’s entry? Hell, it was the progenitor of that bloodletting.
China itself is the embodiment of Halberstam’s term, the best and the brightest. And yet instead it is a killer.
It falls to America to change that, Kissinger and Haig and the Bushes be damned. Instead we have a swish in the White House.
Halberstam justly wrung his hands over America’s role in Vietnam. But what of Russia’s role, and of China’s?
A few more words from General Smedley Butler:
“There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its “finger men” to point out enemies, its “muscle men” to destroy enemies, its “brain men” to plan war preparations, and a “Big Boss” Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.
“It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
“I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.
“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
“During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents. ”
Any of this sound at all familiar? Either as something you might have heard of faintly in a US History class? Usually with a twist, on how “we” were bringing “democracy” to the wogs, or in the kind of shit we are fed by the “powers that be” on the virtues of serving in their army and the wisdom and kindness of “our” interventionism?
As to “China” and “Russia” being good labels to help us manage our need to identify ourselves by some myth that “we” are different from “our Enemy:” Epicanthic folds, and guttural languages, and funny alphabets, “unAmerican” as they may be, shouldn’t blind us to the truth that “their” rulers and “ours” are cut completely from the same cloth. “Ours” just benefit from a little better PR here at home, and the fundamental human response that deep down in our tribal brains still, after centuries of bitter experience on the wrongness of the notion, we will always fall for the “my country, right or wrong” line. As do those slanty-eyed or sallow-skinned or vodka-swilling non-humans Over There. Enabling all our “leaders” to keep the pretense up and pick us clean, time and again.
You and I and our taxpaying children are still shelling out big bucks for the Korea thing and the Cold War and “Vietnam,” and has anyone noted and gotten even a bit exercised about the budget games being played to move this year’s “War on Terror” costs onto the pages and backs of budgets, and taxpayers, yet unborn?
You think the average Chinaman or Rooskie (or Lithuanian or Chechen or Georgian, since it was “the Evil Empire Soviet Union” that clientized N. Vietnam in the ’60s and ’70s) really thinks in his or her heart of hearts that the thing we shorthand as “Vietnam” was a Good Idea? They’re still paying, too. and they didn’t even get the comfort of the myth that we get to choose our “leaders and masters” via some “democratic process.”
“Do we still care, here, about America’s information infrastructure?”
Don’t be had so easily, Hugo. America’s information infrastructure is and has been under attack constantly. Those attacks are coming from France, Germany, Russia and in incredible amounts, from China. I manage a data center. A lot of time and dollars are spent stopping it. It’s very profitable for the companies that sell firewalls, intrusion detection, anti-viral and so on. All these reports about NK are good for is to ratchet up a reason to take them out.
China today is not the China of Mao. He was blustering and knew we would not use atomic weaponry. A million men didn’t prevail in Korea last time. The current old men have a very good thing going but they know two strikes of medium grade atom bombs on Beijing takes them out of the game. They do fear it because wiping our NK won’t fix it. That is why no one including us uses these weapons. They confer no strategic or tactical outcomes; so rational actors won’t use them and they count on everyone being rational. If the four-eyed mimsy isn’t rational and gets what he wants, he still can’t be counted on not to use the weapons. Old dragons, constant pain, spitefulness and all that.
“Entry”, Hugo, as in when the “volunteers” started appearing in regimental strength, and took direct control of most of the fighting.
Len, assured mutual destruction doesn’t add up for N. Korea. Haven’t enough bombs to keep China from obliterating them in return. Kim is as monomaniacal as Mao was or al-Gaddafi or any of the other warlords who have bought into their own mythologies. But, not crazy enough to take on the giant. It’s the reason the Chinese don’t actually do something to stop Kim’s nuclear build up. If they were afraid, they would and could stop him. Better to use him to keep the running dogs a little off balance in the region and stay a step or two removed.
Oh. I see what you meant, Ken. Fair enough.
It must bug you, as it does me, that darn near everybody forgets that the Korean Conflict was waged, from this side, as an American-led NATO operation, just as the U.S., from 1965, led SEATO forces including some really steadfast and dangerous Australians and South Koreans.
Again, it’s the “fog of war”. War just doesn’t translate well into civil English from the original Carnage.
JTM,
It seems to me that you are quite brilliant in this string. Let me share a couple thoughts.
When I studied war prevention in the 1970s, we had to work mainly with military historians. They mostly were military men themselves, and as such they were characterized by attributes both conducive to our preventive efforts and frustrating of them. The military services are, by nature, traditionalist, and as such they tend to valorize the profession of arms. That’s a problem. Yet what almost all veterans share is a profound revulsion of war, of its tragedy and unspeakable waste.
Today one finds the field of Peace Studies thriving across the globe but especially in the United States. (One might add to this investigation the fruitful efforts in Holocaust Studies.) In the U.S. especially we now have a cohort of working faculty specifically trained in the field of prevention.
I’ve been in Atlanta, from my native California, for precisely two years now, and have spent a part of my time here studying the fascinating career of the late Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, who divided his mature years between the design of advanced weapons systems, on the one hand, and long-range planning for the prevention of military conflict. (I might add that all the while he combatted the virulent anti-Semitism of his generation and the preceding one.) His answer to the challenge of prevention could be summarized in one word, education; not in the spirit of Kampuchean “reeducation”, or of de-Nazification or of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but rather in the spirit of open and honest inquiry, in the Western Tradition.
Toward the end of his life Rickover devoted himself increasingly to the latter project, the peaceful one. Herbert Hoover, by the way, did the same, having developed a great horror of war during his two stints of national service as a kind of nursemaid of war’s outcomes.
Ostensibly this is a desperate topic; at its core, though, a hopeful and necessary, even urgent, one.
@ken: There is nothing mutually assured about it. It’s sensitivity. Why would their *client* be running around doing crazy stuff and them not be a bit concerned? NK is theirs to handle, yes, but how can they do that?
Despite appearances, the hold of the old men in Beijing is tenuous. They have a mad dog on a short leash and such dogs return to bite the hand that holds the leash. If they play this right, they keep the Americans where they want them vis a vis business. If they play it wrong, we kill the dog and default, then the long term plans for the oil from the Iraqi oil fields go right to hell.
This isn’t about a global blowout. It’s a chess game that is never supposed to go to checkmate because everyone loses. Chess games with wildcard pieces aren’t supposed to be played.
There is an “end game” for NK, and that is radio-active craters where population used to be and great slaughter in SK where the NK soldiers pop up out of the ground from their tunnels before they realize they’ve been suckered. Then there’s a 500 year quiet on the Korean peninsula while cockroaches roam after eating radioactive flesh for a while. Korean will be a dead language, Subarus will be made somewhere else, and humanity will have learned little other than that Big Brother was once real.
Yep.
Hugo, here’s one of those observations that are pretty generally made, pretty generally agreed to, and then relegated totally to the “Yeah? So? We’re busy with other stuff” category.
Evolution (that evil word) works on a scale of hundreds of thousands and millions of years. We are what we are thanks to development to meet conditions and levels of organization and mastery of the physical world that haven’t existed for maybe 20 or 30,000 years, and the pace and scope and impact of incremental and “breakthrough” change are just growing exponentially. There’s a huge disconnnect between our ability to survive (let alone prosper) as a species, and our desires to prosper as individuals. I am not so sure that “peace studies” is a discipline that has any real meaning, except as a way to get some grant money or tenure. We have collectively way too much invested, in the personal and fiscal and structural senses, to do any different.
My personal wager is that whatever the apologists for logical positivism and the perfectibility of humanity have to say, we are headed for something that looks very much like a Malthusian cliff. In my little understanding, it doesn’t seem likely that logic and enlightened self-interest, at the scale of species perpetuation and movement toward “goodness,” have a prayer of overcoming the “getting and spending” and “ignorant armies clash[ing] by night” parts of our individual and collective brains. There are lots of “heroic” Smedley Butlers (either ignorantly or purposefully blind to what they really do for a “living,” happy to indulge the impulse to group violence and domination and glad for the secure berth in the MIC that follows a successful career in championing weapons systems or fighting the last war) still ”serving” in militaries and their industrial tributaries around the world, happily raking in wealth and sowing death and violence in the name of “projecting power” or “converting the wogs” or “making the world safe for (insert your particular faith-based “reasons” and excuses for murder, rapine, theft, torture here.)”
And the bulk of us who fund the dysfunctional and terminal activities still cling to the tribal notions that “our side” is somehow better, our “patriots” do holier service to higher goals than “those evil subhuman terrorist commie capitalist MuslimJewChristianHinduBuddhistShintoWhat-Everrr trolls over there.” Or at least we pay lip service to the notion, knowing it will get us elected and re-elected and funded and trooped to keep on with the same old dead-end shit. If in the daily round we think about such stuff at all.
Moral suasion leading to “change” in the direction of a homeostatic human presence on the planet? I offer Stalin, on the “spiritual authority” of the Pope: “How many divisions does he have?” We live and die through “leaders,” and speaking of forever drinking the Kool-Aid, here’s a little taste of their bitter flavor, redolent of almonds: http://www.amazon.com/Warlords-Churchill-Stalin-Hitler-Roosevelt/dp/B000NVKZUG
And for Leaders Past Their Prime, like McNamara and Rickover and Butler and Hoover and Gorbachev and Eisenhower, out of power and out of the loop and looking, like W.C. Fields pawing through the previously scorned New Testament on his reprobate’s deathbed, for absolution and grace and “loopholes,” the damage is done, the cat is still out of the bag, the toothpaste is out of the tube and as lovers of our Brave New World insist of the New Digital Universe, “There’s no going back.” Until the Crash. Which from what I can see and hear and feel is inevitable. And it will not be some Great Rapture, neither.
My bet has to be on the side of Pure Futility, when it comes to any Hope that there will be any Change. Got health insurance and care, fellow citizen? Like what you got? Give a shit that maybe a third of your neighbors are shit out of luck there, and you can be just smug that You’re Covered, and the rest are tough-Noogied? What’s your share of the National Debt? How many trillions are going to those companies whose so-skillful players in the Current and Always Game are attracting and converting DARPA and Main Budget wealth into stuff that kills in Really Cool Ways? Do you congratulate yourself that you’ve “invested” in RayLockaMartiXe, and as the phrase goes, are “making a killing in the market?”And just when are “the troops” we all “support” with our faded little twisted ribbons on the tailgate of the Expedition going to “come home,” in something other than body bags and strait jackets and “chemical restraints?”
And when are “the wogs” (including, from their viewpoint, Our Sacred Tribe) going to stop charging toward the cliff, “following leaders” who egg them on while pretending that they are “out front” in the grand charge toward consistency with the Great Forces of History?
Don’t you just love those movie scenes in restaurants and malls, where some kind of human train wreck happens, the people turn their heads vacantly, detect that the wreck Does Not Affect Them Personally, then swivel back to their oh-so-important text-ies and sex-ties and “Like, totally”s?
Peace Studies may be a desperate and urgent matter, but how many divisions and armies does IT have?
Hugo, here’s one of those observations that are pretty generally made, pretty generally agreed to, and then relegated totally to the “Yeah? So? We’re busy with other stuff” category.
Evolution (that evil word) works on a scale of hundreds of thousands and millions of years. We are what we are thanks to development to meet conditions and levels of organization and mastery of the physical world that haven’t existed for maybe 20 or 30,000 years, and the pace and scope and impact of incremental and “breakthrough” change are just growing exponentially. There’s a huge disconnnect between our ability to survive (let alone prosper) as a species, and our desires to prosper as individuals. I am not so sure that “peace studies” is a discipline that has any real meaning, except as a way to get some grant money or tenure. We have collectively way too much invested, in the personal and fiscal and structural senses, to do any different.
My personal wager is that whatever the apologists for logical positivism and the perfectibility of humanity have to say, we are headed for something that looks very much like a Malthusian cliff. In my little understanding, it doesn’t seem likely that logic and enlightened self-interest, at the scale of species perpetuation and movement toward “goodness,” have a prayer of overcoming the “getting and spending” and “ignorant armies clash[ing] by night” parts of our individual and collective brains. There are lots of “heroic” Smedley Butlers (either ignorantly or purposefully blind to what they really do for a “living,” happy to indulge the impulse to group violence and domination and glad for the secure berth in the MIC that follows a successful career in championing weapons systems or fighting the last war) still ”serving” in militaries and their industrial tributaries around the world, happily raking in wealth and sowing death and violence in the name of “projecting power” or “converting the wogs” or “making the world safe for (insert your particular faith-based “reasons” and excuses for murder, rapine, theft, torture here.)” And the bulk of us who fund the dysfunctional and terminal activities still cling to the tribal notions that “our side” is somehow better, our “patriots” do holier service to higher goals than “those evil subhuman terrorist commie capitalist MuslimJewChristianHinduBuddhistShintoWhat-Everrr trolls over there.” Or at least we pay lip service to the notion, knowing it will get us elected and re-elected and funded and trooped to keep on with the same old dead-end shit. If in the daily round we think about such stuff at all.
Moral suasion leading to “change” in the direction of a homeostatic human presence on the planet? I offer Stalin, on the “spiritual authority” of the Pope: “How many divisions does he have?” We live and die through “leaders,” and speaking of forever drinking the Kool-Aid, here’s a little taste of their bitter flavor, redolent of almonds: http://www.amazon.com/Warlords-Churchill-Stalin-Hitler-Roosevelt/dp/B000NVKZUG. One example among millions of the gulf between the Hero-AntiHero myths we insist as a species on erecting to reduce the otherwise intolerable tensions between the altruistic-spiritual parts of our limbic systems and the tribal-violent-greeedy-self-pleasuring parts. Nobody wants to think about or believe that Great Men like Roosevelt or Churchill or even Hitler or Stalin do all the shit that makes up the days of our leaders’ lives, and the slave mind recoils from any such thoughts as from a third rail.
My bet has to be on the side of Pure Futility, when it comes to any Hope that there will be any Change. Got health insurance and care, fellow citizen? Like what you got? What’s your share of the National Debt? How many trillions are going to those companies whose so-skillful players in the Current and Always Game are attracting and converting DARPA and Main Budget wealth into stuff that kills in Really Cool Ways? Do you congratulate yourself that you’ve “invested” in RayLockaMartiXe, and as the phrase goes, are “making a killing in the market?”And just when are “the troops” we all “support” with our faded little twisted ribbons on the tailgate of the Expedition going to “come home,” in something other than body bags and strait jackets and “chemical restraints?” And when are “the wogs” including, from their viewpoint, Our Sacred Tribe) going to stop charging toward the cliff, “following leaders” who egg them on while pretending that they are “out front” in the grand charge toward consistency with the Great Forces of History? For McNamara and Rickover and Hoover and even Eisenhower
Don’t you just love those movie scenes in restaurants and malls, where some kind of human train wreck happens, the people turn their heads vacantly, detect that the wreck Does Not Affect Them Personally, then swivel back to their oh-so-important text-ies and “Like, totally”s?
Rick, isn’t it just soul-satisfying to think about bombing the bastards back to the Stone Age? All those warped little Commie mongrels and their spawn? It’s such a nice simple solution to an annoying problem.
Not that I have any brief for Koreans, having seen in Vietnam what the ROK troops did in their nothing-left-alive approach to their fellow Asian critters, as a reminder of what us humans, all of us, are capable of. And having learned a little about how the Two Koreas came to be the way they are. Ever heard of a guy named Syngman Rhee?
JTM,
Is there collective human “progress”, inevitable or otherwise? I doubt it. But things do change, and some of things for the better, and some of the betterments have resulted recognizably from the spread of logical positivism. In my view they’ve resulted more often from changes of the heart, from a deepening of the moral well.
Certainly I agree with you and Jon and most others here about the seemingly unstoppable power of the U.S. MIC. Yet there are countervailing forces that need not match our military services and contractors in troop strength, disposition or order of battle to overmatch the array of miltants.
Let me offer two examples. A close study of the events that triggered American wars reveals that, in the case of naval causus belli alone, the U.S. repeatedly has gone to war on the basis of fallacies such as the Maine, the Lusitania and the Tonkin Gulf incident, and exposure of these trumped-up charges can steel us against similar ruses in the future.
Second, at the close of the Cold War the Soviet Union and the United States agreed to take down a tremendous lot of throw weight, with the result that the world still is a far safer and therefore better place. On the American side, these efforts were the fruit largely of the peacemaking of physicists and mathematicians who’d rued their earlier participation in the Manhattan Project and its progeny.
Perhaps IT doesn’t require whole divisions. Maybe it requires only the services of a relatively few and well equipped counterfoil hackers.
I am not advocating the erasure of North Korea; I just happen to think that it’s a likely outcome if the beloved leader does something stupid. Another observation: in the long run it would be better for China as all out war on the Korean peninsula would severely impact South Korea’s status as an exporting nation. Less competition for Chinese factory workers.
Cynical? Perhaps, but I suspect that such a scenario is much discussed on both sides of the Pacific among the higher ups.
Some kids enjoy playing Risk!, and Taking Over The World. And then they get a little older, see that the same stratagems and self-aggrandizement are available on a much larger scale, and there’s how the human species falls off the cliff.
I’d rather not stand around applauding the gaming skills of those usually puny, sneaky little snotballs who preferred Risk! to playing pickup baseball. But so many of us, the vast majority of us, actually, are relegated to Permanent Right Field or only get to play Left Out, and are forced to turn over our lunch money and cookies to the schmucks who by accumulating Power and Money and Men and Materiel force the rest of us to live on the edge of the abyss.
Said Cronkite, “And that’s the way it is.” Too bad on us.
JTM, it would be good were you to participate in a war game, viz North Korea, and to follow the outcome. Such exercises occur with regularity, even in California, and your participation in a fortcoming such event is not farfetched.
Did a little actual war gaming, and like WOPR, it seemed pretty clear to me (being dumb enough to give a toot what happens to the plain folks) that the only way to win is not to play at all. But your invitation gives me hope that my understanding of the endgame for the game of Human Life is right on the particle beam.
I wonder, don’t really care though since I’m pretty sure the answer can be derived by simple inspection of externals, whether Doom or Grand Theft Auto or Halo or Universal Combat activate greater sets of limbic system neurons than, say, SimCity 3000. Too bad (for my potential great-grandchildren) that such a puny amount of interest and brainpower are devoted to really understanding the roots of violent conflict and the turgid yearnings and action potentials that foster the rise of Beloved Rulers and Presidents-For-Life. As opposed to the truly cosmic-scale expenditure of cogitation and resources on trying to Capture the Flag, forever marching with ignorant armies into the night of oblivion in some idiot’s-inevitably-negative-net-sum game. But of course the unanswerable comeback is that The Enemy Poses A Threat To Our Way Of Life, so OF COURSE we have to play out the hand. Aces and eights…
Yep, gotta remember that Those Weird Semi-Humans Over There are Going To Get Us (remember the delightful terror you felt when Daddy or Uncle Joe was going to GET YOU when you were 3 or 4?) and TAKE US OVER if we aren’t Prepared with the appropriate and grotesquely expensive and soon infinitely fatal Security-Providing Weapons, and the Right Doctrines and Strategies and Tactics and Deployments and Projections of Power to Keep Us Safe And Free In Our Beds.
I did a Southeast Asia war game, my friend, and in retrospect it proved pretty completely my conviction that the only way to win is not to play, but that we as a species are too stupid do figure out any more fruitful form of long-term entertainment. Face it — killing someone, the pink mist or the flying body parts or the soul-satisfying visions of radioactive craters that glow in the dark and are visible from space, is what In Our Hearts We Know Is Right. We are almost all convinced that our karma is to foster the mindset and behaviors and conditions that create the Thunderdome, so we can have the possible great joy of being a Triumphant Survivor. The Beloved Leader’s Groveses and Oppenheimers and Tellers and Nuclear Alis have the wherewithal to build nukular threats largely because for-profit Western companies and war-gamers in various governments and quasi-governments peddled their bits of the necessary knowledge and technology all over the place just to make a fucking buck or serve some warped stratagem.
I used to say we are blind to the realities of what we as a species are about. I think it’s more a matter of that suicide pact we all seem to sign being the best we can do. Too much cerebrum for our own good, by far.
And by the way — is the tone of your 2:22 re my “not farfetched participation” indicative of a threat? or a hope? or a promise?
And one last question: Given the new flatness of our planet, why is it that penny- ante dictators and kleptocrats persist in trying to develop fucking MISSILES, with all their complexities, to “deliver nukular weapons,” with all the atendant need to actually master “rocket science,” when ships carrying shipping containers, and 18-wheelers carrying carrots and chickens, and such, are routinely “delivered” into the bowels of all major population centers? Oh, that’s right — helps take food off the peasants’ tables, makes careers in “science” and engineering and military procurement and “banking” for the potentate’s hangers-on.
What is it the smug say at the ends of their posts? “’nuff said.” Wasted breath, of course.