Category Archives: War

We are all heroes

Americana, Psychological Musings, War, What's a man?

in our own minds, except that we are not. When I was about 31 or 32, I read The Winds of War by Herman Wouk. It is one of those book with lots of characters and shows the wind- up to WWII from different view points and if you haven’t read it, I would recommend it – although I may be wrong, as I did read it almost forty years ago and our collective sensibilities may have changed – if you like historical fiction. Anyway, a couple of the characters are Aaron Jastrow and his niece, Natalie. They are Jewish – duh! – and in Europe. From almost the beginning of their part of the story, it became obvious – from my view point of looking back on the war – that they were going to end up at one of the German Death Camps.

When I would get to the Aaron and Natalie sections, I would just skip ahead. I couldn’t read all the bad choices they were making; choices I knew that I would not have made. In my mind – at 31 or 32 – I would have, heroically, made much better choices. Now – forty years later – I know that I would not have made those heroic choices of my fantasies. Now I know that I couldn’t read many of those sections because I saw myself in Jastrow’s mistakes.
These remembrances came up when I read a  blog post by Ta-Nehisi Coates today. In it, he writes about how easy it is to think we would do something different than what the slave owners and slaves actually did do, if we had lived in the slave society of the pre-Civil War south. It is a constant theme of Coates and was brought up by an article by some fool white guy saying what he would do if he were a black kid being raised in poverty. Read it, really! It goes directly to the question that people who are raised in poverty tend to stay in poverty and should society try to change that or just say, It’s their fault, with all the ramifications that brings.
By the way, the prison camp photo above is one of the camps we – we being the United Sates of America – built, in one of our racist fits, to intern our Japanese citizens during WWII. I want to say that I would have been against these camps if I had been my parent’s age when they were built, but I doubt it.

 

“A date which will live in infamy.”

Americana, Psychological Musings, War

About fifteen years ago, when the Serbs were trying their best to be the alphadogs of the region, before we were worried about global jihad and the GWOT, the Serbs  justified attacking Kosovo because it was of major historical importance to them. Major historical importance because of the Battle of Kosovo in which Serbia got their ass kicked in 1389.

In the build up to the Clinton”11week air campaign that forced Yugoslavia to accept a Western peace plan for Kosovo” – to quote someone – we were pretty much anti-Serb and, among other things, their 1389 Battle of Kosovo fetish was used as as a reason they couldn’t be trusted. I remember reading a newspaper article – or maybe it was a magazine article – that said something like In The Balkans, the past is never dead, they still remember this loss like it was yesterday. The article was very critical of the Serbian personality that would remember a loss and not a win.

But we are all like that. Certainly we Americans are. We remember the Alamo, and remember Pearl Harbor. Here, in California we even have a special license plate for Pearl Harbor. We don’t have a special license plate for VJ Day or VE Day, or our smashing the Japanese at Iwo Jima or at Guadalcanal which may have been the roughest fight the US has ever been in.

I’m not going anywhere with this except that I find it interesting and I suspect it is pretty much a human trait.

 

 

Why are we in Afghanistan? We shouldn’t be.

Americana, Current Affairs, War

I don’t understand why we are in Afghanistan. I don’t understand what we are fighting for. I don’t understand what our men – and women – are getting wounded and dying for. I don’t know, even, how we would know if we were winning.

We are paying for truck companies to bring supplies in from Pakistan and up the highways across Afghanistan that, in many cases, we paid to build; then the truckers have to pay off the Taliban to pass on those highways. Or get killed. We are fighting the Taliban and funding them. And we can’t stop because we need the supplies to fight the Taliban but, if we were not fighting them, they wouldn’t be getting all that money. It is more bazaar than Catch 22.

Our strategy is to develop Afghanistan but almost everybody we hire is corrupt and Karzai’s family is especially corrupt. Because we are there, houses in Kabul rent for over $6,000 per month. The owners now live in Bahrain or Dubai, or some other nice safe place on the Gulf Coast. Drug export is a – if not the –  major source of export income for Afghanistan and the counter-narcotics mission is a waste of time and resources that just alienates the Afghans we are trying to get on our side.

Paradoxically, under Obama, we now have more troops in Afghanistan so we can fight the “big war” with American troops, just as we did in Vietnam. The plan in Afghanistan is to flood an area with troops, secure it, then rebuild it, and leave them a new, rebuilt area, in control of our “good” Afghan allies. In Vietnam, this was called the Oil-blot Strategy with fortified Strategic Hamlets. It doesn’t work.

When Obama first started talking about Afghanistan being the good war, I thought it sounded like such a good idea. I was wrong – which means nothing – and Obama was wrong – which means a lot. We should get out. Say it was a mistake, say we got Osama and we won, say whatever; just get out. This will not end well and it is time to cut our losses.

 

We Killed Anwar al-Awlaki, shit!

Americana, War

 

The New York Times has an editorial saying that killing Anwar al-Awlaki is a justified act of war. The editorial is worth reading  saying in part

The United States did not claim the power to kill Mr. Awlaki because of his political views or because he was a mere member of a Qaeda affiliate against which Congress had authorized the use of force. It claimed the power to kill him, rather, because he was an operational leader of a Qaeda affiliate that had been involved in terrorist plots on American soil and because he was hiding in a country that lacked the capacity to arrest him and bring him to justice.

Of course the New York Times editorials usually say that what the president did was justified whether it is killing an American citizen we don’t like or invading Iraq. Anyway, it seems to me that Obama is doing a crackerjack job of what Bush the Younger bollixed. I wish that made it right but it doesn’t. We are fighting a war against a bunch of wackos that we should be rounding up and trying in court just like the Symbionese Liberation Army.

How much different the world would be if Bush had declared 9-11 the biggest criminal act in history and committed to tracking the criminals down and bring them to justice. Maybe we wouldn’t have fought two stupid, un-winnable, wars at the cost of bankrupting ourselves.

Instead, we have a war on terror. So maybe that is three, stupid, un-winnable wars.

Imagine killing somebody

Americana, War

Just think about it for a second. Over the last, say, 65 years – I’m hoping and going with the premise that I didn’t want to kill anybody before I was six – I have wanted to kill many people. Not for long enough to actually imagine what it would be like, more of a That fucker should be shot. kind of killing. But, imagine killing somebody. A man, say, in a dirt poor third world country.

Somebody who doesn’t want the United States there. Maybe they have kids and a wife who depend on them. So you are not just killing them, you are fucking up a whole family. But, hopefully, they don’t have a dependent family. But, surely, they do have a mother and a father who have invested their hopes and dreams in him. Maybe they named him Ibrahim – Abraham – after the founder of their religion, maybe they named him Anthony. What difference does it make? Just think about killing them. Make it easy on yourself, make the killing from a distance with a high powered rifle.

Now watch this video.  I think that it is a simulation – a training film – but, maybe not. Either way, this is what it is like to kill a person today.