War Talk, Part III

And, the exciting, triumphant conclusion...

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 22:35:46 -0800 (PST)

So, the man who once played a militant soviet in the fourth grade play (well at least your single line reading gave that impression) is clearly not in favor of war. I certainly hope this doesn’t throw you in the untenable “just say no to war” position favored by Hollywood pinheads like Sheryl Crow and Richard Gere.

Which isn’t to say that I’m in favor of war. War sucks. People die who shouldn’t, it eats resources better used more constructively, it exhibits the absolute worst in human nature before, during and in it’s aftermath. Often causes more problems than it solves—much like the burn tactics (you are well acquainted with) wild land firefighters sometimes employ that (literally) blow up in their faces. That war only serves itself is a nice pithy aphorism, but a student of history (or even one who lifted his drooling chin from his desk during random screams of “pillbox!” in Mr. Swenson’s 12th grade Am Hist class) might concede that some wars are a necessary evil.

Say what you will of those who wave flags and offer the company line about “defending freedom from tyranny” and protecting American interests from those who would destroy us, but isn’t there some truth behind the hawk rhetoric? I’m cynical enough (still) to believe that any large endeavor, certainly wars, and likely anything entered by the U.S. government in foreign diplomacy is rooted in some way in money. War is notoriously profitable, and it’s more than a little fishy that many members of Team Bush have profited immensely from the last Gulf shindig. And a quick, successful war never hurt anyone’s reelection campaign even in a recession. But I’m also convinced that the single greatest impetus and driving force for this one is our own defense.

And if it isn’t really the true impetus (who can honestly say their vantage point offers them a clear line-of-sight on the driver of this crazy, infinitely complex bus to hell?), then I’m convinced it’s at least a legitimate justification.

The comparisons are obvious even as they are inapt. WWII was justified and necessary. Any arguments? Maybe we went overboard firebombing civilian populations (more people died in Dresden than any one place at any one time in the history of the planet) and vaporizing Hiroshima. And given those atrocities, it’s hard to argue much for round two in Nagasaki. Especially in this part of the world and considering that from what I’ve read, Truman didn’t have a clue what he was about to do, or indeed, had done immediately after the fact (referring in his address to the nation and his private journal that the bombed civilian centers of industry were “military targets”). Maybe we would have had (and continued to have) a bit more moral authority if we weren’t the only country on the planet to detonate an atomic bomb, without warning, on two populated cities. And maybe it was myopic to insist on an unconditional surrender from a nation to which that term was anathema, when all we eventually got was a negotiated peace years later. But that’s another rambling screed entirely.

And yet, (and damned if this next quote won’t short-circuit my whole argument in light of it’s original, facile musical employment) we didn’t start the fire. WW dos had this fella named Hitler intent on systematically exterminating a race of people and conquering the planet. In retrospect, such a quaint notion reeks of something worthy only of a D-grade GI Joe storyline (post Zartan, the shape shifting Aussie, and circa the time of the serpent faced Emperor guy made of Attila the Hun’s DNA when the TV show and Hasbro started to dictate the book’s storylines—to its severe detriment). But, yeah, Hitler was completely nuts. And all he had was the largest, fiercest army known to man.

Saddam has a broken down crew of unmotivated recruits and the remnants of his strong Republican guard. But the thing is, a maniac these days doesn’t need endless columns of Panzer tanks and the Luftwaffe. Even Cobra Commander knew that a nuclear device (or one that could somehow control the weather) was enough to cow the world.

So, in a suggestion from my previous blabbering, we need to fight the wars we can win before they metastasize into something a little hairier. You know, like North Korea and Iran.

Brinkmanship is a game that can only be played by those who’ve got themselves a convincing brink.

You could argue that Saddam is well contained with the eyes of the world firmly on his country and opinion strongly and almost unanimously against his regime, albeit if not America’s unilateral plans to jam 12,000 lb bombs up his ass.

I repudiate all such notions that this is Gulf War II. This is simply the endgame of the same war begun by Poppa Bush in 1991. Saddam never acceded to the conditions of the ceasefire and has brazenly continued to advance his WMD programs. Can’t really blame him, really. He was dumbfounded that he was still in power—a power that rests entirely in his ability to kill his enemies, scare the rest of the population and eventually to possess those Ws of MD that will grant him a de facto seat at the world diplomacy table.

9/11 has only made more immediate all of the clear and present dangers that we’ve willfully ignored for years in favor of the dot com good life and (un)reality television while occasionally lobbing cruise missiles at empty tents in the Afghan dessert.

And yeah, while American military intelligence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be in the movies, I still trust the raw data being consumed by the big brains in high places. Are you crass enough, cynical enough to believe that anyone, even someone as simple-minded as GWB (the president, not the Hudson River crossing), would send his country to war just for his Texas oil interests? There are too many respectable players in this game for that to be the only true stake. I mean, Nixon was a conniving, egomaniacal rat bastard motherfucker who had lots of despicable reasons for churning bodies all over Vietnam and Cambodia, but can anyone argue that he didn’t see communism in S.E. Asia as a genuine threat? Can even you, in retrospect really say that while the cost was severe on so many fronts actual and psychological, that the Cold War in all of it’s pockmarked ignominy (and dare I say, success?) wasn’t a legitimate reaction to a legitimate threat? Again, I digress therefore I am.

Back to Saddam.

He’s gotta go. I follow the Bush camp’s philosophy that this isn’t about disarmament, but regime change. There is no way to prove he doesn’t have these weapons. You can’t prove a negative. And you can’t find evidence of something in a country the size of Iraq. Not with five guys and a humvie. Not with all the time to obfuscate and shove things under deep rugs. I can’t tell you how easy it was to vanish something as fundamental to my life as rolling papers in an apartment the size of your Shadowlawn Drive bathtub, much less a little bit of VX nerve gas and anthrax in a vast dessert.

Sometimes things need to get worse before they get better. I’m more concerned with the precedent this sets in the eyes of the world than anything. America: the aggressor. But it’s hard, if not impossible to convince people of the virtue of this war beforehand. I’m sure Europe was just as cautious and thumb-twiddling in the months and years while Adolph was passing curious laws and passing out yellow stars, hanging out on the border near the Sudetenland and then eventually re-districting downtown Warsaw.

In some people’s eyes America has always been a bullying aggressor. You can’t imagine my frustration dealing with the well-educated, seemingly intelligent Namibian chucklehead who couldn’t see the difference between American “oppressive” economic foreign policy and a crack terrorist attack on U.S. soil using commercial aircraft.

She sees American capitalism and exploitive forays into developing nations as pure evil. OK. There is much inequity in the world. The have-nots suffer greatly when Americans institute tariffs to protect American farmers and similar such measures. We place sanctions on unfriendly governments to get them in line and only end up hurting their innocent citizens. We support dictators and shady regimes when convenient and attempt to topple them when we can to replace them with friendlier dictators and sunnier shady regimes. Arrogance is never welcome in polite society.

And to that, I say we are still the best and go fuck yourselves. Capitalist industrialization under democracy, while problematic is still the best system going. The world will always have problems. There were shitloads of problems long before America existed. I seem to recall some of them that even predate Billy Joel’s history lesson ditty. I know virtually jack shit about economics, but it seems that the way out of some of this inequity is to further expand this system, not for us to ignore the world and keep our products and markets to ourselves. Make more haves and continue to work and improving the lot of the have-nots. Don’t get all pissy if your country hasn’t produced anything of value to the world, ever. Or in the case of France, since the Renaissance.

And I don’t have any answers for America’s tendency to suck up the world’s resources while developing countries wallow in poverty. Or our hypocritical political endorsements. But I’m pretty sure it’s not gonna be the U.S. sounding a full retreat from world markets and politics. I’m convinced the world needs a superpower at the moment. And I’m pretty sure that our default setting has always been isolationist. Everyone please just shut up, take care of yourselves (like we did) and let me watch “American Idol.” But the world is too small and integrated these days. We need to be more careful whose toes we are stepping on and whose girlfriends we steal with a wink and a smile.

And the hell with all that. Point is, you’ve mapped out the worst-case scenario. People had similar concerns about Afghanistan, and while not a perfect coup by any measurement, it wasn’t Armageddon either. What if the brief surgical bombing campaign cripples the air defenses and command and control capacity in the predicted matter of days, Special Forces (no doubt already in country) take out other major obstacles for the lightening tactics expected from the north and south, most Iraqi GI Mustafas quickly surrender to join the new America-led occupying police forces, Saddam’s generals aren’t crazy enough to carry out default orders to use chemical weapons, Sharon somehow is restrained from retaliating for the 4 SCUDs that eventually impact somewhere in Tel Aviv causing causalities, Baghdad quickly surrenders amid rumors of Saddam’s death or defection rather than face months of siege and starvation, Saddam attempts to flee the country and is eventually apprehended by Syrian authorities that falsely promised him a safe exile, massive amounts of chemical and biological agents are confiscated and a burgeoning nuclear program snuffed, the country is split into 5 equal sovereignties that will fight among themselves for decades after the U.S. pulls out but under the careful eye of a new U.N. peacekeeping force stocked heavily with U.S. manpower after we promise to never, ever do something like this again without permission? Or until the next time we really, really have to.

In it’s entirety, it’s an unlikely scenario. (And in several incidences, patently wrongheaded) But clearly as unlikely as any worst-case scenario playing out to form. Or as unlikely as the 1999 Rams coming out of nowhere to win the Super Bowl followed by the equally unlikely 2000 Ravens and the (did this really happen?) 2001 Tom Brady-led New England Patriots.

And all of this might be easier for me to endorse since I certainly ain’t gonna be deployed in a forward position in the Iraqi dessert with friendly fire zipping past my cowardly head. And I don’t know anyone currently in the military. But my friends and family are currently in harm’s way—even if it’s harm from an ominous distance. And so am I, as a walking and talking American target in S.E. Asia.

Anyway, and fuck all if my opinions are any more valid than Richard Gere’s, that gerbil-stuffing shampoo-head. I apologize after the fact for my party-crashing discourse whose genesis is twofold: Fold one is that the well educated, opinionated and conversant American couple I worked with has vamoosed for a teaching gig in the lovely neighboring country of Burma (Myanmar) run by a delightfully ruthless, stifling, drug-running military junta. Leaving me with two friendly Canadians who, sadly, are 21-year old high school grads and not nearly as stimulating in the talking department. Not even about hockey, if you can believe it. It’s not their fault, of course, (or yours), but in a world that like pointillist painting, makes less and less sense the closer I look at it, I need to bounce ideas off of someone or something a little more pliant. (This metaphor is hopelessly muddled, but then this is singularly appropriate to my state of mind) And the second fold concerns my recent obsessive reading of HST’s “Fear and Loathing in America,” which I picked up on my last trip to Bangkok (on your recommendation if I recall correctly) and it has kindled a heretofore unknown yen for prolonged and turgid correspondence.

Still wondering what’s so funny ‘bout peace, love and understanding,

--D. Bones