13 posts tagged “war”

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience

America at a Crossroads: Operation Homecoming - Writing the Wartime Experience (Edited for TV)

Warfare puts human beings into the most intense of human physical, psychological, and emotional experiences that one can imagine. In war, a person is being attacked and/or is attacking. One is facing one's ultimate destiny and making choices about the destiny of others. Decisions have to be made faster than they can be made well. It is too late for ethical thinking for the most part and too early for the contemplation of meaning. In peaceful times, we cultivate the broadening of the scope of individual vision. We ask people to see things from an enemy's point of view, to depress of clutch of decision making until we have determined where we ought to head. In war, this field of vision is reduced, either by superiors or by the demands of the day's fight.

Operation Homecoming is an opportunity for soldiers to reflect on the many facets of their experience – their anticipations, their fears, their pain, their choices, their injuries, their deaths, their enemies' deaths, their own deaths. It is an attempt to answer the question, “What are we doing to humans when we recruit them to go off to war? What are we doing to ourselves?”

This movie speaks for itself. I cannot add. I cannot subtract.

WarGames: The Dead Code

"Beware the system you have empowered to defend you." A piece of advice that many a Roman Emperor might have benefited from (I believe Caligula was assassinated by his own Praetorian Guard) and the subject of a number of contemporary movies. A few weeks ago, I saw the movie EAGLE EYE and this morning the boys and I watched WAR GAMES: THE DEAD ZONE, both new movies about government super-computers that take over the entire digital infrastructure of the country and almost destroy it in an effort to defend it.

What amuses me about some of these movies is how 15 year old kids are celebrated as being so computer savvy that they can gain access to just about any computer any place any time and redirect nuclear missiles at will. OK. Not quite that bad but ... there clearly is a good deal of ambiguity in the movies that tech savvy teens are watching these days. (Like there isn't moral ambiguity enough in the movie industry at large?). Perhaps one of my favorites is the movie Flightplan with Jodie Foster. Here is a movie that leads us to suspect a band of swarthy Arabs on the plane through most of the first half of the movie and then reveals to us at the end that the REAL danger facing this plane full of Americans is none other than the U.S. MARSHALL who was hired to protect the plane. In other words, in a crisis, suspect the system you have created to protect you. 

Eagle Eye (Two-Disc Special Edition)

Movies today are full of this ambiguity. Watch any movie where the authorities are pitted against some diabolical kid-genius and you are 90% sure to find that the kid is morally superior. Indeed, in the end, it will be the sociopathic hacker genius who will be asked by the planet to SAVE US ALL from the government itself. Sigh. Modern movies have seemingly been designed by anarchists it would seem. But are they onto something?

 Its things like this that remind me why governments in fascist states control the media. I guess the redeeming feature of both movies is that they present us with evil teenage hacker geniuses who have not eaten so many donuts that they can't run away from the police when the situation requires it.

Question for Comment: What is your level of trust in government right now? How did it get there? 

No End in Sight

Today's movie was No End in Sight, a documentary about the the chaos in Iraq circa 2006. Anyone who differed with Bush policy, Garner policy, State Department policy, and primarily L. Paul Bremmer policy gets a chance to say "I told you so" in this movie. I certainly would want to balance it with other documentaries but it certainly makes an argument that was compelling enough to force President Bush to change personnel and policy. Among the most forceful arguments made are:

1. There was not enough planning for post-Iraq reconstruction before the war.
2. Not enough people making decisions knew the Middle East, Arabic, Islamic theology, or Iraqi culture
3. The deBaathification policy alienated tens of thousans of people who had joined the Baath party only for professional reasons.
4. The disbanding of the Iraqi military put tens of thousands of armed trained troops out of work. Say what? One person interviewed said of these unemployed Iraqi soldiers, suddenly without jobs to support their families "I see bullets in their eyes." What would you do if someone with a stroke of a pen took away the source of income that used to care for your family. Is it any wonder that they joined the movement to get America out of Iraq?

Poor results from the above policies were met with denial ...

"There is no insurgency in Iraq. there is a high level of domestic violence."

... and the rest is History.

 Question for Comment: Have you ever had bullets in your eyes?

At the Center of the Storm: The CIA During America's Time of Crisis

George Tenet

I confess, George Tenet’s book on the CIA involvement in counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, At the Center of the Storm is something I have been wanting to read for some time and this week, I finally got to it. I would particularly recommend the chapter entitled “The One Issue that Everyone Could Agree On” about the WMD diagnosis in Iraq.

I have to say that I appreciated Tenet’s ability to take blame and refuse to take blame based on whether he believed he deserved blame or did not deserve blame. Taken as a whole, the book admits mistakes and yet at the same time refuses to take bullets in the chest for the mistakes that others made. And I do not get the impression that he is the sort of person to take advantage of the mistakes of others when they admit them either. The book is full of “This is why we thought what we thought. This is why we said what we said. This is how we drew our conclusions.” Some of the impressions that I finished the book with are as follows.

One, People cannot be blamed for sub-par work that they did not receive the support or time to do and few things are more frustrating than being so blamed. Secondly, it is always easier to see in hindsight what questions you should have been asking if you only had the resources to ask a few. But any of us who look at our own lives know that. Thirdly, Tenet makes it clear that there are those in the Islamic world who are just as, if not more, concerned with the ideology of al-Qaeda as we are. “There were a few countries that got it long before 9/11” Tenet writes:

“The Jordanians, Egyptians, Uzbeks, Moroccans, and Algerians always understood what we were talking about.  It was ironic that, pre-9/11, we had more success in getting help within the Islamic world than elsewhere.” P. 230

I also learned just how deeply offended those in the CIA are at the notion that they catered their intelligence to executive expectations. Tenet argues that the idea of regime change in Iraq was not something that was the result of Bush and Cheney demanding supporting intelligence for.

“The focus on Iraq by senior Bush officials predated the administration.  Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle were among 18 people who had signed a public letter from a group they named the Project for the new American Century calling for Saddam's ouster.  It is often forgotten, but regime change in Iraq was also the explicitly stated policy of the Clinton administration, and was the goal of the Iraq Liberation Act, passed by Congress in 1998.  $100 million was appropriated to the State Department for the express purpose of seeking an end to Saddam's regime. . . . America's promise to topple Saddam remained the law of this land from halfway through Bill Clinton's second term right up until US troops invaded in March 2003.” P. 302

To the contrary, Tenet insists that the Iraq War was more the result of the executive branch NOT relying on the CIA for its intelligence. He says that key advisors to Bush and Cheney were developing their own pseudo-CIA analysis.

“For many in the Bush administration, Iraq was unfinished business.  They seized on the emotional impact of 9/11 and created a psychological connection between the failure to act decisively against Al Qaeda and the danger posed by Iraq's WMD programs.  The message was: we can never afford to be surprised again.” P. 305

“In looking back, there seemed to be a lack of curiosity and asking these kinds of questions, and the lack of a disciplined process to get the answers before committing the country to war.  And in hindsight, we in the intelligence community should have done more to answer those questions even though not asked.  One of our senior analyst subsequently told me that the impression given was that the issue of ‘should we go to war’ had already been decided in meetings in which we were not present.  We were just called in to discuss ‘how’ and occasionally the ‘how will we explain it to the public.’ There was never any doubt of the military outcome, but there was precious little consideration, that I'm aware of, about the big picture of what would come next.” P. 308

On several occasions, Tenet reiterates the problem with funding side-CIA’s and not the institution itself.

“Feith’s team, it turned out, had been sifting through raw intelligence and wanted to brief us on things they thought we had missed.  Trouble was, while they seem to like playing the role of analysts, they showed none of the professional skills or discipline required.  Fieth and company would find little nuggets that supported their beliefs and seize upon them, never understanding that there might be a larger picture that they were missing.  Isolated data points became so important to them that they would never look at the thousands of other data points that might convey an opposite story.” P. 347

“Trained analysts would ask questions like, ‘What is the source?  What do I know about the source?  Do they have the access that they claim?’” p. 356

At the heart of his message about mis-information in the executive branch’s decision to go to war, is the fear that the Nitro of the unfounded assurance of the President’s advisors was being combined with the Glycerin of qualified guesses of the official intelligence services to produce the lethal combination we know now was the decision to go to war. “Policymakers have a right to their own opinions, but not their own set of facts.” Tenet states in several places.

And yet, he takes responsibility for the mistakes while setting them in their historical context.

“Because of the impending vote on the use of force, scheduled for early October, a production process that normally stretched for six to ten months had to be truncated to less than three weeks.  Even that was not fast enough for some of the unsympathetic members of Congress who wanted the NIE, delivered almost instantly. . . . Had we started the process sooner, I am confident we would have done a better job highlighting what we did and did not know about Saddam's WMD programs, and we would have sorted out some of the inconsistencies in the document.  The lack of time, however, did not relieve us of the responsibility to get the information right.  The flawed analysis that was compiled in the NIE provided some of the material for Colin Powell's February 5, 2003, UN speech, which helped galvanize public support for the war. ” P. 323

“We allowed flawed information to be presented to Congress, the president, United Nations, and the world.  That never should have happened.” P. 383

One of the interesting insights I gained from my reading was how impossible it is to predict what will happen in a certain region without knowing what YOUR OWN government is going to do when it gets involved there.

“Our prewar analysis of postwar Iraq was prescient.  The challenge for CIA analyst was not so much in predicting what the Iraqis would do.  Where we ran into trouble was in our inability to foresee some of the actions of our own government.” P. 426

I particularly appreciated his suggestion that the problems of post-war Iraq were a surprise to the administration because they had expected the appearance of a ‘Muhammad Jefferson’ who would do for Iraq what Washington had done for post Revolutionary War America. The problem was, and the CIA probably knew this as well as anyone, that Saddam had shot all the ‘Muhammad Jeffersons’ in the course of his several decade regime.

All in all, a good book. It certainly will not heal the wound in the hearts of those who have lost loved ones as a result of the lack of good intelligence but it is a reminder that it could have been worse. It could have been much worse …. Had there not been people willing to make it their life’s passion to protect us.

Question for Comment: How are you at accepting blame when blame is deserved? How are you at defending yourself from blame when it is not?

The Aeneid

I am almost done with the Aeneid today. I confess, its been hard marches for the last few chapters. There is just way too much testosterone in this epic for my liking. If it isn't young men wanting to kill each other all the time, its gods mock-flogging the young men into killing each other. I swear there SHOULD have been a Roman god of war named Testosterone. Eventually Jove gets fed up with his various godletts, sitting around the battlefield like whiskey drunk spectators at a grand-pre wrestling match when a hockey game breaks out. He insists that he has so had it with the gods and their quarreling and whining that he is just going to let any one kill any one he wants for a few days. If Turnus wants to dismember Aeneas or Aeneas wants to cleave Turnus from pate to fart-hole, it won't matter to him.

Then thus to both replied th' imperial god,
Who shakes heav'n's axles with his awful nod.
(When he begins, the silent senate stand
With rev'rence, list'ning to the dread command:
The clouds dispel; the winds their breath restrain;
And the hush'd waves lie flatted on the main.)
"Celestials, your attentive ears incline!
Since," said the god, "the Trojans must not join
In wish'd alliance with the Latian line;
Since endless jarrings and immortal hate
Tend but to discompose our happy state;
The war henceforward be resign'd to fate:
Each to his proper fortune stand or fall;
Equal and unconcern'd I look on all.
Rutulians, Trojans, are the same to me;
And both shall draw the lots their fates decree.
Let these assault, if Fortune be their friend;
And, if she favors those, let those defend:
The Fates will find their way." The Thund'rer said,
And shook the sacred honors of his head,

Clearly Jove is not a Mennonite or Amish God. He certainly isn't Quaker. I remember some Mennonite friends of my parents when I was a kid that had a poster that said "A Modest Proposal for Peace: Let all the Christians of the World Decide that they will not Kill Each Other". Poor Jove who goddess squad is out to manipulate him to pick the Red Sax (Aeneid's guys) or Yankees (Turnus' guys) and he just decides for the sake of domestic tranquility to abdicate temporarily.

But it does seem that all religions have  some element of this - this notion that God or the gods just get lazy about keeping humans from killing each other.

Then, to his rage abandoning the rein,
With blood and slaughter'd bodies fills the plain.
What god can tell, what numbers can display,
The various labors of that fatal day;
What chiefs and champions fell on either side,
In combat slain, or by what deaths they died;
Whom Turnus, whom the Trojan hero kill'd;
Who shar'd the fame and fortune of the field!
Jove, could'st thou view, and not avert thy sight,
Two jarring nations join'd in cruel fight,

By Jove, I think Jove was up in his Skybox having a beer and watching the game. He certainly was not about to, Ghandi like, fast until the two sides buried their hatchets, While Aeneis is telling his son to fight hard and let others be lucky, Jove is coming back from the concession stand with a root beer and a bag of peanuts to watch his son, Aneas fight.

Question for Comment: Sometimes in religious history the exact same God can be portrayed as calling people to war (Deus Volt - God Will's It! the crusaders shouted) and other times portrayed as pleading with people NOT to go to war - under any circumstances. On this issue the sources appear to allow for a lot of theological elasticity. What do you think? Is God (or whatevr power you may believe in) ever for a war? Ever against? Ever indifferent?

The Middle East and Islamic World Reader

One of my projects in the last few weeks has been to read the Middle East and Islamic World Reader edited by Marvin Getterman and Stuart Shaar. It would be IMPOSSIBLE to discuss each and every primary source in this anthology (Just the question guide I created yesterday was seven pages). I could, I suppose make a brilliant attempt to solve the various conflicts in the Middle East myself. One idea I had was to take all the people who feel like they have been deprived of hearth and home in some Middle Eastern War in the last 2000 years and let them put up a homestead somewhere in the Green Mountain National Forest. Not that I have anything against the Green Mountain National Forest but ... if it can save the world a bloody nuke job, I am willing to make a sacrifice. I would love to have them solve their problems by themselves but, as Catbert says "It would be nice to eat candy and poop emeralds". It just seems like the Middle East cannot seem to escape its tribalism (can any of us?) Whether it expresses itself in religious forms, national forms, ethnic forms, or economic forms there is this fierce identification with tribe that assumes a limited supply of whatever it takes to survive and a commitment to solidarity.

One excerpt from a speech by Richard Falk comes to mind:

“America badly needs another kind of patriotism, what I will call cosmopolitan or worldly patriotism, a sense of country that blurs the boundaries between the self and others and that is aware that in an era of globalization, all of us have multiple identities based on nationality, race, religion, gender, age, and professional and vocational activities.  The physical boundaries of the state never were, and are less and less the source of meaning for our collective selves.  To adapt to a world of the Internet in the global market and media, we need to soften the exclusivity of our tribal attachments to a single national narrative.  We need to adjust to increasingly post-sovereignty world that is richly diverse and grossly uneven in wealth and influence, and we need to address the injustice is that this unevenness of wealth and power has produced over the centuries, and recognized the dangers of these widening disparities between rich and poor.  We cannot dispense with patriotism in such an emergent world, but what is needed are collective attachments that are not tightly tied to an outmoded and myopic national ethos.”

Richard A. Falk, “patriotism and dissent after 911, The Frederick Ewen Memorial Lecture, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, November 7, 2001. Found in the Middle East and Islamic World rRader, edited by Marvin Gettleman and Stuart Schaar.

My question is ... "WHY?" Why do we "need" to change the way we identify ourselves? Why do we need to "soften the exclusivity" of our various tribes? Why do we need to address the injustice that we regard as injustice only when we change the way we think about tribes? The following comes from something H.G. Wells wrote in the early part of WWI:

“Mars [the god of war] will sit like a giant above all human affairs for the next two decades, and thespeech of Mars is blunt and plain. He will say to us all:

‘Get your houses in order. If you squabble among yourselves, waste time, litigate, muddle, snatch profits and shirk obligations, I will certainly come down upon you again. I have taken all your men between eighteen and fifty, and killed and maimed such as I pleased; millions of them. I have wasted your substance contemptuously. Now, mark you, you have multitudes of male children between the ages of nine and nineteen running about among you. Delightful and beloved boys. And behind them come millions of delightful babies. Of these I have scarcely smashed and starved a paltry hundred thousand perhaps my way.

‘But go on muddling, each for himself and his parish and his family and none for all the world, go on in the old way, stick to your “rights”, stick to your “claims” each one of you, make no concessions and no sacrifices, obstruct the fresh harvest of live I have spared, all those millions that are now sweet children and dear little boys and youths, and I will squeeze it into red pulp in my hands. I will mix it with the mud of trenches and feast on it before your eyes, even more damnable than I have done with your grown-up sons and young men. And I have taken most of your superfluities already; next time I will take your barest necessities.” -  H.G. Wells, What Is Coming

Question for Comment: Do you find yourself agreeing with H.G. Wells and Richard Falk? Even if it means a reduction in the privileges that you enjoy as a member of a successful "tribe" in the world stage? Or is there something greater to be gained by thinking of ourselves as part of a human family?

The Aeneid

A little more from the Aeneid today. Aeneas meets Dido on his way through hell to see his father:

"Not far from these Phoenician Dido stood,
Fresh from her wound, her bosom bath'd in blood;
Whom when the Trojan hero hardly knew,
Obscure in shades, and with a doubtful view,
(Doubtful as he who sees, thro' dusky night,
Or thinks he sees, the moon's uncertain light,)
With tears he first approach'd the sullen shade;
And, as his love inspir'd him, thus he said:
"Unhappy queen! then is the common breath
Of rumor true, in your reported death,
And I, alas! the cause? By Heav'n, I vow,
And all the pow'rs that rule the realms below,
Unwilling I forsook your friendly state,
Commanded by the gods, and forc'd by fate-
Those gods, that fate, whose unresisted might
Have sent me to these regions void of light,
Thro' the vast empire of eternal night.
Nor dar'd I to presume, that, press'd with grief,
My flight should urge you to this dire relief.
Stay, stay your steps, and listen to my vows:
'Tis the last interview that fate allows!"
In vain he thus attempts her mind to move
With tears, and pray'rs, and late-repenting love.
Disdainfully she look'd; then turning round,
But fix'd her eyes unmov'd upon the ground,
And what he says and swears, regards no more
Than the deaf rocks, when the loud billows roar;
But whirl'd away, to shun his hateful sight,
Hid in the forest and the shades of night;
Then sought Sichaeus thro' the shady grove,
Who answer'd all her cares, and equal'd all her love.
Some pious tears the pitying hero paid,
And follow'd with his eyes the flitting shade,
Then took the forward way, by fate ordain'd,
And, with his guide, the farther fields attain'd,"

The question is of course, should Dido listen to him? Can this man be regarded as sincere? He claims that just as the Gods REQUIRED him, forced him, compelled him to make this trip through hell where he has accidentally come upon her, so was he forced to leave her to travel to Rome and found his city. Well ... what is the actual case? Was Aeneid FORCED to make this trip to hades? Or, to the contrary, had he ASKED to be allowed to come? Indeed, had he not gone out of his way and taken risks IN SPITE OF A CAUTION NOT TO?

My son refers to "free will" as "free won't". I tend to think Dido is right to ignore him. "Better a dead husband in hell that reciprocates something than a lying lover in Carthage" is the moral of that story.

I also enjoyed the part where Juno, seeing that she cannot keep Aeneas from founding Rome determines to make it difficult for him:

"If Jove and Heav'n my just desires deny,
Hell shall the pow'r of Heav'n and Jove supply.
Grant that the Fates have firm'd, by their decree,
The Trojan race to reign in Italy;
At least I can defer the nuptial day,
And with protracted wars the peace delay:"

She plans thus to make Aerneas' marriage to the local king's daughter fraught with complications. She heads off to the underworld to hire a professional sower of discord, Alecta.

"This Fury, fit for her intent, she chose;
One who delights in wars and human woes. . . .
'T is thine to ruin realms, o'erturn a state,
Betwixt the dearest friends to raise debate,
And kindle kindred blood to mutual hate.
Thy hand o'er towns the fun'ral torch displays,
And forms a thousand ills ten thousand ways.
Now shake, out thy fruitful breast, the seeds
Of envy, discord, and of cruel deeds:
Confound the peace establish'd, and prepare
Their souls to hatred, and their hands to war." Smear'd as she was with black Gorgonian blood,
The Fury sprang above the Stygian flood;
And on her wicker wings, sublime thro' night,
She to the Latian palace took her flight:"

She begins to work her "magic on her intended target, the mother of Aeneas' chosen bride:

"Betwixt her linen and her naked limbs;
His baleful breath inspiring, as he glides,
Now like a chain around her neck he rides,
Now like a fillet to her head repairs,
And with his circling volumes folds her hairs.
At first the silent venom slid with ease,
And seiz'd her cooler senses by degrees;
Then, ere th' infected mass was fir'd too far,
In plaintive accents she began the war"

... and so she works up the conflict be various means, beginning with the family and moving on into the community till everyone is killing each other.

Question for Comment: Have you ever been part of a  conflict that seemed to come from outside the circle of the people who were fighting it?

The Blood of My Brother

Movie of the Day was Blood of My Brother, an insiders look into the fight for Sadr City. On the whole, it wa s afairly apolitical movie that just basically went into the mosques, the funerals, the night raids, the families, and the heart of the conflict and then let you as a viewer make up your mind. The American position obviously is that the elected government of Iraq was the legitimate government of Iraq and that Muqrada Al sadr's Mahdi militia was therefore A) unnecessary and B) dangerous. He clearly was both anti-American and anti-Israeli, and anti-coalition government. In the eyes of his followers, he clearly was the leader Allah wanted them to have and if an election was the means, that would be fine but I can't see any good coming from an Iraqi state that adopted a sectarian government controlled so entirely by one sect's "televangelist".

Muqtada Al Sadr is not Al Qaeda but from listening to him preach, it is hard not to see him coming out of the same batch of cookie dough. He believes in the need to forsake this world for the next and the need for Muslims to dissolve their national borders and unite into one unified Islamo-fascist state with black robed clerics listening to Allah for State policy. He would certainly not be good for Israel and in so far as he defines America as a disunifying force in Islam, he would be no friend. This video was enlightening in that regard.

Still, I couldn't help but watch these house raids looking for weapons without thinking about Lexington and Concord. Apparently Iraqi law allowed each family a machine gun but that's all. The only difference between what was going on in Sadr City and Lexington and Concord is that Iraq HAS a democratically elected government and the minutemen are following a deputized Ayatollah. Further, the minutemen, to my knowledge were not hiding their weapon's caches in their homes.

Unmistakably, innocent people are being hurt and kids are  getting the crap scared out of them in these house raids. I just have a hard time visualizing my hiding weapon stashes in my kids' bedroom. The thematic resemblance to the episodes of Battlestar Galactica that the boys and I have been watching is unmistakable though. These are not easy issues.  I don;t mind praying for Iraq's peace and saftey. I hope I can be forgiven for doubting that it would come in the form of a Muqtada al-Sadr government. Just calling it like I see it. don;t anyone shoot me.

Question for Comment: When you see large crowds of people chanting for a leader who they associate with the will of God (be it G.W. Bush or Muqtada al-Sadr, what reaction does it evoke in you?

Frontline: The Dark Side

Watched another Frontline documentary on the part that Dick Cheney played in the push to war.

I wish Dick Cheney would watch it and respond so that I could say that I had listened to both sides of the story.The argument is that Cheney, Rumsfeild, Wolfowitz, Pearl, etc. set up their own intelligence agency and suppressed the CIA intelligence by putting pressure on George Tennant. 

It is interesting that Dick Cheney is the one that gets the workover and not Bush in this 2006 version of the Iraq War. What is so interesting is that most of the material is ALSO in the Frontline documentary, BUSH'S WAR put out two years later. In short you can pick either video and watch either man, Bush or Cheney get blamed for the Iraq War. In 2004, Frontline put out the documentary Rumsfeld's War. In 2010, maybe it will be Condi Rices?

None are friendly to Condi Rice or Don Rumsfeld who will need to have a movie made to redeem them from eternal blame for Iraq if it winds up a total mess indefinitely. I just find it fascinating that Frontline has used the exact same movie to go after EITHER Cheney OR Bush or Rumsfeld. Its like medication that will work for either pain relief OR headaches or high blood pressure being packaged as medication for each.

Question for Comment: Who do YOU blame for the Iraq War (if anybody).