IRAQ AND VIETNAM

Comparisons of the Iraqi war with the Vietnam war tend to consider primarily the conduct and completion of military operations and our inability to get out. A related similarity is that we clearly lost the war in Vietnam, and we are well on our way to losing in Iraq as well. While these are real similarities between the two conflicts, by far the most important similarity that historians will likely note is the role of deception in convincing the American public that the wars were justified. Remember the domino theory: if Vietnam falls, then all Southeast Asian nations will one by one fall to Communist domination. We accept the tenet that Communism was a monolithic empire that stood ready and able to take over any part of the world it wanted unless we stepped in and stopped them. Local people had no say in what might happen to them. The claim in Iraq is not altogether different, but in addition to the recent claim of establishing a beach head of democracy in the Middle East, more importantly our government mendaciously claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a serious threat to the security of the United States.

But what are the real reasons we went to war in Vietnam and Iraq? Not fear that either nation would fall under the sway of a foreign ideology, or that either could seriously harm us. In Vietnam, the primary supporting condition for the war was the threat from the rising horde of American baby boomers just reaching adulthood and demanding good jobs and social and political policies that would mesh with the ideals and hopes of youth. As president, Lyndon Johnson could look back over his shoulder and see 70+ million vigorous young people marching straight at him with all the energy and idealism characteristic of youth. What in the hell to do with them! Here was a force that our nation had never experienced before. How much Johnson consciously thought about this, I don't know, but it is clear that as a nation we were not ready for them. Our four-year colleges could not absorb them, the Peace Corps had absorbed only a few, no where near enough jobs would be ready for them, and yet here they came marching steadily forward in their tens of millions. If there's anything to scare a politician it's what Johnson faced then, a horde of untried and untested potential voters eager to change the political climate.

What better way of dealing with this danger than sending as many of them out of the country as possible? If they got killed, too bad. The necessity was to slow their absorption to a manageable rate. The draft and Vietnam were just the tricks to accomplish this.

Nowhere in the discussion of events leading up the war in Vietnam does anyone ever mention the condition absolutely essential for the conduct of the war, an excess of young men. Yet, without these millions of young men (and women), there would have been no Vietnam war. The American people sensed this, I suspect, and their half conscious awareness of something gravely wrong in our motives sparked the protests that finally brought the war to an end. The comparison we were then, and now, incapable of making, is that we might have done something as egregious as Saddam Hussein did in gassing his own people when they became inconvenient.

Official justification for our attack on Iraq is equally misleading. I doubt that there ever was any real concern by our leaders that Saddam Hussein might actually possess enough weapons with enough power to threaten us. Nor was there reason to think Al Qaeda worked out of Iraq or had any influence there. So why did George Bush and his minions insist on starting this unnecessary war? Two plausible hypotheses come to mind. First, George Bush's near neurotic compulsion to complete the work of his father. In itself, this is a basic impulse among males, but in Bush junior's case the impulse went unchecked, despite the serious consequences of such neglect, largely, I suspect, because George junior lacks the innate intelligence to deveop and maintain the kind of moral standard that could control such a compulsion.

Second, the Iraqi war was and is being fought for money. The current crop of neocons have worked diligently the past several years to turn the United States into a satrapy for corporations. Ronald Reagan began this pursuit and carried it far. His major way of transferring tax dollars into the coffers of corporations was through huge expenditures for (cold) war materiel. Not being able to pay for all these defense expenditures, the nation borrowed enormous sums, the interest charges for which went to, you guessed it, financial corporations. Together the weapons procurements and the costs of borrowing sent the nation trillions of dollars into debt. George Bush is furthering that goal of transferring the wealth and resources of the nation to corporations by his enormous tax cuts, securing legislation that turns natural resources into short term corporate profits, and by the war in Iraq, which is not only expensive in itself, but also offers a convenient way to transfer money directly (think no bid contracts) to corporations. Other efforts helpful in this nefarious enterprise include subsidizing pharmaceutical companies under the guise of drug benefits for seniors, and destroying Social Security by transferring it to private corporations.

Thus, I would argue that comparisons between the Iraqi and Vietnam wars are fully justified. We just need to identify the most salient similarities.

THE COMING LIES

I shall not listen to the President's speech tonight. Whenever he speaks, I turn the channel or hit the mute button, because I know that George Bush had rather climb a tree and tell a lie than to stand on the ground and tell the truth. Consequently, his speech tonight, like all the others he's given, will be nothing but lies and deceptions. Hell, I'll be better off watching some stupid sitcom. At least they won't claim to be anything but crap.

The really sad part about the President's deception is that the majority of Americans thoroughly approve of that sort of behavior. As the influence of hill-billy Christrians increases, their innate dishonesty will come to dominate public discourse more and more. At the other pole, corporate interests with their values based solely on money, will continue to find lies and deception more and more profitable.

In our public affairs, I think we've turned the corner, but it's the wrong corner.


In an email message today, John Kerry said, "We need to put the Iraqi troops on a true six month war time footing . . . ." That strikes me as the kind of effort we need to begin now. We've talked about restarting the military draft in the United States, but why not initiate a draft in Iraq to build and train an Iraqi army that can defend the country. We train our own draftee armies in six months or less; surely we could train an Iraqi army in the same time frame if we were to put some real effort into it. Of course we would have to provide a safe place for prospective recruits to apply, and not leave them outside in long lines as prime targets for suicide bombers. I can't help but wonder if we're willing to do even this little.

MORE THOUGHTS

President Bush's defense of his actions with the claim that he is a war time president reminds me of the fellow who killed his mother and father and then pleaded with the court for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.

The sleazy Republicans are after PBS now. Their strategy is the same as that being used against Social Security: attack and claim a problem, even though there is no problem in need of correction. Social Security is not on the brink of bankruptcy, nor is Public Television excessively biased toward liberal views. The Republicans know that just by asserting over and over that there is a problem that eventually people will come to accept the claims as true and begin to demand that something be done. They know that if they repeat often enough and loud enough the claim that Social Security needs saving and that PBS is dominated by liberal ideas people will begin to believe them. This is the same propaganda technique used by the Nazis. A lie repeated often enough will finally be believed. The remedy they espouse for Social Security, of course, is to destroy it, and their remedy for PBS is to fill it with purely neocon political programming.

Sadly, the scheme will probably work. The nation is on a neo-fascist track now and there isn't much that will slow it down, let alone stop the rush to disaster. I don't know why Americans fall for such political manipulation, but I suspect that part of the answer lies in the dumbing down of educational efforts over the past several decades. Of course, simple minded television is also partly responsible. These are only a couple of possible and partial explanations. The simple-mindedness of Americans, like most other phenonena, has many causes and there is no smoking gun that we can point to as "the" cause. The fact is, we are a public incapable of critical thinking and easily led astray by unscrupulous politicans who exploit our stupidity for their gain. The question that bugs me is why anyone would want to be leader of a people too stupid to realize when they're being manipulated. Being a leader among such people strikes me as too much like shooting fish in a barrel to have any appeal: there being no challenge, only those with no self esteem at all will find value in it.

OF PASSING INTEREST

Well, I see that Republican stalwarts in the House are up to their old tricks over PBS. Seems they think anything that isn't sycophantic praise must be a malicious attack. That's dumb Bush's attitude ringing through; if you're not with me, then you have to be against me. No middle ground at all. So, now Big Bird has to go.

One day I hope Americans wake up and realize what a con game is being played on them. Republican neoNazis care nothing about free speech, democracy, or the American people. All they are concerned about is holding power, which they achieve by sucking up to deep pockets within giant corporations.

The Gray Eminence was back on the Hill, too, for another of his all too frequent dour performances. I keep saying that the stage lost one of its great performers when Alan Greenspan turned bad and took up the study of economics. No one can top his performance before a Senate or House committee. It is sheer theatre.

DEEP THROAT

I've always loved the pseudonym Deep Throat. It fits so perfectly the situation in Washington at the time. Remember the plumbers were trying to discover and plug all leaks. The money wrench (or pipe wrench), a tool commonly used in this work, is a wrench with the capacity for grasping big items. The part that does the gripping is called the throat. For gripping large objects, the wrench needs to have a deep throat. In the case of Watergate, the large objects to be gripped were highups in the Nixon administration, and eventually even Nixon himself.

There have been some who relate the term Deep Throat to a pornographic movie at the time with that title. Never having seen the movie, I don't know if the association is appropriate or not. I like my associations with a monkey or pipe wrench much better. More poetic (sic).

What about Felt's disclosures? Were they ethical and beneficial? I think so. Not only did Felt swear loyalty to the United States, but so did Nixon and all his minons involved in the nefarious activities of that period. Clearly, the Nixon administration was trying to take over the country and destroy it. Nixon placed his minons in most, of not all, government agencies to keep watch and at least try to control what each agency did. At the time of Watergate I worked for the Census Bureau and we even had one of his political hacks stationed in the Population Divison reading every statistical report that we prepared and sticking his nasty little nose into everything going on. Fortunately, there was a lot of foot-dragging all across the federal bureaucracy that contributed to Nixon's failure to utterly destroy the government.

Sadly, we're seeing much the same thing happening again. Oh, the methods may not be exactly the same, but the purpose clearly is to take over the government and run the nation as a fascist totalitarian state. We managed, through the wisdom and good actions of good people, to put an end to Nixon's attempted coup. I hope we can do the same with the Bush crowd. Recent senate action in thwarting the right wing effort to destroy a bulwark of the checks and balances that make our government work is a positive sign. The emergence of honest and democratic minded governmental and political leaders in that era should give pause to current Bush administrations efforts at destroying our nation. We stopped the takeover once, we can do it again.

THOUGHTS ON RELIGION

Religion seems to have become one again a major source for structuring Americans' perception of the world around them. In our history we have periodically entered phases of evangelical zeal where we seem to abandon all reason and reach out for magical answers to important questions. It seems that Jonathan Edwards never really died. He's still out there ranting about his angry God. One difference in this reformation and others is that more of the world is involved, or at least because of better communication we are aware of similar trends in other nations. Right now the Middle East is where the most similar pattern of fundamentalism rages. In truth, there is not much real difference between the intolerance developing in this country and the intolerance exhibited by the fundamentalists in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and other Islamic nations. Hill-billy Christians are not much different from the Taliban, just more cowardly. Both are sources for most of the evil in the world today.

Contrary to what the religionists would have us believe, religion is not the reason for human action; religion is simply used to justify and defend actions taken for entirely different reasons, usually reasons connected with selfish or nefarious motives.

The Middle East has always been a region of intense emotion and hatred, mixed with some tendency toward supernatural explanations , but primarily a region of hate. Over the centuries this hatred has congealed into three main conceptual systems, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These systems of hatred, incarnated into religion, have been the Middle East's primary export to the Western world. Periodically this imported religion as support systems for hatred rises to dominance in our thinking and we enter another reformation phase where intolerance reigns. Unscrupulous politicians, such as those in control in Washington now, exploit this hatred for their own purposes and we find hatred being promulgated from the government above and our own human weaknesses from below. Thus, what we face in America today is the far right using the simple minded fanaticism of hilll-billy Christians to foster their anti-humane causes.

There is absolutely nothing positive about hill-billy Christianity. Fantasies of burning people who see life differently arise not from a concern for their eternal well-being, as they claim, but from sheer hatred. Thus, hill-billy Christians default everybody to hell. Only by becoming one of them and easing their fears can one escape their wrath.

Like the Puritans of old, hill-billy Christians thrive on opposition. Once the Puritans arrived in the new world and could practice their religion without opposition (the Indians didn't care), they fell apart. After all, their driving force was hatred. Similarly, hill-billy Christians today perceive themselves as persecuted and thrive on this perception. Just listen to their sermons and conversations. To oppose hill-billy Christian simple mindedness is merely to reinforce their solidarity. The best way of dealing with this paranoid cult is to buck up those who know better so that they can practice a religion not based on a theology of hatred.

I suspect that one of the difficulties some have with accepting evolutionary theory is the inability to comprehend the immensity of time involved in evolutionary change. A billion years is an immense length of time; fifteen billion years is fifteen times as long. This is a period of time entirely beyond our ability to take in.