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3 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Dying in vain or for George W's
daddy? By Julian Delasantellis
The great 20th-century scholar of Jewish
mysticism, Gershom Scholem, once wrote of what he
called "plastic hours", moments in history so
filled with promise and possibilities that all
manner of great change for the human race was
achievable.
There was one such moment, a
chance to make a real start toward a conclusion to
the United States' four-year agony in Iraq, a true
plastic hour, at the Democratic Party's recent "YouTube
debate".
The moment was not seized on; in fact, it seems
more as if the Democratic Party tossed its plastic
hour straight into the recycling bin, to sit there
as refuse along with the old newspapers and empty
beer cans.
The Cable News Network (CNN),
attempting to be the very model of a modern major
cable news outfit, structured the event so as to
have the questions submitted by the real heartland
of America or, at least, the part of the real
heartland of America that knew how to attach
webcams to their computers and then upload the
attendant video files to YouTube.
Prior to
the actual event, it seemed as though nothing
could top the entertainment value of the videos
not selected to be posed to the candidates. Among
the best of these were a man asking a question
about the future US policy in Iraq while wearing a
bad-guy wrestler's mask; another man had his
parakeet on his shoulder asking another question
while standing on some rotating device that
produced the effect of the room seeming to spin
around him. My favorite was a sophisticated woman
in an elegant red evening gown, sitting in an
ornate room behind a lovely Queen Anne desk,
singing in alto an operatic aria decrying
telephone outsourcing.
The most important
question of the evening (more so than the
questioner with apparent severe eye damage who
asked whether Senator Barack Obama was really
black or whether Senator Hillary Clinton was
really a woman) came from John Cantees, from the
state of West Virginia.
"My question is
for Mike Gravel [US senator from Alaska from
1969-81, now seeking the Democratic nomination as
the darkest horse in the field]. In one of the
previous debates you said something along the
lines of the entire deaths of Vietnam died in
vain. How do you expect to win in a country where
probably a pretty large chunk of the people voting
disagree with that statement and might very well
be offended by it? I'd like to know if you plan to
defend that statement, or if you're just going to
flip-flop. Thanks."
The young man asked
the question in an angry tone; I could not tell if
he was angry at Gravel for making the statement
about US troops dying in vain, or angry at him for
a possible upcoming backtracking on the statement,
or, as I remember my own son's teenage years, just
angry so as to be angry. I think it's the last,
especially after seeing this young man's YouTube
homepage. It lists among his favorite video
posters "diebunnyhater" and "vomitinyourface";
besides the video selected for the debate, there
is also one showing him kicking in a window, and
another called "my online dating video", where he
justifies his statement that "I am a rapist" by
noting that "they chose to not run away as fast as
I was chasing them".
The aphorism vox
populi, vox dei (the voice of the people is
the voice of God) is attributed to the 8th-century
poet Flaccus Albinus Alcuinus; the prospect of
this gentleman and his young vox populi
possessing vox dei is enough to turn anyone
to atheism.
At first, Gravel tried to
answer the young man's question directly. "Our
soldiers died in Vietnam in vain." Then, in
keeping with the quixotic nature of his campaign,
he justified the above statement with this curious
manner: "You can now, John, go to Hanoi and get a
Baskin-Robbins ice-cream cone. That's what you can
do. And now we have most-favored-nation trade.
What did all these people die for? What are they
dying for right now in Iraq every single day? Let
me tell you: there's only one thing worse than a
soldier dying in vain; it's more soldiers dying in
vain."
Was the senator trying to say that
it would have been all right for the 58,000
Americans who died in Vietnam to have done so if
only you could now get a Burger King Whopper in
Hanoi instead of a hot-fudge sundae?
Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and John
Edwards, former North Carolina senator and the
Democratic Party's 2004 nominee for vice
president, knew how to answer this question; with
their fatter campaign war chests, they can
probably afford better focus-group polling than
the shoestring Gravel campaign.
Obama: "I never think that
troops, like those who are coming out of The
Citadel [the South Carolina military college that
hosted the debate], who do their mission for their
country are dying in vain."
Edwards: "I don't think any
of our troops die in vain when they go and do the
duty that's been given to them by the
commander-in-chief. No, I don't think they died in
vain."
And in their responses, the
prospect of a significant withdrawal of US forces
from Iraq before 2009 grew ever fainter.
For many of those residing outside the
United States, the continued US willingness to
sustain the levels of casualties and expense it
continues to suffer in Iraq is bewildering to the
point of exasperation. All the previously stated
justifications for the war - Saddam Hussein's
threats, weapons of mass destruction, spreading
democracy in the Middle East, "we'll stand down
when they [the Iraqi military and security forces]
stand up", the "temporary" "surge" - have proved
to be, at the very best, unintentional falsehoods;
at worst, they've been proved to be bald-face
lies.
Still, the war continues to have
enough support that just under half of the US
Congress continues to block all efforts to end it
through a legislative initiative. A growing number
of congressional representatives from the
president's Republican Party now say they support
a change in policy or a troop withdrawal, but when
it comes to voting on measures that would place
these declared desires into law, they prove
themselves to be examples of the new political
acronym called WINO - they're for Withdrawal In
Name Only.
In the June 6 edition of Asia
Times Online, my article Yes, Rambo, you get to win this
time explained how, although it is
perfectly clear that the current war is actually
being fought in geographical Iraq, for many
Americans, and perhaps for the American psyche as
a whole, what actually is happening in Iraq is
nothing but the last battle of the Vietnam War, as
the US fights on for a victory in Iraq that would
expunge the memory of its lone military defeat in
Vietnam.
"Remember the Maine" (the US
battleship that exploded in questionable
circumstances in Havana harbor in 1898) became the
patriotic slogan that rallied US public support
for the Spanish-American War. "Make the World Safe
for Democracy" did the same for World War I,
"Remember Pearl Harbor" likewise for domestic US
support of World War II. "Support the Troops"
became a near-omnipresent popular-culture rallying
cry as US
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