Page 3 of
3 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Dying
in vain or for George W's
daddy? By
Julian Delasantellis
play
one of the hard right's original golden oldies,
that during the Cold War, the US left, for all its
proclamations of patriotism, was really rooting
for Josef Stalin.
Just as a monkey in an
experiment learns that pressing a bar in his cage
will get him a treat, and pressing it more will
get him more, the war's supporters are waling away
at the support-the-
troops
bar furiously. On July 15, on the NBC (National
Broadcasting Co) News program Meet the
Press, a debate on the war was held between
war supporter Republican Senator Lindsay Graham of
South Carolina and a war opponent, newly elected
Democratic Senator James Webb of Virginia.
Graham was working the bar with abandon.
"They [the troops] re-enlist in the highest
numbers anywhere else in the military. They're
speaking ... the soldiers are speaking, my friend.
Let them win ... Let them win."
The fact
that Graham had the gall to accuse Webb, a
twice-decorated Vietnam veteran, Ronald Reagan-era
secretary of the navy, and a man with a son
currently serving as a marine officer in Iraq, of
not supporting the troops demonstrates just how
much power the support-the-troops canon currently
has to temper and discipline the anti-war debate
in the US. Whether true or not, Graham's argument
that the war should be continued because the
troops want to fight it reduces the war to
something that sounds like a carnival attraction;
let the children ride it as long as they want.
The fairly extensive media reporting of
the abuses at the US military prison at Abu Ghraib
was met by an avalanche of critical comment along
the lines that such coverage was not supporting
the troops. Editors at US mainstream print and
electronic media outlets got back into line fast;
reporting of subsequent military abuses of Iraqi
civilians, such as the rape and murder of a
14-year-old girl in Mahmoudiya, and the subsequent
cover-up murder of her family, along with reported
premeditated killings of unarmed Iraqi civilian
noncombatants at Haditha and Hamdaniya, received,
at best, cursory, back-page coverage in the print
media, and virtually no coverage on television.
There, the editors "spiked" these stories
in favor of reportage on more important issues.
Frequently, these included the current state of
public drunkenness of America's proud young
starlets.
It is difficult to determine
just how much the US troops, many on their third
or fourth tours in Iraq, who are fighting the war
actually support the war. The defenders of the
canon react with aghast at the apostasy that they
might not; to them, today's soldiers and marines
are the continuum of an unbroken line that reaches
back to the Revolutionary War soldiers during the
frigid winter at Valley Forge, all the way to the
courageous marines braving withering Japanese fire
to raise the flag at Iwo Jima.
Their
dedication proves that they are both utterly
devoted to the mission of delivering freedom to
the Iraqis and that they must be supported. Since
the troops know full well that the Bush Pentagon,
much like the rest of the Bush government,
punishes dissent far more harshly than it does
incompetence, it is only natural that most
dissenting voices are not publicly heard. Still,
much as it would like to, the administration of
President George W Bush has not managed to
suppress all differing voices. New York Times
polling data reveal that opposition to the war, at
about 60% of the population depending on how the
question is posed, is the same in military
families as it is in the general population.
The troops' public voices may be silenced,
but on many military veteran discussion groups
(see my May 25 article A surge in the wrong
direction on the varied sentiments
expressed in these sites), the fathers of today's
troops, reporting on what their children describe
to them in letters home from the front lines in
Iraq, are more than generous with outrage and
indignation at what they see as their children's
pointless sacrifice. Perhaps most fascinating are
recent reports from the US Federal Election
Commission. They indicate that it is the
aggressively anti-war candidate Congressman Ron
Paul, not Vietnam hero and war supporter Senator
John McCain, nor front-runner Rudy Giuliani, who
has garnered the most campaign contributions from
US military personnel and veterans.
But
the enforcement of the ideological orthodoxy
assures that such information never strays far
beyond the periphery of the information superglut;
it certainly has not become an issue in the
current political debate on the war.
Because it would imply that today's troops
are, in volunteering to serve, either stupid (the
canon's enforcers punished Senator John Kerry
harshly during last year's campaign for implying
that, leading him soon after to withdraw from
consideration for the 2008 nomination) or
misguided or both, the war's critics are severely
constrained as to just how vigorously they can
question the war's ever-changing rationalizations.
Since the current troops' sacrifice means
you can't question the mission for which they are
sacrificing, the previous deaths of more than
3,600 US troops must have had some purpose, if
only for the reason that America's troops suffered
them. Although most Americans would now be
hard-pressed to identify specifically some current
cause now being achieved in Iraq worthy enough to
have sacrificed the fallen, and then to sacrifice
more in the future, you can't follow that
reasoning through to the next logical step, as
Gravel did (sort of), but Obama and Edwards
wouldn't, and say that their deaths are in vain.
In February, Obama was roundly criticized
for violating the canon when he said, "We ended up
launching a war that should have never been
authorized, and should have never been waged, and
to which we have now spent $400 billion and have
seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young
Americans wasted." That last line, about "young
Americans wasted", raised a hornets' nest of
controversy from the canon's defenders.
He
quickly backtracked, and his response at the
YouTube debate proves he knows what you can and
cannot say about the war in contemporaneous
America.
Polls say Americans want an
expedited end to the war; the inability to
accomplish this has resulted in the new Democratic
Congress suffering a decline in approval poll
numbers so quick and steep that they are currently
even lower than Bush's, whose numbers settled into
a crater never to be climbed out of after the
ineffective federal response to Hurricane Katrina
in 2005.
But it is the acceptance and
internalization of the bastardized tautology of
the canon - if the troops are pure then so is
their cause, and if their cause is noble it would
be wrong to stop doing it - that has prevented any
significant or effective anti-war movement from
emerging in the US Congress or general population.
As if they were continually ashamed and fearful of
the exposure of their mad aunt in the attic, the
Democrats know that it is their party's previous
support of the Vietnam anti-war movement that the
war's supporters are really trying to remind the
public of when the charge is leveled that being
opposed to the Iraq war means not supporting
today's troops.
Today's middle-aged
anti-war Democrats don't talk much about their
past back then as young Vietnam-era protesters; in
hiding and denying the past they once were, they
have allowed their opponents to define them and,
in doing so, deny them the present, probably their
future as well.
Human-like creatures have
been dying in combat since at least the Battle of
the Monolith among the ape tribes in Arthur C
Clarke's 1968 novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Willingly they have died for their ruler's greed,
or megalomania, or lust, or for a hundred other
reasons. It is the height of hubris to suggest
that the inherent nobility of the American
experiment, of the American cause, renders US
troops impervious to the possibility of falling in
vain.
Since all the stated rationales for
the war have been proved false, I'll finish by
entertaining you with mine. Gleaned from reading
many of the books published about the Iraq war and
Bush, but especially Bob Woodward's 2004 Plan
of Attack and 2006 State of Denial, I
see the war as representative of nothing but a fit
of deep Oedipal rage, illustrating the terrible
contradictions in the love/hate relationship
between the current Bush and his father, former
president George H W Bush. It was not at all
uncommon for the mid-20th-century US patrician
class to raise sons with a cold and distant
parenting style, leaving the current President
Bush filled with simultaneous unresolved towering
admiration and seething resentment toward his
father.
At first, he dealt with this
problem with alcohol and substance abuse; now, as
president, he tries to top his father, and in
doing so quiet his inner demons, by doing what
president George H W Bush could not, conquering
Iraq. In doing so, he unconsciously hopes that, at
last, his father might finally grant him the
paternal love so long denied him.
If
that's not a cause to die in vain for, I don't
know what is.
Julian
Delasantellis is a management consultant,
private investor and educator in international
business in the US state of Washington. He can be
reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.
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