A War With No Victors

Sir;... Those people who trusted their government did so out of stupidity; but those same people who trusted their government before distrust it now that Mr. Obama is its figure-head...The whole nonsense of a war over matters with other possible solutions is insane... That class among us, including many in the "News" business who helped to sell the war, wanted the violence, wanted the pain, and wanted the violence... It reveals much of their nature, their upbringing and their morality... People quite content to follow the rule of law and who are moral in all their domestic relationships can be the most irrational, bigoted, and chauvenistic people in regard to international relations...Do they suddenly believe that the murder they would never do because it is horrible becomes less horrible because government does it instead of the individual... It is still an individual dying, and an individual killing, but only the justification changes, and as a practical matter it is pitiful poor justification...
I can give my government no more power than I possess myself... What is wrong and illegal for me to do it is wrong and illegal for government to do...If we would deny no person the right of self defense even to the point of slaughter, then the same is true of our government; but no one has the right, especially when wrong, to attack some one on the presumption that they may be able to attack in return, pre-emptively or on a collection of specious evidence...This idea that our government has more rights and powers than we can give to it out of our own share of human rights is behind every international atrocity in the last hundred years, and before that, lords simply did as they pleased on their own authority...
War is an expensive proposition, and those people who said: Oil will pay for it, or deficits don't matter had the issue completely misunderstood...Wars should not be fought, but studied, because wars are the method by which societies destroy themselves...Feuds, on the other hand always kept people honorable, strong, alert, and intelligent, and happy...It is impossible to conceive of a modern nation state in a condition of constant blood feud; but neither should nation states be motivated by vengeance...
If you look at the war leaders we have had in the past century you can see what set them apart was their intelligence and knowledge...Gen MacArthur knew and understood the Japanese; but he did not know or understand the Chinese... Mr. Churchill understood the Prussians, and understood their vast preparations for war and conquest... He understood the Nazis, and with some remarkable help in international economics and trade, was able to discern the Nazi preparation for war, and long before it became evident to all...He did not understand the Russians or the futility of opposing the Bolshevic with a handful of Americans in Siberia...

The point is the same as that expressed in the Art of War, that: he who knows himself and knows the enemy will not be endangered in a hundred engagements... We would not have engaged in war with these people if we understood our own weakness, for it is our weakness we have demonstrated in trying to show our strength...On the others side; we have learned nothing of these people, and knew nothing to begin with, and so they have learned about us while we have learned nothing of them...
We do not grasp what it is to die in the process of teaching a spiritual lesson to a spiritual people... Ho Chi Minh got it... He realized we were over there spreading spiritual values like liberty while he was fighting for a materialistic value: country... He realized that to go so far, and to die for so little was a greater defeat for us than was the loss to him of ten times our number... And he was realistic: War is about the political solution...
If war is about politics, an expression of international politics; then why not just get with the deal making in which force, if not used up and pissed away, can be there as a chip of unknown value...
Ultimately, we went to war as an expression of personality, one personality, -encouraged, and goaded on by greed and corruption... People saw their chances to make billions in the glut of war and did not care if it broke the whole country in the process...The deficit does not matter if you do not have to pay it; but can use it as an excuse to deny the population their share of the commonwealth... I would bet that not 5% of the cost of these wars ever left our banks...
Politics is the personality of any form of relationship, and no relationship is free of the expression of personality in the form of politics...Dogs with dogs have their politics even if they cannot be said to have personalities... Marriages have their politics... Chance encounters with strangers in a supermarket have their politics... All forms; even international forms of relationship have their politics...
People like Mr. Bush who have partied away their lives, become decider in chief without the wisdom or knowledge to do so well, having the power he sought and that fate unloaded upon him, thinking history is not what all people do, but what is written after we are gone for clowns like him to disregard -are a tragedy... So long as we confuse wealth with worth, and material value with honor we are doomed to suffer the debacles of such men until we die as a nation...
It is fine if we decide to play the game of empire; but there was never once an empire without tyranny first gaining control of the home land... One must face the world with those at home already defeated, crushed, unable to resist, able to serve and denied a voice... They went to war without good cause, with our economy bruised and beaten by years of low wages and high profits, and the population clearly divided on the issue... It did not matter that they could corral our elected repesentatives... In a period of fear and ferver the government cannot be expected to lead, but only to follow the will of the people... They did not lead, but ran scared of the people... Still, having given the president the power only a fool would use, the fool used it, and who should be surprised... What was it for???...
I am certain some people are still making money or getting oil out of the deal... We have revealed the weakness of our economy and have reached the limits of our military might... This is Armageddon... This is the end of our world we have found, where we cannot afford to advance, and fear to retreat... This is the point at which nuclear war becomes considerable because it is the only sort of war we have ever actually prepared for... As we have been broken, and seen our government run into debt we are every day making nuclear war more probable... What will the Russians and Chinese think about us nuking Iran because we really have no other option??? Duck and cover, and cross that bridge when we come to it???....
It is inevitable that a people governed by their economy because they will not govern it, who trust in anarchy-enterprise to bringing them good though it is founded on greed will be forced into wars that reveal their weakness and broaden their divisions until they can resist no one, and offer no credible defense to domestic tyranny... This is how societies fail... We do not read history to avoid mistakes made for our education, but for the fantasy of mistakes people made for their own pleasures...
Thanks...Sweeney

Great article. I agree with every word, but you left out the parts where Obama continued the war even after promised to end it ASAP and to this day there are still tens of thousands of troops over there. This war was a failure of both the presidents who had command while it was and is going on.

Re: Chris McCoy;...Sir, you must try to understand the extent to which politic makes presidents the servants of the events they seem to be the masters of... MacArthur dying warned Kennedy out of South East Asia... Why give the enemy interior lines??? Pick your battlefields, etc. was no doubt the object; and it seems that Kennedy was smart enough to take the advice, but first there was the little matter of re-election, and not seeming soft on communism... Kennedy had other problems... Fate made other plans... LBJ thought the thing was do-able... Who could stand before the cop of the free world; but even he realized and stated perfectly the short patience of the American Public for failure...
If Mr. Bush thought Afghanistan was possible in four or even eight years he was as mad as he was dim... But, for his part, Mr. Obama was stuck with it, unable to afford it, unable politically to withdraw precipitously... That is part of the problem of going to war without a united country behind you... Even Agamemnon, who was a pretty dense brick had the sense to get all the Greeks on board...That essential political unity to do some deed, or die trying without sniping, back biting, or serial assasinations in the press is unknown in our system of politics; but the time for unity, for all to be sworn to a common purpose is before and not in the middle of an action, and some acts should be rejected out of hand as unlikely to result in any sort of desired end...
Who has beat Islam so they stayed beat... They are worse than a bunch of hillbillies... The more you fight them the more come for a licking... No one has stayed in Afghanistan for long... The place must look like a gddamned welcome mat for all the armies who have found it fit only to hold their graves... The place is only about a million miles from here, and about as different as any place can be from here except the deserts are dryer, the mountains higher, the valleys deeper, the winters colder and the summers hotter... I would personally rather set up an ice cream stand in hell than try to fight a war there; but what was the point???
Armies are for defense, and if that means offense at times, then so be it; but the wonderful thing about offense is the ability to choose the battle field...We picked the whole place... Even if armies are extremely good at taking up space that is not their job... They are supposed to fight enemies, and when they have departed, so should the army...
Why make a target of yourself where every one gets a gold star for killing you??? You cannot fight geography, distance and weather; and you cannot defeat religion without killing people entirely... We could have pulled out and went back ten times for the price of staying once, and when we will get out it will be with us broke and our tails between our legs never to return except for demonstrations no one will take seriously...
Who is to blame???... I think our military has something wrong with its collective head... But it was for politics that they went... They are like pitbulls that get their teeth into something and cannot let go...People like Betrayus who said it could be done ought to be hung out to dry...If you want to fight a population, you need a target, and if you want to make peace you need some one in authority... So you beat the crap out of them and leave, and when they form up, you beat the crap out of them again, and again and again until you find some one willing to make a deal...
Mr. Obama can get out at any time... No one in hell can turn this defeat- which any one with any knowledge knew was a defeat before the first shot was fired- into a victory... The defeat here was made possible by America's want of democracy... Not one of us was empowered to stop those idiots from making that great leap into stupidity...There was no need to seek the consent of the people... There was no need to consult with wise minds, and there was no desire to offer the people the facts and offer a creditable argument for going forth in search of vengeance...There was no consensus... And that is no way for even a ficticious democracy to function...
Believe it... The people are smarter than their government... They are not broke and without hope because they haven't got sense... They have faith instead of knowledge...The people know after the fact that it was a mistake... If they had had any idea of the costs in lives, material, good will, and treasure before hand; no part of a majority could have been found to ram it through...They were denied knowledge...
I think it was Lincoln who said after the slaughter at Mary's heights in the battle of Fredricksburg: What will the people say???... If, for political purposes the slightest slander should be broadcast in order to put or keep our people in harms way, there is no punishment how ever cruel that is just enough...Those profiteers who put themselves forward as patriots are our enemies...The fact that presidents must suffer long and hard to do the right thing only because every action can be turned against them shows how little democracy we have... All we have is the mob of public opinion which can be raised and directed at any pretext...The people do not know, and it is too late for presidents to become school teachers, though that is what they would be in a democracy...
Thanks...Sweeney

Mark was one of the few who had the spine to oppose what anyone with a brain could see was a total ruse. Good for him.

What I wish he would do is cut down on the whining about American soldiers' lives lost (after all, it was their choice to get in harm's way) and teach his myopic readers and listeners about what that war did to the millions of Iraqi's whose lives were ruined, the hundreds of thousands who were killed, and the untold numbers who were maimed. That was not their choice. It was done to them by a quasi-sociopathic, utterly stupid president, and his thoroughly sociopathic and murderous inner circle.

I do feel for the Americans whose lives were lost or ruined, but American suffering due to that war is NOTHING compared to what the Iraqis suffered. This is the kind of self-centered pissing and moaning that earns us the world's disgust.

What we did to Iraq will forever be a stain on the conscience of Americans. The only salvation for us is to admit fully what we did, apologize to the world, and take decisive steps to try to ensure such a terrible thing is never, ever again done by this country.

Don't hold your breath. That phony Obama, who's happy to let innocent kids die in droves in the streets of his Chicago political spawning ground, while he orates in tongues about symbolic gun control, wouldn't dream of it.

Mark, of course, will not go there. He's way too comfy in his dollarific little perch.

Re: Masako;... Have you no pity??? It is the want of choice that makes tragedy tragic... These people cannot be said to have choice... No one has a choice... The way this society has used up and closed off its options is like America before the Civil War, moving toward some fateful conclusion no one can fully imagine and no one can avoid...And then, with death at hand they see what they have all along been missing..
Did you ever read the Iliad... It was all about the wrath of a single man, and like the other Greeks there he was stuck on a point of honor, for all had sworn to make common cause... In a confrontation with Agamemnon, his honor was insulted, so he withheld his troops, and then the Greeks were getting waxed... Achilles' friend asked to join the battle and was killed, and for revenge Achilles fought again, knowing his own death would follow his vengence...
The Gods gave all these people a limited vision of their future, but not complete vision, and certainly not enough to change their fates... And their sense of honor, as splendid as it was, only tied their hands, and made their sacrifice complete...
What a frail voice becomes Cassandra, seeing all and believed not...These people seeing only the object before them, the next moment, the next hour, their satisfaction or revenge -could not conceive or could not care that they were sealing their fates... Caesar, warned could not hear...
The people taking up arms for the lost cause that is our country- at moment have only a limited future, and a limited vision of their futures, or they would find nothing in the America they are likely to experience worth the risk of their lives, or the loss of their eternal souls... Not one generation who died for the ideas that make America had their dreams filled with reality, and each new generation has had its dreams in turn filled with promise...How many died without knowing the futures they were promised... How many returned maimed, or without legs so they could ride the Harleys for which they died... How many returned too messed up to be loved by their wives or only to find their wives had spent the wages of death, and wished them away...
The blindness of those people made mercenary by a society that has taken all from them, and made them wager their lives for a chance at any sort of life is met and measured by the blindness of their government that has burned its bridges and options, that cannot live without war and cannot afford peace...
Choose your issue, and I can point to a congress with so little wiggle room they have to take a number to fart... Tragedy happens when two people can speak the same language, can understand each other, but can find no way out of their difficulty... North and South could talk... Greeks and Trojans could talk... When enough people die, those left alive find ways to compromise... And I am not saying one side or the other in our situation should compromise... The rich compromising on the rights of the poor for something they like better is only stock and trade... This whole country needs to think of things in a whole new way, to imagine what we might be willing to accept or would accept nothing less than once we have salughtered about half of us on principal... -And then skip the killing...
There is a deep immorality at work when people are promised a better life for the life they will take, but the larger share of that immorality rests with the government which should exist to open our horizons and expand our personal opportunities, and social alternatives... When the government finds the end of its line a month, three months, six months down the line, that is as far as its attention will reach...How many in congress today from across this nation are really looking for the total destruction of government because they expect better from anarchy or mobocracy...There are places in this country where the life of a black man, a native, or a hispanic would not be worth ten cents ten minutes after the rule of law recedes...Cowardice of consequences is all that is keeping many people alive...
When government itself is spreading the notion of government as the problem, and many sworn to the constitution only want what they want of it on their own terms, then the ultimate breach is not far off...No person of any sense would paint themselves into a corner for the privilage of having the job...People do it because they follow their failed principals into ever greater failure, even if necessary into the grave rather than examine them rationally if it will avoid bloodshed... The death wish stands on their side...People like death to the extent they can inflict it without suffering it...
Turning insides out is an easy exercise compared to philosophy...If they could turn their gaze aways from their petty lives and their senseless objections, they might examine history, or drama to see how peoples die, and of what dis-ease and with what blindness they rush to their demise...I do not pretend to like the constitution more than those people working in government for its destruction...They do not like it for the goals it finds worthy, and that is all I find value in...Listen to this people and to their representatives...All thunder in an sticky wind...

The last Civil War did not make a dent in the contradictions of the constitution, and those contradiction make our conflict inevitable... Will people once more die so the constitution can live as a failed document, or will they realize that our impass- that cannot be got over short of murder, is the perfect reason for a constitutional convention???...
How many more lives do we have to throw into the grave for a monument to our honored dead??? In pity we reveal our humanity... When we can see all the misled nabobs for our neighbors and country men; when we stop relieving ourselves with excuses, and stop burdening our neighbors with labels -we will be half ways to peace...
Sir; there are a few hints of the humanity of Jesus, but he never became fully, undeniably human until he forgave his own death...This pity, this ability to relent, to realize enough is enough is also a mark of tragedy... Who can blame us if we forgive, and if we can our selves forgive, who can condemn us...
But look at your congress so determined to play to the audience they have selected, and all digging in their heels... Can you imagine any man as they, all heels and no head???... The two dimensions of left and right give no sense of the many directions that lay open to humanity... Jumbos and jackasses will never get it...
Thanks....Sweeney

The continuing Iraq War is being waged against our own servicemen who require waiting up to 600 days or more for an answer to their requests for Veteran's disability assistance.

Re: Mike Ohr. Got that right. Anybody listening? Apparently not our president.

What if we all were to do the next right, honest thing!

Re: Roy Lindbom;... If we cannot get to; it is hard to get to -what if...
People cannot change their conditions without changing themselves, and with what they are as an adaptation to their conditions both sort of have to change together, or not at all...Those who think we can be successful against the primitive peoples we now fight because they are so primitive do not see that they are primitive simply because they find their social forms impossible to change...They are not properly a target for us, but a lesson in how not to be...
Honest, meaning honorable, and right, meaning moral are as impossible to conceive of as to reach...Liberality is some times considered a virtue, but people are stingy with their morality, and liberal with their immorality...Though honor and justice may be considered a best practice, and as much so -between governments as between government and people and between people and people; where shall it begin???
People simply accept that the world is made up of rubes and carnies, and try not to be a rube...If the game is fixed and everyone knows it is fixed, that is a whole lot better that the game being fixed and people acting like it isn't...As much as I try to be just, and moral; I am very careful what I ask for since this whole society is unjust and immoral, and very much depends upon it, as do many people, such as myself... Would I demand justice if it meant I would starve... If I had justice I might well be shot, or hung; and it is a terror of many faithful lives that suspect justice waits on the will of God...
As much as we know that justice and morality are the key to all healthy and happy relationships, to expand that individual justice and morality to a national level reguires iconoclasts of the first order... People have to realize that they do not need to be without sin to cast a rock at a terrible sin... They should start with the big ones, and their own greatest faults... Life is not much fun without challenging giants, so we should all start with our own, and be reasonable about it... Only Allah is perfect, say the Muslims... All the more reason for forgiveness, say I...
Thanks....Sweeney

Re: Masako;... War is always costly, and wars of choice, primarily for empire or in defense of empire are disasterously expensive... It was the bottom line that made England give up empire... Lenin showed it costs the homeland, a cost invariably paid by the working class to keep empires... Britain still has the advantages of empire with us bearing the price of peace... If we could weigh the cost in the loss of capital, in the expense of defense, the whole thing would have been a bust long ago... The rich have shipped our industry abroad where it will not pay for its own defense, so the military has to nickle and dime the grunts who make everything possible... The only reason the rich throw more good money after bad is that they can keep the profit and load the expense onto us... If they had to pay their own way, we would have got no further than this hemisphere, and even there the price would have been prohibitive if the people had found it possible politically to limit their competition with slaves...
It is hard to conceive of these hillbillies from the backwater of central Asia actually being a thorn in our side worthy of the expense of being defeated by them... No one has ever beat these people, but they never were a practical threat to us... We did not like them... They gave Bin Ladin sanctuary... God damned if that is not worth all that blood and treasure for nothing better than the pride of having beat ourselves...
This was a defeat of common sense, and reason -by the right that puts their stupid principals and beliefs ahead of every other consideration... It should not have been done, but done, should have been done differently...I think that if the power of the evangelicals over our officer corp were not so pervasive, they might have found one of their number who might have suggested not doing it, or alternatives to doing it...What do the churches pay for the failures they think God will prevent...Nothing!!! God has not once in this world saved any one bent on destroying themselves...
The people if given the facts, and the time to consider them cool-ly, and the cost probable; would certainly have encouraged another course... The people are smarter than the government, and the government is stupid because they do not consult with the people... All this guessing after what will be politically possible or popular, or profitable instead of handing the facts to the people who must inevitably suffer the consequences is unacceptable... The contempt for the people is complete... The hatred for democracy is without limit... The sabotage of democracy goes on non stop; and this robbing of the people's bank to make private profit that would be impossible except on the back of the population is a crime without equal... Where has our money gone because if you find that, you can find out what happened to the democracy this country was formed for...
Thanks...Sweeney