More on Atrocities

Well, since the war has stirred me up again, I might as well work on it some more here in the blog. After all, who reads this nonsense anyway?

What upset me was the atrocity talk. Always it's American atrocities in war. Seldom (I'm tempted to say never) are the atrocities of the other side (Vietcong, Al Qaeda, Iraqi insurgency, or even whatever comes next--and it will come) even mentioned.

Once early in the Iraq war, I was corresponding with a flaming pacifist who told me that it was acceptable that an Iraqi could blow himself up in an Iraqi market killing Iraqis, but it wasn't okay that one stray American bomb should kill one civilian. I was so angry I couldn't see straight at the unfairness of that double standard. I'm still angry at the double standard.

Most people don't know (and some who do know simply refuse to believe) how hard the American military works to avoid civilian casualties. I do know since that was part of my job when I served in Vietnam. Someone would call in a target request for what were no doubt enemy positions that needed to be eliminated. If the position was too close to a village, we couldn't strike it. If it was in a pagoda, we couldn't strike it, even if the enemy had put a .51 cal. machine gun in it and was shooting at our helicopters.

I know, I know that others can tell stories exactly opposite to what I've said above. Everyone seems to know the quote by an American officer during one of the Tet offensives about how he had to "destroy a village to save it." I know atrocities happen. I'll say it again: All War is Atrocity. There is no such thing as a good war, a clean war, a war without atrocity. Every action in a war is an atrocity. And yet I also know how hard most of the military works most of the time to prevent more bloodshed than is necessary to carry out the mission. I've even had fighter/bombers abort runs on cleared targets because they didn't like the chance of missing their target and hitting something they didn't want to hit.

But we don't hear those stories, do we? Is it that we don't want to know? Is it that we've made up our minds already? It is obvious to me that Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Vietcong, and other insurgencies that come to mind, do not have thoughts about "collateral damage" (to quote a terrible euphemism for killing innocents) unless it is to determine how to get more random death into every attack.

I guess the thing that still upsets me, even as I approach my 59th birthday, is the unfairness of one-sided criticism. Unfairness has always bothered me, and I guess it always will. I know life isn't fair, and I don't like that. I know that, in this modern world, we make arguments because we want to win the debating point, not because we want to improve understanding (ours or others), and I don't like it.

Democratic Party Unity

You know, everywhere I look these days I find stories about the disunity of the Democratic Party. Will Bill and Hillary (no last names needed) fully support the Obama-Biden ticket? Will Hillary's supporters get over their mad and support their party's nominee? Will the Democratic Party unite this time around?

I'm reminded of a quote attributed to the humorist Will Rogers, who was the Jon Stewart of the Twenties and Thirties: "I belong to no organized political party; I'm a Democrat."

Democratic Party unity is not the issue and won't be the issue on election day. The economy and race will be the defining issues of this campaign. If Obama can keep his campaign focused on the economy, where the polls say the electorate trusts the Democrats more than they trust the Republicans, he has a chance to win. In a normal election, he would win.

Let's face it, when it comes to security, national or otherwise, people look to their personal finances first. Do I have a job? How secure is my job? How secure are my savings? How good and how secure is my health care when I need it? These issues far outweigh the threat of terrorism in our land, and both parties should know this.

However, if the issue is, becomes, or remains (depending on your point of view) can I trust Obama as my President, then he'll have a hard time winning. And the fundamental key to that trust issue is Obama's race and his weird name. (I'm sorry, but to most of white America Barack Obama is a weird name.)

For him to win, he majority of white America has to see that their economic interests are more important to them than their fear of a black President.

The G-D War...Again!

I was listening to the public radio program To The Best of Our Knowledge this past weekend. The program was called "Rethinking the Sixties" (you can listen to the program if you want at this location http://www.wpr.org/book/080824a.html.

It was, as usual, a thoughtfully produced program about certain aspects of the theme. And it really set me off to hear Tom Hayden rejustifying himself 40 years later. And there was another piece right after that on the My Lai Massacre. That one got me angry. (Well, okay, maybe Tom Hayden started it, but the second piece was no walk in the park either.)

It really annoys me that all the Vietnam War is remembered for are a few atrocities and the "fact" that we lost. I'll leave the won/lost debate for another time. I mean does anybody ever really win a war? In my opinion, we're still paying the price of winning WWII. (again, another topic for another time)

Yes, people, there were atrocities in Vietnam. There are atrocities in every war. In fact, I'll give you this fact to chew on: ALL WAR IS ATROCITY, period full stop. The whole damn thing about a war is atrocious. War is a war crime. There is no good war.

If you don't believe me, then go back and look closely at WWII. Here are a few random examples. When the Japanese Navy attacked the US Navy at Pearl Harbor, they were so conscious of trying to avoid civilian casualties (not on the naval base itself) that they did not hit the fuel storage tanks that would have crippled the Navy's ability to respond to anything in the Pacific because they chose not to risk creating civilian casualties. (The off-base casualties that did occur came from American antiaircraft fire shells that fell back to explode in Honolulu.)

The US responded with unrestricted submarine warfare, in contravention of the Geneva Conventions and an act for which we justified fighting Germany in WWI. By any reasonable measure, we were more guilty of a war crime in that than the Japanese were in the attack at Pearl. And we followed it up with loads and loads of aircraft bombings of purely civilian targets in both the Pacifc and European theatres of WWII. War crimes all. Atrocities all.

But then what is done to a human body on the field of battle is an atrocity, too. All war is a crime, but we only prosecute the losers and the unlucky. The rest of us have to live with what we saw, heard, did, or even didn't do.

What I'm really tired of is hearing only from those who haven't been there and don't know what it's like to even be in the area but who think they have the right to judge the actions of others who were there.

Thanks for letting me vent. This whole business just riles me up so I can't hardly think, let alone write, sometimes.

Nothing is ever as simple as the willfully ignorant would have us believe.

From AP: People Hearing too much about Obama

In a story running today from AP in Washington: "Barack Obama may be the fresh face in this year's presidential election, but nearly half say they're already tired of hearing about him, a poll says. With Election Day still three months away, 48 percent said they're hearing too much about the Democratic candidate, according to a poll released Wednesday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. Just 26 percent said the same about his Republican rival, John McCain."

Is it any wonder? Even McCain talks more about Obama than he does about himself of his positions, policies, and plans.

Early Thoughts on the Presidential Campaigns

Though you might find it hard to believe, it's early in the current race for the American Presidency. Neither of the major parties has yet formally anointed their nominees or held their conventions. No dueling press conferences, I mean debates, have yet taken place. No surprising developments, either here or abroad, have taken place.

I go back a ways in experiencing Presidential campaigns. The first one I remember, though I was ten at the time, was Nixon-Kennedy. The current campaign reminds me a lot of that one (at least as I have studied it since; my recollections as a kid are limited to rooting for the Catholic, which I was at that time). That campaign had a young, inexperienced, charismatic Senator up against, a well-known, politically experienced, reasonably handsome sitting Vice President.

Prejudice played a big factor in that election, as it does in this one. Lets not kid ourselves by all the media talk about how this campaign can't be about race. Frankly, it's all about race. As you know, I'm an old white guy. My life experiences and acquaintances are more like those of John McCain than they are like those of Barack Obama. The same is true for almost all white Americans. The same is true for most Americans. Americans who studied in an Islamic school in Indonesia are rare. So we're not going to have had a lot of the same formative experiences that Senator Obama has had.

We should acknowledge that race relations are tenuous at best in this country. (Frankly, they're pretty tenuous at best all over the world. All people seem to prefer "their own kind" to those who are of a different race or ethnicity from us. American race relations actually led to a bloody war that only partially settled anything. I lived through the Civil Rights movement of the Sixties, and that advanced the rights of minorities (at the expense, it must be noted, of the privileges of the majority), but the Civil Rights movement did not advance race relations. We still live in primarily segregated neighborhoods, go to primarily segregated schools, and attend extremely segregated churches (that is, when we attend church at all). So anybody who isn't a white male (like John McCain) will be viewed with unease and suspicion simply because he's different.

I was a big fan of John McCain in 2000. I thought that what the Bush campaign did with its dirty campaign against him in the primaries was despicable, especially coming from someone who used what loopholes he could to avoid service in Vietnam where John McCain became a hero for getting shot down and imprisoned by the North Vietnamese.

So it saddens me greatly to see the turn the McCain campaign has taken with its negative ads portraying Obama as an empty suit, at best. All the ads that are getting play on the news (I have a DVR and don't watch commercials) are negative, negative, negative. According to those ads, Obama is responsible for higher gas prices, would rather lose a war than an election, doesn't support the troops, and has the brains of a Paris Hilton.

What happened to the campaign of ideas that John McCain promised us? Should be elect John McCain because he can't draw a crowd in a phone booth? Because he can't give a soaring speech? Because he was a POW?

I would have voted for the John McCain of 2000. I won't vote for the one I'm seeing right now.