Chronicle Of A Failure Foretold

 “I was reminded again how the men who start wars invariably live through them to justify the behavior that has left millions maimed and dead.” Jim Harrison

Saigon, 1975. Kabul, 2021. The motif of the limits of American military power is that of helicopters evacuating personnel from embassy compounds once thought to be impregnable, and permanent. 

I was opposed to the invasion of Afghanistan from the beginning. While the American reaction to the 9/11 attacks was understandable, it always struck me as an overreaction, misguided, out of proportion. I place the Patriot Act in the same category. The folly of trading civil liberties for the illusion of safety, and in the process creating a massive bureaucracy with a creepy name -- the Department of Homeland Security -- was sure to return to haunt us, and did in the summer of 2020 when protestors were snatched off the streets of Portland by DHS thugs in unmarked vehicles and uniforms without insignia or identification. I never consented at the ballot box to be kept under constant electronic surveillance by my own government. Homeland. The word has fascist overtones. 

Had 9/11 been treated like a crime America would not be scrambling to exit Kabul today. Nor would Osama bin Laden have been able to evade capture for ten years, hiding in plain sight in Pakistan. We were told that bin Laden was the most wanted man in the world, hunted by all of America’s major intelligence agencies, and with help from our “allies” in the region. I’m sure it will be fifty years before the full story about bin Laden is known, but my gut sense is that the reporting on the raid that killed bin Laden by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is nearer the truth than any official explanation by the US government. And, of course, the War on Terror didn’t end with bin Laden’s death. Over the course of two decades the lies told by the military establishment to Congress, the media, and the public about Afghanistan rival the lies told about Vietnam. We’re winning; progress is being made; we’re turning the corner; we can leave victorious once the local security forces are trained and equipped, indoctrinated with our fool-proof methods; all we need to completely turn the tide in our favor is a troop surge; all we need is to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. Year after year. Thousands of Afghan and American lives, trillions of taxpayer dollars, wasted. 

Once the rather nauseating explosion of “thank you for your service” tributes, solemn moments of silence for our fallen heroes, and stadium flyovers by Navy F-14’s lost their novelty, the American people forgot about Afghanistan. Who could keep track of the Whack-A-Mole nature of the conflict, with the Taliban being routed one year only to return the next more potent than ever. Our victories on the ground were ephemeral; the Taliban had only to be patient, to wait. That was the way to outwit the overwhelming military power of the foreign invader. It worked against the Soviet Union. It worked against the United States, too. 

I’m struck by how often the most egregious blunders are conceptualized and sold by men and women with the finest pedigrees, educated at elite institutions like Harvard and Yale. The best and brightest of the Vietnam Era, the financial wizards who crashed the world economy in 2008, and the architects of the War on Terror, which was always meant to be evergreen. We’ve forgotten the inconvenient fact that the majority of the 9/11 hijackers were nationals of Saudi Arabia, but the United States could hardly launch a military invasion against our dear friends in Riyadh, not at the risk of losing access to Saudi oil. No, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney gave the Saudis a soft pass, as has every administration since. What was the first foreign country Donald Trump visited? Saudi Arabia. Hubris. Greed. Corruption. Rot. This is how global empires deteriorate and collapse. Under the crushing weight of stupidity and the mythology of their own infallibility. 

In my head I can still hear the voice of George W. Bush, the faux cowboy, as he justified the undeclared war against a country that had not attacked the United States; a country in a part of the world that most American citizens couldn’t find on a map or begin to understand; a country of regions, tribes, languages, dialects, feuds and traditions. Bush painted with a simplistic brush, good against evil, on our side or the side of our enemy, our benevolent god against their malignant god. A shocked and frightened nation bought the story. Now will come the excuses and justifications and retellings of the story, recast, not as a tale of colossal failure, but as a noble effort to bestow American-style freedom and democracy on a country that never asked for either. 

We're Outta' Here

“As soon as we believe that we cannot be citizens of the world, we lose the world of which we might have been citizens.” Andrew Solomon

My wife and I haven’t been abroad since 1998, when Bill Clinton was president, the dot-com bubble hadn’t burst, and the Twin Towers in New York were still standing, representing American power, not an American tragedy, and my father-in-law, Guero, was alive. In the big scheme of things twenty years isn’t a long time, but America -- and most of the world -- is a different place now. Very different. Much more on the surface, tilting toward raw, racist, cruel, crass, and deadly. Twenty years ago climate change was far in the future, a whispered warning among scientists, a problem we had time to deal with. We could deny it, push it to the back burner, go on extracting and burning fossil fuels, polluting the oceans, rivers and lakes, pretend that endless consumer consumption was sustainable. Today there are those, like Donald J. Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party, who continue to deny the evidence in front of them, the massive hurricanes, floods, wildfires, sinkholes, and warming of the oceans, but the rest of the world understands that catastrophic climate change is real, and it’s happening right now. Trump, as stupid and incoherent as ever, surveys the devastation caused by the Camp Fire in California and declares that we will have “great climate,” as if the climate is a product that can be bottled and sold on the cheap at Target. Meanwhile, his lawless administration does everything it can to hasten our demise.

The US has been a belligerent military power for more than twenty years, but in the post-9/11 hysteria the belligerence was given a double dose of steroids by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. The US invaded Afghanistan, ostensibly to hunt down Osama bin Laden and make it untenable for terrorists to use Afghanistan as a base, then the mission changed to rooting out the Taliban, building infrastructure and democratic processes, all of which have been spectacular failures. The Afghan people have suffered for 17 years, their country, not stable to begin with after years of war with the Soviet Union, is even worse off -- and the US remains, unable to win or find a plausible way to withdraw. I have lost count of the number of times I have asked my elected representatives to explain why we are still in Afghanistan. The responses are pathetic.

Then, based on a mountain of lies and false evidence, and with most of the world against them, Cheney and Bush invaded Iraq and set the Middle East reeling. The promised cakewalk didn’t happen, nor did Iraqi citizens line the boulevards and toss flowers at the feet of American soldiers. Iraq was torn apart, sundered by sectarian violence, corruption, and rampant death. It remains the greatest military blunder in American history, and as if that were not bad enough, the invasion and occupation also proved to the world that America wasn’t any better than other countries who murder, torture and destroy. Killed the myth, except in the US, where every last soldier, sailor, marine, and Air Force desk jockey was treated as a conquering hero. The full-US-PR monty, football stadiums, airports, everywhere, support the troops. Don’t ask what they’re doing or where, just support them, no matter what. Naturally, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and all the rest of the perpetrators have walked away, written books, made money as media pundits, or, in Bush’s case, painted portraits and had his reputation rehabilitated. Fifteen years later, the US remains in Iraq, in neighboring Syria, and Libya, and other places in North Africa, and, let's not forget, our role in Yemen.

Nearly two decades of non-stop warfare has had domestic consequences, not in rejuvenating the anti-war movement, but in nurturing hyper-militarism and hyper-masculinity, the dangerous notion that all problems can be solved by state violence, against unarmed black people, Mexican immigrants and innocent children. Hate groups are ascendant, fueled by the rhetoric of Donald J. Trump and the grifters on Fox News. Absurd conspiracy theories flourish, like the idea that immigrants and people of color are waging genocide on white people. America is now a place where facts come to die. The president makes up his own reality in which he is always the biggest winner, the strongest man, the tough guy, the guy who knows stuff because of his very large brain.

For fourteen of the past twenty years I have written about all this stuff, and more, on this blog, now more than 700 posts. Shouts from the Balcony was my wife’s idea; ironically, she never reads this blog. Neither do my kids, which is amusing because they were the main reason I wanted to record some aspect of our times, so they would know, one day, what their father was thinking about and doing to exercise some agency in the world, to raise his voice, no matter how faint or ineffectual, against injustice. Think, I tell them, about all the people in this world, today, as we speak, who have almost no say over any aspect of their lives. Every massive wildfire, every hurricane-induced flood, every report of melting glaciers, I worry for their future. As many countries in the world, desperately trying to cope with climate change and income inequality and refugees and aggrieved citizens -- all of which can be traced back to the death machine that is unfettered capitalism -- turn to authoritarian figures for solutions, I worry for their future. As I look at the economy, knowing that its fundamentals are all wrong and completely unsustainable, I know a reckoning is approaching and I worry some more.

And over it all, my entire life, the threat of nuclear annihilation.

But in the short run there is a trip to Italy to make, the trip we were supposed to make in 1991, before we started raising a family, when we were much younger and I had more hair and a dark beard rather than a gray one. I am so looking forward to being outside the US for a couple of weeks, away from the non-stop insanity and stupidity, the rampant ignorance and poisoned atmosphere. Who knows, I may come back with a story or two to tell.

Operation Iraqi Freedom

“The only certain way of remaining above suspicion was to regurgitate the official catchphrases and to echo the insipid pronouncements of the Leader. Statistics were as threatening as hand grenades…” Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova Trotsky, The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky

Shock & Awe turns 15 this week
an American War of Choice
sold to the American public and the world as absolutely necessary

Once the missiles began to slam Baghdad, 
the American media shifted into full war overdrive,
fawning over ex-Generals who praised the US military
day and night on cable TV
millions of people around the globe who marched against this manufactured war
were ignored as if invisible

Operation Iraqi Freedom

Missile strikes described as surgical
harmless to civilians, women and children, old men, newborn babies
meant only for Saddam, the dictator, the evil tyrant holding WMD’s that were never found
because they never existed

Bush knew that, Blair knew that, Cheney knew that, Powell knew that, Rumsfeld knew that,
but emblematic of our time, none of them were held to account for the chaos they unleashed;
W. Bush paints portraits and tosses out the first pitch at the World Series,
plays the jovial ex-president,
oblivious to the bloodstains on his hands;
his accomplices walk free

Operation Iraqi Freedom

Sold with sleight of hand worthy of a traveling carnival,
flogged by the best PR machine the Pentagon could buy
hired masters of illusion,
wizards of “perception management,” 
dim and dark arts
more potent than any wielded by Joseph Goebbels

Embedded reporters loyal to everything but the simple, obvious Truth -- Shock & Awe was unnecessary, unjustified, illegal, a crime against humanity 

Never did we bother to accurately count the Iraqis killed as we “liberated” them
from Saddam’s iron fist;
200,000, 600,000, 1,000,000?
most Americans could care less,
crowds roared when F-14’s streaked over baseball and football stadiums
the lowliest private feted as a conquering hero,
a defender of every beautiful American myth;
we learned to repeat thank you for your service,
until the words were bled of meaning

Operation Iraqi Freedom

Deeper into blissful ignorance we sank
Bush said we won, toppled Saddam, made the world safe again
war had produced peace,
the use of overwhelming military force against a nation that posed
no threat was justified then sanctified
Mission Accomplished

It’s said that the meek shall inherit the Earth
try the line on an Iraqi from Fallujah
who lost his wife, his brother, his baby daughter
everything he once held dear;
now the street where he played as a child
is divided by a bullet-pocked blast wall

Operation Iraqi Freedom

A lie then, a lie now,
a crime then, a crime now
A war of choice waged by the ultimate rogue nation;
for the Iraqi people the war and the suffering are present,
not past