[Peace-discuss] Gravel's lament: Fighting another dumb war

[C. G. Estabrook]

Mort--

I think you're right to hesitate over Hedges' notion of a "dumb war."

I recently posted the following to Doug Henwood's economists' list:

"American planners are not idiots.  (We went to school with most of them.) They
(essentially the same people through the last two administrations, except for a
slight neocon detour) would not have poured people and money into their
21st-century Middle East wars out of pique or madness.  Their plans were not
irrational -- just vicious.  Capitalism, imperialism, and geopolitics provide an
adequate account.  And, as [another member of the listserv] pointed out, they're
winning."


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> 
> The war is probably not considered "dumb" by the administration—they have 
> their own interests in it different from what they proclaim at West Point or 
> from Oslo—, but it  is interesting to hear from Mike Gravel again in this 
> article by Chris Hedges. --mkb
> 
> 
> Gravel's assesment: / //“Obama comes on the scene,” he [Gravel] added. “He is
>  endorsed in the course of the campaign by some 19 generals and admirals. 
> These people had no confidence in [George W.] Bush. They recognized that 
> Bush’s unilateralism and cavalier approach to torture was injurious to the 
> American military. They gravitated towards Obama. It turned his head. He 
> thought he could be commander in chief and he could, he has the intelligence,
>  but he does not have fortitude. He lacks courage.”/
> 
> 
> Here's the whole article:
> 
> 
> Gravel’s Lament: Fighting Another Dumb War
> 
> by Chris Hedges
> 
> I have spent enough time inside the American military to have tasted its dark
>  brutality, frequent incompetence and profligate ability to waste human lives
>  and taxpayer dollars. The deviousness and stupidity of generals, the 
> absurdity of most war plans and the pathological addiction to violence—which 
> is the only language most who command our armed forces are able to 
> understand—make the American military the gravest threat to our anemic 
> democracy, especially as we head toward economic collapse.
> 
> Barack Obama, who is as mesmerized by the red, white and blue bunting draped 
> around our vast killing machine as the press, the two main political parties 
> and our entertainment industry, will not halt our doomed imperial projects or
>  renege on the $1 trillion in defense-related spending that is hollowing out 
> the country from the inside. A plague of unchecked militarism has seeped 
> outward from the Pentagon since the end of World War II and is now sucking 
> our marrow dry. It is a familiar disease in imperial empires. We are in the 
> terminal stage. We spend more on our military—half of all discretionary 
> spending—than all of the other countries on Earth combined, although we face 
> no explicit threat.
> 
> Mike Gravel, the former two-term senator from Alaska and 2008 presidential 
> candidate, sat Saturday on a park bench in Lafayette Park facing the White 
> House. Gravel and I were in the park, along with Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Ralph 
> Nader, Cynthia McKinney and other anti-war activists, to denounce the wars in
>  Iraq and Afghanistan at a sparsely attended rally. [Click here 
> <http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/kucinich_nader_hedges_protest_at_the_white_house_20091213/%20>
>  for video clips of speeches by Kucinich, Hedges and Nader.] Few voices in 
> American politics have been as consistent, as reasoned and as moral as his, 
> which is why Gravel, on a chilly December morning, is in front of the White 
> House, not inside it.
> 
> “I suspect that from the get-go he had an inferiority complex with respect to
>  the military,” Gravel, who was a first lieutenant in the Army, said of the 
> president. “It is the same problem [Bill] Clinton had by not serving in the 
> military, by not having an actual experience. You don’t have to go into 
> combat, you just have to get into the military and recognize at the lower 
> reaches how incompetent the military can be. So not having that experience, 
> and only dealing with generals, who of course learn to be charming—it’s the 
> sergeants who inflict the pain—he has this aura about the military. We have 
> acculturated the nation to a military culture. This is the sadness of it all 
> because that sustains the military-industrial complex.”
> 
> “Obama comes on the scene,” he added. “He is endorsed in the course of the 
> campaign by some 19 generals and admirals. These people had no confidence in 
> [George W.] Bush. They recognized that Bush’s unilateralism and cavalier 
> approach to torture was injurious to the American military. They gravitated 
> towards Obama. It turned his head. He thought he could be commander in chief 
> and he could, he has the intelligence, but he does not have fortitude. He 
> lacks courage.”
> 
> Time is rapidly running out. The massive bailouts, stimulus packages, 
> giveaways and short-term debt, along with imperial wars we can no longer 
> afford, will leave the country struggling to finance nearly $5 trillion in 
> debt by 2010. This will require the United States to auction off about $96 
> billion in debt a week. Once China and the oil-rich states walk away from our
>  debt, which is inevitable, the Federal Reserve will become the buyer of last
>  resort. The Fed has printed perhaps as much as 2 trillion new dollars in the
>  last two years, and buying this much new debt will see it print trillions 
> more. This is when inflation, and most likely hyperinflation, will turn the 
> dollar into junk. A backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared
>  intellectually and psychologically for collapse, will tear apart the social 
> fabric, unleash chaos and violence, and strengthen the calls for more 
> draconian measures by our security apparatus and military.
> 
> Obama uses the veneer of intellectualism to promote the dirty politics of 
> Bush. The president spoke in Oslo, when he accepted the Nobel Prize, of “just
>  war” theory, although the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan do not meet the 
> criteria laid down by Thomas Aquinas or traditional Catholic just-war 
> doctrine. He spoke of battling evil, dividing human reality into binary poles
>  of black and white as Bush did, without examining the evil of pre-emptive 
> war, sustained military occupation and imperialism. He compared al-Qaida to 
> Hitler, ignoring the difference between a protean group of terrorists and a 
> nation-state with the capacity to overwhelm its neighbors with conventional 
> military force. “The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving 
> the peace,” Obama insisted in Oslo. The U.S., he said, has the right to “act 
> unilaterally if necessary” and to launch wars whose purpose “extends beyond 
> self-defense or the defense of one nation against an aggressor.” Obama’s 
> policies, despite the high-blown rhetoric, are as morally bankrupt as those 
> of his predecessor.
> 
> “The first time I met him I felt there was arrogance with a touch of 
> cynicism,” Gravel said of the president. “Now the cynicism and the arrogance 
> have overwhelmed his intelligence. Like Clinton, he is into power.”
> 
> Gravel’s shining moment as a politician occurred in 1971 when Daniel 
> Ellsberg, a military analyst, handed the secret Pentagon Papers to The New 
> York Times. The newspaper published portions of the document, which painted a
>  picture of a failing war at odds with official pronouncements. The Justice 
> Department swiftly blocked further publication and moved to punish newspaper 
> publishers who revealed its contents. Gravel responded by reading large 
> portions of the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record. His courageous
>  public release of the papers made it possible for the publication to resume.
>  Gravel also launched in 1971 a one-man five-month filibuster to end the 
> peacetime military draft, forcing the Nixon administration to cut a deal that
>  allowed the draft to expire in 1973. He was a feisty and blunt candidate in 
> 2008 who lambasted the Democratic Party and its major candidates for being in
>  the service of corporations, especially the arms industry. His outspokenness
>  saw him banned by the Democratic leadership from later primary debates.
> 
> “Obama has wasted an opportunity to be a great president,” Gravel lamented. 
> “More than 50 percent of the American people do not buy into this war. He 
> could have stood up and said ‘we are getting out.’ Forget the Congress. 
> Forget the Republicans. Forget the hawks. Forget mainstream media, including 
> The New York Times and The Washington Post, which are hawks. He would have 
> weathered that storm because he would have had the American people on his 
> side. And what did he do? He caved in to the leadership of [David] Petraeus 
> and [Stanley A.] McChrystal and adopted a scenario that is a total loser.”
> 
> “When he hugs his children at night, when he puts them to bed, he has got to 
> begin to think there are little girls like this in Afghanistan who are being 
> killed and maimed,” Gravel told me. “If he can’t have that kind of a thought 
> then his arrogance knows no boundaries. I saw this in the Senate during the 
> Vietnam War. People detach themselves from the immediacy of the crime. They 
> vote for the money. They vote for the policy. The picture of people dying is 
> distant. My God, if you are sitting next to me and a bomb explodes and your 
> arm is ripped off that is not distant. It is immediate. I saw the film by 
> Robert Greenwald, “Rethink Afghanistan.” 
> <http://rethinkafghanistan.com/videos.php> It rips your heart out. And 
> America under the leadership of Obama is a party to this crime. Close your 
> eyes. Listen to the media. Listen to the pundits. Listen to the rhetoric. It 
> is Vietnam all over again. What is the difference between our vital interests
>  and the domino theory? We could leave Afghanistan and it would be as 
> significant as when we left Vietnam.”
> 
> “Don’t be hoodwinked by Obama going to Dover [Air Force Base] to watch the 
> caskets or going to Arlington to salute the graves, with his snappy salute,” 
> Gravel says. “Adolf Hitler lionized soldiers dying. This is the old idea that
>  it is honorable to die. It is not honorable to die in vain. People died in 
> vain in Vietnam. They are dying in vain in Iraq and Afghanistan. And more 
> people will die in vain because of the leadership of Barack Obama.”
> 
> “They don’t hate us because we are free,” Gravel said of the insurgents in 
> Iraq and Afghanistan. “They hate us because we are killing them.”
> 
> 
> Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C.
> 
> /Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com 
> <http://www.truthdig.com/>. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and
>  was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times.
> He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us
> Meaning
> 
> <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400034639?ie=UTF8&tag=commondreams-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1400034639>,
>  What Every Person Should Know About War 
> <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743255127?ie=UTF8&tag=commondreams-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0743255127>,
>  and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. 
> <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743284437?tag=commondreams-20/ref=nosim>  His most
>  recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of 
> Spectacle 
> <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568584377?ie=UTF8&tag=commondreams-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1568584377>.
>  /