[Peace-discuss] My letter in the N-G

[David Green]

This letter was "unfortunately" printed without quotes around Davis's
comments, making it somewhat hard to understand the meaning of the letter.

In his Memorial Day message, Congressman Rodney Davis “remembered … Petty
Officer Logan Palmer by dedicating the Harristown post office as the Logan
S. Palmer Post Office. Logan died … when a tanker collided with the USS
John McCain in 2017. The year Logan died, our nation lost more
servicemembers to accidents than we did in combat. That’s unacceptable.”

However, a deeper look at this incident (10 deaths), one other recent Navy
incident (USS Fitzgerald, 7 deaths), and two crashes of the Boeing 737 Max
(338 total deaths), all in the context of long-established priorities of
the Navy and the defense industry, would lead one to believe that these
deaths are indeed quite acceptable—including to the vast majority of
Congresspersons.

Clear culpability regarding training and procedural issues is not unrelated
to the American imperialism that requires Davis and at least 500 of his
colleagues to support sending poorly trained youth on large, dangerous
boats halfway around the world to police Asia.

Two long, detailed investigations by ProPublica about these naval incidents
provide no reason to believe that more Pentagon funding will be used to
address underlying issues, as Davis asserted in his message. The risks are
systemic and historically-rooted, as Andrew Cockburn argues in “The
Military-Industrial Virus” in *Harper’s.* This general critique is also
applied to Boeing by Marshall Auerback in “Boeing Might Represent the
Greatest Indictment of 21st-Century Capitalism.”

Davis’s message contained less than half-truths in service of militarism
and political opportunism—not that Democrats present an alternative.
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