Celebrations, Remembrance, and Repentance by Origin

 

Celebration--

Sunday evening, I was both moved and angered by the Lockheed-Martin Production of the National Memorial Day Concert.  Prominently among the dignitaries sat Colin Powell as an honored guest and pontificator. The show was broadcast on Sunday evening prime time, not even on Memorial Day itself.  Sadly, it had the tone of an infomercial. http://video.pbs.org/video/2365477756/

The musical interludes of the show were interspersed with segments showing the heroic actions of veterans who are striving to overcome the wounds exacted on them by the lies of Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell and their sycophants.  While it is quite important for all of us to recognize and be aware of the sacrifices given, the vignettes of the wounded and lost screamed to evoke pity and had the cheap tone of a picture of a thin, crying child in a feed-the-poor-starving children ad.  The production included subtle and heavy advertising for its commercial sponsors glorifying the war machine.  The whole production had a lack of seriousness of tone that substituted an understanding of the gravity and tragedy of war for rosy patriotic feel-good.

How the producers of the “celebration” could sit one of the authors of their injuries, Colin Powell, there on national television as a featured presenter is an act as cynical and corrupt as can be imagined.  http://video.pbs.org/video/2365478624/ 

Powell did not apologize for his participation in the lies that killed so many.  

After watching the show, I felt I had participated in a cheap, dishonorable experience.  A requiem would have been more appropriate.

Remembrance—

On Memorial Day, I always think about a military casualty in my family, my first cousin Larry, a year older than I.  In 1967, instead of going on to college, Larry enlisted in the Navy.  Larry served continuously until June 1995 when he died of mesothelioma on active duty sick leave with the rank of Senior Chief Petty Officer.  Larry served his career in the asbestos filled bowels of numerous engine rooms.  His last posting was at Guantanamo where he instructed new sailors on how to run a ship’s engines.  He loved his time in the Navy.  Larry gave his all to the country, including loss of his family and contact with his child in a divorce due to long separations on cruises and his life cut short.

Every Memorial Days, we should also remember those who did not die in battle or as a result of battle, but who died because of the industrial hazards of running a military.  They served as assigned and did their jobs loyally, without any glory.  We must honor them.

Repentance—

On this day, not only should we celebrate the gift from those who served, we should also seek repentance as a nation for the mistakes made that we, as a People, allowed and encouraged.  We should repent for allowing asbestos and other carcinogenic substances, burn pits, and radioactive ammunition to imperil our service members because of budgetary restraints.  We should repent for assigning terrible officers like the Lt. Colonel of the “B” 2/5 Cavalry at Ap Bu Nho described in Col. Lang's post yesterday.

Most of all, at this moment in our history, we as a nation should repent for the Iraq invasion, a war based in knowing deception and national hubris.  We should not let the Lockheed-Martins of the world engulf us in a false patriotism that omits the moral culpability of our actions abroad.

The Iraq invasion was no intelligence failure.  Instead, known fake intelligence was used to deceive the American People to believe that they were mortally threatened when they were not and to believe they were attacking a regime responsible for 9-11 when they were not. 

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/text-of-president-bushs-speech-07-10-2002/ http://web.archive.org/web/20060514140012/http://www.house.gov/reform/min/pdfs_108_2/pdfs_inves/pdf_admin_iraq_on_the_record_rep.pdf http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/03/18/911-and-iraq-the-wars-greatest-lie/ http://themoderatevoice.com/121921/ten-years-later-belief-in-iraq-connection-with-911-attack-persists/

The consequences flowing from these lies and our national failure to discern that our leaders were liars in time to stop their perfidy has had, and will continue to have, terrible consequences.  Until We the People can come to grips with our failures in Iraq, we cannot begin to correct the errors of our belief in our exceptionalism.  That belief will destroy US if we do not moderate it.

Instead of sitting as an honored guest last night, Colin Powel should be sitting in ashes and sackcloth before the alter of some church in repentance for the evil he has brought into the world by his knowing participation in the greatest lie ever perpetrated on the American People.  Powell, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and the others should be shunned and dishonored until they acknowledge and repent of their crimes against the nation and the world.  Yet, those and many others who acted in concert with them still are not brought to any accountability for their actions that have harmed so many.  It is like the infomercial for US last night, we enjoy the pomp of the cynically choreographed ceremony on the Capitol steps and steadfastly ignore the circumstance of the disaster that is Iraq.  Until we, here in the U.S., can stand as a nation knowing and admitting our moral failure, we cannot fix the problem.  Repentance is central to redemption.

As a part of our Memorial Day celebrations, we should add a ceremony of national repentance for the damage we, the American People, have allowed to be inflicted upon millions in this New American Century so that we do not commit the same crimes again.

Comments

[walrus]

Origin, well said. Amen

[oth]

Robert Kaplan says it's time to bring Imperialism back to the ME

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/25/its-time-to-bring-imperialism-back-to-the-middle-east-syria-iraq-islamic-state-iran/

[Origin]

oth,

The article is behind a paywall, so not available to most of the Committee.

Would you believe anything Kaplan says?

I am reminded of a conversation I once had with a detective looking for the crook named Robert who converted my corporate client's car when I told him I had just talked to the thief who had said he would return the car in an hour.

The detective's reply, knowing earlier promises had been broken was, "Really, are you going to believe anything Robert says?"

Later, Robert was arrested a state away about an hour after my conversation.

[Origin]

oth and all

Lest the Committee forget who Robert Kaplan is and the basis of his thought.

Kaplan was part of the Project for the New American Century and is one of the founding thinkers of the neocon cabal. As a profound immoralist, "Kaplan offered the opinion that political and business leaders should discard Christian/Jewish morality in public decision-making in favor of a pagan morality focused on the morality of the result rather than the morality of the means." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Kaplan.

Some have regarded the PNAC's January 16, 1998 letter to President Clinton urging "the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power," and the involvement of multiple PNAC members in the Bush Administration as evidence that the PNAC had a significant influence on the Bush Administration's decision to Invade Iraq, or even argued that the invasion was a foregone conclusion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century

Note that Jeb Bush is one of the initial signers of the Kool Aid Document. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century#Signatories_to_Statement_of_Principles (note Jeb Bush is on the list.)

Why the ilk of Kaplan can still get print space is beyond me. To a large degree, the Kagans and Kaplans are some of the seminal authors of our present disaster in the Middle East and elsewhere.

They need to be kneeling in the sanctuary next to Colin Powell on this Memorial Day.

[Origin]

Link correction Robert David Kaplan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Kaplan

[The Beaver]

Origin,

Two articles to look at:
First the garbage that David Brooks wrote some 12 yrs ago :
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/358pyodq.asp?ZoomFont=YES%20Brooks

Too bad, instead of defending the US, his son joined the IDF.

and this article:
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/24/theyre_all_still_lying_about_iraq_the_real_story_about_the_biggest_blunder_in_american_history_and_the_right_wings_obsessive_need_to_cover_it_up/

"When Clinton bombed Iraq in late 1998 rather than launching an invasion, PNAC and its supporters, like Senate Majority leader Trent Lott and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, insisted he was weak.

When George W. Bush became president, 10 of the 18 men who had signed a letter urging Clinton to take out Saddam Hussein went to work in his administration. Donald Rumsfeld became defense secretary; Paul Wolfowitz was the assistant defense secretary. John Bolton became an undersecretary of state. Dick Cheney, an original PNAC supporter, became vice president."

[VietnamVet]

Origin,

Corporate Media is getting pretty free with the feel good propaganda with a bit at the end of each news broadcast; but, Chelsea Clinton and Colin Powell are too much. At least she’s left NBC but he still keeps showing up.

Today’s WP had a report on the Dutch care of the graveyard of WWII American soldiers. They will be remember as liberators. Since then, America has protected and expanded its sphere of influence with its own troops in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq. But, with the end of the draft it has had to turn to military contractors and proxies. Due to drive for regime change across the world from Somalia to Russia, the USA has an inadequate number of worn out troops. The USA turned to Jihadists in Syria and Neo-Nazis in Ukraine to further its global ambitions. But like all barbarians, they’ve gone on a rampage of destruction. The divergence of western news and the truth has become obvious.

[David Habakkuk]

Origin,

A lot to think about in your piece.

If one registers on the 'Foreign Policy' site, one can get access to up to five articles a month for free.

In fairness to Kaplan, the section on his support for the Iraq War in his Wikipedia entry does say that he 'later concluded that the war had been a mistake and expressed deep remorse for supporting it.'

As to ends and means. In a piece on neo-conservative attitudes to intelligence which Colonel Lang posted in the early says of SST, I recalled a book which had a formative influence on the 'Cold War liberal' culture in which I grew up:

'The whole of Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon, whose old Bolshevik protagonist is partly modelled on Bukharin, is structured in terms of an argument about ends and means derived from Dostoevsky's writings. On the one hand, the protagonist never quite manages to answer the Machiavellian case made by his initial interrogator, also an old comrade. But at the end, with his interrogator having been shot before him, the protagonist reflects that it may be that Machiavellian doctrine which has made the revolution into the utter catastrophe it became.'

(See http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2005/11/habakkuk_onleo_.html .)

And Kaplan's new essay brings me back full circle, in that its central argument – that 'totalitarianism was the only answer' to the problems created by 'modernity' in much of the Middle East – directly parallels the case that 'Grand Inquisitor' makes in Dostoevsky's 'The Brothers Karamazov.'

And the Inquisitor is actually one 'alter ego' of the Russian radical intellectual Ivan Karamazov – saying, in essence, that when 'Western' values have brought chaos to the Russian Empire, what can a decent man do but act like Stalin (or one might say, Saddam Hussein, or the al-Assads, father and son)? It will be necessary to impose a new orthodoxy, by telling lies and using the methods of Torquemada to stop them being questioned, if people are to protected from their own predeliction for chaos.

But the novel also contains within it an opposing polemic, which is intimately bound up with its author's attack on the notion that 'the ends justify the means'. The argument is not simply that means can easily corrupt ends – which indeed, they often do, as can easily happen when people convince themselves they are telling lies in a good cause.

A central part of Dostoevsky's case against the Russian radical intelligentsia is that utopian 'ends' – and in particular projects for a secular redemption of mankind – can conceal a total contempt for those who are supposed to be benefited. Moreover pretensions to benevolence can also veil will-to-power and what Dostoevsky, in religious language, called 'self-deification', and some of us would call 'narcissism.'

In my view the argument is unresolved, in Koestler and his master Dostoevsky alike, in part because it is not really resolvable. However, a great deal of it can I think be applied to the proponents of the 'Global War on Terror'.

A remarkable feature of Kaplan, however, is his utter failure to face up to the complexities involved. A logical implication of his adoption of the argument of the Inquisitor would seem to be that all his neoconservative friends should be engaged in a kind of penitential parade, wearing 'sanbenitos' – perhaps with Francis Fukuyama in the lead!

Certainly, none of them should ever again be heard to utter an opinion on foreign policy issues in public, unless they had issued a full recantation of their earlier views, and demonstrated that they have learned from their mistakes.

As to Kaplan's advocacy of a reconstructed imperial order, what it seems to represent is a kind of 'window-dressing' for a new version of the old Israel-first conception of American foreign policy.

Having empowered the 'Shia Crescent' through the catastrophically misconceived toppling of Saddam, the U.S. is now to back the Saudis and other Sunni states against them – with the jihadist threat being treated as quite secondary. This seems to me the reverse order of priorities to that dictated by any kind of objective consideration of American or European interests.

An imperial power which allows itself to be manipulated by one player in the ethnic and sectarian conflicts of the area it is attempting to control, as the United States has been by Israel for decades, is clearly a patent absurdity.

If your country really wants to be a 'world empire in all but name', to use Kaplan's phrase – or indeed even if it doesn't – the first thing it needs to do is put people like him out to grass.

[LeaNder]

I wasn't aware that:

http://tinyurl.com/RDK-Pagan-Ethos

your link to his Wiki article does not work, due to the period at the end.

Yaron Brook, made a similar argument for his target group: He suggested an "Objectivist moral philosophy" for US Foreign Policy. ... It vaguely felt like he picked up neocon thought while also denying it, but somewhat only reshaping the outlook for his own target group.

He was paddled a lot as a ME specialist based on his experience in Israeli intelligence at that time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaron_Brook#Foreign_policy_and_war

thanks oth.

[William R. Cumming]

Thanks for the link! Re Kaplan as I see it corrupted by his being acclaimed.

Few of his books and articles have undergone knowlegable criticism and rebuttal.

[William R. Cumming]

WOW! An amazing post and thread. More from me later but in the meantime IMO Colin Powell haunts the past and future of USA civil/military relations.

[LeaNder]

Beaver, my own really very, very selective memory on the Weekly Standard, was a young journalist who once described his mission at weeklystandard, not verbatim, but something like: "we are turning up the heat", which apparently got some attention. ...

picking up on the "media sycophants" that is. It made something visible in context that puzzled me a lot at the time.

A closer look at the collective dynamics would be really, really interesting. ... And notice: now I read your Salon link. ;)

[LeaNder]

"A remarkable feature of Kaplan, however, is his utter failure to face up to the complexities involved."

He is much too busy with his output to be able to do that, that's my first superficial impression. Did someone in the field of academia look into his 94 suggestion of an American love affair:

http://tinyurl.com/RDK-American-love-affair

In the larger political context? And beyond?

[LeaNder]

"graveyard of WWII American soldiers"

don't ask me how I felt, once I spent a couple of month up North from here to write a PR concept for a museum and I discovered both, the history of the place and the Allies graveyard. ... apparently the place was one of the hardcore defense lines of the true believers. It didn't show up in the museums history. Not a whisper. That was about the time Bush jun took over.

Here are a bit of other historical remnants that were meant to stop Allied tanks in the larger region. Among the first things that drew my attention when I moved here:

http://tinyurl.com/Historical-remnents

[LeaNder]

Oh, I should have said, the graveyard got me interested in the earlier castle's WWII history. Thus it's good it is still there.

[William R. Cumming]

Merchants of Death?

he number one war profiteer is Lockheed Martin, according to USA Today, with annual arms sales of $36 billion. Not surprisingly Lockheed Martin spends over $14 million a year lobbying the people who make the decisions about how much money is spent on weapons and which weapons will be purchased. Their CEO is paid over $15 million, according to their 2015 shareholder report, and on their board is James Ellis, a former Admiral and Commander in Chief of US Strategic Air Command, who gets paid over $277,000 for the part time work and James Loy, former Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, who gets over $260,000 for his part time work. Lockheed receives substantial government contracts amounting, by one calculation, to over $260 from each taxpaying household in the US. They are so entitled that a 2014 special investigation by the US Department of Energy found Lockheed used taxpayer funds to lobby for more taxpayer funds.

Number two war profiteer is Boeing with annual arms sales of $31 billion. Boeings spends over $16 million a year lobbying. The rest of the top ten corporations profiting from war include BAE Systems, General Dynamics, Raytheon, EADS, Finmeccanica, L-3 Communications, and United Technologies. You can track their corporate contributions to members of Congress, especially the politicians on the Appropriations Committees of the House and Senate on Open Secrets.

While most of the lobbying money has gone to Republicans, all the arms merchants hire lobbyists who can influence Democrats and Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

And these war profiteers do not just sell to the US government. The US sold more than $26 billion in weapons to foreign nations and has been number one for a long time though recently that title has been going back and forth with Russia as to which is the world biggest international arms merchant.

Extract from comment on HLSWatch.com blog.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Does UK government consider ISIS an enemy?

Do you know?

[anna-marina]

Excellent paper by Professor Sakwa. This paper alone makes various expensive think-tanks obsolete:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/266515275/The-New-Atlanticism
"The fundamental problem was that Russia had not been defeated and considered itself a great power in its own right, very unlike post- war Germany. ... Invocations of the American commitment to the defence of Europe take on mantric qualities, obscuring the dynamic whereby that very commitment undermines pan-European security. Any concession, or even understanding, of the Russian position is considered weakness, if not appeasement of the worst order, thus ratcheting up confrontation. The idea of a multipolar world order, advocated loudly by Russia and by China more quietly, is considered anathema to the new atlanticists. This is as much to do with normative issues as it is with power considerations."

[Origin]

David,

I wholeheartedly agree that the likes of Kaplan should be put to pasture and never be allowed to be anywhere near to foreign policy decisions. Their ideology has nearly destroyed our future by its misguided, and strident belief the American Exceptionalism that messianically demands American military and economic power projection.

Those reading here who have children should be familiar with the books and videos of Thomas the Tank Engine a character filled with earnestness and a craving to be useful. I view one of the properties of neoconism to be a malignant exaggeration of this craving resulting in an unchallenged belief that America (and perhaps Great Britain) are the sole templates for social organization. The result is a total lack of any ability to perceive that others may do thing differently and better in their own cultural contexts.

Until We the People can come to grips with our failures in Iraq, we cannot begin to correct the errors of our belief in our exceptionalism.

The hubris of the position so poisons all social intercourse in the target countries that most often over the last Century or so of American intervention many countries and operating polities have been destroyed leaving totalitarian client states wholly hollowed out of a rich, multilevel society. Thus, when Kaplan wrote, “When these regimes collapsed they left behind an utter void.” He was correct. What he fails to see is that void is largely the consequence of our corruption of so many governments by our projection of power.

Several lines from his article are telling:

“Thus does Iran partially inherit the void left by the disappearance of Ottoman, European, and American empires.”

“In several countries, there is simply no one in charge to whom we can bring our concerns. Chaos is not only a security and humanitarian problem, but a severe impediment to American power projection.”

“The challenge now is less to establish democracy than to reestablish order. For without order, there is no freedom for anyone.”

What he means by democracy is the imposition of a fake democracy actually controlled by American Power projection.

Kaplan's starting premise is bigotry: some sort of belief that only Americans can organize a just society and only American templates are valid. Eventually humans, even dark skinned humans, will invent and implement patterns of governance consistent with their cultures. Kaplan rues the struggles between the Sunni and Shia and the other organizational ethnicities in the Levant straining to understand how those people can possibly organize themselves into civilized societies without the American help and the American template for democracy. Since the unspoken premise of the neocon argument is fallacious, one cannot expect a sound result.

What Kaplan fails to understand through his neocon blinders is that the very struggle between the competing groups is the mechanism for the formation of new societies and that the interjection of American Exceptionalism into that process is a bigotry that impedes rather than speeds progress.

One can only imagine where we would now be it the U.S. had not murdered Mohammad Mosaddegh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh or had not kept Saddam Hussein on the CIA payroll. Or one can imagine where Israel would be if it had not murdered so many of the Palestinian leaders and established an equal protection of the law for all within its writ instead of killing the morals of its youth by impressing them into the dirty game of being occupation troops killing and maiming Palestinian children.

Any student reading the history of the Middle East since the time of Mohammad cannot miss the continuing fact that these societies have been constantly at war and in rebellion, but that a strong civilization and a well-developed legal system was evolved over the centuries which, until the beginning of the last century, worked pretty well until Zionism and the discovery of oil complicated things and imposed the West into the governance of the Levant.

It is the continuous injection of British and American exceptionalism that had brought us to the catastrophe of where we are. The neocon formula just does not work. Just as the American Revolution ended by the end of 1777 when the States had completed the establishment of the American Way, the game us up for constructive western intervention. Likewise, as in the American Revolutionary War, it took Britain another five years or so of military defeats to come to the realization that no military solution could recover the American Colonies, it has taken the West just to begin to understand that further military intervention in the Levant is a fool’s errant. The West has as little chance of ruling the Levant now than did the British or reclaiming the American Colonies in 1777.

It is time for US to leave and let the locals find their own way. Eventually, they will succeed. They will establish their own form of justice. They will sell all the oil we need—and probably cheaper because competition will reign instead of cartel pricing.

The neocons are now just outdated and delusional.

[William R. Cumming]

There is absolutely NO QUESTION that Russia polity and leadership NEVER BELIEVED the USA WON THE COLD WAR.

[William R. Cumming]

MORE: I always try to avoid so-called ad hominem attacks. But the public record shows that James Loy in assigning the creation of a NATIONAL RESPONSE PLAN to the RAND Corporation to create it and replace the FEDERAL RESPONSE PLAN [that first appeared in May 1992] largely destroyed Domestic Response to Catastrophic Events in the USA. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 document this failure.

AND JUST TO MAKE SURE ALL WHO POST AND COMMENT ON THIS BLOG UNDERSTAND COMPLETELY YOU ARE COMPLETELY ON YOUR OWN FOR THE FIRST 72 HOURS OF ANY CATASTROPHIC OCCURRENCE BECAUSE IT TAKES THAT LONG BEFORE THE FEDS APPEAR ON THE SCENE WITH "HELP!"

And of course their is NO domestic chain of command for the Chief Executive Function as compared to the Armed Forces.

[Laura Wilson]

Vietnam Vet--Did you notice the programming for the White House Memorial Concert? (It was on earlier than the other and the Kennedy Center.) John Foggarty singing "Fortunate Son"... and the crowd LOVED it! I was just amazed and impressed with that choice---the only other song that would have packed the same punch would have been "Amercian Woman." It was nice to see someone stand up on stage in front of the President, et al. and say it out loud---these wars are on the backs of other people's children.

I considered it a good antidote to so much of the back-patting twaddle that comprised much of the weekend's "entertainment." Decoration Day has fallen far.

[William R. Cumming]

Thanks for the link but it [the article] is actually an argument masked as fact IMO. There is really no Atlantic Community now or perhaps never was. Cod fishing probably the real glue since 1500 for the Atlantic Community and those living in the western hemisphere that thought they were the new battalions of Western Civilization. West of the Urals few living there thought much of the Western Hemisphere except for its natural riches until surprise surprise WWI and WWII. Perhaps that is China today. also. US and Canadian farmland being bought by China just like the Smithfield Corporation.

HOW WRONG THEY [WE] WERE!

[William R. Cumming]

P.S. There are no articles or books to my knowledge other than those dealing with warfare that document the impacts on the cultures of Nation-States of catastrophic events.

As for the USA since 1789 the most catastrophic event in the sense of changing USA culture outside of wars is the DUSTBOWL! Could be wrong as always.

[Origin]

A quote from your hyperlink:

Yaron Brook claims that the Islamic totalitarians repeatedly express this, openly. "...it is a movement that believes in conquest...Islam should rule every aspect of one's life...they don't believe in separation of religion and state...and those who disagree are second class citizens or worthy of death, they want an empire in middle east, but their goal ultimately is world domination, and they state this. They are never satisfied with oppressing their own people or the people around them, they want world domination."

From another perspective, Randian Objective selfishness ia a movement that believes in conquest...Objective selfishness should rule every aspect of one's life...they don't believe in separation of religion and state because they have no room for religion..and those who disagree are second class citizens or worthy of death, they want an empire in middle east, but their goal ultimately is world domination, and they state this. They are never satisfied with oppressing their own people or the people around them, they want world domination.

Things are a matter of perspective and the guys like Yaron Brook cannot see or find any value any the other view.