Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 4 Number 3, December 2003

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Doing their Job

by

Merle Borg

Arms merchants and generals whispered "spreading communism" into our ears for a good fifty years, then watched us tremble while we got out our checkbooks at budget appropriation time. Like everyone else in that budget, they had programs to sell. When the Viet Cong started slipping into South Vietnam, they told us all about the "domino" theory... that if South Vietnam was lost to communism, the rest of Southeast Asia would fall like a row of dominoes. We sent troops in to prop up a corrupt government and for years we watched nightly briefings where stiffly erect generals told us how we were winning the war… more importantly how we were winning the hearts and minds of the people.

More than a few lives were lost but we kept winning until we were satisfied that Vietnam was safe for democracy. Our generals made some hasty remarks over their shoulders about peace with dignity and they scrambled on to helicopters and came home. The embarassing part is that in the decades since then, Vietnam has never tried to spread anything beyond its borders. The Pentagon didn’t really expect us to believe the domino thing; it was just a pitch. Like salesmen around the world, they were just doing their job.

With the end of the cold war, fear of "communism" lost its marketability and a new strategy had to be devised. We began to hear about "weapons of mass destruction", and they are a concern. We are the freest and richest nation ever conceived, and no one would argue our need for vigilance. The danger however in these doomsday presentations is that occasionally we elect someone paranoid enough to believe them.

By the skin of it’s teeth, the radical right was in power when, for whatever reason, murderous fanatics commandeered airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center. The elements of disaster suddenly arranged themselves such that we are once again at war. I don’t think anyone in the Pentagon ever really expected this one, I know the rest of us didn’t. Saddam had caused trouble before, but not terrorism and not with us. Of the two deadliest acts of horror in our country, one came from within and was done with farm fertilizer, and those airliners were commandeered with pocketknives. Fertilizer and pocketknives are not exactly weapons of mass destruction and Iraq had nothing to do with either, but once again America is bombing a tiny country into submission. Our sons and daughters are now doing their job, enduring undescribable sacrifice and learning what it is to kill.

"Target of opportunity", the phrase that was used to describe the opening salvo pretty much sums up our involvement in "Operation Iraqi Freedom". "No fly" zones and inspectors on the ground guaranteed that Iraq posed no threat, but the hapless country was ruled by an unsavory tyrant with the temerity to thumb his nose at the Bush dynasty, and oh yes, then there is the oil. Iraq is sitting on the world’s second largest oil reserve and for a people implicated in the 911 tragedy by reason of being largely Arab and Muslim, this unfortunate nation qualified itself as a target of opportunity. The ease with which it will be liberated seems to be the only thing in question. Tanks with close air support are freeing the desert fairly easily. In the cities it could get ugly. Early indications are that given the choice between liberty and death, many Iraqi’s and their neighboring brothers will chose the later.

Any nation or religion can field people willing to die for a cause. Getting American tanks out of their countries seems to be one of those causes. Buddhist monks in Vietnam doused themselves with gasoline and lit matches to demonstrate their desire for our absence. Muslims are more inclined to take a few of us with them when they make that ultimate sacrifice. Their method is more effective but the sincerity of their final act still gets lost in the reporting. We are told that a dozen or so terrorists were killed here and a pocket of hard core extremists was exterminated there, and then the TV screen flashes to some feel-good piece about pride and heroism and the obligatory yellow ribbons. Like everything else in this world, news involves Americans, the rest is incidental.

Embedded journalists are the current trend in war coverage. In "real time" we get to see what war feels like. It lacks the rehearsed baritone and the martial music of WW2 newsreels but the reporting hasn’t changed... exaggerated American victories coupled with stories about the enemy’s depravity and cowardice. The segments finish with interviews of grieving families and lots of flags. The "video game" aspect of our killing machine is new however... nose-cone views of targets, horrendous explosions, then great clouds of dust and debris and vaporized body fluids. Reporters, too, are just doing their job. Like salesmen and politicians, they tell us what we want to hear… that we are fighting terrorism and spreading democracy and liberating the long-suffering people of Iraq. We will hear this, or we will simply change channels until we do.

Among those objecting to our world vision we are told will be the elite "Republican Guards" and we expect a hard fight from them. When informed that ordinary Iraqi soldiers and citizens are also resisting... we convince each other that families are being held hostage and will be killed if the fathers don't fight. It’s not impossible to believe the part about hostages, but it stretches even American credulity to believe that anyone threatening children would ever hand their father a gun.

The unwanted truth is that once again our country has blundered into a quagmire. Vietnam was involved in a struggle for reunification until with the acquiescence of our media, we allowed our arms merchants and generals to turn it into a bloodbath. Iraq now shares the same tragic fate. History, however, has not been kind to Western occupation in this part of the world and the killing has just begun. It will not be confined to Iraq. It would be easy to blame the people in charge, but the unrelenting burden of freedom is that they all answer to us. It is the world’s sorrowful burden that we never learn. Weapons get smarter. We don’t.