Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 4 Number 3, December 2003
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Doing their Job
by
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.