|
|
In Iraq, as in Vietnam, war's exit strategy begins at home
|
by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News
Dec. 4, 2006
Just as was experienced during the American War in Vietnam, the news
coverage of the war in Iraq consistently fails to make any real
sense. I call it the American War in Vietnam, rather than the
Vietnam War as is customary in western writing, because that is what
the Vietnamese call it, and they won. So, just as virtually all that
has been written about that war in the last fifty years fails to
enlighten, the vast majority of what we are being exposed to about
the Oil Majors', Arms Producers' and their friends' War In the Middle
East is also productive only of confusion.
|
Perceptions at the highest levels of journalism,
academia and government are so contaminated by the egoistic
projections of careerist whores that the light of truth is seldom
allowed to cast even a small shadow on our consciousness. The first
casualty of war is truth, to paraphrase Hiram Johnson, and confusion
is its love child. One does not have to go to Iraq, or to have been
in Vietnam during that war, to appreciate this insight.
War is often more a matter of who wins political struggles at home,
than who is defeated on the battlefield. In both the wars, in Viet
Nam and now in Iraq, the struggle was, and is, more about what group
espousing what vision of the world, would be dominant in the US, and
has had very little to do with the facts on the ground in those
distant countries.
In his interesting book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the
Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg recounts his confusion at the
disconnect between official analysis and reporting and what he
actually observed going on around him during the mid-sixties in Viet
Nam.
In the book he describes his sense of despair at discovering
that there was virtually no constituency amongst US officials for any
accurate portrayal of events, much less any desire for a reasonable
analysis of the available facts. He discovered that
essentially no
officials involved in planning or decision making about the war had
any actual information about what was going on outside their offices
in Saigon and Washington, and most importantly, they didn't seem to care.
He describes investigating the burning to the ground of a Vietnamese
village that was on Saigon's side, by a supposedly protective
South Vietnamese military unit. Turns out that the whole ghastly
episode was over the rejected sexual advances of a South Vietnamese
military officer. He describes briefing high-level US Government
officials in Saigon about this and other incidents he personally
witnessed, and being completely dismissed, only to be taken aside by a
US Army colonel who agreed, but only in secret, that Ellsberg was
telling the truth -- but that the truth could not be told.
Let's recount in some sad detail this particular story told by Ellsberg:
A regular Saigon military officer has the hots for a female member of
a paramilitary unit working in a village next to his fort. Having
been rejected he proceeds to shell the village. Lives are destroyed
and recruits for the enemy are mustered for the most trivial and base
motivations.
This was the real fabric of that war -- and of the war in
Iraq, of essentially every war that has ever been waged. In reality,
during all wars, countless episodes of irrationality are fictitiously melded together under the flag of national "purpose," so that the true
nature of what is going on remains concealed.
From my experience during that war, I will add a couple of more
stories that reveal the nitty-gritty, day-to-day
|
|
|
reality. As part of my responsibilities as a volunteer civilian aid worker in
a Vietnamese village, I would lead forays to the garbage dump of the
US Army 1st Division. Particularly prized were the boxes that 105 mm
artillery shells came in, because they made great building material. The
problem that we encountered was that many of the boxes were not
empty. We would come across live artillery shells on a regularly
basis. At night the Liberation forces also visited the garbage dump
and doubtless prized the shells for making land mines.
When I
approached the commanding artillery officer with this story I was
summarily dismissed. Consequently, we took to just removing the live
shells and placing them carefully aside for the Liberation Front
soldiers to take away at night.
Later I sought out the soldiers that were actually putting the shells
on the dump. They explained that they were required to fire a
certain number of shells into "free fire zones" each day, but due to
equipment breakdowns and such (they were also stoned much of the
time, which couldn't have helped) they always had shells left over. The only option they had was to put the un-fired shells on the dump.
Thus Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara avoided having shells pile up on the docks
and cause delivery bottlenecks. Artillery shell manufacturers were
enabled to keep the production lines running smoothly. And the
Liberation forces were able to arm themselves at US taxpayer expense, to kill American soldiers.
Just as Heller's character, Milo Minderbinder, in his wonderful novel
Catch-22, everyone (except the victims of the shelling and mining of
roads, of course) came out ahead in this insanity.
One is expected to at least smile at this idiocy, and I am sure that
we are missing out on many such little entertaining stories from Iraq
due to press censorship. Here is another one.
At one point in May, 1969, the Liberation forces were attacking
Saigon and occupying large sections of the city. Consequently I
ended up in a US Army hospital to be treated for dysentery, rather
than the civilian hospital that we usually used and was now in enemy
occupied territory. After a couple of liters of IV fluids I was
feeling pretty good, but the GI in the next bed looked bad. He was
moaning and twisting in his cot.
A transistor (that is what we called radios then) on the bed side
stand between us was tuned to Armed Forces Radio and was providing a
blow-by-blow account of the fighting around Saigon. Suddenly the GI
jumped out of his bed dislodging his IV and proceeded to dance in the
aisle and sing a little happy song.
When I asked, he explained that the Liberation Forces had just
captured the warehouse where he was the quartermaster. As soon as
that happened, he explained, all the air conditioners, refrigerators
and other treasures he had been selling to the black market became
combat losses. Relief from fear of being caught provided an
immediate cure.
* * *
What was really happening in Vietnam then, was the
melding of a vast number of insane fantasies of acquisition and
maintenance of power, rank, prestige, wealth and personal indulgence
into a hologram of horror. And that's what's really happening in Iraq now.
For each individual perspective involved, both in the military and among very many
Vietnamese and now Iraqi people, some sort of ego gratification could be had, some
kind of fetish or game could be explored. This accumulated
force of desire created the story that all these tiny individual
stories could fit into. Granted, the amoral fantasies of major
bankers, arms manufacturers, corporate war profiteers, high ranking
military and political actors provide the largest pieces of the
insane puzzle of war, but by themselves they were
insufficient to author the entire phantasm, much less bring the golem
to life and keep it breathing, decade after decade of senseless
suffering and loss.
War, therefore, is the accumulated effect of
countless defects of character, rather than as the result a of need
for security, or national destiny, or the product of a dominant ideology.
This has ever been the reality of war. The mental fantasies, the
thirst for glory and/or loot on the part of the many small players in
the drama pushes forward and enables the grand fantasies of the
leaders. All the petty, personal motivations aside, in Vietnam, and
now in Iraq, it is the aggregate of individual needs to indulge in a
fantasy of exceptionalism, of moral and cultural superiority, which
is the compost in which this vile weed of war grows so luxuriantly.
So folks, let's cut this out. Let's agree to attend to the logs in
our own eyes. Let's agree that we, the citizens of the United States
of America, are no different, no more worthy of emulation, no more
suited to be obeyed than are any other people on the planet. We do
not have the answers. We don't even have the questions. We have no
business throwing stones.
The answer to the problem of getting out of this war is the same as
the answer to getting out of most of our previous wars. The answer is to
take a good, hard look at the problems (the following being neither a
complete list nor a ranking of priority) in our own society --
predatory corporate legal structures, mistreatment of children, our
system of injustice, consumerism, ignorance, illiteracy, poverty,
racism, misogyny, the abuse of class and privilege, the militarism,
the irrational commitment to absurd systems of belief, all the warts
and draining sores that we naturally want to ignore. And having
taken a fearless moral inventory of our society, let us set out to
correct those wrongs and make whole the victims of past insanity.
I suggest that even a bare start on this project will leave us
insufficient time or energy to contemplate foreign wars.
© by the author.
| |
We sell our own progressive bumper stickers:
pro-peace, anti-Bush,
pro-freedom,
anti-Republican
stickers you won't find anywhere else.
bumper stickers
|
|
| |
We're usually unable to forward readers'
emails, but both readers and authors are
invited to visit our 'dialogue' page
for two-way communication: |
|
This is an archived Unknown News page. For newest material, visit our main page.
|
Previous articles by Dr Ruhs:
Humanity needs an intervention
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Fight for the rudder
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Newspaper lies on page one. I know. I was there.
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Meditations on the coming collapse
by Herb Ruhs, MD
This is how civil wars begin
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The Secret Police may be
watching you so don't think,
act or believe like a free person
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The end is at hand
by Herb Ruhs, MD
When spinach becomes a matter of life and death
by Herb Ruhs, MD
And now for something completely different
by Herb Ruhs, MD
We are all prisoners on home supervision
by Herb Ruhs, MD
There is no war but class war
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Meanwhile, back on Lifeboat Earth
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Is anyone willing to
think about America’s
dismal health statistics?
by Herb Ruhs, MD
A plague of criminals
by Herb Ruhs, MD
On facing adversity with courage and good humor
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Bush's death toll will vastly exceed Hitler's
by Herb Ruhs, MD
An unemployed physician
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Truth and Reconciliation Commission
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Who "Them" are:
You can't tell
the players without a scorecard
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Global warming passes the point of no return
by Herb Ruhs, MD
In case you wondered
why your doctor would
sell you down the river
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Time to pull the rip cord
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Can the President legally
crush a child's testicles?
His lawyer says, "It depends..."
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The great American misunderstanding
by Herb Ruhs, MD
When death is the proper penalty
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The revolution this time
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The good tidings and the bad
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Health care in America: An ongoing, massive con game
by Paul Krugman,
The New York Times
with comments by Herb Ruhs, MD
Competition: Destroyer of character
by Herb Ruhs, MD
America without the myths
by Herb Ruhs, MD,
To dream the impossible dream
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Refusing to see the obvious
by Maureen Dowd,
The New York Times
with comments by Herb Ruhs, MD
What can we do? Rhetorically speaking, that is.
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Banned in Cloverdale, by Herb Ruhs, MD
All of us are being fatally poisoned
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Daubert is the most
influential Supreme Court
ruling you've never heard of
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Enough already
by Herb Ruhs, MD
War is sometimes justified, often not, but always insane
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The bad news is the same as the good news
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Trying to control your emotions "can make you pretty stupid"
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The gangsters' mentality
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Nietzsche, New Orleans, and 'Nam
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Four decades in five minutes
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The masquerade of "civilization"
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Habits of successful modern cannibals
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Face these horrors with acceptance, equanimity, humor
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Yet another, higher dose of pain
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The war of one against all:
The roots of our enslavement
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Doctors, medicine, hospitals, and the rest of the story
by Herb Ruhs, MD
System of privilege expands in scope and overall power
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Highway robbery turns out to be legal after all
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Class warfare, anyone?
Why class war is not a fiction but a fixture of our lives
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Why the little-known news is the most important
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Why "Free Speech" does not matter
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Big pharma
by Herb Ruhs, MD
The genius fish and other comments
by Herb Ruhs, MD
When all else fails, try the truth
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Childhood abuse and
the role it plays in
maintaining coercive power
by Herb Ruhs, MD
Murder by medical device
by Herb Ruhs, MD
|
|
|
|
|
Let's agree to attend to the logs in our own eyes.
Let's agree that we, the citizens of the United States of America, are no different, no more worthy of emulation, no more suited to be obeyed than are any other people on the planet.
We do not have the answers.
We don't even have the questions.
We have no business throwing stones.
|
|
|
Dr. Herb Ruhs & grandson
|
|
