Americans face a moral reckoning

JAMES CARROLL By James Carroll | March 26, 2007 YOU HAVE been reading "The Sorrow of War" by Bao Ninh, the classic account of what in Vietnam is called the American war. The title of Bao Ninh's novel captures the feeling of grief and loss that always comes in the wake of violent conflict. Allowing room for fear, grief, and loss must define the dominant experience in Iraq today, where the suffering caused by this American war mounts inexorably. But sorrow has also emerged as a note of life in the Unites States lately. Many comparisons are drawn between this nation's misadventures in Iraq and Vietnam, but what you are most aware of is the return of a clenched feeling in your chest, a knot of distressed sadness that is tied to your country's reiteration of the tragic error. After the chaotic end of the Vietnam War in 1975, you were like many Americans in thinking with relief that the nation would never know -- or cause -- such sorrow again. The sorrow is back. Everywhere you go, friends greet one another with a choked acknowledgment of a nearly unspeakable frustration at what unfolds in Iraq. This seems true whether people oppose the war absolutely, or only on pragmatic terms; whether they want US troops out at once, or over time. Even about those distinctions, little remains to be said. Bush's contemptuous carelessness, his inner circle's corrupt enabling, the Pentagon's dependable launching of folly after folly, the Democrats' ineffectual kibitzing, even your heartfelt concern for the troops -- these subjects have exhausted themselves. The "surge" of the January escalation was preceded by the surge of public anguish that resulted in Republican losses in November. That election was a stirring rejection of the administration's purposes in Iraq, a rejection promptly seconded by the Iraq Study Group. But so what? Bush's purposes hold steady, and their poison tide now laps at Iran. Why should you not be demoralized and depressed? --MORE--

The Costs of War

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

As a liberal who is strongly and actively opposed to the war in Iraq, I've been challenged many times as to why I didn't serve in the military. Although I've never shared my story before, and it's difficult for me to write this now, it is perhaps the appropriate time. Today marks the 4th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, and it seems only now are many of the physical and mental costs paid by those who have fought in Iraq becoming apparent to the American people. But all wars extract a similar toll, and my tale is that of the terrible price paid by an American soldier, and his family, in another unnecessary and immoral war a generation ago.

If you've been following the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal you've probably seen the following quote by George Washington:

"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive the Veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their nation."

Powerful words. They've been engraved on memorials and cited by dozens of veterans groups, members of congress, and US senators, including presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain. They have a very personal meaning for me.

I'm an Army brat. Both my parents were in the military, and my father was a major in the US Army Special Forces, a Green Beret. He served on and off for nearly ten years in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, starting in the late 1950s, and during that time he developed a progressive psychosis that today would probably be diagnosed as PTSD. But back then there was an unwillingness, particularly among elite forces, to accept that combat stress often causes mental illness, and there was a severe stigma attached to any service member who sought or accepted what little treatment was available. Symptoms were often ignored or discounted, and you pretty much just had to deal with it and get better on your own.

Or not. Despite the best efforts of my mother, who spent a couple of years trying to get the Army to recognize that my father was slowly deteriorating mentally, they refused to even evaluate him. My father, of course, denied there was anything wrong, because admitting to it would have ended his beloved military career. As long as he was more or less able to do his job the Army could, and did, pretend that he couldn't possibly be mentally ill, and therefore the problem was really just my mother, who was upset that he was being sent on so many combat tours away from his family.

The result was sadly predictable. When I was eight years old the whole facade crumbled. After a series of increasingly violent incidents involving my father, incidents that were intentionally covered up or minimized by the Army, something finally happened that they couldn't brush aside. First-degree attempted murder, three counts.

My father's intended victims? My mother and two other family members.

The Army, no longer able to deny or hide the fact that my father had become dangerous and unpredictable, took him into custody and then institutionalized him. They finally accepted that my mother had been right all along, but it was far too late for any sort of happy ending. My father's illness was by then so advanced, and he was considered such a threat to medical staff, that the "treatment" they recommended for him was a lobotomy followed by indefinite confinement. Although my mother was able to block the lobotomy, at that time there was very little that could be done to help someone in my father's condition, and he remained institutionalized for many years. Our family was devastated, and I never saw my dad again after his arrest on that winter's night in 1967.

By neglecting to respond to my father's clear symptoms of developing mental illness, and continuing to send him back into combat despite all the warning signs, the Army destroyed a great man. A man who proudly and willingly dedicated his life to serving our country. A man who, in return, deserved not only the appreciation of his county, as Washington said, but also the concern and care that might possibly have prevented his descent into insanity and all the suffering that resulted.

No matter how you feel about the war in Iraq, we have a sacred obligation to care for those we send to fight and die for us. We can afford to lose in Iraq, but we can't afford to let this war break our military. In part because we've succeeded so well in using technology to improve the survival rate of severely wounded soldiers, the single largest cost of this and all future wars will be medical care for soldiers and veterans. If we are not willing to accept and pay that price, and to do whatever is humanly possible to heal our sick and make whole our injured, then we have no right to ask our military men and women to risk their lives on our behalf. And if we ask anyway, the day may come when they no longer answer.

My life has been shaped by the failure of our country to fulfill its responsibility to one particular soldier forty years ago. The personal cost of that failure to my father, my mother, my brothers and sister, and to me, has been quite high. But there was also a cost to our country. A cost that is particularly relevant today as we scrape the bottom of the barrel to find more troops to send to Iraq.

Because of the way I saw my father treated, I did not follow his footsteps into the military, nor did any of my siblings. Our proud heritage as a military family came to an end. Washington's prophetic words, spoken more than two hundred years ago, had proven true.

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More about the quote from George Washington in a later post.

Will We Suffer from the Iraq Syndrome?

Related
Quote of the Day
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Tomgram: Chernus, An American Identity Crisis in a Losing War

In recent days, we've have two reports on timing, when it comes to the future of the President's "surge" plan for Baghdad. According to Richard A. Oppel of the New York Times, "The plan, which calls for 17,000 additional troops in Baghdad, will continue until at least this fall, the second-ranking commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, told CNN on Wednesday. ‘I don't want to put an exact time on it, but a minimum of six to nine months.'" On the other hand, Simon Tisdale of the British Guardian reports that the new military "brain trust," headed by Lt. General David H. Petraeus, which has just surged into Baghdad's Green Zone, is operating on a more truncated schedule. Petraeus's men, who believe themselves to be working with too little of everything, especially boots on the ground -- since the Iraqi government has once again not delivered its promised full contingents -- have "concluded the US has six months to win the war in Iraq -- or face a Vietnam-style collapse in political and public support that could force the military into a hasty retreat."

Give me a buck for every predicted six-to-nine month window of opportunity from the military or the White House in the last four years and I'd be rich as Croesus. Amid the hopeless chaos of Iraq, you can already hear various individuals preparing their exculpatory "exit strategies" from this war. So many key players are going to stab one another in the back with their various explanations for failure in the coming years that blood will run between the pages of the many memoirs still to be published.

Of course, for the neocons, the Bush White House, the Vice President and his crew, and various military and intelligence types, the real villains will not, in the end, be themselves. Count on this: The "weak-willed" American people will take the brunt of the official blame (with the "liberal" media, Democratic and Republican politicians who opposed the war, and the antiwar movement, as well as the incompetence of anyone but the speaker of the moment, thrown in for good measure).

As Ira Chernus points out below, we've heard this tune before -- and once upon a time, in the post-Vietnam years, it ended up playing us for a long, long while. The question is: Will history repeat itself in the wake of an American defeat in the Middle East?

Here's the money paragraph in the Tisdale piece, which should have a Surgeon General's warning attached to it:

"Possibly the biggest longer-term concern of Gen Petraeus's team is that political will in Washington may collapse just as the military is on the point of making a decisive counter-insurgency breakthrough. According to a senior administration official, speaking this week, this is precisely what happened in the final year of the Vietnam war."

Mom, I tell you that fish I had hooked was at least as long as the boat and I was just bringing it in when you made me come home… Tom

Will We Suffer from the Iraq Syndrome?

Beware of the Boomerang
By Ira Chernus

The Iraq syndrome is headed our way. Perhaps it's already here.

A clear and growing majority of Americans now tell pollsters that that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a mistake, that it's a bad idea to "surge" more troops into Baghdad, that we need a definite timeline for removing all our troops.

The nation seems to be remembering a lesson of the Vietnam War: We can't get security by sending military power abroad. Every time we try to control another country by force of arms, we only end up more troubled and less secure.

But the Iraq syndrome is a two-edged sword, and there is no telling which way it will cut in the end.

Remember the "Vietnam syndrome," which made its appearance soon after the actual war ended in defeat. It did restrain our appetite for military interventions overseas -- but only briefly. By the late 1970s, it had already begun to boomerang. Conservatives denounced the syndrome as evidence of a paralyzing, Vietnam-induced surrender to national weakness. Their cries of alarm stimulated broad public support for an endless military build-up and, of course, yet more imperial interventions.

The very idea of such a "syndrome" implied that what the Vietnam War had devastated was not so much the Vietnamese or their ruined land as the traumatized American psyche. As a concept, it served to mask, if not obliterate, many of the realities of the actual war. It also suggested that there was something pathological in a post-war fear of taking our arms and aims abroad, that America had indeed become (in Richard Nixon's famous phrase) a "pitiful, helpless giant," a basket case.

Ronald Reagan played all these notes skillfully enough to become president. The desire to "cure" the Vietnam syndrome became a springboard to unabashed, militant nationalism and a broad rightward turn in the nation's life.

Iraq -- both the war and the "syndrome" to come -- could easily evoke a similar set of urges: to evade a painful reality and ignore the lessons it should teach us. The thought that Americans are simply a collective neurotic head-case when it comes to the use of force could help sow similar seeds of insecurity that might -- after a pause -- again push our politics and culture back to a glorification of military power and imperial intervention as instruments of choice for seeking "security."

Ambivalence in the Land

In current polling data about the war in Iraq, there are obvious reasons for hope, but also less noticed warning signs. In a PIPA poll of December 2006, for instance, three-quarters of the public favored "withdrawing almost all U.S. troops by early 2008," and fully 62% of Republicans agreed. Even in the south, 64% of Americans now disapprove of Bush's "handling" of the war. A recent USA Today poll finds 60% against sending more troops to Iraq. But the exact same number wants Congress to fund those new troops they don't approve of dispatching Iraq-wards.

In that USA Today poll, a remarkable 63% of Americans favor "a time-table for withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of next year," putting them way ahead of the Democratic Party Washington consensus on what to do. Yet in a Washington Post/ABC poll released this week, while 64% say the war in Iraq was not worth fighting, only 45% want to set a deadline of all U.S. troops out within a year, and only the same minority number would move to reduce funding for the war. The latest CBS News poll reveals that over 70% of Americans believe the situation is now going "badly." But fully half say the U.S. is still "likely to succeed in Iraq," and 43% do not want U.S. troops in Iraq removed or even reduced now. A new AP/Ipsos poll asks people what words they'd use for their feelings about the war. While 81% are "worried," 51% remain "hopeful." (That poll also asks how many Iraqi civilians have died in nearly four years of war. The median "best guess" is a woefully uninformed 9,890.)

Beneath the ever shifting polling figures, the only constant is an ambivalence which haunts the land. Politicians, legendary for leading from the rear, are waiting to see which way any coming gale might blow. While many now follow their constituents and speak out against the war, most of them are carefully positioning themselves to go with the flow of a militaristic backlash, should it emerge.

And history tells us a backlash is a real possibility. Just as in the early stages of the Vietnam War, a large majority of Americans were not opposed to the Iraqi intervention or the occupation that followed. When Saddam Hussein's regime was overthrown, some three-quarters of the U.S. public approved George W. Bush's war.

With Iraq, as with Vietnam, the nation did not go sour on the venture until it became frustratingly clear that the United States could not win -- and American deaths began to rise. Bush's ratings have fallen steadily not because he took us into war under false pretenses, but because he failed to deliver the expected triumph. Going to war without winning just doesn't fit our national self-image, what Tom Engelhardt has called our "victory culture."

Victory culture assumes that the United States is bound to win in the end -- that, in fact, we deserve to win because our motives are less self-interested than those of other nations. We may sometimes fight a war ineptly or incompetently, but we always mean well at heart. We want democracy, prosperity, peace, and stability -- not just for ourselves but for everyone.

And in victory culture, we kill only because others are out to ambush and kill us. We are by definition the victims, the innocents, never the perpetrators. That whitewashes our motives, whatever they may actually be.

To go on believing that we are virtuous, we must go on seeing ourselves as profoundly insecure, as beset by enemies, as invariably simply defending ourselves out there on the planetary frontiers of an aggressive, dangerous world; out there on what the President -- referring to remote regions of Pakistan -- called "wild country; this is wilder than the Wild West."

The stories the Bush administration has been spinning in these years to justify its war, and possibly a future assault on Iran as well, are built on the twin pillars of virtue and insecurity. While the war in Iraq itself is, by now, widely rejected, the basic plot outline embedded in the President's stories remains largely intact. In the mainstream media, and around the country, questions about Iraq are still framed within the narrative of a grand, though badly executed, project to bring democracy and stability to a benighted land (and of the Iraqis' inability to grasp our gift of democracy or an American naiveté in believing an Arab land could possibly be ready for such a gift). The news stories and political debate in Washington are still all about the U.S. somehow being responsible for protecting the Iraqis from chaos (even if it's chaos we've in fact created). They're about fulfilling a responsibility, finishing what we started, not to speak of the unquestioned need to go to distant places to protect our own homeland from the ever-present threat of terrorism.

There's good reason to see this whole line of thinking as bogus, but thoughtful analysts who explain why can barely get their voices heard, much less be taken seriously.

Identity Crisis in a Losing War

By now, in the midst of policy and military disaster, victory culture has narrowed to "supporting our troops." Congress cannot defund the war because lawmakers fear the ultimate charge of betrayal, a Congressional "stab in the back" for failing to "support our troops." The obvious logical response -- "The best way to support our troops is to bring them home to their loved ones" -- doesn't cut it in today's political climate. With not a shred of victory in sight, "our troops" have become the prime symbol of both American virtue and insecurity, the prime reason to stay in Iraq now that every other publicly ballyhooed reason has disappeared.

That's an old story. Ever since the Minutemen, soldiers have often been iconic emblems of everything that was imagined as pure, innocent, and vulnerable about America. There's even a history of portraying the American fighting man as a Christ-figure -- a staple of Vietnam movies from Sgt. Elias in Platoon to Rambo.

Now, who can deny that our "kids" in Iraq are, by and large, decent and well-meaning or that they face terrible risks daily? They are the constant heroes in stories of virtue, innocence, and insecurity that fill the media, stories usually detached from any political context, as if Iraq were merely a stage without much scenery and lacking all plot on which "our troops" continuously perform their heroic, sometimes almost mythic, deeds. And those media stories make the image of a virtuous, innocent, and insecure America eminently believable -- but only so long as our troops are deployed in harm's way.

For the broad center of the American public, "supporting our troops" also means supporting some version, however attenuated, of victory culture. By now, vast numbers of Americans realize that we'll surely win no real victory in Iraq. Who is even sure what winning there might mean? But whatever our stumbles, our war stories are supposed to have some kind of happy ending. Every generation sent to war is supposed to be "the greatest."

The ambivalence lurking in the polls suggests that many Americans want it both ways. The war should end quickly, but somehow with victory culture if not still burning brightly, at least flickering, as our birthright as Americans demands.

Awash in all this ambiguity, the broad political center is in a terrible bind when it comes to policy choices. A prompt phased withdrawal offers the promise of something like the formula that Richard Nixon offered in the 1968 election campaign (but never intended to deliver): "peace with honor" -- in other words, something, anything, that might be packaged as less than a defeat.

It would, however, be hard to avoid seeing any kind of withdrawal from Iraq as a retreat under fire, as a quitting of the field of battle, as an admission that the U.S. cannot always save faraway people in faraway places. That, too, would call into question all the traditional stories that are still so widely seen as the bulwark of American identity.

When a whole nation has to cope with an identity crisis, when it has to struggle to believe in narratives that were once self-evidently meaningful, there is no telling what might happen.

There's already a hot debate -- a blame game -- brewing about "who lost Iraq?" The public may well put the blame on the Bush administration, or even on the whole idea of aggressive war as the royal path to domestic security, especially since Iraq can't be easily written off as a one-time disaster. It is the second massive U.S. failure in war in a generation. And it's a lot harder to put two failures behind you. So there is real reason to hope that Americans won't be fooled again, that this fiasco will breed a deep and enduring resistance to the use of military force abroad.

On the other hand, the very fact that Iraq is a second humiliation may make it all the more urgent for many Americans to put it behind them, to deny the painful reality. The frustration over not getting the ending we deserve remains palpable. And it's only likely to rise as the situation worsens. So the public could in the post-war years just as easily put the blame where Ronald Reagan put it after Vietnam -- on "the purveyors of weakness" (oppositional, incompetent, or micromanaging politicians and bureaucrats, the media, the antiwar movement) -- and turn back to the Reaganite (and neoconservative) mantra of "peace and security through strength."

Then we'll be told that Iraq, too, was just an aberration, a well-intentioned war handled with a staggering level of incompetence that simply got out of control. Those who don't want to repeat the experience, who prefer to try other paths to global security, will be told they are infected with the Iraq syndrome. And the prescription for a cure will inevitably be military buildup, imperial war, and, of course, the possibility of both "kicking" the Iraq syndrome and welcoming our troops home in the sort of triumph they so richly deserve.

Put the history of the Vietnam syndrome together with the enduring appeal of America's victory culture, and it's easy to see how the Iraq syndrome could boomerang, too. Boomerangs can easily catch you unaware and give you quite a smack. When one might be coming up behind you, it pays to stay very alert.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. He can be contacted at chernus@colorado.edu.

Copyright 2007 Ira Chernus

Repeating History

Feb 22, 2007

By Robert Fantina
bfantina@gmail.com


No exit strategy; violent resistance by the occupied nation's citizens; opposition to the war in the United States; international anger at the U.S. because of the war; the American economy being decimated by the war; escalating casualties; presidential refusal to recognize mistakes: all of these statements apply to the Iraq war today as much as they did to the Vietnam War forty years ago.

While it is difficult to pinpoint the start of the Vietnam War, since America was involved marginally in that country as early as the 1950's, major escalation began in 1964. The circumstances bringing about this escalation parallel the start of the Iraq war to an amazing degree. Brief descriptions of this first, major escalation in Vietnam, and the start of the Iraq war, follow.

During the Vietnam War, the staging area for the U.S. Seventh Fleet was the Gulf of Tonkin, on the east coast of North Vietnam. On August 2 1964, the U.S. destroyer Maddox was on an espionage mission when it was fired on by North Vietnamese torpedo patrol boats. The Maddox, with supporting air power, fired back, sinking one North Vietnamese boat.

Two evenings later the Maddox and another destroyer, the C. Turner Joy were again in the gulf. The instruments on the Maddox indicated that the ship was under attack or had been attacked and the captain began an immediate retaliatory strike. Both ships began firing into the night with assistance from American air power.

Hours later the captain concluded that there might not have been an actual attack. James B. Stockdale, who was a pilot of a Crusader jet, undertook a reconnaissance flight over the waters that evening and when asked if he witnessed any North Vietnamese attack vessels, Stockdale replied: 'Not a one. No boats, no wakes, no ricochets off boats, no boat impacts, no torpedo wakes--nothing but black sea and American firepower.'

Regardless of any inconsistencies, this incident, which may not have happened at all, was presented to the world as an act of aggression against the United States. The fact that the U.S. had no legitimate business in the Gulf of Tonkin was not addressed. Congress quickly met and with the same lack of fact-finding rigor demonstrated by that body nearly forty years later, passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which allowed the president to take all necessary measures to repel aggression. Those measures resulted in a significant escalation of the war. The ultimate result was years of death and carnage for American soldiers and Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.

On September 12, 2002, President Bush addressed the United Nations and told the skeptical delegates and the doubting world about his belief in Iraq's progression towards creating nuclear weapons and his purported knowledge of its scientists, weapons designs and attempts to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. None of it was true, but Congress bought the story, with both Republicans and Democrats proclaiming the need to give Mr. Bush the authorization to invade Iraq. The result, to date, has been death and carnage for American soldiers and Iraqi soldiers and civilians.

During the Vietnam War, President Nixon ordered the secret invasion of Cambodia, with the apparent goal of containing communism to North Vietnam. Congress approved the bombing of that nation when it passed the Cooper-Church amendment in 1971. While this amendment restricted the ability of the president to deploy troops, it allowed him to do whatever he deemed necessary ' to protect the lives of American armed forces wherever deployed,' and did little to limit the president's use of air power. While Mr. Nixon denounced the bill, it did not prevent him from bombing Cambodia under the guise of protecting the lives of American soldiers.

Today Mr. Bush is stating categorically that he knows Iran is supplying weapons to Iraqi freedom fighters. He has further stated that he is going to do 'something' about it. Congress appears to be in a somewhat less receptive mood than it was four years ago, but it is likely that, in the name of 'supporting the troops' Mr. Bush will once again be given a free reign, with nothing more than a slap on the wrist in the form of a non-binding resolution from Congress to express its displeasure.

When Mr. Nixon opposed the Cooper-Church Amendment (it was an amendment to another bill), he said that it harmed the war effort. Mr. Bush and Co. vehemently opposed the non-binding resolution expressing disagreement with his decision to send an additional 20,000 troops, echoing Mr. Nixon's sentiments and claiming that it would show the 'enemy' that America is divided, and would be a slap in the face to the soldiers serving in Iraq.

In 1967, six Vietnam Veterans founded the organization 'Vietnam Veterans Against the War.' These men had served in Vietnam, and knew first hand that the war was, at best, a calamitous mistake. Thirty-seven years later, a group of veterans of the Iraq war formed 'Iraq Veterans Against the War.' Like their predecessors, these men and women are exposing the cruelty, carnage and obscenity of the war.

The outcome of the Iraqi war will not be known until some future date; Mr. Bush has said that it will be another president, not he, who decides when American soldiers will leave that country. But history does tend to repeat itself, as has been indicated by even this cursory look at some of the major milestones of the Vietnam and Iraq wars. If that is indeed the case, the world can expect several more years of blood and death in Iraq, more American soldiers returning home in coffins, and a growing resentment of the U.S. There does not appear to exist any more optimistic precedent in America's history.


Robert Fantina is a long-time activist for peace and social justice. He has worked with the Coalition for Peace Action in New Jersey. Originally involved in the Dennis Kucinich presidential campaign in 2004, he eventually worked as a district organizer through MoveOn.org on the Kerry campaign in Florida. Following the 2004 presidential election, he moved to Canada, where he now resides. is the author of "Desertion and the American Soldier, 1776-2006".

RE: U.S. troops kept Iraqi brains in the fridge for trophies

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U.S. troops kept Iraqi brains in the fridge for trophies
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Feb 1, 2007

A cousin of mine who served in Vietnam and today still suffers from PTSD told me that his unit would sever the heads off the Viet Cong they killed and line them up on the hoods of their jeeps when returning to their camp. The number of heads would be the measure of their "bravery, courage and performance" in the line of duty. They were trophies. You can bet your ass they had "productive" days in the battlefields. Napalm was even more certain to guarantee a good day's work. How quickly have we forgotten the lessons of the past?!? You would think Viet Nam had never happened, the way this Administration gets away with MURDER, pure and simple. Pelosi, get your gun, hon!

Vic continues to have recurring violent nightmares till this day about that whol experience, and his mental health issues apparently so affected his wife that she flipped out and wound up in the mental hospital herself years ago, never to recover. He, himself, vanished, perhaps into the streets with the rest of our war-damaged youth of that period. War destroys our own families, not just the "enemy's". Beware the spoils of "victory".

War is ugly, but such outright atrocities are absolutely hideous. Violence is the very feature of human life that gives material proof of the lack or loss of a civilized society. America ought to feel deeply shamed by this goon in the Oval Office.

Clearly, we are on a very slippery slope on both the foreign and domestic fronts. The class war at home continues, with the Republicans still clinging to their greedy policies on behalf of their wealthy and corporate constituents.

No minimum wage is as morally wrong as shooting our own citizens through the head. One wonders if that might not in fact be more merciful and compassionate of the neocons than simply letting the worst-off of our wage slaves suffer slowly and so painfully -- no food, no shelter, no clothing, no healthcare. Where is justice? Where is peace and good will? Where?

Toto, we're not in America anymore, are we? Yikes !!!

Y'all >>> "Teach Your Children Well", Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

Cas

CasanovaDeCastro-Almelah

Chuck Hagel for President!

Robert Scheer

Posted on Jan 16, 2007

AP Photo / Gerald Herbert

Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., speaks at a press conference regarding his proposed plan to save Social Security on Capitol Hill in Washington Monday, March 7, 2005.

Chuck Hagel for president! If it ever narrows down to a choice between him and some Democratic hack who hasn’t the guts to fundamentally challenge the president on Iraq, then the conservative Republican from Nebraska will have my vote. Yes, the war is that important, and the fact that Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, the leading Democratic candidate, still can’t or won’t take a clear stand on the occupation is insulting to the vast majority of voters who have.

Sen. Hagel is a decorated Vietnam War vet who learned the crucial lessons of that Democrat-launched debacle of post-colonial imperialism. Even more important, he has the courage to challenge a president from his own party who so clearly didn’t.

“The speech given last night [Jan. 10] by this president represents the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam,” Hagel said. “We are projecting ourselves further and deeper into a situation that we cannot win militarily.

“To ask our young men and women to sacrifice their lives to be put in the middle of a civil war is wrong. It’s, first of all, in my opinion, morally wrong. It’s tactically, strategically, militarily wrong,” he added.

If Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, another Democratic darling, has uttered words of such clarifying dissent on the president’s disastrous course, then I haven’t heard them. Instead, too many leading Democratic politicians continue to act as if they fear that if they are forthright in opposing the war, they will appear weak, whether on national security or the protection of Israel, and so ignore the clear, strong voice of the American people that just revived their party’s fortunes.

Ever since President Ronald Reagan painted foreign policy as a simplistic war of good versus evil, the Republican Party has been in the thrall of neocon adventurers. Yet, the national emergence of Hagel reminds us that, two decades earlier, it was Dwight D. Eisenhower, a war hero and a Republican, who was the only president to clearly challenge the simplistic and jingoistic militarism that most Democrats embraced during the Cold War. It was Eisenhower, in fact, who refused to send troops to Vietnam, and his Democratic successors who opened the gates of war.

True conservatives, going back to George Washington, have always been wary of the “foreign entanglements” that our first general and president warned against in his farewell address. And it is in that spirit, recognizing the limits to U.S. military power, that Hagel spoke this past Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Independent Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, late of an oft-opportunistic Democratic Party that saw fit to nominate him as recently as 2000 for the vice presidency, had just finished accusing those who don’t support President Bush’s escalation of the war of being “all about failing.” In his defense of the indefensible, Lieberman baldly repeated many of Bush’s lies that launched this war four years ago.

“The American people ... have been attacked on 9/11 by the same enemy that we’re fighting in Iraq today, supported by a rising Islamist radical super-powered government in Iran,” said the fear-monger. “Allowing Iraq to collapse would be a disaster for the Iraqis, for the Middle East, for us, that would embolden the Iranians and al-Qaida, who are our enemies. And they would follow us back here.”

Never mind the ridiculous image of “super-powered” Iran invading the United States, or the fact that foreign jihadists—arriving after the overthrow of anti-fundamentalist strongman Saddam Hussein— make up only a tiny fraction of the combatants in Iraq. The question is how the apparently intelligent Lieberman doesn’t understand that the main task of our troops for most of their stay in Iraq has been, de facto, to expand the power of Shiite theocrats trained for decades in Iran. Tehran couldn’t have baited a better trap.

In any case, Hagel refused to bite on Lieberman’s apocalyptic vision, which somehow manages to skip the hard truth that Iraq has collapsed because of our involvement, not despite it.

“[T]he fact is, the Iraqi people will determine the fate of Iraq,” Hagel responded, in what amounts to a radical opinion in paternalistic, arrogant Washington. “The people of the Middle East will determine their fate. We continue to interject ourselves in a situation that we never have understood, we’ve never comprehended [and] we now have to devise a way to find some political consensus with our allies [and] the regional powers, including Iran and Syria.

“To say that we are going to feed more young men and women into that grinder, put them in the middle of a tribal, sectarian civil war, is not going to fix the problem,” he added.

Words of wisdom that set the standard for anyone running for president.

Watch the “Meet the Press” exchange between Hagel and Lieberman

By Robert Scheer

The Lost Voice of Protest: BOB HERBERT

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
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OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Lost Voice of Protest
By BOB HERBERT
Published: January 18, 2007

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. held the unfashionable view that we had an obligation to help those who are in trouble.


On the evening of the fourth of April, 1967, one year to the day (almost to the hour) before his assassination, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. walked into Riverside Church in Manhattan and delivered a speech that was among his least well known, yet most controversial.

“I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight,” he said, “because my conscience leaves me no other choice.”

The speech was an eloquent, full-throated denunciation of the war in Vietnam, one of the earliest public critiques by such a high-profile American. Silence in the face of the horrors of that war, said Dr. King, amounted to a “betrayal.”

The speech unleashed a hurricane of criticism. Even the N.A.A.C.P. complained about Dr. King stepping out of his perceived area of expertise, civil rights, to raise his voice against the evil of the war. The Times headlined an editorial, “Dr. King’s Error.” The war would go on for another eight years, ultimately taking the lives of 58,000 Americans and a million to two million Vietnamese. Dr. King himself would be silenced, at the age of 39, by a bullet in Memphis.

The widespread celebration of Dr. King’s birthday on Monday brought that Vietnam speech to mind. It’s both gratifying and important that we honor this great man with a national holiday. But it’s disturbing that we pay so much more attention to the celebrations than we do to the absolutely crucial lessons that he spent much of his life trying to teach us.

Whether it’s the war in Iraq, or the plight of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, or the violence and self-destructive behavior that plagues so many black Americans, our attitude toward the wisdom of Dr. King has been that of the drug addict or alcoholic to the notion that there might be a better way. We give lip service to it, and then we ignore it.

In the Vietnam speech, Dr. King said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

--MORE--

How US is deferring war costs

from the January 16, 2007 edition

As war spending on Iraq and Afghanistan nears the levels for Vietnam and Korea, concern is rising over the 'borrow now, pay later' approach.

Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

NEW YORK

To pay for World War II, Americans bought savings bonds and put extra notches in their belts. President Harry Truman raised taxes and cut nonmilitary spending to pay for the Korean conflict. During Vietnam, the US raised taxes but still watched deficits soar.

But to pay for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has used its credit card, counting on the Chinese and other foreign buyers of its debt to pay the bills.

Now, as President Bush is promising to boost the number of troops in Iraq, there is increased scrutiny over how the US is going to pay for it all.

The US is spending about $10 billion a month on Iraq and Afghanistan. By the end of this year, the total funds appropriated will be nearly $600 billion – approaching the amount spent on the Vietnam or Korean wars, when adjusted for inflation.

However, the actual impact of the war on the economy is different than in the past, largely because the US economy is so much bigger now. During World War II, some analysts calculate that the US spent as much as 30 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on the war effort. The Korean War, at its spending peak in 1953, represented 14 percent of GDP; Vietnam was about 9 percent. The current war, however, is less than 1 percent of America's annual $13 trillion GDP.

Payment due: in the future

The US can certainly afford the war, says budget analyst Stan Collender, a managing director of Qorvis Communications in Washington. But the spending is taking resources from other areas, he notes. Because the US is borrowing to finance the war, the cost will be borne by future generations. "And it's still going to be one of the most expensive wars we have ever fought," he says.

Unlike in previous major wars, the United States has cut taxes at the same time it has increased military spending. "It's fair to say all of the money spent on the war has been borrowed," says Richard Kogan, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank in Washington. "But eventually everything has to be paid for."

Congressional questioning

Congress hopes to hold hearings on the financial implications of the war before the president releases his budget proposal for fiscal year 2008 on Feb. 5. Democrats, now in the majority, plan to ask a wide range of questions, from the future costs of the war to how those costs should be budgeted.

"We won't balance the budget in one year. The best we can expect is five years," says Rep. John Spratt (D) of South Carolina, the new chairman of the House Budget Committee, in a phone interview. "But we need to know: What is the bar we need to reach?"

Estimating the budget deficit has become more difficult in recent years because the White House has funded much of the war through emergency supplemental bills, which are not included in the federal budget. According to a Congressional Research Service report, it is a practice that other administrations have employed since the Korean War. This year, the White House is expected to ask for another $100 billion in supplemental war funds, but Representative Spratt says he would like to get the war back on the budget since it can be argued the war is no longer an emergency.

"Calling it an emergency means the spending does not get the scrutiny," he adds, because then the spending is reviewed by only one committee – House Appropriations. In addition, he says, emergency spending is exempt from caps on discretionary spending. This has prompted the military to include in the bill items that are not directly related to the war. Making the spending a part of the budget would end the practice of some members placing pet projects on a bill that must be passed, he says.

A war-by-war cost comparison

Numbers are fuzzy on how much has been spent so far on the global war on terror. According to the House Appropriations Committee, some $471 billion has been committed so far. Spratt says it's closer to $507 billion. By the end of this year, on a cash basis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be closing in on the costs of the Vietnam War ($650 billion in today's dollars) and the Korean War ($691 billion).

Some analysts believe the cost of the war is much higher than Congress estimates. In a study last January and updated in October, Harvard Prof. Linda Bilmes and Columbia Prof. Joseph Stiglitz estimated the budgetary and economic cost of the war at $2 trillion.

Ms. Bilmes, in a phone interview, says Congress looks only at its cash outlays, not at the war's future costs. For example, she says, an estimated 42,000 light trucks are in use in Iraq. Although it costs something to run them, the major cost will be replacing them. "That's not factored into the cost of the war," she says.

The same is true of the cost of taking care of injured veterans in the future. "After our study came out, what surprised us is that the VFW, the Vietnam Vets, and others said, 'Thanks for shining the spotlight on this issue, but your numbers are too low,' " Bilmes says. After working with the vets, she concluded that the future costs of caring for the wounded were much higher than she had estimated.

Just the cash costs alone have mushroomed over the past two years, says Steve Kosiak, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a think tank in Washington. He estimates that Congress has appropriated nearly $300 billion during that period. "Perhaps some of the additional cost is for repairing the equipment," he says. "But it's fair to say it's partly a mystery why it's up so much."

Polls show people are concerned about the war, says Dennis Jacobe, chief economist at the Gallup Organization in Washington. But, he adds, "they are not concerned about the cost."

This is partly because of the way the war is funded through the supplemental budget process, Mr. Jacobe says. But it's also because the war has not disrupted the economy the same way past wars have. "It's really had no significant impact except for the deficit spending," he says.

By Ron Scherer

History always teaches, but not everyone learns

Posted on Thu, Jan. 11, 2007

Rev. Bob Edgar,

served six terms as a Democratic U.S. representative from Pennsylvania's 7th District


Three decades appears to be long enough to forget a few things, at least for President Bush and those who've been advising him on waging war in Iraq. However, the memory of being a freshman member of Congress standing to begin a floor debate over sending more troops to Vietnam will be forever with me.

It was April 22, 1975. President Gerald R. Ford had proposed a way to help us get out of Vietnam more quickly. He wanted hundreds of millions of dollars for something called the Vietnam Humanitarian Assistance and Evacuation Act of 1975. My recollection is that the administration wanted to send 20,000 more ground troops to secure Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam.

It was a proposal many members of the House of Representatives, both Republicans and Democrats, would not approve. One of my colleagues said he didn't "want 40,000 or 50,000 American troops going back into Vietnam to take out 100,000, 500,000, a million South Vietnamese. That can happen under this bill."

It was all intimidating for me, in my first elected political office, to rise and speak on the House floor to challenge the president. But that was what I had been elected to do, and this was a moment when it was the constitutional duty of the legislative branch to check the executive branch of our government.

I was 31 and in office just four months. I had just been elected the previous November, along with 48 other new Democrats, because Americans didn't like the status quo. They wanted a government they could trust. They wanted government officials truly to represent them in Washington.

But the responsibility of the office, the widespread opposition to the war, and the support of Tip O'Neill, Massachusetts Democrat and the House majority leader, all combined to give me a voice on the House floor that began nearly 24 hours of very spirited debate. Occasionally, O'Neill came to the floor to whisper suggestions of legislative maneuvers about which I had no clue. Before my election to Congress, my main training had been as a minister, and I must admit the image of David and Goliath did cross my mind that day.

We lost vote after vote on substitution amendments. But, at last, the fall of Saigon made Ford's request a lost cause. Many of my colleagues were committed to exercising the check and balance of the legislative branch on the executive branch. We were determined not to allow any more money to be spent on more troops for a war we were not winning.

It is somewhat ironic that, on that same day, April 22, 1975, an official White House photograph captured the architects of the proposed troop surge. President Ford is seated behind his desk in the Oval Office. He is conferring with his chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Dick Cheney.

Fast-forward 32 years. We are hearing the same talk. We are hearing the same reasoning that more troops will help us get out of a war thousands of miles away.

We have just seen a new Congress sworn in. Many say voters spoke loudly last November against the status quo. In 1975, the 49 of us were called "Watergate babies," referring to the crimes that brought down the Nixon administration. Voters then were tired of being lied to, and wanted desperately to get our troops home from the war in Southeast Asia.

The architects of the waning days of the Vietnam War are many of the same planners who pushed our troops into the current war in Iraq. Apparently history has taught them nothing.

History, however, apparently was not lost on the American voters last November. I suspect it will likely not be lost on their representatives in the 110th Congress. I suspect those elected by the people will not approve spending any more tax dollars to extend another unpopular, ill-planned and shortsighted war.


The Rev. Bob Edgar (redgar@ncccusa.org) is the general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA and author of "Middle Church: Reclaiming the Moral Values of the Faithful Majority from the Religious Right."

Bush Plagiarized LBJ's Speech on Why The U.S Needed To Send More Troops To Vietnam

E-Day": It was 40 years ago today

This comes with a huge hat tip to a good Friend of Attytood who was born 40 years ago on this date -- Happy Birthday, dude! -- and as a result is more up to speed on what happened on January 10, 1967, than the rest of us.

The big news story that night? President Lyndon B. Johnson's State of the Union address.

The topic that dominated all others: Vietnam.

I'm going to guide you to some excerpts of that address -- exactly 40 years ago tonight. See how it compares to some of the excerpts from President Bush's speech that were just released minutes ago:

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: We have chosen to fight a limited war in Vietnam in an attempt to prevent a larger war--a war almost certain to follow, I believe, if the Communists succeed in overrunning and taking over South Vietnam by aggression and by force. I believe, and I am supported by some authority, that if they are not checked now the world can expect to pay a greater price to check them later.

GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Tonight in Iraq, the Armed Forces of the United States are engaged in a struggle that will determine the direction of the global war on terror – and our safety here at home. The new strategy I outline tonight will change America's course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: I wish I could report to you that the conflict is almost over. This I cannot do. We face more cost, more loss, and more agony. For the end is not yet. I cannot promise you that it will come this year--or come next year. Our adversary still believes, I think, tonight, that he can go on fighting longer than we can, and longer than we and our allies will be prepared to stand up and resist.

GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: Our South Vietnamese allies are also being tested tonight. Because they must provide real security to the people living in the countryside. And this means reducing the terrorism and the armed attacks which kidnaped and killed 26,900 civilians in the last 32 months, to levels where they can be successfully controlled by the regular South Vietnamese security forces. It means bringing to the villagers an effective civilian government that they can respect, and that they can rely upon and that they can participate in, and that they can have a personal stake in. We hope that government is now beginning to emerge.

GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Only the Iraqis can end the sectarian violence and secure their people. And their government has put forward an aggressive plan to do it.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: This forward movement is rooted in the ambitions and the interests of Asian nations themselves. It was precisely this movement that we hoped to accelerate when I spoke at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore in April 1965, and I pledged "a much more massive effort to improve the life of man" in that part of the world, in the hope that we could take some of the funds that we were spending on bullets and bombs and spend it on schools and production.

GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: We have chosen to fight a limited war in Vietnam in an attempt to prevent a larger war--a war almost certain to follow, I believe, if the Communists succeed in overrunning and taking over South Vietnam by aggression and by force. I believe, and I am supported by some authority, that if they are not checked now the world can expect to pay a greater price to check them later.

GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time…In the long run, the most realistic way to protect the American people is to provide a hopeful alternative to the hateful ideology of the enemy – by advancing liberty across a troubled region.

LBJ, Jan. 10, 1967: A time of testing--yes. And a time of transition. The transition is sometimes slow; sometimes unpopular; almost always very painful; and often quite dangerous. But we have lived with danger for a long time before, and we shall live with it for a long time yet to come. We know that "man is born unto trouble." We also know that this Nation was not forged and did not survive and grow and prosper without a great deal of sacrifice from a great many men.

GWB, Jan. 10, 2007: Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship…A democratic Iraq will not be perfect. But it will be a country that fights terrorists instead of harboring them – and it will help bring a future of peace and security for our children and grandchildren.

Not much to add here -- the words of Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush pretty much speak for themselves.

Two things, though. First of all, only 7,917 American troop had died in Vietnam through the end of 1966, or ten days before Johnson's speech. From the beginning of 1967 though the end of the war, an addition 50,285 -- more than six times as many -- Americans would lose their lives.

Also, and we're not endorsing this action by any means, then or now, but it is interesting to note that in that 1967 SOTU, LBJ also called for a 6 percent surcharge on personal and corporate income taxes to pay for the cost of the war. That's a level of responsibility -- and yes, sacrifice -- for war that our current president is unwilling to take.

Posted on January 10, 2007 7:24 PM | TrackBack

The Last Soldier To Die for A Mistake

The question is now being asked in relation to Iraq, as some military families wonder if lives are not only being lost but wasted. The story of the last American to die in a previous mistake, Vietnam, may hold lessons for today. By Greg Mitchell (December 10, 2006) -- In the wake of the November elections, the release of the Baker-Hamilton report, and the latest surge in American fatalities in Iraq, a familiar phrase has resurfaced in the press. It’s an updating of John Kerry’s famous question in 1971, as a Vietnam veterans’ leader, now reading something like, “How do you ask someone to be the last American soldier to die in Iraq for a mistake?” Indeed, today’s Washington Post features an article by Christian Davenport and Joshua Partlow about the emerging split among military families over that very question. All of this has caused me to wonder: Well, who WAS the last soldier to die for the Vietnam mistake? To my surprise, with a little research, I discovered that there is a consensus on who that individual was. We’ll get to his name in a moment, but what’s most relevant is that he died almost five years after that “mistake” was widely acknowledged. How many will die from now until the last American perishes in Iraq? Gallup and other polls show that a clear majority of American have already labeled the Iraq invasion a "mistake." We are at a haunting juncture in the Iraq war. Forgive me for another “back in the day” reference, but I recall very well that the public only turned strongly against the Vietnam conflict with the mass realization that young American lives were not only being lost but truly wasted. Now, a woman named Beverly Fabri says in today’s Washington Post, almost three years after her 19-year-old son, Army Pvt. Bryan Nicholas Spry, was killed, "I'm beginning to feel like he just died in vain, I really am.” That’s because she believes, "We are not going to win this war. And we shouldn't have gotten involved with it in the first place." Another echo of Vietnam: press reports of military officers in Iraq saying, off the record, that they are cutting down, or eliminating, certain patrols because they no longer think the effort is worth the death of any of their men. What’s next in this Vietnam flashback? Fragging of officers who do send their men foolishly into harm’s way? Now, who was that last American to die in Vietnam? According to Arlington National Cemetery, and numerous other sources, he was Army Col. William B. Nolde, a 43-year-old father of five. He was killed Jan. 27, 1973, near An Loc – just 11 hours before the U.S. signed the Paris Peace Accords -- when an artillery shell exploded nearby. This is how Time magazine reported it the following week: “The last hours of the Viet Nam War took a cruel human toll. Communist and South Vietnamese casualties ran into the thousands. Four U.S. airmen joined the missing-in-action list when their two aircraft were downed on the last day. Another four Americans were known to have been killed—including Lieut. Colonel William B. Nolde, 43, of Mt. Pleasant, Mich., who was cut down in an artillery barrage at An Loc only eleven hours before the ceasefire. He was the 45,941st American to have died by enemy action in Viet Nam since 1961.” His Wikipedia entry opens: “Born in Menominee, Michigan, Nolde was a professor of military science at Central Michigan University before joining the army. As an officer, he served in both the Korean War and the Vietnam War, acting as an advisor to the South Vietnamese forces in the latter&hellip. i “While other Americans lost their lives after the truce was enacted, these were not recorded as combat casualties. During his time in the armed forces, he had accumulated four medals, including the Bronze Star and Legion of Merit.” His full military funeral was so momentous -- it included the same riderless horse who accompanied President Kennedy's coffin -- it was covered on the front page of The New York Times on Feb. 6, 1973. That story began, “The Army buried one of its own today, Bill Nolde. And with him, it laid to rest – symbolically, at least – its years of torment in Vietnam.” How many more years of torment and wasted lives remain in Iraq? Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor of E&P.

The neocons have finished what the Vietcong started

Vietnam traumatised the US but left its power intact; Iraq, however, will be far more serious for the superpower

Martin Jacques
Friday December 8, 2006
The Guardian

Just a month after the American electorate delivered a resounding rebuff to the Bush Iraq policy, the great and the good - in the guise of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) - have subjected that policy to a withering critique. The administration has had the political equivalent of a car crash. George Bush is being routinely condemned as one of the worst presidents ever, and his Iraq policy no longer enjoys the support of a large swath of the American establishment. The neoconservatives suddenly find themselves isolated and embattled: Rumsfeld has been sacked, Cheney has gone quiet, the likes of Richard Perle are confined to the sidelines. The president is on his own and it is difficult to see how Bush can avoid moving towards the ISG position. The political map is being redrawn with extraordinary alacrity.

Before our eyes, the neoconservative position is disintegrating. Its foreign-policy tenets have been shown to be false. As is now openly admitted, they have brought the US to the verge of disaster in Iraq, which is why the American version of the "men in grey suits" has ridden to the rescue. After less than six years in office, elected at a time when the US was unchallenged as the sole superpower, the Bush administration has managed to deliver the country to the edge of what can only be compared to a Vietnam moment: the political and military defeat of the central and defining plank of American foreign policy.

Of course, in one sense it is quite unlike Vietnam. In 1975 the Americans suffered a spectacular military defeat at the hands of North Vietnam and the Vietcong, with US helicopters seeking to rescue leading US personnel from the tops of buildings as Vietnamese guerrillas closed in on the centre of Saigon. It was to shape American foreign policy - in particular, a desire to avoid overseas military entanglements - for decades. Indeed, the rise of the neoconservatives was partly predicated on a rejection of what they saw as American defeatism during and after the Vietnam war. Iraq is very different. There is no single enemy with a clear military strategy. Baghdad will not be Saigon. This is a case of an endless, bloody and unwinnable quagmire rather than any spectacular denouement in waiting.

But the Iraq moment is far more dangerous for the US than the Vietnam moment. Although one of the key justifications for the Vietnam war was to prevent the spread of communism, the US defeat was to produce nothing of the kind: apart from the fact that Cambodia and Laos became embroiled, the effects were essentially confined to Vietnam. There were no wider political repercussions in east Asia: ironically, it was China that was to invade North Vietnam in 1979 (and deservedly got a bloody nose).

The regional consequences of the Iraq imbroglio are, in comparison, immediate, profound and far-reaching. The civil war threatens to unhinge more or less the entire Middle East. The neoconservative strategy - to remake the region single-handedly (with the support of Israel, of course) - has been undermined by its own hubris. The American dilemma is patent in some of the key recommendations of the ISG report: to involve Iran and Syria in any Iraqi settlement (including the return of the Golan Heights to Syria) and to seek a new agreement between Israel and Palestine. In short, it proposes a reversal of the key strands of Bush's foreign policy

From a longer-term perspective, moreover, it is already clear that it will be impossible for the Americans to restore the status quo ante in the region. The failure of the occupation has shown the limitations of its power - which every country, from Iran and Syria to Israel and Saudi Arabia (not to mention Hizbullah and Hamas), will have noted. The US has been the decisive arbiter in the Middle East since the end of the Suez crisis in 1956, albeit with the Soviet Union playing a secondary role until 1989. The American era is now over.

In future the US will be forced to share its influence with regional powers such as Iran, with the EU - and no doubt in time, with emerging global players such as China and perhaps even Russia. Such a scenario may well mean that the key alliance that has shaped the Middle East since 1956 - between the US and Israel - will no longer be so pivotal and could be increasingly downgraded. From a regional standpoint, it is clear that the Iraq moment is far more serious for the US than the Vietnam moment.

What is true regionally is also the case globally. We are reminded of how even the most powerful and, indeed, the most knowledgeable can get things profoundly wrong. It is worthwhile recalling the longer-term global context of the American defeat in Vietnam. It did not signal any serious upturn in the fortunes of the Soviet Union; this was already in a state of economic stagnation and growing political paralysis that was to become terminal in the 80s, leaving the US as the sole superpower. It was this that encouraged the neoconservatives to utterly misread the historical runes at the end of the 90s. They believed that the world was ripe for a huge expansion of American power and influence.

A few years later we can see the full absurdity of this position. Far from the US being in the ascendant, deeper trends have moved in the opposite direction. The US might enjoy overwhelming military advantage, but its relative economic power, which in the long run is almost invariably decisive, is in decline. The interregnum after the cold war, far from being the prelude to a new American age, was bearing the signs of what is now very visible: the emergence of a multipolar world. By misreading global trends, the Bush administration's embrace of unilateralism not only provoked the Iraq disaster but also hastened American decline.

An increasingly multipolar world requires an entirely different kind of US foreign policy: far from being unilateralist, it necessitates a complex form of power-sharing on both a global and regional basis. This is not only the opposite to neoconservative unilateralism, it is also entirely different from the simplicities of superpower cooperation and rivalry in the bipolar world of the cold war. The new approach is implicit in the ISG report, which recognises that any resolution of the Iraq crisis depends on the involvement of Iran and Syria. Elements of this approach are already apparent on the Korean peninsula and in Latin America. The ramifications of the Iraq moment will surely influence US foreign policy for decades to come.

· Martin Jacques is a visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Centre, London School of Economics

Martinjacques1@aol.com

Spy Chief Cites Perils in Iraq: Worse Than Vietnam

- By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer
Friday, December 1, 2006

(12-01) 12:50 PST WASHINGTON, (AP) --

National Intelligence Director John Negroponte says Iraq is far more precarious than much of Vietnam was when he served as a U.S. diplomat there in the 1960s.

An expert on Vietnam and one-time adviser to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Negroponte said he sees more differences than similarities between the two conflicts. In Vietnam, for example, there was a clear enemy, given Soviet support of the North Vietnamese.

Additionally, "in Vietnam, the cities were secure. The province capitals were secure. I walked around that country as an unarmed civilian for almost four years without ever having any serious brushes," said Negroponte, who served in the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. "In Iraq, even the capital is highly insecure — perhaps one of the most insecure places in the country."

Negroponte made the remarks in a wide-ranging interview that airs Sunday evening on C-SPAN's "Q&A" program. A transcript was made available to The Associated Press.

Negroponte took over as the nation's top intelligence official last year, assuming a post created to unify the 16 intelligence agencies. He indicated in the interview that he wants to stay on through the Bush administration. Many associates have expected Negroponte to return to his diplomatic roots, perhaps serving as deputy secretary of State, a position open since July.

His answer to the question — will he "stay with it for a while?" — didn't completely close to door to a new assignment. "In my own mind at least, I visualize staying with it through the end of this administration and, then I think, probably that'll be about the right time to pack it in," he said.

Negroponte, who also is a former U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, said Iraqis must take more responsibility for their security and defense. The key, he said, is Baghdad, where the violence is greatest. His comments closely tracked the conclusions of an independent group led by former Secretary of State James Baker that is advising the administration as it redraws its Iraq policy.

"This has really got to become more and more of an Iraqi problem, and less and less of a U.S. one," he said. "I would hope that our forces can take more of a support role and a training role, and fall more into the background rather than being in the lead in the months ahead."

Negroponte said he wasn't certain of the impact should an Iraq court follow through with its Nov. 5 sentence to hang former dictator Saddam Hussein for ordering the execution of nearly 150 Shiite Muslims. The sentence triggered an automatic appeal.

"There are a lot of the Iraqis that want some kind of closure in this situation," Negroponte said. "There are probably also some insurgents, some Sunni extremist insurgents, who are fighting in the belief that — under the illusion that — they may be fighting to bring Mr. Saddam back to power, so it could have the effect of actually discouraging some of the Sunni extremists."

Negroponte voiced one regret about the nine months he served as ambassador to Iraq: that the United States wasn't able to convince Sunni politicians to scrap their boycott of the January 2005 elections. "I think that that was a real setback for the political process," he said.

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Iraqinam: 'The parallels to Vietnam are way too optimistic'

Plumb Out of Mission

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, November 29, 2006; A23

The meaning of the election was clear for all to see: The people plainly believed that the unified, pluralistic Iraq that the Bush administration insisted was growing stronger with each passing day actually had no future at all.

There's no other way to interpret the vote for the first Iraqi National Assembly, held one year ago, in December 2005. Overwhelmingly, Iraqis voted their sect rather than their nation. The Shiites, who constitute roughly 60 percent of Iraq's population, voted for Shiite parties, which now control roughly 60 percent of the National Assembly. The Sunnis and the Kurds voted for their own parties, too.

There was, to be sure, a national unity slate, a coalition of nonsectarian parties headed by former prime minister Ayad Allawi. It pulled down 8 percent of the vote.

For a moment, the U.S. government seemed to understand what the election meant. "It looks as if people have preferred to vote for their ethnic or sectarian identities," said Zalmay Khalilzad, our harried proconsul (okay, ambassador) in Baghdad. "But for Iraq to succeed there has to be cross-ethnic and cross-sectarian cooperation."

But if Iraqis had wanted Iraq to succeed, they would have voted for Allawi. Iraq, it turns out, was not the name of their desire, or their fear. And the civil war that has been growing relentlessly more horrifying since the election is ultimately just the continuation of their politics by other means.

Which is why the parallels to Vietnam are way too optimistic. In Vietnam, at least the United States could identify a government and some genuinely anti-communist constituencies with which it was plainly allied. But with whom do we stand, and who stands with us, in Iraq? Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki heads a Shiite-dominated government that grows closer to Iran and that is propped up by Moqtada al-Sadr, whose militia is the most powerful force in the country other than the U.S. Army, which Sadr has called on to leave Iraq forthwith.

As for the Sunni minority, it's among that group that the insurgency against both the U.S. occupation and the string of post-Hussein governments took root. At first the number of insurgents was relatively small, but as the Shiite-controlled police force joined the Shiite militias in anti-Sunni pogroms, the number of Sunnis taking up arms ballooned.

So -- which side are we on?

In the face of escalating civil war, of an increasingly Hobbesian conflict of each against all, the calls still coming from the U.S. military, the administration and Capitol Hill to step up our training of Iraqi forces seem light-years off the mark. The problem with Iraqi security isn't that Iraqi forces are poorly trained. It's that, like the rest of their countrymen, like the very government whose uniform they wear, they're not really invested in fighting for a unified, nonsectarian Iraq. Why do we expect them to defend an ideal that their countrymen either never believed in or were compelled to abandon under pressure of civil war?

But on matters Iraqi, much of the Beltway -- and not just the administration -- remains impervious to fact. "We've got to get the Iraqi army and police better equipped, better trained and into the fight," retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey declared recently. "And I think we've got 24 months." The police, of course, are already into the fight, many of them working with Shiite militias to execute Sunnis. They are, from any dispassionate perspective, proficient enough. Train them for 24 months and they will be the terror of the Earth.

We have plumb run out of mission in Iraq. We have enemies galore, but, other than the Kurds, precious few friends. We defend the idea of Iraq in the absence of Iraqis willing to do the same. We are at best a buffer -- unable to deter the daily atrocities but ensuring by our presence that they won't grow cataclysmically worse. Since we cannot deter the sectarian polarization, however, the cataclysm will follow our leave-taking whether it comes sooner or later.

Those who argue that we should send more troops (as if we had them) to Iraq, or train more Iraqis, or stay until the situation stabilizes should at least explain how the situation will stabilize, how nation-building will work in a nation that doesn't want to be built. We should, as George Packer has argued, rescue as many individual Iraqis as we possibly can on our way out. But rescuing Iraq from the forces we unleashed is plainly beyond us.

Or we could, I suppose, wait it out. About 100,000 Iraqis now flee the country every month for Syria or Jordan. At that rate, if we just hang on for 20 years, Iraq will be completely depopulated. The insurgency will be vanquished; sectarian strife will subside. Victory will be ours, and we can go home.

meyersonh@washpost.com

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/28/AR2006112801279.html

The Next Step? Think Vietnam.

Zakaria: The Next Step? Think Vietnam.

There is much moaning in Washington about the return of the 'realists.' But what we need is a Kissingerian effort to extricate America.

By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek

Dec. 4, 2006 issue - If you want to understand the futility of America's current situation in Iraq, last week provided a vivid microcosm. On Thursday, just hours before a series of car bombs killed more than 200 people in the Shia stronghold of Sadr City, Sunni militants attacked the Ministry of Health, which is run by one of Moqtada al-Sadr's followers. Within a couple of hours, American units arrived at the scene and chased off the attackers. The next day, Sadr's men began reprisals against Sunnis, firing RPGs at several mosques. When U.S. forces tried to stop the carnage and restore order, goons from Sadr's Mahdi Army began firing on American helicopters. In other words, one day the U.S. Army was defending Sadr's militia and, the next day, was attacked by it. We're in the middle of a civil war and are being shot at by both sides.

There can be no more doubt that Iraq is in a civil war, in which leaders of both its main communities, Sunnis and Shiites, are fomenting violence. The assault on Sadr's Ministry of Health was likely retaliation for a recent mass kidnapping at the Ministry of Education, which still retains some Sunnis. The Ministry of the Interior houses the deadliest killers from the Badr Brigades, the other large Shiite militia. Badr's Bayan Jabr built the death squads when he ran the ministry; he's now Iraq's Finance minister, in charge of its resources. This is the Iraqi government we are protecting, funding and attempting to strengthen. To speak, as the White House deputy press secretary did last week, of "terrorists ... targeting innocents in a brazen effort to topple a democratically elected government" totally misses the reality of Iraq today. Who are the terrorists and who are the innocents? Among the most pro-American voices to emerge from the new Iraq have been two young Baghdadis, Omar and Mohammed Fadhlil, whose three-year-old blog, Iraq the Model, has promoted a relentlessly upbeat and hopeful message. Last week they threw in the towel. "I believe that America would like to see Iraq emerge as a model for the region," Mohammed wrote. "But that cannot be done without having a cooperative Iraqi partner on the ground who shares similar views for Iraq and the Middle East. And that's the point—that partner does not exist, at least not in the government."

The American Army has more than enough troops to confront the Mahdi Army. The problem is political, not military. U.S. forces have been repeatedly blocked from going after Mahdi leaders. This month they were forced by the Iraqi government to abandon raids into Sadr City in search of a kidnapped American soldier. They were not even allowed to stop traffic in the neighborhood. Will more troops change that?


To the contrary, both sides now see American troops as the problem. The Shiite ruling coalition and the Sunni insurgency both believe that if only the United States were to get out of the way, they could defeat their enemies outright. That's why, in the most recent poll of Iraqis, taken in September, 91 percent of Sunnis and 74 percent of Shiites said they wanted American forces to leave within a year.

While these are not conditions that suggest a political deal is likely, there is nothing to be lost in trying. When President Bush meets with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Jordan this week, he should make clear that Iraq's leaders need to come to an agreement that meets both sides' key demands on such issues as autonomy, oil revenues and amnesty. But he needs to deliver an ultimatum: either the government begins implementing such a deal by January or American troops will begin a drawdown, leaving the core tasks of security to Iraqi forces.

There is much moaning in Washington about the return of the "realists," like James Baker, who are allegedly pushing to surrender America's ideals as the price of bringing stability to the situation in Iraq. In fact, even stability in Iraq is unattainable. What we will soon need is a supreme act of realism, dictated not by the ascendancy of a school of thought in Washington but by events on the ground in Iraq. We will need a Kissingerian effort to extricate the United States from the catastrophe that Iraq has become.

Iraq is not Vietnam. But America's predicament in Iraq is becoming increasingly similar to the one it faced in Southeast Asia more than 30 years ago. Henry Kissinger's negotiations to end the Vietnam War have been criticized from both the left and right. One side thought he moved too slowly to get us out, the other that he gave up too much. But looking at our circumstances in Iraq should give us some appreciation for the difficulty of his task. With a losing hand and deteriorating conditions on the ground, Kissinger maneuvered to extricate the United States from a situation in which it could not achieve its objectives, while at the same time limiting the damage, shoring up regional allies and maintaining some measure of American credibility. A version of such a strategy is the only one that has any chance of success in Iraq today.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15897617/site/newsweek/

The Grind

by Bruce Patterson

[ed. This is an excerpt from Rural Manpower, a work in progress by the author of a little-known but splendid book, Walking Tractor and Other Tales of Old Anderson Valley.]


(Swans - November 20, 2006) It was my experiences in Vietnam that turned me against the war. It wasn't like, after carefully weighing all of the evidence and balancing the pros and cons, I'd up and changed my mind. What happened to me was more like -- the process was so common among us grunts that we had a name for it -- "getting turned around in your boots." It was like an explosion of experiences, with you in the center of the impact dome, with bleeding ears and dust settling, looking down and seeing your boots pointing due north while the rest of you is pointing due south. Arriving in combat ready to play a game, have some fun, become a man, take some scalps, serve your country, and earn the everlasting gratitude and esteem of your countrymen and women and girls, in the grind of days you realize that war isn't a game, it serves no purpose, and the folks back home may as well be living on the moon.

Another bush term for getting turned around in your boots? "Getting your cherry popped."

Out in the jungle -- at least if you were determined to live -- you couldn't even suspend disbelief because belief itself was irrelevant and immaterial, no more important than that flickering beam of moonshine glowing in the mountain blackness under the towering foliage, below your foxhole and at the bottom edge of your field of fire.

In combat human life is cheap, talk is cheaper, and the only thoughts that matter are keeping your eyes and ears open, your nerves taut, your heart cold, and your weapons ready.

Yet, even by totally submitting to the tyranny of your situation and expendability, there's no guarantee that total submission won't be your last one. Everything can change all over again with the crack of a bullet -- the bullet you never heard, the bullet you'd fired mistakenly, or the one that killed your partner.

To armor yourself with your blown-away stateside illusions, or by allowing your old civilian imagination to carry you back to The World with its easy pleasures and all you'd willingly left behind, was worse than useless. Reality was too blaring, too in-your-face and for keeps, for flights of fancy. What you needed to do was to keep your bloody nose to the bloody ground at all times, your mind just a mirror of the bush. You wanted your mind to be just another piece of gear that you were forced to hump around in your rucksack.

In combat the very worst thing that can happen to your morale is to lose your "enemy concept." Even though you and your adversaries are trapped in a symbiotic relationship, and even though you are faced-up across a divide that binds you together, and even though you and they wish for the same things in life and share the very same fears, and even though, like you, they are made of flesh and blood and they cry out lustily when mutilated, they asked for it and they got everything they deserved. They got everything they deserved while your side had been dragged forward kicking and screaming.

Locked in a death grip and eyeball-to-eyeball, each must be the opposite of the other. One must be Good, and the other Evil, and which is which depends on who you talk to.

When I was in Vietnam I not only kept my hatred of the enemy, but during my short tour I tried my best to grow it, to cultivate it, to make it even bigger so I could wrap it around my shivering body like a bulletproof wool poncho. I wanted a magic poncho to keep me warm while I was out sleeping under the cold pelting rain below the slippery-steep rim of some nameless, root-bound vine and thorn-choked summit. I wanted my hatred for the enemy to keep me awake at night in my half-foxhole/half-rock pile while I was sitting a shift of guard duty, blinded by triple canopy darkness, or deafened by splattering rain dropping like bomblets, or gusts of wind rustling and bending the trees, or made totally senseless by all three.

In my hatred for the enemy I wanted a little dose of something to help keep me awake all night long while I was out on a six man ambush detail, my belly to the ground, my eyes pealed and my trigger finger itchy.

Hatred for the enemy was not just energy and purpose; it was guns and ammunition, bountiful rations, cool clean water, ripe old age, eagle eyes, cat-quickness, and the nose of a bloodhound.

In combat the enemy must die so that you can live. If there is anything wrong with that equation, then the last source you want to hear it from is your own weak and wicked mind. If questions like that don't get you or your partners killed or maimed, they'll damn sure make you all the more miserable.

Yet what had originally turned me against war wasn't, I must admit, the killing. The killing -- as terrorizing and hideous as it sometimes was -- was built into the contract I'd signed.

Instead, what had initially turned me against the war was my own nearly constant hunger for food. I'd arrived in Vietnam fourteen days after my eighteenth birthday, and I was still a growing boy with a big, Chicago-bred appetite. And even though back stateside I'd given serious thought to the possibility that I might get killed, or worse, in the service of my country in this outrageously faraway and foreign place, it had never occurred to me that, week after week and month after month, they'd starve me half to death.

I never imagined that -- during desperate times -- while on the run I'd fill my canteens with muddy water scooped from the bottoms of bomb craters. Not only that, but I'd be glad to get it. I'd treat the bomb crater muck with iodine pills and an envelope of Kool-Aid sent from home and then I'd gulp it down like I was some thirsty English lord craving a slug of hot brown tea.

Nor had it ever occurred to my young volunteer ass that when first thing in the morning I got a hole punched into my plastic "tit bag" holding the last of my drinking water, I'd spend a day begging sips of water from my fellow thirsty GI compadres before I managed, before dark, to convince my platoon sergeant, who was flush with water and proud of it, to sell me a quart canteen of it -- just the water, not the canteen -- for ten dollars American and cash up front.

Nor was I prepared for the unrelenting drudgery. True, back stateside, I'd been warned many times and from many sources about what was in store for me once I got out in the bush. And, true, I'd spent a year in vigorous physical, tactical, and psychological preparation for it. Still it'd never occurred to me that, even when the strongest of us were sleepwalking through the jungle, we'd never get a day off.

Mine was an elite, hunter-killer outfit commanded by ambitious officers -- a good percentage of them were West Pointers -- and we American paratroopers under their command were trained to attack and only to attack. It wasn't our job to hold on to territory, nor were we getting paid to guard anything.

But -- here was the rub -- the people we were fighting, which were mostly units of what was then the North Vietnamese Army, saw themselves exactly as we saw ourselves and they saw their mission exactly as we saw ours.

As a result, we bad-assed bush bunnies were not just the hunters, but the hunted. In order to avoid inviting possible annihilation, we were forced to always keep on the move. With swinging machetes we hacked paths through the jungle instead of following established trails, and we never, ever returned the way we came. We never slept anywhere but atop a mountain, and then only after digging a perimeter of holes, cutting out of the bushes fields of fire and communication trails, setting out booby traps and trip flares and sending out three or four overnight ambush details, one or two to cover our tracks and the remainder to stake out the most likely "approaches." Again, to avoid possible annihilation, we never slept on any one mountain twice.

Our cycle began on re-supply day when, after a couple of fat-bellied gunships had swooped over our summit to let the enemy know the sheriff was in town, a Huey dropped into the hole we'd hacked in the jungle canopy. Whatever replacements that had rolled down the pipe would jump from the deck of the Huey and run like hunchbacks for cover while the flight crew, with the help of a detail of us bush bunnies, hurled cargo to the ground like there was no tomorrow (with the wound-up whine of the chopper primed to get back up out of there, you couldn't hear incoming bullets or mortars).

While the replacements were getting "orientated" and divvied-up ("cherries" were sprinkled into the ranks where it was decided they'd do the least damage), the rest of us took turns having at our rations of bounty. The choppers might have brought us letters and care packages from home, or real care packages from the USO to be divvied up within our half-squads. We'd often get clean, fresh water and sometimes we'd get new socks and underwear and complimentary cigarettes from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, or packages of milk chocolate from Hershey, Pennsylvania. Always we'd get more ammunition, munitions, weapons, and medicines as needed. Plus we'd get whatever special orders that our CO had put in through channels; formal written requests for stuff like a new barrel for a machine gun, or a base plate for a mortar, six new helmets, fifty more canteens and the like. Yet special orders, like the care (food) packages sent to us from our families back home had a way of disappearing in the rear areas and either getting devoured on base or sold on the black market in town.

In addition, the re-supply choppers brought us our next stash of C-rations. Since, for reasons of self-preservation, we only got re-supplied once every five days, each of us was issued fifteen boxed and canned C-Rat meals. We'd stack our C-Rats like building blocks inside an empty sandbag, tie the bag shut with a length of parachute cord and then, once it was time for us to move out in the morning, tie our bulging sandbags to the tops of our rucksacks.

More than anything else on re-supply day it was the hot chow brought to us in five gallon cans that we most looked forward to. Even if the monsoon was blowing and half of our turkey and gravy, potatoes and dressing got washed off our trays before we could spoon it up into our mouths, still that hot meal was about the closest we'd ever get to feeling full bellies.

The next morning at first light, we'd all be up and at our battle stations, awaiting a dawn attack ("stand-to," the position was called). Then we'd take turns eating C-Rats for breakfast and then we'd "saddle up and move out," our shoulders straining under our over-stuffed, seventy-pound rucksacks.

During the day we'd play cat and mouse with the enemy until, two or three hours before sundown, we'd climb a mountain, dig in, eat C-Rats, tend to our ammunition, weapons, and equipment and then, from dusk till pitch black, "stand-to" again before beginning our rotation of overnight guard duty.

Barring a fixed-piece or a running battle, or a gauntlet of booby traps, the next day would be exactly the same, as would be the next night, and so on through the five-day cycle. You survive three cycles and, on the 16th day, you get rewarded with a chopper ride back to your forward artillery base -- another carved mountaintop somewhere off in the sticks -- to line up for breakfast and supper in a chow line and then, sitting on the ground wherever it was comfortable and balancing your tray on your lap, devouring what little food they'd given you.

While guarding the "firebase" you'd get the chance to take makeshift soapy showers to scrub the caked salt, stink, bugs, and tropical rot off you. If it was to your liking, you could gather in the bent grass and sit and listen to patriotic sermons delivered by military chaplains enthralled by the universal and everlasting spirit of the M-16. While resting in a firebase, you'd fill sandbags, build bunkers, dig communication trenches between bunkers, run short recon patrols, go out in pairs as "pickets" (human trip wires), sit and GI your equipment, stand guard, write letters home, and listen to the 105mm Howitzers blasting what seemed like all day and all night long.

After five days of rest and relaxation in the firebase, that gave you roughly two-thirds of one month served. Then it was back to the bush for you for another fifteen days. Multiply that bush-to-firebase rotation about sixteen times, and that was a tour.

http://www.swans.com/library/art12/brucep01.html