"For I Have Promises To Keep ..."

(Cartoon by Matson and found here.  Click on image to enlarge.)

Karen Greenberg (a professor at Fordham University) had an interesting analysis of Obama's presidency from the standpoint of some of the promises he made during his campaign and during the early days of his administration.  Those in the progressive base who worked so hard to get him elected were elated.  The eight-year long nightmare of the Bush Administration was finally over.  Unfortunately, things haven't exactly worked out the way many of us hoped. Greenberg's scorecard on several issues nicely captures our disappointment.

From the 2/27/14 Los Angeles Times:

Ending torture

On his first day in office, Obama ordered an end to the practice of torture, or as the George W. Bush administration preferred to call it, "enhanced interrogation techniques." In the president's words, "effective immediately" individuals in U.S. custody "shall not be subjected to any interrogation technique or approach, or any treatment related to interrogation, that is not authorized by and listed in the Army Field Manual."

Of the four promises, this is the one the president has come closest to keeping.

Greenberg notes that the "black site" prisons were closed down and Obama did set some limits on interrogation techniques (although forced-feeding continued.)

Closing Guantanamo

On his first day in office, Obama also pledged to close the infamous Guantanamo Bay detention facility — home at the time to 245 detainees — within a year. That proved politically impossible. As of January, 155 detainees remained at the prison, including 77 who had been cleared for release. But the president insists he is still trying. In his State of the Union address last month, he urged legislative action: "This needs to be the year Congress lifts the remaining restrictions on detainee transfers and we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay."

But even if the president is successful, there's a catch: He has made it clear that he means to close Guantanamo only in the most technical sense. While he would like to empty the facility, he is quite prepared to keep the strikingly un-American Guantanamo system of indefinite detention itself intact, allowing some suspects in Washington's war on terrorism to be held indefinitely without charges or trial if they are considered a risk to national security.  [Emphasis added]

Unless and until President Obama ends the concept of indefinite detention of anyone, including citizens, not only has this promise been broken, but is totally unacceptable treatment by an allegedly constitutional government.

Ending unnecessary secrecy

Another goal Obama identified on his first day in office as key to his presidency was establishing a "sunshine" administration. He pledged to end the excessive secrecy of the Bush administration and put more information in the public arena.

Obama's self-professed aim was to restore trust between the people and their government by pledging to promote accountability and provide "information for citizens about what their government is doing." Toward that end, the president quickly released a number of previously classified documents from the Bush years on torture policy.

But that, as it happened, was the end of the sunshine. In the five years since, little of note has occurred in the name of transparency and much, including a war against whistle-blowers, has been pursued in the name of secrecy. The administration has also, even after Edward Snowden's devastating revelations, continued for the most part to defend the  NSA's massive, secret, warrantless surveillance.  [Emphasis added]

The NSA has been strengthened and has extended its reach into who knows how many homes and computers, and there is no way for the victims to do anything about it because they don't know about it.  The drone program operates in a similar super-secret fashion, spying and even assassinating.  This is not the transparent government Obama promised.

An end to war without limits

At the outset of Obama's presidency, the administration downplayed the notion of a borderless battlefield that encompassed the globe. It also threw on the trash heap of history the Bush administration's term "global war on terror."

In his recent State of the Union address, the president stated his continued aversion to the notion that Washington should pursue an unlimited war. He was speaking by now not just about the geography of the boundless battlefield but of the very idea of warfare without an end point. "America," he counseled, "must move off a permanent war footing."

But despite the president's insistence on placing limits on war, and on the defense budget, his brand of warfare has helped lay the basis for a permanent state of global warfare via "low footprint" drone campaigns and special forces operations aimed at an ever-morphing enemy usually identified as some form of Al Qaeda."  [Emphasis added]

The use of drones, satellite imagery, and interception of phone and email messages, justified by the use of the magic words "Al Qaeda" and "terrorists", has continued to burgeon under the Obama administration. 

The cartoon, showing Obama morphing into George W. Bush, provides an apt image for what we have seen over the past five years.  All those promises broken, and in the most expensive way imaginable, and I'm not talking about just the dollar cost.

 This is not what I voted for.  Not at all.

In Memoriam

I suppose it's a little odd that I grieve my late brother on Memorial Day rather than on his birthday, or the date of his death or funeral. After all, he did not die in battle, at least not directly. I believe that his multiple tours of duty in Viet Nam did contribute to his death, but I have no direct proof of that. You see, my brother died of complications of early-onset Alzheimer's and his doctors did speculate that the chemical exposure he had during those years certainly could have had an effect, especially with respect to the speed of his decline. My mother, who was his legal guardian at the time of his death refused an autopsy because of her own religious beliefs, so we can't know.

I do know, however, that his experience at war did affect the last years of his life profoundly. He had enlisted in the Sea Bees in the hopes that he wouldn't get sent into the battle zone. Foolish young man that he was, he didn't realize that construction would be required even on the battle field. He and his unit spent a great deal of time building, and rebuilding, and rebuilding Da Nang's air strip. And he did so without all the accouterments of battle. His main protection was a side-arm, either a .45 or a 9 mm semi-automatic. That isn't much in a war.

And this wasn't a traditional war. It was our first real experience with what is now called asymmetrical warfare. It wasn't easy to identify the enemy. It often was a villager who had been friendly the day before who led an attack on the men trying to grade for concrete laying. Or, even more horrific, a child carrying a live grenade racing toward them. Sometimes it was US airplanes who missed their targets and dropped munitions dangerously close to them. Some exploded. Some didn't.

He never spoke of any of this to us, not while it was going on, not while he was posted in "safer" locales, not while he ended his 25 year career in California with his family. But the memories surfaced when his Alzheimer's accelerated, making the last two years of his life hell. At first they were nightmares from which he would awaken screaming about being attacked or being bombed. Then the nightmares took over his waking life and he re-enacted them over and over until my mother couldn't restrain him. She finally had to place him in the same Alzheimer's care facility that she had placed my father in just a few years before.

I remember speaking to him by telephone and trying to reassure him that he would not be going to hell for killing that child with the hand grenade, that he would be forgiven, that he was forgiven. After that conversation I cried for hours, even as I am crying right now. That decent young man, who loved children, who had more baby sitting jobs than I ever had, suffered horribly.

And that's what war does to young men, and now young women as well. AP had an astounding article about the veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and what they're bringing home with them:

A staggering 45 percent of the 1.6 million veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now seeking compensation for injuries they say are service-related. That is more than double the estimate of 21 percent who filed such claims after the Gulf War in the early 1990s, top government officials told The Associated Press.

This includes amputations, internal injuries, head injuries, and, yes, PTSD. The VA is simply not equipped to deal with those numbers and those numbers will only increase as time goes on. How will we, as a society, deal with that consequence of war? Will we simply forget about them until the next veteran commits suicide or kills someone else? How will their families deal with them now, broken in body and spirit?

This is what war does.

At least my brother's suffering is over. That is cold comfort today.

Drift

I've got Rachel Maddow's new book "Drift" at the top of my list of books to buy. David Horsey has a very helpful review of the book, and it has whet my appetite.

Her book very much reflects the way she comports herself on TV. It is smart and deeply documented. It is entertaining and occasionally whimsical. (In any other book about national security issues, you would not find the word "whoopsie," nor would the word "ally" be rhymed with "schmally" in one phrase.) And, far from being a left-wing screed, it presents a sharply argued commentary that many conservatives could buy into.

Maddow's core thesis is that in the decades since the end of the war in Vietnam, there has been a steady and dramatic shift in the way the United States goes to war. There was a time when Congress stepped up to its constitutional responsibility to say when the country would send troops into battle. Once engaged, the entire country took part. Now, Maddow writes, the president can churn up a war anytime he wants, Congress rolls over, and only a tiny fraction of Americans do the fighting while the rest blithely carry on with their normal lives. ...

The best thing Maddow does is resist portraying the drift to unfettered war power as a conspiracy concocted by an evil cabal. These choices were made by intelligent men and women who seemed to truly believe they had the best interests of the country in mind. These very smart, patriotic people promoted really foolish policies because they were guided by poor information, blinded by ideology or driven by political expediency. With rare exceptions, they were not motivated by actual wickedness. (For pure wickedness, check out Maddow's chapters covering the misdeeds and greed of private contractors in the Balkans and Iraq.)

Rachel Maddow is wise enough to recognize that, even at the highest levels of government, human folly explains far more than any conspiracy theory. It's really all about "whoopsie" moments on a disturbingly grand scale. [Emphasis added]

Now, I have to admit that my tinfoil chapeau vibrated madly at this conclusion by Horsey (and presumably by Maddow). I think that especially during the Bush administration there was almost a total overlap with the administration and the private contractors (e.g., Cheney and Halliburton). The Pentagon's private contractors then, as now, seemed to have a direct line to the White House and to many in Congress. Still, the more innocent argument does have merit.

My other concern was expressed perfectly by Florence at Ruminations, an elder blog that I visit daily.

...This is a great, important, well researched, and well written book that I just could not read. That's not exactly accurate--I read the prologue, the first chapter, and the epilogue in detail. The problem was all the chapters in between. I just couldn't take the return in excruciating detail of Grenada, Iran-Contra, and Oliver North, from there we move on to Kuwait, Halliburton, and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, followed by Bosnia, leading inexorably to Afghanistan and Iraq. It was like nails on a chalkboard for 7 of 9 chapters. Don't get me wrong, Maddow nails it completely in the description of our not so slow drift toward the replacement of our Constitutionally designed plan that going to war should be a difficult thing to do to our current state of perpetual war which can be initiated unilaterally by the President. It's just that I lived through all of it and I just get mad all over reading about it. [Emphasis added]

Florence still thought the book was worth the price. I'm off to Vroman's later this week and I'll let you know what I think sometime soon.

[Note: Ordinarily I would give the link to Amazon for the book, but I intentionally didn't this time because I'm mad at Amazon for being a supporter of ALEC. I intend to bus it over to my independent book store in Pasadena for all purchases until Amazon retracts that support. I urge you to avoid Amazon for the same reason.]

Shocking, But Not Surprising

(Editorial cartoon by Jim Morin / Miami Herald (March 14, 2012)and featured at McClatchy DC. Click on image to enlarge.)

Over the past week, more information on the soldier charged with gunning down 16 Afghanistan civilians has emerged:

The soldier suspected of shooting 16 Afghan civilians has been identified as Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, a U.S. official confirmed Friday. ...

A 38-year-old father of two, he'd served in the Army for 11 years. He had been deployed to Iraq three times and was on his fourth deployment, this time to Afghanistan.

Bales grew up in the Midwest and joined the Army after the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, Browne said. He was injured during a previous tour in Iraq when the vehicle in which he was riding was hit by an improvised explosive device, the lawyer said. He suffered a concussive head injury and a wound that caused him to lose part of his foot. [Emphasis added]

Now, given these facts and the fact that like all soldiers he had been trained to kill, his actions, while deplorable, are not all that surprising. Clearly he had been over-deployed. He probably was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from his own injuries and from witnessing the injuries and deaths of his own troops. What is surprising is that more such incidents don't occur, or at least are not reported.

It is hard not to find some sympathy for Staff Sergeant Bales and for his family. What a horrible end to a lengthy career, and yet there are those who are outraged at the notion of cutting him any slack:

Talk like that infuriates Fred Wellman, a retired Army lieutenant colonel from Fredericksburg, Va., who did three tours in Iraq. He said comments like those of Bales' neighbors and his attorney simply feed into the notion of "the broken veteran."

Wellman does not deny that 10 years of war have severely strained the service. But while others might see Bales as a wounded soul, Wellman sees a man who sneaked off base to commit his alleged crimes, then had the presence of mind to "lawyer up" as soon as he was caught.

"That may play well with certain circles of the civilian community, which doesn't understand our lives," Wellman said. "But he's going to be tried by a military court ... and chances are three or four of those guys had things happen to them, may have had three or four tours, may have lost people, may have been blown up. And NONE of them snapped and killed 16 people." He added: "It's just too easy, and a lot of us, we're not buying it."

Oh, please. That's a pretty easy stance for a retired officer to take. The mere fact that the lieutenant colonel used the word "snapped" kind of undercuts his argument, yes?

Others, however, have managed to pinpoint what the real problem is, one that we will be facing for years, perhaps decades:

Benjamin Busch, a Marine veteran of two tours of Iraq, wrote last week on the website The Daily Beast that he and his comrades are afraid to admit that Bales "lost his mind in war," because that "allows for the possibility that any one of us could go insane at any time, and that every veteran poisoned by their combat experience could be on edge for life." ...

The killings sent Thomas L. Amerson, a retired Navy captain from Ledyard, Conn., back to the history books to explore other stains on America's military history, including the 1968 massacre of Vietnamese civilians at the village of My Lai. Too often, he argued, Americans absolve the leaders who start the wars and "invest the full responsibility in the combatants themselves and the families that support them."

"These actions in Iraq and Afghanistan have been more than a clash of combatants; they have been a clash of cultures, ideologies, and religions that has blurred the lines of right and wrong," Amerson wrote in an email to The Associated Press. [Emphasis added]

I don't know what justice will look like in Staff Sergeant Bales' case, but I hope it is tempered with mercy. I also hope that the case puts more pressure on the military to take the steps necessary to ensure that before deploying an already injured soldier for the fourth time he is thoroughly checked out, more thoroughly than Bales was.

Finally, I hope this country gets to the point where it can finally acknowledge that war is simply not healthy for human beings, that it is the sign of failure that impedes our growth as species. And I hope that realization comes sooner rather than later.

Inured To War?

[Click on image to enlarge and then come back.]

David Horsey's recent cartoon and post is quite depressing for many different reasons. I'm not sure I agree with all of Horsey's opinions on the possibility of war with Iran, but I do admit that is certainly a possibility.

War has become a matter of presidential choice. That’s why we should take seriously what the candidates for president have to say about attacking Iran. They can promise to cut the deficit or bring down gas prices or scuttle Obamacare, but, if they promise war, it’s the one promise we know they can keep. ...

Obama has pushed tough sanctions on Iran. His hard-edged diplomacy has gotten Europeans to line up with him to demand that Iran refrain from building nukes. The president, showing his grimmest face, insists he is not bluffing when he says that military action is a real and ready option if Iran does not comply with the demands of the international community (at least the international community that does not include Russia and China, which, for obvious self-interested reasons, do not approve of military intervention in countries where the governments are corrupt and authoritarian).

Obama’s rhetoric may be more nuanced than the campaign speeches of Santorum and Gingrich – that is why the Republicans attack him for "apologizing" to America’s adversaries -- but the president’s foreign policy is very much in line with the philosophy that has guided U.S. actions in the world since 1945: engagement everywhere on the globe where there is a perceived national interest, backed by military power that is second-to-none and quick to be employed.

It's pretty hard to quarrel with that, especially given the last decade or so. Congress effectively ceded the right to declare war to the White House after 9/11, but even before that presidents have pretty much gotten their way when it comes to initiating armed conflict. It became much easier after the draft was abolished because not everyone had to worry about doing the fighting or sending a loved one to do it. But Horsey carries the argument further:

The truth is, Americans are not a peace-loving people. We pretend otherwise because it seems wrong to admit that the United States is a nation that has mostly benefited from war. We were not like the contented Canadians, who patiently waited for the Mother Country to bestow self-government. We went to war and tossed the British out. Through one war with Mexico and relentless wars with Indian tribes, we became a country that spanned a continent. The Spanish-American War and the First World War marked our arrival on the world stage. And the Second World War left us as one of the two preeminent powers on the planet.

Wars in Korea and Vietnam were not popular, but, by the time of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, Americans had become used to fighting wars with ambiguous results. War is now simply what we do. It is part of our national identity; facing any foe, bearing any burden in the twilight struggle to defend freedom.

Put in less idealistic terms, our country is a national security state built on the vast military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about. Our government and our economy are permanently geared up for war, and very few Americans can remember a time when this was not so. It’s hard to imagine any president resisting the temptation to use this awesome force and even harder to imagine that a majority of Americans would ever elect a man who would. [Emphasis added]

Yes, we do now live in a "national security state built on the vast military-industrial complex," but I am not so certain that the American public has become inured to the constant state of war we've been in for all these years to the point where we will just shrug our shoulders as the next one begins before the last one ends. It has become too costly, both in terms of our national treasury and in terms of our national psyche. Too much has happened, especially the last four years. Too much has been lost and too many people are tired of being the pack animals for these kinds of whims.

At least I hope so.

We Have Always Been At War

There was an absolutely stunning article in yesterday's Washington Post. The main thrust of the article is that sine 9/11 we have entered into a period of perpetual war. War is now the norm, peace a mere anomaly. As a consequence, our country has changed and will continue to change to fit that new norm.

The two sets of buildings tell the story of America’s embrace of endless war in the 10 years since Sept. 11, 2001. In previous decades, the military and the American public viewed war as an aberration and peace as the norm.

Today, radical religious ideologies, new technologies and cheap, powerful weapons have catapulted the world into “a period of persistent conflict,” according to the Pentagon’s last major assessment of global security. “No one should harbor the illusion that the developed world can win this conflict in the near future,” the document concludes.

By this logic, America’s wars are unending and any talk of peace is quixotic or naive. The new view of war and peace has brought about far-reaching changes in agencies such as the CIA, which is increasingly shifting its focus from gathering intelligence to targeting and killing terrorists. Within the military the shift has reshaped Army bases, spurred the creation of new commands and changed what it means to be a warrior.

On the home front, the new thinking has altered long-held views about the effectiveness of military power and the likelihood that peace will ever prevail.

If the article is correct, and I think it may very well be on most levels, then certain key elements of our traditions may have been seriously undermined.

Up until this point, our military has been comprised mostly of "temporary" soldiers, those serving for only a brief two to four year stint. Now, however, with stop-gap measures considered allowable and normal, many more of our soldiers are permanent warriors, rotating in and out of combat zones for years on end. There is no break for a return to civilian status. This in effect isolates our military from the civilian and may be weakening the role of civilian leadership of the military.

Next, because of the nature of this new warfare, the enemy is not a recognizable nation, but a few rogues living or operating inside a country. This means that traditional means of averting war (diplomatic negotiations) are not possible. A specific country may be the site of the new battlefield, but that nation's leaders have no real status either at the beginning or at the end of hostilities.

Further, because of the increasingly sophisticated technology in weapons systems, war appears somehow less lethal. Our unmanned drones take out the enemy with no cost to those operating the drones. This has the effect of somehow suggesting that war is no longer dangerous, at least for our side. The fact that the technology is also improving for our enemies is somehow overlooked. IED's, now harder to spot and more devastating in impact, continue to kill and maim, yet we somehow fail to include that in our assessment. What we must include, however, is the cost of continuing the technological advances: defense budgets become more sacrosanct and less apt to be cut during times of economic stress. This further widens the gap between the civilian and the military.

We will constantly be on a war footing and that will affect every aspect of life. This is not a healthy scenario, but it is one that may be our future, at least in the short term.