The Poet's Eye
     commentary by Lightning Rod

The Poet's Eye is skeptical without being cynical,
innocent without being naive and critical without
being judgemental.

Deja Vu All Over Again
for release 02-14-05
Washington D.C.

One of my earliest memories, I must have been two or three years old, was seeing this picture, on our fuzzy black and white television screen, of soldiers fighting in Korea. It was footage of GI's loading and firing a howitzer. They were in the snow and every time they would put a new shell in the cannon and then turn away and hold their ears, the gun would fire and the concussion would cause the snow to rise off the ground while the announcers voice was talking about the Cold War. I thought it was called the Cold War because they were fighting in the snow.

I had no sense of history when I was three and I hadn't been keeping up with the news. The Bush administration likewise has no sense of history. The last time we tried to intervene in Korea it cost over 50,000 American lives and over a million Koreans. And after all those lives spent, we were back exactly where we started, The 38th Parallel.

When MacArthur suggested that we drop a nuke on them, instead of the pursuing the costly ground war that we were fighting, Truman canned him. The buck stopped there.

Today, we are still sitting on The 38th Parallel, but we aren't the only ones with nukes anymore. The Koreans probably have several warheads by now and also the means to deliver them to Anchorage or Seattle.

Now the Bush administration has taken the first step to another Korean war. They have refused direct negotiations with Korea about WMD's. The first step to war is a breach of communications.

The administration is hiding behind the smokescreen of 'six nation talks.' The only two nations that matter in these talks are Bushco and North Korea. Russia and China both supported North Korea in the last Korean war. The Japanese occupation was the underlying reason for the conflict in the first place. The South Koreans were our allies. None of these countries signed the peace agreement, only the US and North Korea. Why should North Korea submit to this six country gang-bang when the only pertinent power is the US?

When we entered Korea in Sept of 1950 with MacArthur's bold invasion at Inchon , the CIA, in it's typical fashion, told President Truman that the Koreans had 3,600 troops. MacArthur claimed rightly that there were more like 136,000 North Korean troops. As a result we didn't have 'catastrophic success.' We had one of the bloodiest wars in American history, and we're still paying for it a half-century later. Just a little intelligence failure, like the one that got us into Iraq.

Already our armed forces are stretched thin trying to manage Iraq, which has 22 million people, and where they claim that the insurgents only number 20,000. North Korea has another 22 million and if we take on Iran, that's another 67 million that we will have to subdue. Are you ready for your sons and daughters to have a career in the military?

For as much as Bushco wants to maintain that the military option is still on the table in Iran and North Korea, it is not. If Bush re-instated the draft, which would be necessary to conduct these wars, it would galvanize the American public like nothing that even Karl Rove could imagine.

And as long as we're saving the world from tyranny and threat, why don't we just jump on the Chinese and the Indians and the Pakistanis and the Israelis and the Russians? We know that they all have nukes. Hell, we could all be soldiers before you know it. That could be the American National Occupation. Forget manufacturing and farming and medicine and science. Let's all be soldiers and rule the world. We can export the rest of the jobs or get 'guest workers' to do them.

The Poet's Eye sees that if this government continues with its ambitions, you will need to plant an oak tree, stock up on yellow ribbon and learn this song:

 

When Johnny comes marching home again,
Hurrah! Hurrah!
We'll give him a hearty welcome then
Hurrah! Hurrah!
The men will cheer and the boys will shout
The ladies they will all turn out
And we'll all feel gay,
When Johnny comes marching home.
---Union Army bandmaster, Patrick S. Gilmore

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