Military May Propose an Active-Duty Force for Relief Efforts
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hester_prynne
Jesus Christ Knip, war involves everyone! Takes a hefty hefty toll on everyone around it, the energy of it is bleak and violent and full of one way resolve.
Those "directly involved" meaning the ones in power to make decisions about whether to war or not are the ones responsible.
Responsibility and involvement are two different things here in this war! The Iraq decision was totally outrageous! Based on lies and deceit to all of us now affected by it! Totally irresponsible involvement.
You said:
"I don't think anyone other than those directly involved, including the victims, can claim any special knowledge in this area".
Strikes me as extremely naive........
However, your loyalty to those "in the know" is something that those "directly involved" surely appreciate I'm sure......
I'm movin on from this conversation. It wouldn't be constructive for me to continue due to " my lack of understanding" so readily assumed by you Knip.
Peace Brother
H
Those "directly involved" meaning the ones in power to make decisions about whether to war or not are the ones responsible.
Responsibility and involvement are two different things here in this war! The Iraq decision was totally outrageous! Based on lies and deceit to all of us now affected by it! Totally irresponsible involvement.
You said:
"I don't think anyone other than those directly involved, including the victims, can claim any special knowledge in this area".
Strikes me as extremely naive........
However, your loyalty to those "in the know" is something that those "directly involved" surely appreciate I'm sure......
I'm movin on from this conversation. It wouldn't be constructive for me to continue due to " my lack of understanding" so readily assumed by you Knip.
Peace Brother
H
How Operation Whack Iraq affects us all. We are generating an army of future terrorists by our endless, uninvited occupation, such that this (supposed) extension of the "war on terror" has made us less safe; probably much less safe. We are spending mountains of money that we don't have, which is putting our economy at serious risk and diverting funds from other more productive purposes. We are making it more difficult to find quality recruits for the Army. We are killing and maiming Americans and Iraqis alike, with no real signs of progress and no end in sight to the bloodshed. We have screwed up relations with our allies.
It affects us all, one way or another.
It affects us all, one way or another.
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hester_prynne
Well I appreciate the Knipster being here, I also agree with Hester. I hear that refrain all too often, "You can't understand unless you've been there." Obviously it is true to a certain extend, yet there are many who have been to war and continue to deny that they were missused etc, and there are many who continue to celebrate "heroism" etc without really being aware of what it is all about. One refrain that really gets me is "They are fighting for our freedumb, " and "We got to fight them over there to keep from fighting them over here."
What is most important is to access the credibility of anti-war veterans and unite with the opposition. Yes I learned from being inn Vietnam, but that does not stop the Knipster or anyone else from disagreeing with me, so really it is a matter ofperception and awareness.
Thankyou for continuing to make my day Hester.
At least after 35 years, (yes I was there 35 years ago, flying cargo in the monsoon season, getting stoned, Vietnam) I am continuing my own personal evolution in spirit.
What is most important is to access the credibility of anti-war veterans and unite with the opposition. Yes I learned from being inn Vietnam, but that does not stop the Knipster or anyone else from disagreeing with me, so really it is a matter ofperception and awareness.
Thankyou for continuing to make my day Hester.
No wonder the Rat likes the desert.it affects us all, one way or another.
At least after 35 years, (yes I was there 35 years ago, flying cargo in the monsoon season, getting stoned, Vietnam) I am continuing my own personal evolution in spirit.
[color=darkcyan]i'm on a survival mission
yo ho ho an a bottle of rum om[/color]
yo ho ho an a bottle of rum om[/color]
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hester_prynne
Quote:
a generation of people who don't seem to realize the gravity of war today
i don't think anyone other than those directly involved, including the victims, can claim any special knowledge in this area
that is what i responded to...i wasn't inferring folks didn't have rights to opinions etc..., but that the 'first-hand' folks involved had a special perspective to offer
this whole thing seems to move towards the fringes, no matter what the argument...although jimbo calls it 'wishy-washy', i'm quite comfortable in the centre, and i think i'll stay right here...i've found truth normally resides between the extremes (self-evident, i would think)
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hester_prynne
I suppose they do have a "special perspective" Knip. I suspect that that "special perspective" is a self-brainwashing of sorts, into thinking that "they know better" which of course is a very destructive attitude to have. I mean, attitudes like that cause wars.
A broader, more centered "special perspective" would seem to be a more obviously common sense goal, rather than the usual small and often blindsighted "circles in the know". These limited (and rather elitely naive) circles often blindly miss out on what's going on outside their circles, and this can cause them to grossly misjudge many vital and sensitive issues.
In other words Knip, I believe we are all "first hand" folks. Those that don't acknowledge this, in my opinion, are hangin us all up, bigtime.
Your fringe-dwelling friend,
H
A broader, more centered "special perspective" would seem to be a more obviously common sense goal, rather than the usual small and often blindsighted "circles in the know". These limited (and rather elitely naive) circles often blindly miss out on what's going on outside their circles, and this can cause them to grossly misjudge many vital and sensitive issues.
In other words Knip, I believe we are all "first hand" folks. Those that don't acknowledge this, in my opinion, are hangin us all up, bigtime.
Your fringe-dwelling friend,
H
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Zlatko Waterman
- Posts: 1631
- Joined: August 19th, 2004, 8:30 am
- Location: Los Angeles, CA USA
- Contact:
(But let's not forget the polluting effect of two isms: militarism and nationalism, as Jim Lobe points out in his book review of two recent works by anything but left-wing radicals . . .
Ideology usually precedes war, particularly wars that don't result from a self-defensive reaction to an overtly aggressive act.
In many cases, the Gulf of Tonkin incident
http://www.answers.com/topic/gulf-of-tonkin-incident
or Weapons of Mass Destruction must be flourished before the guns and bombs really come out.)
( paste)
BOOK REVIEW
The specter of two 'isms'
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - With US citizens marking their annual celebration of patriotism on July 4, they might do well to also ponder the specter of two other "isms" - nationalism and militarism - that threaten the country's durability and strength.
Both have been addressed by two important books published over the past year. America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, by Financial Times columnist Anatol Lieven, warns that the US polity is turning its back on the civic patriotism of the "American creed" of liberty, the rule of law and political egalitarianism in favor of an "American antithesis", a radical and vengeful nationalism that recalls the worst tendencies and mistakes of Germany just before World War I.
The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, by retired army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, contends that the country's recent love affair with force and exaltation of the soldier threaten both the military institution, as policymakers expect it to solve ever more problems, but also the republican ideals on which the US was founded.
"Of all the enemies of public liberty," Bacevich quotes former president James Madison as writing in 1795, "war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other ... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
Published by Oxford University Press, both books offer some of the most trenchant and original criticism of the trajectory of US foreign and military policy that has surfaced since the US invasion of Iraq in March, 2003.
Although their analyses of that trajectory - and the larger social and cultural trends that underpin it - would not be unfamiliar to left-wing analysts, the two authors could not possibly be confused with the "blame-America-first" crowd that has been scapegoated so frequently by the US right since the Vietnam War.
Indeed, Bacevich, a West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran and career soldier, used to write for the neo-conservative Weekly Standard and the far-right National Review, while Lieven, a British subject who has more recently sought to revive the "ethical realism" of the post-World War II era, betrays a deep affection for the US, gained in part from a year as a high school exchange student in Alabama. Both write from a deep sense of concern about where the US is headed.
To Lieven, now based at the New American Foundation after several years at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, two kinds of nationalism have long wrestled over the country's soul - a civic nationalism, or "American thesis", based on universalist principles of the enlightenment and that animated the Declaration of Independence 229 years ago, and the far more aggressive and exclusivist nationalism, or "American antithesis", that harkens back to the Protestant Reformation, and the religious wars that it sparked.
While the thesis is optimistic by nature and extols reason and the rule of law, the antithesis in many ways is anti-modern, radical, deeply alienated "from the supposed ruling elites and dominant culture", and even paranoid. Through most of US history, it has also been deeply racist, not just toward blacks, but toward most minority groups, including Catholics and Jews.
What the two nationalisms share, however, is a sense that the US "is exceptional in its allegiance to democracy and freedom and is therefore exceptionally good", in Lieven's view. And because America is exceptionally good, it both deserves to be exceptionally powerful and by nature cannot use its power for evil ends.
This belief in the fundamental goodness of America - which actually runs from the first Pilgrims straight through Woodrow Wilson to George W Bush - naturally reinforces everything that many Europeans and much of the rest of the world find objectionable about US foreign policy.
This is namely its moral absolutism, messianism and a contempt for history that can have grave consequences, particularly when it is held by the world's sole superpower after a period in which it triumphed over "evil" - first the Nazis and then the communists during the Cold War.
Many, if not most US citizens, combine the two kinds of nationalism in varying degrees and proportions in themselves, although, with the "southernization of the Republican Party since the 1960s, the party has tended increasingly to embrace and become identified with the antithesis", even while it extols the myths of the American thesis, according to Lieven.
This process has been boosted over the past 30 years by two groups in particular: the Christian Right and its Christian Zionist leaders, such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson; and the neo-conservatives, who have played a key role both by cloaking the angry and exclusivist outlook of the far right in the universalist rhetoric of the "American creed" of democracy and freedom (thus attracting support from internationalist liberals who should know better) and by mounting a sustained attack on mainstream Republican realism as immoral.
In the most controversial but ultimately persuasive section of the book, Lieven argues that the same two groups have done much to tie US policy to Israel's rightwing governments, in much the same way that Slavic nationalists tied imperial Russia to Serbian radicals on the eve of World War I.
"Insofar as American nationalism has become mixed up with a chauvinist version of Israeli nationalism," according to Lieven, "it ... plays an absolutely disastrous role in US relations with the Muslim world and in fueling terrorism."
Lieven stresses that there have been periods in US history - most recently during the McCarthy era - when the US antithesis has gained the upper hand in the body politic, but each time the pendulum has swung back, saving "the nation from falling into authoritarian rule or a permanent state of militant chauvinism".
Now, however, he is less optimistic, warning that another devastating terrorist attack could provoke a permanent state of siege and that the continuing stresses on the middle class in coping with globalization and economic change could swell the ranks of the antithesis who are angry, aggrieved and aggressive.
Bacevich, director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University, is similarly concerned about the fate of the republic and likewise sees the Christian Right, whose own much-requited love affair with the military after the Vietnam War is detailed in the book, and the neo-conservatives as bearing heavy responsibility for "creeping militarism". Both are subjects of entire chapters.
But he stresses that blaming a particular sector or group, or even Bush himself, misses the bipartisan and cultural nature of the phenomenon. Hollywood, a generation of "defense intellectuals", particularly neo-con prince Richard Perle's mentor, Albert Wohlstetter, and the Democratic administrations of Jimmy Carter ("the Carter Doctrine" to protect the Persian Gulf) and Bill Clinton, have all made important contributions, according to Bacevich.
He writes with real anger about the role played by former secretary of state Colin Powell first in promulgating the doctrine that bears his name - a doctrine that encapsulated all the bitter lessons of the Vietnam War - and then in acquiescing in its wholesale abandonment over a period of 15 years.
The key moment, according to Bacevich, came in the early 1990s when the collapse of the Soviet Union - Washington's only peer rival - should have brought about a major reassessment and reduction of Washington's global military posture.
The first Gulf War - and the interests of the military-industrial complex and its ideological fellow-travelers - put paid to any such possibility, and, in the wake of Desert Storm, it suddenly seemed that the armed forces, fully recovered from Vietnam, could do just about anything it wished, and, given technological advances, in ways that appeared on television to be more or less bloodless, at least for the home team.
The distance between "coercive diplomacy", as in Kosovo, and preventive warfare, as in Iraq, is not as great as some Democrats would like to think.
"At the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power," Bacevich writes. "The skepticism about arms and armies that informed the original Wilsonian vision, indeed, that pervaded the American experiment from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, became enamoured with military power."
The result: "To a degree without precedent in US history, Americans have come to define the nation's strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals," according to Bacevich, who writes as a very knowledgeable, if very worried, insider on the military's own thinking from the disaster of Vietnam to the anticipated disaster of the open-ended "global war on terror".
As a reading of the two books makes clear, the nationalism and militarism addressed, respectively, by Lieven and Bacevich are in reality closely related, but the books' distinct perspectives and insights make them a particularly compelling combination.
America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism by Anatol Lieven. Oxford University Press, September 30, 2004. ISBN: 0195168402. Price $30.00, 288 pages.
The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War by Andrew Bacevich. Oxford University Press. February, 2005. ISBN: 0195173384. Price $28, 270 pages.
(Inter Press Service)
Ideology usually precedes war, particularly wars that don't result from a self-defensive reaction to an overtly aggressive act.
In many cases, the Gulf of Tonkin incident
http://www.answers.com/topic/gulf-of-tonkin-incident
or Weapons of Mass Destruction must be flourished before the guns and bombs really come out.)
( paste)
BOOK REVIEW
The specter of two 'isms'
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - With US citizens marking their annual celebration of patriotism on July 4, they might do well to also ponder the specter of two other "isms" - nationalism and militarism - that threaten the country's durability and strength.
Both have been addressed by two important books published over the past year. America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, by Financial Times columnist Anatol Lieven, warns that the US polity is turning its back on the civic patriotism of the "American creed" of liberty, the rule of law and political egalitarianism in favor of an "American antithesis", a radical and vengeful nationalism that recalls the worst tendencies and mistakes of Germany just before World War I.
The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, by retired army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, contends that the country's recent love affair with force and exaltation of the soldier threaten both the military institution, as policymakers expect it to solve ever more problems, but also the republican ideals on which the US was founded.
"Of all the enemies of public liberty," Bacevich quotes former president James Madison as writing in 1795, "war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other ... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
Published by Oxford University Press, both books offer some of the most trenchant and original criticism of the trajectory of US foreign and military policy that has surfaced since the US invasion of Iraq in March, 2003.
Although their analyses of that trajectory - and the larger social and cultural trends that underpin it - would not be unfamiliar to left-wing analysts, the two authors could not possibly be confused with the "blame-America-first" crowd that has been scapegoated so frequently by the US right since the Vietnam War.
Indeed, Bacevich, a West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran and career soldier, used to write for the neo-conservative Weekly Standard and the far-right National Review, while Lieven, a British subject who has more recently sought to revive the "ethical realism" of the post-World War II era, betrays a deep affection for the US, gained in part from a year as a high school exchange student in Alabama. Both write from a deep sense of concern about where the US is headed.
To Lieven, now based at the New American Foundation after several years at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, two kinds of nationalism have long wrestled over the country's soul - a civic nationalism, or "American thesis", based on universalist principles of the enlightenment and that animated the Declaration of Independence 229 years ago, and the far more aggressive and exclusivist nationalism, or "American antithesis", that harkens back to the Protestant Reformation, and the religious wars that it sparked.
While the thesis is optimistic by nature and extols reason and the rule of law, the antithesis in many ways is anti-modern, radical, deeply alienated "from the supposed ruling elites and dominant culture", and even paranoid. Through most of US history, it has also been deeply racist, not just toward blacks, but toward most minority groups, including Catholics and Jews.
What the two nationalisms share, however, is a sense that the US "is exceptional in its allegiance to democracy and freedom and is therefore exceptionally good", in Lieven's view. And because America is exceptionally good, it both deserves to be exceptionally powerful and by nature cannot use its power for evil ends.
This belief in the fundamental goodness of America - which actually runs from the first Pilgrims straight through Woodrow Wilson to George W Bush - naturally reinforces everything that many Europeans and much of the rest of the world find objectionable about US foreign policy.
This is namely its moral absolutism, messianism and a contempt for history that can have grave consequences, particularly when it is held by the world's sole superpower after a period in which it triumphed over "evil" - first the Nazis and then the communists during the Cold War.
Many, if not most US citizens, combine the two kinds of nationalism in varying degrees and proportions in themselves, although, with the "southernization of the Republican Party since the 1960s, the party has tended increasingly to embrace and become identified with the antithesis", even while it extols the myths of the American thesis, according to Lieven.
This process has been boosted over the past 30 years by two groups in particular: the Christian Right and its Christian Zionist leaders, such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson; and the neo-conservatives, who have played a key role both by cloaking the angry and exclusivist outlook of the far right in the universalist rhetoric of the "American creed" of democracy and freedom (thus attracting support from internationalist liberals who should know better) and by mounting a sustained attack on mainstream Republican realism as immoral.
In the most controversial but ultimately persuasive section of the book, Lieven argues that the same two groups have done much to tie US policy to Israel's rightwing governments, in much the same way that Slavic nationalists tied imperial Russia to Serbian radicals on the eve of World War I.
"Insofar as American nationalism has become mixed up with a chauvinist version of Israeli nationalism," according to Lieven, "it ... plays an absolutely disastrous role in US relations with the Muslim world and in fueling terrorism."
Lieven stresses that there have been periods in US history - most recently during the McCarthy era - when the US antithesis has gained the upper hand in the body politic, but each time the pendulum has swung back, saving "the nation from falling into authoritarian rule or a permanent state of militant chauvinism".
Now, however, he is less optimistic, warning that another devastating terrorist attack could provoke a permanent state of siege and that the continuing stresses on the middle class in coping with globalization and economic change could swell the ranks of the antithesis who are angry, aggrieved and aggressive.
Bacevich, director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University, is similarly concerned about the fate of the republic and likewise sees the Christian Right, whose own much-requited love affair with the military after the Vietnam War is detailed in the book, and the neo-conservatives as bearing heavy responsibility for "creeping militarism". Both are subjects of entire chapters.
But he stresses that blaming a particular sector or group, or even Bush himself, misses the bipartisan and cultural nature of the phenomenon. Hollywood, a generation of "defense intellectuals", particularly neo-con prince Richard Perle's mentor, Albert Wohlstetter, and the Democratic administrations of Jimmy Carter ("the Carter Doctrine" to protect the Persian Gulf) and Bill Clinton, have all made important contributions, according to Bacevich.
He writes with real anger about the role played by former secretary of state Colin Powell first in promulgating the doctrine that bears his name - a doctrine that encapsulated all the bitter lessons of the Vietnam War - and then in acquiescing in its wholesale abandonment over a period of 15 years.
The key moment, according to Bacevich, came in the early 1990s when the collapse of the Soviet Union - Washington's only peer rival - should have brought about a major reassessment and reduction of Washington's global military posture.
The first Gulf War - and the interests of the military-industrial complex and its ideological fellow-travelers - put paid to any such possibility, and, in the wake of Desert Storm, it suddenly seemed that the armed forces, fully recovered from Vietnam, could do just about anything it wished, and, given technological advances, in ways that appeared on television to be more or less bloodless, at least for the home team.
The distance between "coercive diplomacy", as in Kosovo, and preventive warfare, as in Iraq, is not as great as some Democrats would like to think.
"At the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power," Bacevich writes. "The skepticism about arms and armies that informed the original Wilsonian vision, indeed, that pervaded the American experiment from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, became enamoured with military power."
The result: "To a degree without precedent in US history, Americans have come to define the nation's strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals," according to Bacevich, who writes as a very knowledgeable, if very worried, insider on the military's own thinking from the disaster of Vietnam to the anticipated disaster of the open-ended "global war on terror".
As a reading of the two books makes clear, the nationalism and militarism addressed, respectively, by Lieven and Bacevich are in reality closely related, but the books' distinct perspectives and insights make them a particularly compelling combination.
America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism by Anatol Lieven. Oxford University Press, September 30, 2004. ISBN: 0195168402. Price $30.00, 288 pages.
The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War by Andrew Bacevich. Oxford University Press. February, 2005. ISBN: 0195173384. Price $28, 270 pages.
(Inter Press Service)
how is it possible everyone directly involved could have a 'voice', to begin with? come again?
most victims of this (or any) war, don't have a "voice". it is bushco's spin juggernaut which has the "voice" (more like a recorded loop, at this point), and those who perpetuate it are too obsessively close to and/or self-interested in the 'mission' to have any damn perspective.
most victims of this (or any) war, don't have a "voice". it is bushco's spin juggernaut which has the "voice" (more like a recorded loop, at this point), and those who perpetuate it are too obsessively close to and/or self-interested in the 'mission' to have any damn perspective.
What Hester said about self-brainwashing, like wow, what commonsense insight, nothing fringe about it. Infact the great brainwashing is the onus we all bear and are sworn to throw off.
What you say about being in the center is merely a safe political lable. But it has nothing to do with being centrist. You define your area of the spectrum and then saty that some of us, implied, are closer to the fringe.
Oh baby, got to love them fringes and those white framed dark glasses, man, with the deep green lanses, so I can instantly be transported to the Emerald City, here I come.
starring Knip as the lion,
ans Mnaz as the tin man,
and Jimbo as the scarecrow,
and Hester as Dorothy.....
The brainwashing goes deep. Consider the various little assumptions or conclusions which are really little tapes that represent the old paradigm. Like, "thank a veteran for your freedom," or, "If you haven't been there, then you don't really know." Man what a drag.
Freedom comes from each of us all the time. Most "veterans" are merely brainwashed but well meaning citizens who unquestioning went to war in the big machine following various images implanted by the marketing and socialization process that conveys people into the wars of imperial reach, without them really understanding that they are really hired guns for economic lords and barons of the global elite. War is a racket.
What you say about being in the center is merely a safe political lable. But it has nothing to do with being centrist. You define your area of the spectrum and then saty that some of us, implied, are closer to the fringe.
Oh baby, got to love them fringes and those white framed dark glasses, man, with the deep green lanses, so I can instantly be transported to the Emerald City, here I come.
starring Knip as the lion,
ans Mnaz as the tin man,
and Jimbo as the scarecrow,
and Hester as Dorothy.....
Many, if not most US citizens, combine the two kinds of nationalism in varying degrees and proportions in themselves, although, with the "southernization of the Republican Party since the 1960s, the party has tended increasingly to embrace and become identified with the antithesis", even while it extols the myths of the American thesis,
The brainwashing goes deep. Consider the various little assumptions or conclusions which are really little tapes that represent the old paradigm. Like, "thank a veteran for your freedom," or, "If you haven't been there, then you don't really know." Man what a drag.
Freedom comes from each of us all the time. Most "veterans" are merely brainwashed but well meaning citizens who unquestioning went to war in the big machine following various images implanted by the marketing and socialization process that conveys people into the wars of imperial reach, without them really understanding that they are really hired guns for economic lords and barons of the global elite. War is a racket.
[color=darkcyan]i'm on a survival mission
yo ho ho an a bottle of rum om[/color]
yo ho ho an a bottle of rum om[/color]
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