Gravel's Lament: Fighting Another Dumb War
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/14
by Chris Hedges
December 14, 2009 by TruthDig.com
I have spent enough time inside the American military to have tasted
its dark brutality, frequent incompetence and profligate ability to
waste human lives and taxpayer dollars. The deviousness and stupidity
of generals, the absurdity of most war plans and the pathological
addiction to violence趴hich is the only language most who command our
armed forces are able to understand衫ake the American military the
gravest threat to our anemic democracy, especially as we head toward
economic collapse.
Barack Obama, who is as mesmerized by the red, white and blue bunting
draped around our vast killing machine as the press, the two main
political parties and our entertainment industry, will not halt our
doomed imperial projects or renege on the $1 trillion in
defense-related spending that is hollowing out the country from the
inside. A plague of unchecked militarism has seeped outward from the
Pentagon since the end of World War II and is now sucking our marrow
dry. It is a familiar disease in imperial empires. We are in the
terminal stage. We spend more on our military虐alf of all
discretionary spending負han all of the other countries on Earth
combined, although we face no explicit threat.
Mike Gravel, the former two-term senator from Alaska and 2008
presidential candidate, sat Saturday on a park bench in Lafayette
Park facing the White House. Gravel and I were in the park, along
with Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney and other
anti-war activists, to denounce the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at a
sparsely attended rally. [Click here for video clips of speeches by
Kucinich, Hedges and Nader.] Few voices in American politics have
been as consistent, as reasoned and as moral as his, which is why
Gravel, on a chilly December morning, is in front of the White House,
not inside it.
"I suspect that from the get-go he had an inferiority complex with
respect to the military," Gravel, who was a first lieutenant in the
Army, said of the president. "It is the same problem [Bill] Clinton
had by not serving in the military, by not having an actual
experience. You don't have to go into combat, you just have to get
into the military and recognize at the lower reaches how incompetent
the military can be. So not having that experience, and only dealing
with generals, who of course learn to be charming虹t's the sergeants
who inflict the pain虐e has this aura about the military. We have
acculturated the nation to a military culture. This is the sadness of
it all because that sustains the military-industrial complex."
"Obama comes on the scene," he added. "He is endorsed in the course
of the campaign by some 19 generals and admirals. These people had no
confidence in [George W.] Bush. They recognized that Bush's
unilateralism and cavalier approach to torture was injurious to the
American military. They gravitated towards Obama. It turned his head.
He thought he could be commander in chief and he could, he has the
intelligence, but he does not have fortitude. He lacks courage."
Time is rapidly running out. The massive bailouts, stimulus packages,
giveaways and short-term debt, along with imperial wars we can no
longer afford, will leave the country struggling to finance nearly $5
trillion in debt by 2010. This will require the United States to
auction off about $96 billion in debt a week. Once China and the
oil-rich states walk away from our debt, which is inevitable, the
Federal Reserve will become the buyer of last resort. The Fed has
printed perhaps as much as 2 trillion new dollars in the last two
years, and buying this much new debt will see it print trillions
more. This is when inflation, and most likely hyperinflation, will
turn the dollar into junk. A backlash by a betrayed and angry
populace, one unprepared intellectually and psychologically for
collapse, will tear apart the social fabric, unleash chaos and
violence, and strengthen the calls for more draconian measures by our
security apparatus and military.
Obama uses the veneer of intellectualism to promote the dirty
politics of Bush. The president spoke in Oslo, when he accepted the
Nobel Prize, of "just war" theory, although the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan do not meet the criteria laid down by Thomas Aquinas or
traditional Catholic just-war doctrine. He spoke of battling evil,
dividing human reality into binary poles of black and white as Bush
did, without examining the evil of pre-emptive war, sustained
military occupation and imperialism. He compared al-Qaida to Hitler,
ignoring the difference between a protean group of terrorists and a
nation-state with the capacity to overwhelm its neighbors with
conventional military force. "The instruments of war do have a role
to play in preserving the peace," Obama insisted in Oslo. The U.S.,
he said, has the right to "act unilaterally if necessary" and to
launch wars whose purpose "extends beyond self-defense or the defense
of one nation against an aggressor." Obama's policies, despite the
high-blown rhetoric, are as morally bankrupt as those of his predecessor.
"The first time I met him I felt there was arrogance with a touch of
cynicism," Gravel said of the president. "Now the cynicism and the
arrogance have overwhelmed his intelligence. Like Clinton, he is into power."
Gravel's shining moment as a politician occurred in 1971 when Daniel
Ellsberg, a military analyst, handed the secret Pentagon Papers to
The New York Times. The newspaper published portions of the document,
which painted a picture of a failing war at odds with official
pronouncements. The Justice Department swiftly blocked further
publication and moved to punish newspaper publishers who revealed its
contents. Gravel responded by reading large portions of the Pentagon
Papers into the Congressional Record. His courageous public release
of the papers made it possible for the publication to resume. Gravel
also launched in 1971 a one-man five-month filibuster to end the
peacetime military draft, forcing the Nixon administration to cut a
deal that allowed the draft to expire in 1973. He was a feisty and
blunt candidate in 2008 who lambasted the Democratic Party and its
major candidates for being in the service of corporations, especially
the arms industry. His outspokenness saw him banned by the Democratic
leadership from later primary debates.
"Obama has wasted an opportunity to be a great president," Gravel
lamented. "More than 50 percent of the American people do not buy
into this war. He could have stood up and said 'we are getting out.'
Forget the Congress. Forget the Republicans. Forget the hawks. Forget
mainstream media, including The New York Times and The Washington
Post, which are hawks. He would have weathered that storm because he
would have had the American people on his side. And what did he do?
He caved in to the leadership of [David] Petraeus and [Stanley A.]
McChrystal and adopted a scenario that is a total loser."
"When he hugs his children at night, when he puts them to bed, he has
got to begin to think there are little girls like this in Afghanistan
who are being killed and maimed," Gravel told me. "If he can't have
that kind of a thought then his arrogance knows no boundaries. I saw
this in the Senate during the Vietnam War. People detach themselves
from the immediacy of the crime. They vote for the money. They vote
for the policy. The picture of people dying is distant. My God, if
you are sitting next to me and a bomb explodes and your arm is ripped
off that is not distant. It is immediate. I saw the film by Robert
Greenwald, "Rethink Afghanistan." It rips your heart out. And America
under the leadership of Obama is a party to this crime. Close your
eyes. Listen to the media. Listen to the pundits. Listen to the
rhetoric. It is Vietnam all over again. What is the difference
between our vital interests and the domino theory? We could leave
Afghanistan and it would be as significant as when we left Vietnam."
"Don't be hoodwinked by Obama going to Dover [Air Force Base] to
watch the caskets or going to Arlington to salute the graves, with
his snappy salute," Gravel says. "Adolf Hitler lionized soldiers
dying. This is the old idea that it is honorable to die. It is not
honorable to die in vain. People died in vain in Vietnam. They are
dying in vain in Iraq and Afghanistan. And more people will die in
vain because of the leadership of Barack Obama."
"They don't hate us because we are free," Gravel said of the
insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. "They hate us because we are
killing them."
.
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