Tag Archives: Iraq

2001-2008 9/11 and Bush’s Wars

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A tragic tale of two millionaire wannabes: the Saudi terrorist, the cowboy president, and what they wrought. Continue reading →

I wrote this entry on September 11, 2001, the twentieth anniversary of the famous terrorist incident. 9/11/01 was a Tuesday. We had a full house at TSI’s office in East Windsor—Sandy Sant’Angelo, Nadine Holmes, Harry Burt, Brian Rolllet, Denise Bessette, and myself. Sandy either was either listening to a radio, or she was surfing the Internet. She told the rest of us. I cannot remember whether everyone stopped working or not.

I was not even a little surprised that something like this had happened. I had followed developments in the Middle East since I debated and gave extemporaneous speeches about foreign policy when I was in high school. Also, there had already been some close calls. In 1993 a member of a group called Al-Qaeda, Ramzi Yusef, had set off a very destructive bomb in a basement parking lot of the World Trade Center.

A country can’t just take another country’s land and colonize it little by little.

For a long time Arabs who were not lucky enough to control oil deposits had been treated very shabbily by the West. The big issue, of course, was the fact that after World War II the Palestinians had been summarily evicted from the land in which they had resided for decades and replaced by Jewish refugees from the Pale and from western countries. At the same time Israel had been assisted by the United States in developing a very strong army with an impressive arsenal that included nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

Little by little the Israeli government had limited the rights of non-Jews and, after the Six-Day War in 1967, had authorized hundreds of thousands of settlers to seize property on the West Bank previously owned by the Palestinians. Another factor was the fact that one of Islam’s holiest places had also been seized during the war and access to it was subsequently controlled by the Israelis. On several occasions a peace negotiations between the two sides had been attempted, but nothing much ever happened.

For more than fifty years any attempt to address these issues in the United Nations was thwarted by the U.S. So, it was no surprise to me that a very large number of people in the Middle East felt great animosity toward America.

BDL was my starting and ending point.

In 2001 and the previous few years I had been traveling all over the country1, almost always by airplane (anecdotes recounted here). I was lucky that most major airlines scheduled flights at the local airport, Bradley International, but almost all my itineraries required a layover at a hub. So, I was quite familiar with the security arrangements at airports around the country. At most airports security was run by the airlines themselves or by contractors that they hired. The marketplace for air travel was intensely competitive. The primary objective for the airlines was to make the experience enjoyable.They emphasized how pleasant flying on their planes was. Security was seldom mentioned.

The gates at KCI were walled in, but the walls were only about ten feet high. I envisioned a graceful sky hook.

In the hours that I spent sitting in airports I sometimes tried to imagine ways for getting weapons onto airplanes. The type of security varied greatly from airport to airport, but I thought that a determined person could easily have figured out a way to get a gun on an airplane. In some airports, such as Kansas City’s, it would have been laughably easy.

So, when I heard on 9/11 that a group of people had skyjacked some planes, I assumed that that they had smuggled guns aboard. In fact, however, they did not need guns. Their only weapons were box-cutters, mace, and imaginary bombs. They were able to commandeer the planes because in those days the door to the cockpit was generally open. Flight attendants went in and out all the time. It was also not rare for the captain to meander into the passenger area and chat with people. Kids were sometimes invited to visit the cockpit. The airlines encouraged this rapport between the crew and the customers.

Four box cutters!

On 9/11 nineteen men divided into four teams. Two teams went to Logan International Airport in Boston, and one each to Newark International and Dulles in Virginia. Each group intended to board a flight,and when it had reached cruising altitude, and take control of the passenger area and then the cockpit. The one member of each group who had some training as a pilot would then fly his plane to a designated targets and crash int it. The four events were designed to occur simultaneously or nearly so.

Fifteen of the men were Saudis, one was Egyptian, two were from the United Arab Emirates, and one was Lebanese. Four had some training as pilots. The others were simply there as “muscle” to keep the passengers and crew under control. The oldest was the Egyptian, Mohamed Atta, who was thirty-three. All the rest were in their twenties.

Two morning flights each were selected on American Airlines and United Airlines. Three of the attempts were successful. At that time the standard procedure in dealing with a hijacker was to accede to the demands. In this case the demands were simply for the crew to get out of the way and for the passengers to remain in their assigned seats.

The passengers on United Flight #93 revolted. What happened after that is unclear, but the plane crashed in Pennsylvania.

The event was merely a murderous stunt, not an attempted coup. Al-Qaeda claimed credit for the attack, and intelligence briefings had actually predicted something like what had occurred. Most of the 2,997 casualties were associated with the attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

My representative, Nancy Johnson, immediately declared that “9/11 changed everything.” Most people probably agreed with her, but to me the only thing that 9/11 changed was to remove the blinders concerning airport security. The other potential lesson, that U.S. foreign policy was bitterly hated by a large swath of the world’s population, was not learned. In fact, anyone who acknowledged it was reviled. Instead, the clarion call was “United we stand!” Criticism was not tolerated.

The Bush administration’s reaction was very strange in one way. The entire country’s airspace was essentially closed to commercial traffic for several days. That was probably prudent. However, during this period the government allowed the evacuation from the U.S. of 140 or more Saudi nationals despite confirmed intelligence that the vast majority of the of the perpetrators were Saudis. The funding also mostly came from other Saudis.

The attack was described by everyone as a terrorist act, which, of course, it was. Colin Powell said that we were “fighting a war against terrorists of global reach.” He therefore excluded Hamas, Hezbollah, and domestic terrorists. Almost immediately, however, the “of global reach” limitation was dropped, and anyone who in any way supported terrorism (except for the right-wing American version) was added to the list of enemies. Later the president the target as evil itself, as embodied in the “Axis of Evil’: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Bush even used the word “Crusade” to describe the new Bush Doctrine of boundless preemptive military actions. No word was more offensive to Muslims.

To his credit, W. stopped short of offering indulgences to everyone who fought in this war on terror.

The testosterone-laden approach was very popular. Support for the president jumped to an astounding 90 percent. Nobody asked me.

Paul Wolfowitz and the Neo-Cons demanded blood.

This is indisputable; None of these countries had in any way participated in the attacks. Iraq’s biggest crime was probably the $25,000 that Saddam Hussein had been paying families of Palestinian suicide bombers. There was something personal, too. Iraq had allegedly been behind an assassination attempt on W.’s father in Kuwait. Iran was allied with Hezbollah. The Israeli lobby and the Neo-Cons who advised Bush pressed for aggressive action against both.

Nobody in North Korea ever crossed any borders. Who knows what the justification was for including them in this unholy crusade? It has been reported that President Bush informed Bob Woodward that he loathed Kim Jong Il.

So, who was a terrorist? Terrorism is a tactic, not a country or organization. Terrorists didn’t wear uniforms or work on behalf of governments. Some didn’t work for anyone. Their common traits were strict secrecy and lack of access to advanced weapons.

So, how do you identify them before they commit a heinous act? The answer was simple: “Don’t worry. We know some of them3, and we have ways of finding the rest. Trust us.”

Noun: exaggerated pride or self-confidence.

Meanwhile, the first stage was to attack the Taliban, a band of religious fanatics who ran Afghanistan and gave refuge to Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda. After a few weeks of heavy bombing the Taliban offered to hand Bin Laden over, but the Bush people were unwilling to negotiate. They expected a quick unconditional surrender, which, of course, never happened. If you look up “hubris” in the dictionary, you might see a picture of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

No more crusades, please.

In 2003 the U.S. attacked Iraq. The administration had made a comical attempt to gather allies for the vengeful invasion of the country that was the most secular of any in the Muslim world. An attempt was even made to convince the United Nations to back the attack.That was thwarted by Pope (Saint) John Paul II. My dad was very upset by the fact the country that he loved and for which he had fought in World War II, would commit such an act of naked and illegal aggression.5

I remember watching a video recording of Colin Powell’s presentation to the U.N. I had read a transcript and had been somewhat impressed. However, when I saw the video I realized that what I had assumed were photos presented in evidence were actually drawings. He was trying to sell an unprovoked invasion based on an artist’s conception of what the Iraqis might have been doing. These were just cartoons! Although many Americans swooned, the rest of the world was unimpressed.

Most of the American public bought all or at least most of the lies. I knew from reading Juan Coles’ blog, Informed Comment, that the case presented was full of holes.

The administration was not impeded by this snub. Condoleezza Rice and others appeared on radio and television programs to promulgate a new catchphrase. Even if Iraq did not currently harbor terrorists, it certainly had “weapons of mass destruction” and if the country ever did start welcoming terrorists, we did not “want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

In point of fact, no one (except perhaps Cheney in his yellowcake fantasy) thought that Iraq had nuclear weapons. Some people just assumed that Saddam Hussein had been lying when he declared that his government had destroyed all of Iraq’s chemical weapons. The WMD justification was totally bogus.

No one except Harry Shearer seemed to notice that the one Islamic country that definitely possessed weapons of mass destruction and definitely had harbored terrorists, Pakistan, was never mentioned in this propaganda blitz.

There is no doubt whatever that the Republicans (joined by a few turncoats like my senator, Joe Lieberman) knew exactly what they were doing. Bush informed a stunned Tony Blair on September 14, 2001, that they planned to attack Iraq.

What really made me see red was the indefinite imprisonment of foreigners on the military base in Guantánamo Bay for the sole purpose of circumventing the American system of justice. Some were never even charged with a crime.

The interrogators even tortured civilians—some captured by very sketchy foreigners—to force them to provide evidence of Iraqi misdeeds. Even worse was the disgraceful use of “extraordinary rendition” to send captured individuals to countries with less rigorous legal systems in order to extract information from them—whether or not it was true. This was perhaps the most disgraceful period in U.S. history that I have witnessed. In my opinion all of the participants should have been tried for war crimes. I cannot imagine what their defense would have been.

Richard Reid’s shoes.

The reaction to 9/11 that affected my lifestyle the most was the creation of the Homeland Security Department and, especially, its Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Security at airports and on airplanes definitely needed improvement. Armed passengers needed to be prevented from boarding airplanes. If someone with a weapon somehow got aboard, they must be prevented from gaining access to the cockpit.

However, one does not use a double-barreled shotgun when threatened by a mosquito. The new security procedures were a grotesque overreaction. For example, solely because one incompetent idiot named Richard Reid once tried to light his sneakers on fire on an airplane, every adult was required to remove both shoes before boarding an airplane! The TSA transformed air travel from a boring expediency into an outrageously annoying exercise in frustration. I ended every trip in a very foul mood.

European countries had already implemented a much more reasonable and equally effective program. We should have sought counsel from them as to how they had successfully dealt with a very active terrorist group, the Red Brigades. The Bushies were too busy making and selling their plans to ask anyone for advice.

The most sensible moves that the administration undertook were to require the crew in the cockpit to stay there and to require the door to the cockpit to be locked. Thank goodness the government did not accede to the demands from some gung-ho pilots to carry sidearms.

The most frightening experience that I ever had in an airport or an airplane was in the Intercontinental Airport in Houston shortly after 9/11. Some genius had decided that it would be cool to have soldiers with automatic weapons in U.S. airports. I saw in the Houston airport a young guy in U.S. Army camos4 eating his supper alone at a restaurant. His M16 was leaning against the back of his chair.

The M16 was a weapon that I (and thousands of others) knew very well. I could consistently hit a human-sized target with one at distances up to three hundred meters. I could take one apart and reassemble it. Most importantly, I knew the location of the little lever that activated the fully automatic mode. As I watched the young man eat his burger, I suddenly realized that I was carrying a potential weapon—my laptop in its very sturdy metal case—with which I could easily disable this soldier, thereby enabling me to seize his rifle. I wondered how many other travelers there had similar thoughts.

Anyway, the U.S. forces quickly brushed aside the Iraqi troops. Our draft-dodging president got to land a jet on an aircraft carrier where a huge “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” banner was displayed.

We tried to install a Hartford Native, Paul Bremer, as imperial governor. That did not go over too well. The fighting continued in whack-a-mole fashion at a reduced level. Then the situation deteriorated. We dropped a lot of bombs, and hired a lot of mercenaries. When things began to look really bad again our military presence in Iraq even “surged” just before the 2004 election in America. Some called it “the splurge” because a whole lot of money was spent assuring the support of local power brokers. This tactic was effective, but the loyalty only lasted as long as the payments kept coming.

After the first election, Iraqi men and women showed their purple fingers to cameramen.

The U.S. eventually imposed on the Iraqis an Italian-style parliamentary democracy. We may have expected the Iraqis to form parties that resembled liberals and conservatives, but, in fact, Saddam Hussein had probably been the most liberal leader in the Muslim world. He tolerated all religions, but the new parties were formed primarily along religious lines, and, guess what, the most popular party was the Shiite faction that was friendliest to Iran, a card-carrying member of the Axis of Evil. The main thing that all parties agreed upon was that all Americans and practitioners of non-Muslim religions—including the rather vibrant Christian communities—were not welcome in democratic Iraq.

Eventually, we did go, in a manner of speaking. But what a cost this adventure exacted—hundreds of thousands of lives lost, millions of lives of innocent Iraqis disrupted, trillions of dollars wasted, and a treasure trove of international good will squandered.

Then the Islamic State (or ISIS or ISIL) developed, and we allied with Iran, of all people. Then we had to fight them in Syria, too, and …

I don’t want to write any more about this. I am not an expert on the Middle East, but Juan Cole is.

I have been following Juan Cole’s blog, Informed Comment since it began in 2002. You can find it at juancole.com. Cole was (and still is in 2021) a professor in the history department at my Alma Mater, the University of Michigan. His writings presented an impartial and very well researched description of affairs in the Middle East and other countries dominated by Muslims. He had lived for a period in the area and he could read and understand Arabic and a few other languages used in that area.

I have read his blog every morning no matter where I was since he started posting it in 2002.

Professor Cole wrote a long article in 2006 for Foreign Policy magazine explaining the politics of the situation. Although he was pilloried by jingoistic Americans and Zionists at the time, he has proven right about nearly everything. The article was republished on his website on September 10, 2021. You can read it here.

1. In those years I spent considerable amounts of time in airports in all of the following states: Alabama, California, Colorado, Connecticut, DC, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin.

2. Nancy Johnson served in Congress for twenty-four years. She was defeated by twelve percentage points in 2006 by Democrat Chris Murphy despite outspending him by a large margin. Since then she has worked as a lobbyist.

3. To help identify the “bad guys”, a deck of cards was created. Saddam was the ace of spades. During this period rumors abounded about potential terrorists who looked like ordinary God-fearing law-abiding citizens. However, on notification by someone (George Soros?) they and the other members of their “sleeper cell” were ready to spring into action to attack a predetermined target.

Some patriots took the “better safe than sorry” approach. On September 15, 2001, Frank Roque murdered a Sikh man and fired on a Lebanese man and an Afghan family in Arizona.

4. My dad asserted at the time that it was the first unprovoked attack by the U.S. This was clearly false, but I never challenged it.

5. Don’t get me started on the current custom of military personnel wearing camouflaged fatigues for day-to-day activities in the U.S.

Athens or Sparta?

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I’ll take Athens. Continue reading →

Just about the most disturbing thing that I have ever heard was broadcast last week on the radio show This American Life, which you can listen to here. A soldier in his early thirties disclosed that, after three tours in Afghanistan, he really regretted not having killed any of the “bad guys” there. He insisted that everyone in the Army knows who has a kill and who doesn’t. He also reported that the training that he received was in large part designed to overcome the innate psychological barrier against taking human life and to turn killing into a goal. He rejected this intellectually, but he still felt a primal and almost irresistible urge of some kind to find out what it was like to kill someone. The urge remained even after he had completed his term of service and returned to civilian life.

What a contrast to my own military experience from October 1970 through April 1972. In those days half of the enlisted men in the Army had been drafted, and a good number of those were college graduates. Most of the rest of the guys had either joined up to escape from some problem in civilian life or had been bamboozled by a recruiting sergeant into thinking that they could get something out of the Army. At the time the country was still mired in Vietnam, but no one whom I knew thought of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese as “the bad guys.” The truly bad guys to us were the government officials who forced us to give up the best years of our lives to this inane institution and the lifers who made the whole thing possible. There certainly were a few fellows who enlisted out of a sense of duty, but in most cases it was a duty that had been inherited from parents and/or siblings who had also been in the military.

Another gigantic difference is the way in which the rest of the country treats the military today. I remember in 2003 as we began our ill-fated invasion of Iraq that nearly every football game on television included a tribute of some kind to the American military personnel. That was almost eleven years ago, and the attitude of the media has hardly changed one iota. On Friday I heard on the radio that veterans can now obtain a special driver’s license or ID card with a flag on it to indicate that they have served in the military. The Secretary of the State went on the air to encourage merchants to offer discounts to anyone who had one because “they have done such a great job.”

I just do not get it. By what conceivable standard has the military done a great job? It is a positive development that soldiers no longer roll grenades into the tents of the commanding officers, or at least the instances of “fragging” are now lumped in with other incidents of “friendly fire.” On the other hand, unless you are a Shiite partisan, Iraq seems no better than it was under Sadaam. Moreover, Al Qaeda is reportedly stronger than ever, and Afghanistan is, well, Afghanistan. The expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of lives of non-Americans, and untold numbers of physical and emotional casualties has produced absolutely no good at all as far as I can tell. And don’t tell me that the problems remain because we did not have the political will to finish the job. If it takes longer than a decade to accomplish something, you cannot expect the public to keep writing blank checks. Both the Nazis and the Japanese were defeated in far less time. Simultaneously!

It defies credulity how much the American military itself and the citizenry’s attitude toward it has changed in the four decades since I was involved in it. An overriding concern of every male in my generation was the specter of the draft. Some people, including most of the major politicians of the last two decades, took extreme steps to avoid being drafted. Others, including myself, did not try to avoid the draft, but only because we thought that we would probably figure out a way to avoid facing combat.

The enlisted men in the Army were treated like dirt. The starting pay was $125 per month. For that the soldiers were continually subjected to humiliation and mindless labor. I hated every single minute that I was in the Army even though I had one of the cushiest assignments imaginable. The effect on the Army was pernicious. Both the people who did the fighting and the people who supposedly supported them were angry and resentful. Just about the only thing that Donald Rumsfeld and I agree on is his assessment that the American military of the era of the draft was not an effective fighting force.

We have a totally different military today. An astounding 168,000 members of the armed forces are married to other members of the military! In my illustrious military career I met very few people who were married at all. Men who were married with children were exempt from military service, and married people almost never enlisted.* I never encountered a single person who had a spouse in the military.

Everyone in the military is now paid good wages, easily enough to support a family. The troops are provided with a lot more support than we had. I wonder if the drill sergeants even tell recruits about the infamous Jody these days.

The National Guard and the Reserve were a joke in the old days. They helped in emergencies like hurricanes, but mostly they were known as a way for the rich, influential, and the merely lucky to pretend to be in the military. There was never even a suggestion that they might be sent to help out in the war. Now they are deployed in combat almost as often as the regular GI’s.

The Vietnamese War was much more deadly than the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Over 50,000 American troops perished in Vietnam, more than ten times the number killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the troops today who kill bad guys using drones and bombs are considered heroes, whereas the poor slobs who got caught in ambushes in the rice paddies were considered … hardly at all.

One thing that the current engagements have in common with the War in Vietname is that they were both based on The Big Lie. In the seventies the lie was known as the Domino Theory, which held that losing in Vietnam would somehow impel other countries to embrace Communism. For many years Americans seemed to buy into this theory, but by the time that I was in the Army hardly anyone of my generation was willing to put his life on the line to hold the line before Communism reached Thailand or Burma.

The lie behind the War on Terror claimed that the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were somehow preventing terrorists from staging future attacks on the United States. The evidence against it is at least as strong as the evidence against the Domino Theory, but only now, more than a dozen years after it was promulgated, are the people who have served in the military beginning to question whether the invasions were worth the cost. For years it was considered unpatriotic even to mention the cost.

And what of blood lust? I knew a few guys in the Army who were “gung-ho.” They were the subject of widespread ridicule. The sergeants did not try to get us to hate the Viet Cong. One sergeant even told us never to call him Charlie. He said that he deserved the respectful appellation Mr. Charles. What the dedicated sergeants tried to impart on us was how worthless we were and how hopeless their job of trying to train us was. Half of the sergeants, however, were as lackadaisical as we were. They were just counting their own days.

I certainly had no desire to kill anyone. In fact, I mentioned once or twice in Basic Training that I would in no circumstances do it. At the end of our eight weeks of training period one guy came up to me and said that he did not believe me when I said it, but after eight weeks of being with me he changed his mind.

I never changed mine.

* In Basic Training I did meet one very poor guy from Mississippi who sent every paycheck back home to his wife.

Support Our Troops

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Three puzzling words. Continue reading →

Whenever I see a bumper sticker or a window sticker, I try to imagine what aspect of that idea would be so powerful as to impel someone to deface their vehicle in order to display it. For me one of the most puzzling is the very common one: “Support Our Troops.” It is difficult, at least for me, to understand exactly what behavior the sticker is supposed to promote or suppress.

I was a “troop” in the early 1970’s, and I do not recall anyone campaigning to support us. In those days, a large percentage of the men in the military were draftees, and a large percentage of the others had only volunteered to avoid being drafted.

If “support” means provision of material goods, we certainly needed it more than today’s well-paid men and women in uniform. I remember making $125 per month, and I was heavily pressured by the brass to spend part of that on insurance and part on savings bonds. Of course, the army did subsidize the price of cigarettes and alcohol. The former cost a quarter a pack, and you could buy a six-pack of Lone Star at the PX for ninety cents.

The salaries of today’s soldiers, especially the ones deployed abroad, are many times as much as we received. Maybe mercenaries make more, but the amount paid to enlisted men and women today is enough for a family to live on comfortably. It therefore stands to reason that the verb “support” must refer not to monetary support but to some kind of psychological support. On the other hand, I have never heard anyone denigrate people who are serving in the military just because they are wearing uniforms. Nobody calls them “dog faces” or “Gomers” any more. So, what do the people with these bumper stickers want the rest of us to do? I suppose that what they mean is that members of the armed forces should be treated with respect, maybe even with deference. That idea resonates within the National Football League, which seems intent on paying tribute to the military as often as possible, and the airlines, which allow soldiers to board the aircraft before the civilians and sometimes proudly announce their presence.

Some people take this concept to the point of actively seeking out people in uniform and thanking them for their service. When I was actually in the military absolutely no one thanked me. The first person who did was the guy who was assigned the task of introducing me to the rest of the tour group in Italy in 2011. I was taken aback because I certainly would not have joined the military if I had not been forced to, and I have always considered my eighteen months in uniform as one long joke of which I was the butt.

When did all of this change? It changed on September 11, 2001, the day on which nineteen Saudis and Egyptians executed their plan to take advantage of massive holes in airline security in order to hijack four commercial airliners and fly them into buildings. “9/11 changed everything.” Somehow the president came to the conclusion that the proper response to this incident was to mobilize the armed forces in order to invade Iraq, which had been openly hostile to the perpetrators, and Afghanistan, which had indeed harbored people who supported them. Why anyone would consider the armed services as the appropriate tool for dealing with this problem has always been a mystery to me. It calls to mind Maslow’s Hammer: “When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” In this case, the military wasn’t our only tool, of course, but it was the one that we had proudly spent over $500 billion per year on, and the vice-president was the former Secretary of Defense.

Over the next two or three years Americans really bought into the notion that military action was not only appropriate, but also necessary and, well, good. They were evil; we were good. Yellow ribbons bearing the famous phrase appeared on cars everywhere. There were almost as many stickers with the phrase “United We Stand.” Every man who appeared on television in a suit proudly displayed a pin with flag on his lapel. Dissent was not tolerated. It was considered almost criminal even to ask of the government how much all of this was going to cost, and how would we know if we had won the war.

Central to all of this was what I have called The Big Lie, which was the oft-repeated tale that the military deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan were somehow defending the United States. At first this was phrased as “We are fighting them there, so we do not need to fight them here.” Long after their leaders dropped this catch-phrase many Americans still clung to the notion that it was not just important but necessary for the United States to deploy hundreds of thousands of troops in these two remote locations. To them the idea that this approach might be counterproductive — creating more terrorists than it eliminated — was, in Condoleeza Rice’s words, “grotesque.” They had invested a lot in this venture, and they were unwilling to accept that it had been a mistake.

Ten years have now passed since we invaded Iraq. What does it mean to “Support Our Troops?” I admit that I have not had the temerity to ask anyone who bears one of these stickers what they intend it to mean. My impression is that it really means: “I and my family have bought into The Big Lie. Don’t you dare say anything to question it.” I might be wrong, but I honestly cannot think of any other reason why someone would promulgate such a sentiment. I mean, it is not really about the troops, is it?

Twenty-first Century Liars

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Can you trust your parents? Continue reading →

I recently watched an episode on the PBS show Nature about crows. Evidently researchers now think that these birds are so intelligent that they can recognize human faces and can even use their system of calls to pass on information about specific people to other crows. One of the points that the show emphasized was that mental activities that were long considered unique to homo sapiens have now been verified in diverse areas of the animal kingdom.

What I took away from the show was somewhat different. I could not help wondering whether any of the crows were liars. I have long suspected that at least a few of the first dozen statements uttered by men were probably deliberate lies. Until prevarication by crows can be demonstrated by science, I will continue to believe in the superiority of our species. Even if such proof is forthcoming, I doubt that crows or any other animal have raised lying to the level of an art form the way that we humans have.

What ranks the biggest lie of the twenty-first century? Many people would probably nominate the Bush administration’s strident claim that there was “no doubt” that Iraq in 2003 possessed weapons of mass destruction. I strongly disagree. In fact, I am not sure that it was a lie at all. While the talking points that mentioned “smoking guns” and “mushroom clouds” were pure horse hockey, many knowledgeable people probably were pretty certain that Saddam Hussein still had a number of chemical weapons, which are relatively cheap, hanging around. After all, he had already deployed them once, and even the radical cult Aum Shinrikyo had managed to obtain enough sarin gas to attack the Japanese subway system in 1995. If you considered this type of chemical as a WMD, then it was reasonable to suppose that Iraq had some.

Far more outrageous was the linking of Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden and his followers. From Osama’s perspective Saddam was perhaps the worst Muslim ruler in the world. He ran a secular state that tolerated a thriving Christian community; he even wrote trashy novels! ObL was a fanatical fundamentalist who had no use for an infidel like Saddam. The two had no relationship whatever. In fact, they almost certainly hated each other. The evidence that Iraq had anything to do with Al Qaeda consisted of one imaginary meeting in Prague between Muhammed Atta, the Egyptian student who organized the 9/11 attacks, and an Iraqi agent. This meeting never happened, and everyone knew it. However, that was not the big lie.

I came to recognize the actual big lie when I was sitting in the Burger King at the Kansas City airport a year or two after the initiation of the fiasco in Iraq. At a nearby table were a young couple, their two children, and an older couple who evidently were the grandparents. The striking thing to me was that the young adults were both dressed in camos and combat boots. They were evidently both in the military, and they were about to be deployed. What of the kids? I could only surmise that they would be staying with the grandparents. At least, I hoped so.

I was in the army during the tail end of our nation’s last major fiasco — Vietnam. I had been drafted, and the non-lifers that I knew had either been drafted or had volunteered to avoid the draft. A few of them were married, but of the hundreds of guys whom I encountered, I can only remember one person — an extremely poor fellow from Mississippi who joined up because it was the best job that he could find — who had any children. In those days having a wife and kids exempted a young man from the draft. Needless to say, the wife was already exempt because she was female, and women in those days were too weak or too hysterical or something to be trusted with fighting our wars. I had never even heard a rumor of a family that included children in which both parents were in the service and were shipped off to ‘Nam. Such a thing would have been just short of inconceivable.

So, the scene at the Burger King had a dramatic effect on me. How, I wondered, would the family explain to the children why both mommy and daddy had to leave them behind for several months. The answer was, of course, quite simple. They would almost certainly be told that mommy and daddy needed to go to Iraq to defend America. That was the big lie. The deception was originally started by Bush, Cheney, Rice and the rest of them, but it then became interwoven into the fabric of families all across America. No one would tell the children that their parents were leaving them behind because they were being well paid by the administration to implement the incredibly costly invasion of a country the ruler of which had never had the slightest intention of attacking America. He had just made the mistake of getting on the wrong side of a few people in Washington who took advantage of a two-bit terrorist attack to implement a grudge that they had been nursing for decades.

What happens when the children learn about the big lie? I suppose that a few will be disgusted with their parents’ choices, but most of them will probably still think of them as heroic figures who made a big sacrifice that saved the rest of us from the bad guys.