On the day I left Vietnam, the bus that took me to the "freedom bird" passed by a brand new swimming pool. When I saw a hundred GIs swimming in that pool... I somehow knew that the war would drag on a long time.

The recent pictures of GIs swimming in one of the former-palace swimming pools in Iraq brought back the same feelings.


I have nothing against GIs trying to cool off, but I do not believe the people we are fighting spend much of their time doing the backstroke.

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Anyone who's ever been in a war knows instintively that they are sharing the same basic experience that any soldier has ever felt. All wars are the same: dreadful.

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Former Generals make good Presidents: they've seen the big picture of war and want nothing to do with it if at all possible. This does not extend to former lower-ranking officers, who, years later, seem to be much too impressed by the novelty of new military hardware and bravado.

Correct, but I don't recall much protest when the Vietnam War was 8 months old either...
Crucial for the US Administration is their control of the 'encapsulated' media: as long as they can keep the body bags from the evening news, they're fine.

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The administration has restricted media access to the Dover Delaware airforce base where those bodybags re-enter the country.

The pentagon doesn't like to release casualty figures either, so how many of our young men and women are being crippled and disfigured on a daily basis? It's been suggested that scores of soldiers have committed suicide while deployed in Iraq.

How many Iraqis have been killed so far? The pentagon doesn't claim to track these figures -- no strategic importance...

I agree with you, Vronsky. But perhaps we will learn from our past?!?!?! Right? Maybe not, once again we're doomed to repeat history. This being my whole point in starting this thread. My .02

Recall that before the lottery system there was the deferment system in which people with influence and money could bargain their way out of service. That left poor folks, disproportionately minority and southern whites, to service.

There wasn't much protest at all until there was draft reform and every teenaged boy in Amercia had one hell of an equal opportunity. Suddenly the kids of the rich and powerful faced military forced servitude. It was okay to stuff poor folks into the meatgrinder but not the senator's son.

Well, very few children of the power elite volunteer nowadays so the military is once again a ladder of hope and opportunity for the poor while serving as a tool of state. There is danger in that. One of the few things with which I have ever agreed with Charlie Rangel (D, NY) is the danger of having a military whose members do not represent the children of politicians and the wealthy class. Its easier to risk the life of somebody else's child than one's own.

I do not advocate a draft. I think a draft is immoral. I sure wish the people who have power in this country would encourage their children to take an active role in its defence.

Its the worst form of cynical hypocracy to be a gung-ho war supporter but not teach your children that they have a moral duty to serve their country.

We tried that during the runup to the invasion, but the Neo-con juggernaut couldn't be stopped. This really demoralized the Left. I think it'll take a bit more time for this quagmire to create the same level of protest momentum.

One of the worst trends in modern culture is the fact that a growing portion of our citizens view TV war coverage as a form of entertainment. Watching the initial phases of the gulf wars is not unlike having a seat at the colleseum.

For such people, the reality of the bloodletting that is presently going on is more annoying than tragic.

I sure agree. I could hardly drop the remote control and sucked-up every bit of information, visual or print, that I could find. It was great theatre to have all of those "embeds" in with the soldiers. Too bad Saddam didn't have a similar adventurous interest in journalism. The closest he had was the unfortunately slanted Al Jazeera, and even their handlers were pretty restrictive.

I'll say this for Al Jazeera, they've come a long way from their early wildly partisan reporting. It still isn't close to objective, but they're learning.

In addition to the entertainment value of a real-time war reporter, it also serevd to inform viewers of the soldiers life, without some Washington spindoctors haggling over what it all means. This was a totally new way of war correspondence and it will take a while to figure-out how best to do it. Heck, its never been done--no society in history has felt it was safe to give reporters direct, real-time access to viewers and warriors.

Have they stopped the imbed program? I wish the news corps would stick their folks back in there. I'd rather hear from reporters who live with the soldiers rather than 6 O'clock news drive-bys.

Botnst

In my humble opinion - we aren't at a Vietnam stage yet. As Vronsky mentioned above, the US administration needs to keep the death toll down or at least controlled level to maintain support.
However, there will never be peace in Iraq whilst American troops remain in Iraq.
Now i'm not stupid and realise that there will always be a US presence in Iraq (as there is in Saudi). Iraq is too important not to be. With this in mind - can or will the blood shed ever stop?
Also botnst - where did this word Islamists come from? Didn't think such a word existed...I think you've been watching too much Fox news!

Did you try googling teh word? Its been around, oh, fifty years or so. I first came across it in an article in "Wilson Quarterly" back in the 1980's.

I probably do watch too much Fox. Too much NY Times, too. Too much Al Jazeera, Guardian, Times of London, Washington Post, Washington Times, CBS, MSNBC.....

Maybe if I read and listened less I would know more.

If you're truly interested, here's a start for some links:

http://www.islamist.org/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3037694.stm
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1046701,00.html
http://www.islamistwatch.org/blogger/IslamistBlog.html
http://www.bahraini.tv/index.php/news/592

I had the same question(s). So I asked my daughter who is currently in Bagsdaddy (her word) for her candid views vs the media.

This is an excerpt of her e-mail:

Right now I am in no situation to be able to discuss my own personal thoughts on this state of affairs. There is a lot going on over here, and the nine times out of ten the TV is right. What we see as not correct is the number of people that are wounded or injured otherwise. I am rechecking everyday my sanity on
joining the military and still have not come up with a good enough
justification for this place. If I remember correctly I served my four years last April. We are fighting for our country right? We can't even keep the war with in our company to a minimum how the heck are we suppose to win the war with this country. We are a NG unit we have old hand-me-down for uniforms/equip - most of us have never been trained with some of the weapons/equip we are using........We have though, moved across the street from our present location. We have permanent tents with air/heat, we are able to shower everyday, hot showers,and we have some semi normal bathrooms. Here is the kicker – they brought over some young civilians (contractor) to build these new facilities (deluxe tents). They are making $306 a day and they live in RV’s that travel from camp to camp. Real moral booster................... In the mornings I get up and do PT. Ya, PT, have you ever heard of PT in a war zone....oh, that's right the war's over right? That's why soldiers die every day!! My body, mind and soul is tired, and not sure how I will ever adapt to normal living when I return. We have changed so much over here, some good, some bad. I fight
the urge to not be that person that I am turning into but can't beat it anymore. I just want to come home.....................


Just sharing

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Thanks for sharing. My heart goes out to you, your family, and all those good folks who are dealing with this unfortunate situation.

TX,
Thank you for posting some thoughts from your daughter. I'm sure most readers will view the evening news just a little differently after reading Kelli's words. We are rooting for her continued courage, safety, and early return home.

The fraud of primitive authenticity
By Spengler

Two billion war deaths would have occurred in the 20th century if modern societies suffered the same casualty rate as primitive peoples, according to anthropologist Lawrence H Keeley, who calculates that two-thirds of them were at war continuously, typically losing half of a percent of its population to war each year. [1]

This and other noteworthy prehistoric factoids can be found in Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn, a survey of genetic, linguistic and archeological research on early man. [2] Primitive peoples, it appears, were nasty, brutish, and short, not at all the cuddly children of nature depicted by popular culture and post-colonial




academic studies. The author writes on science for the New York
Times and too often wades in where angels fear to tread. [3] A complete evaluation is beyond my capacity, but there is no gainsaying his representation of prehistoric violence.

That raises the question: Why, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, does popular culture portray primitives as peace-loving folk living in harmony with nature, as opposed to rapacious and brutal civilization? Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which attributes civilization to mere geographical accident, made a best-seller out of a mendacious apology for the failure of primitive society. Wade reports research that refutes Diamond on a dozen counts, but his book never will reach the vast audience that takes comfort in Diamond's pulp science.

Why is it that the modern public revels in a demonstrably false portrait of primitive life? Hollywood grinds out stories of wise and worthy native Americans, African tribesmen, Brazilian rainforest people and Australian Aborigines, not because Hollywood studio executives hired the wrong sort of anthropologist, but because the public pays for them, the same public whose middle-brow contingent reads Jared Diamond.

Nonetheless the overwhelming consensus in popular culture holds that primitive peoples enjoy a quality - call it authenticity - that moderns lack, and that by rolling in their muck, some of this authenticity will stick to us. Colonial guilt at the extermination of tribal societies does not go very far as an explanation, for the Westerners who were close enough to primitives to exterminate them rarely regretted having done so. The hunger for authenticity surges up from a different spring.

European civilization arose by stamping out the kind of authenticity that characterizes primitive peoples. It is a construct, not a "natural" development. One of the great puzzles of prehistory is the proliferation of languages. Linguists believe, for credible reasons too complex to review here, [4] that present-day languages descend from a small number of early prototypes, and splintered into many thousands of variants. Wade says (p 204):
This variability is extremely puzzling given that a universal, unchanging language would seem to be the most useful form of communication. That language has evolved to be parochial, not universal, is surely no accident. Security would have been far more important to early human societies than ease of communication with outsiders. Given the incessant warfare between early human groups, a highly variable language would have served to exclude outsiders and to identify strangers the moment they opened their mouths.
What brought about civilization, that is, large-scale communication and political organization? Conquest is too simple an explanation. We have from Latin five national languages and dozens of dialects, but no comparable development out of the Greek of the earlier Alexandrian empire. Latin and its offshoots dominated Europe because Latin was the language of the Church. The invaders who replenished the depopulated territories of the ruined Roman Empire, Goths, Vandals and Celts, learned in large measure dialects of Latin because Christianity made them into Europeans.

Even in Christianity's darkest hours, when the Third Reich reduced the pope to a prisoner in the Vatican and the European peoples turned the full terror of Western technology upon one another, they managed to kill a small fraction of the numbers that routinely and normally fell in primitive warfare.

Native Americans, Eskimos, New Guinea Highlanders as well as African tribes slaughtered one another with skill and vigor, frequently winning their first encounters with modern armed forces. "Even in the harshest possible environments [such as northwestern Alaska] where it was struggle enough just to keep alive, primitive societies still pursued the more overriding goal of killing one another," Wade notes.

A quarter of the language groups in New Guinea, home to 1,200 of the world's 6,000 languages, were exterminated by warfare during every preceding century, according to one estimate Wade cites. In primitive warfare "casualty rates were enormous, not the least because they did not take prisoners. That policy was compatible with their usual strategic goal: to exterminate the opponent's society. Captured warriors were killed on the spot, except in the case of the Iroquois, who took captives home to torture them before death, and certain tribes in Colombia, who liked to fatten prisoners before eating them."

However badly civilized peoples may have behaved, the 100 million or so killed by communism and the 50 million or so killed by National Socialism seem modest compared with the 2 billion or so who would have died if the casualty rates of primitive peoples had applied to the West. The verdict is not yet in, to be sure. One is reminded of the exchange between Wednesday Addams (played by the young Christina Ricci in the 1993 film Addams Family Values) and a girl at summer camp, who asks, "Why are you dressed like someone died?" to which Wednesday replies, "Wait!"

Guiding the warlike inclinations of primitive peoples is genetic kinship, and the micro-cultures (such as dialect) that attend it. Christianity called out individuals from the nations, and gave them a new birth through baptism in a new people, whose earthly pilgrimage led to the Kingdom of God. Christians began with contempt for the flesh of their own origins; post-Christians envy the "authenticity" of the peoples who never were called out from the nations, for they have left the pilgrimage in mid-passage and do not know where they are or where they should go.

It is difficult to be a Christian, for the faith that points to the Kingdom of God conflicts with the Gentile flesh whence Christians come; but it is oppressive, indeed intolerable to be an ex-Christian, for it is all the harder to trace one's way back. Europeans have less difficulty, for the Italians never quite gave up their pagan gods whom the Church admitted as saints, and the Germans never quite gave up their heathen religion, which lived on as a substratum of myth and magic beneath the veneer of Christianity.

If the United States of America is the Christian nation par excellence - as I have argued on numerous occasions - then the predicament of an American ex-Christian is especially miserable. Americans do not have close at hand the Saints Days of Italian villages incorporating heathen practice predating Rome, or the Elf-ridden forest of the German north celebrated in Romantic poetry. They have suburban housing developments and strip malls, urban forests of steel and glass, Hollywood and Graceland, but nothing "authentic".

An overpowering nostalgia afflicts the American post-Christian, for whom the American journey has neither goal nor purpose. He seeks authenticity in nature and in the dead customs of peoples who were subject to nature, that is, peoples who never learned from the Book of Genesis that the heavenly bodies were lamps and clocks hung in the sky for the benefit of man. Even more: in their mortality, the post-Christian senses his own mortality, for without the Kingdom of God as a goal, American life offers only addictive diversions interrupted by ever-sharper episodes of anxiety.

With 90% of the world's more than 6,000 languages likely to disappear during the next hundred years, the search for authenticity will turn from an exercise in frustration into a source of horror. For those upon whom mortality weighs heavily, the object lessons in mortality from the disappearing peoples of the world will be a terrifying form of instruction indeed.

Notes
1. Lawrence H Keeley, War Before Civilization, Oxford University Press, 1996.
2. Before the Dawn, by Nicholas Wade. Penguin: New York 2006.
3. Most irritating is Wade's repetititon of the standard academic anthropologist's attempt to explain away religion as a natural phenomenon.
4. Wade's book contains a good summary and exhaustive notes on the state of linguistic research.

one of the biggest things that bothers me about iraq is that the war is being prosecuted by so many national guard units and reservists. many are back over there on their third tours. this is so unfair. their lives are being ruined. divorces are running at very high rates.

if the war is so important our leaders should ask for a draft so that these people who are supposed to be emergency back up can be replaced by regular army. this is not being done because imho our leaders dont want to pay the political price for a more fair system.

so these folks who signed on because they needed a side job with benefits are stuck over there doing a police action with about 1/3 the number of troops that were recommended by experienced military leaders. (who said this was what was needed in the first place.)

i am guessing this is a very old thread by the number of casualties noted early on.

tom w

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