Learned nothing and forgot nothing

 Fourteen years ago I wrote this:

Seven years after 9/11, we're stuck in Groundhog Day and I just don't care anymore. Bin Laden has become, like the flu or like natural male enhancement, something that cynical hucksters use to bilk the rubes. For the past two years I've posted the usual solemn reflection on the innocent people who died that day.

Fuck that.

We lost the right to parade that goddam bloody shirt when the first baby died in a mistaken bomb run over Baquoba or hapless taxi driver got sodomized at Bagram Air Base. 

Now we're just another Great Power on the make, another Smedley Butler racketeer using our dead and our grieving to justify our own damn greed and fear.

Fuck that. Fuck all that. Who'd have thought that we would let nineteen yay-hoos with boxcutters and screwdrivers and a bunch of panicked politicians yank a nation so far off the road of national self-interest and sanity?

I see not the slightest reason to retract or restate any of the above.

I've stayed away from the television and, largely, the internet today simply because I would be irked by the usual hypocritical wailing about the events of the day. I get a sense that they're more muted than ever outside the usual right-wing nimrods, which is both fortunate and long overdue.

But the bottom line is that Dubya and Deadeye Dick Cheney still live in cossetted retirement and Charles Gittings died with his mission of justice unfulfilled.

"Personne n'est corrigé; personne n'a su ni rien oublier ni rien apprendre."

 

Well, it's That Day again.

I'm not going to bother going over all this nonsense again; it's bad enough that my country will, for the twentieth time, wave the bloody shirt of the towers and the Pentagon and the farm field where the fourth airliner went down to try and draw the audience's attention from the mountainous heap of death and destruction it built on those ruinous foundations.

I've already talked that sonofabitch to death and there's nothing more to say.

Instead I want to think about the original pile of corpses harvested from that day twenty years ago; the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

By pure coincidence, one of the books on my nightstand the day the last U.S. troop walked up the ramp to the evac bird was Andy Krepinevich's The Army and Vietnam.

Krepinevich is supposed to have been moved largely by another Vietnam post-mortem, Harry Summers' On Strategy, that posited that the problem was that the U.S. wasn't WW2-enough, that the real problem was that the Army never really went full-D-Day on the Communist forces and defeated them militarily.

Krepinevich's analysis, though, suggested that the opposite was true; that the Army have never really stopped trying to D-Day the war. That what he calls the "Army Concept" - "a focus on mid-intensity, or conventional, war and a reliance on high volumes of firepower to minimize casualties" (Krepenevich, 1986, p. 6) - was central to the reason that the U.S. failed to realize either it's military or political objectives in Vietnam.

Krepinevich's assessment of low-intensity (call it "guerrilla war" or "counterinsurgency" or "foreign internal defense"...) conflict is that the ultimate objective of the counter-insurgent forces has to be to separate the rebels/insurgents/guerillas from the bulk of the local people, and then to weld the locals to your local proxy through...well, a bunch of stuff, but basically by making the proxy attractive to the locals.

You do that, you eventually win.

He writes that while paying lip service to this objective that, outside a small and relatively powerless group of low-ranking officers (largely in the Special Forces and advisory cadres), the Army hierarchy had no interest in doing this. They wanted to meet the NVA and VC Main Force units in open combat and smash them.

So the low-level, day-to-day, grinding work of securing the population was left to the South Vietnamese, from the ARVN down to the Regional Force and Popular Force paramilitaries and the National Police.

And this crippled the actual counterinsurgency. The ARVN and the police were a corrupt mess even where they were militarily competent, the RVN government was, if anything, worse, and the RF/PF (the "Ruff-Puffs") starved for resources and unsupported so at the mercy of the local VC.

The "contribution" of the US and ARVN maneuver forces was to swing through in a "big sweep", shoot the fuck out of the landscape, create a bunch of refugees among the survivors, and then move on, leaving the locals to get re-occupied by the local force VC and the political cadres that had largely gone to ground before the sweep.

That pretty much tallies with my reading of the conduct of the war, and Krepinevich in his conclusion, says that:

"Low-intensity warfare represents the most likely arena of future conflict for the Army, and counterinsurgency the most demanding contingency. As in the period following the Korean War, (after Vietnam) the Army is erecting barriers to avoid fighting another Vietnam War...instead of gaining a better understanding of how to wage counterinsurgency warfare within the unique social, economic, political, and military dimensions comprising that form of conflict, the Army is trying...to transform it into something it can handle." (op. cit., p.274-275)

That, fundamentally, the Army Concept "won" the war for the U.S. Army's hearts and minds. Instead of being in Vietnam one year twelve times, the Army tried to forget that the nasty interlude even happened so it could return to the sort of high-kinetic warfare it was good at.

Fast forward thirty years, then, and the U.S. Army gets dragged into southcentral Asia.

I won't pretend to have read any tactical or operational studies of the ISAF mission in general, but the impression I get from what I have suggests that not only did the US operational command not review or learn from the lessons of Vietnam, it actively repeated the mistakes that it had made before.

The maneuver forces leaned hard on firepower and air-and-vehicle mobility. Units rotated in and out without ever spending enough time to truly learn the ground and the people they fought over. The primary focus seems to have been trying to find, fix, and finish the Taliban field forces rather than securing the population.

The Afghan military and police appear to have been as bad or worse than the ARVN; vastly corrupt and randomly brutal. The ISAF command doesn't seem to have been particularly picky who it sponsored, and that ended up putting a lot of the same people whose bad behavior had encouraged Joe and Molly Afghan to support (or, at least, tolerate) the Taliban in the first place - Anand Gopal's The Other Afghan Women does a good job of detailing the problems this created.

From what I can tell - and it's worth noting that whatever truth is there in the twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan it's surrounded by an imperial guard-size bodyguard of lies - what horrifies me the most is that having had twenty years to learn the fundamentals of suppressing a rebellion in Vietnam my Army, the U.S. Army, not only didn't learn those lessons but actively turned their back on them and spent another twenty years reapplying the methods they knew, they should have known from the beginning, had failed before.

And that, for me, sums up my personal connection to the tragedy of the twenty years that began this day.

My Army, my country, We, the People, forgot none of our outrage and fears and grievances.

And then we proved that we had learned nothing, as well.

You can argue about whether we should have sent an army into Afghanistan. I tend to agree that the occupation was not a bright idea...but I also understand why it happened.

But once that Army was there...how the hell did we manage to do things not just catastrophically wrong, but catastrophically wrong in nearly the identical way we'd done them - and knew we'd done them - wrong fifty years before? 

We knew - we should have known - what would happen when we did the things in Afghanistan we did (and the way we did them) because we'd done them that way before - in Vietnam - and ended up with a heap of ashes.

And yet, here we are again.

That seems to me the bitterest legacy of the lake of bitterness that is this day.

V-USA Day

On this day eighteen years ago today another war began, a war that continues to this day, a war that was, eventually subsumed and engorged by lies and fear, driven by greed and stupidity and hubris, and that ended up covering the bodies piled up here - in New York City and Washington D.C. and a field in Pennsylvania - with piles and heaps and mountains of bodies; bodies of innocent women, of small children, of innocents without so much as a drop of blood on their hands, with young men and women sent to fight and kill and die for those lies and that fear.

And those who shed that blood and took those lives?

"Don't you wonder if they ever pause on September 11 every year and ponder how they all used the dead of that awful day for their own purposes, to fulfill their long-held desires for empire-building in the countries of oil, to use other people's children in service of their profane desires? Don't you wonder if they ever pause on September 11 and ponder how they'd all screwed up so badly throughout the summer of 2001 when, as Richard Clarke recalled, "all the lights were blinking red"? Do you wonder if they make the connection, in the softening dark of the early morning, between their own incompetence and the use they ultimately made of it?

Of course, you don't wonder. Because they don't. Introspection was never a priority with this crew. And as we see so many of them on television today, deeply troubled by the actions of another underprepared, incompetent president*, and using the dead of 9/11 as protective camouflage for all their deception and bloody blundering that occurred beginning that very morning, we should all take time to mourn the dead of that day, and all the days thereafter, and, yes, say, Never Again."

The country we live in today; the country of security gates and drones and surveillance and national security letters and yellow-ribbon patriotism was built, bloody brick by bloody brick, from the foundation these people laid on that day.

THAT's what we should never forget, on this day, every year.

Damn them.

Damn them all to Hell.

Reeking tube and iron shard

Given the monumental clusterfuck that the inchoate rage and fear born on this day 16 years ago have created across the globe I can't think of any reason for my country or my countrymen to "commemorate" the events of that day in any way that doesn't consist only of a silent, humble, deeply mournful contrition.

We won't, of course, because We the People suck at contrition and have never accepted our own responsibility for excusing or, worse, encouraging a coterie of evil, greedy fools for using the events of 9/11/01 as a hammer to drive the poisoned nails of their ambition and hubris into the wide world as well as into our own society. Instead there will be all the usual solemnity and public waving of the Bloody Shirt of the dead of Manhattan and Virginia, just as if those heaps of dead had not, like the horrible unliving monsters of World War Z, created Alps and Himalayas of dead all across the world.

Instead of ruing the arrogance and stupidity that this day awoke in our nation we will continue to pretend that we were the victims that day, innocent of any wrongdoing and greatly wronged, instead of using a wrong done to us to do a thousandfold wrongs to any and everyone we hated - or were told to hate - and feared.

Death Star Truthers

The inside joke here is that this is apparently a perfect parody of the 9-11 truther product Loose Change, which I've never seen (I try to keep my crazies at a distance...). Regardless, for a Star Wars-by-parenting fan, it's funny in its own right. Enjoy.

(h/t to David Hagelund of Slate for the link...)

Harvest of Shame

I had a chance to stop for a moment this morning and got to read the World's Worst Newspaper over my coffee. And for just a moment I was pleased to see that the headline had nothing to do with the events of twelve years ago today.

That's nice, I thought; maybe we're starting to get over ourselves.

And then I continued to think about the entire business.

And realized that the silly, self-licking-ice-cream-cone of our Middle Eastern "policies" remain both unchanged and unquestioned,

Recognized that our national greed for the sweet, sweet crude remains unslaked, and we have not even seriously considered any sort of sensible attempt to even discuss weaning ourselves from the petroleum teat proffered by the unstable, violent strumpets that feed our lubricious petrochemical craving,

Acknowledged with bitter anger that the willful crimes, errors, and omissions made because of the events of that day have never even really been examined, much less punished or expiated. The doors to that madhouse still stand open, ready for another cabal of idiots, criminals, and grifters to pull us back inside,

And accepted with rueful regret that we appear to have learned nothing and yet forgotten nothing from that eminently forgettable day.

I rose from my table angry at myself, at my "fellow citizens", but most of all at the greedy, cynical opportunists that have continued to use this day to create the United States they crave; the fearful, ignorant, credulous Skinnerbox of useful idiots that will continue to prefer "safety" to liberty and "strength" to honor.

I looked out over the green hills of Portland and saw, instead of the dark firs and big-leaved maples a broad field sown thick with the foolish ideas planted that day twelve years ago; planted by fools, would-be oligarchs, and con-men, yes, but nurtured and grown to ripeness by the carelessness and indolence of you and I.

And clenched my fists with my useless fury at the grief of it.

Because - as vile as are the shoots that we have already gathered - I know that someday, perhaps in my time but more likely in my children's, we will likely come to reap a bitterer harvest from that poisoned field.

September 12th

So.

My last post was a straight-up rant, and one that those who know me have learned to dread. By late August they are avoiding meeting with me, or attending any sort of event where politics or recent history may be discussed, but as early as the First of September they are even dodging my phone calls and deleting my text messages before reading them, knowing that my vitriolic bile will be reaching explosively toxic levels.

The actual detonation is usually reserved for the collision of some innoffensively idiotic television 9/11 retrospective and my forebrain which leaves me flecking the innocent phosphor screen with spittle shouting about 1948, Lebanon, Charlie Wilson's War, Rumsfeld/McFarlane, the cake and the Bible, and the House of Saud.

After that things return rather quickly to normal, and by 13 SEPT I can even hold normal conversations with friends without more than an occasional mutter about "the fucking moron-grade American public..."

All very entertaining, but...now that the ranting is done, what now?

Over at MilPub one of the commentors brought up a post on the blog "Zenpundit" that he considered the best observation of 9/11 he had read that day. I went over and read it and found a generic "The Day History Changed" (because, of course, the Soviet Union never fell in 1989...) sort of thing, with the usual mild "perhaps we should re-examine some of the choices we made that day" caveat at the end.

And that got me thinking. Okay, so, first; what things DID change that day?

Well, remember on 11 SEPT 2001 the U.S. was snakebit by one of the snakes we'd been handling since 1948, and not in a good way (our snake made the other snakes play mean, and we had done some snake-slapping ourselves) so while it shouldn't have been a surprise the sheer effectiveness of it was a nasty shock. We'd gotten used to the idea that those Allah-pesterers were pretty much hopeless fuckups, so the notion that they could kill large groups of Americans (that is, large groups of Americans not dispatched on pointless show-the-flag-missions in the Levant by Saint Ronald of Hollywood) using boxcutters and lead pipes was a novel one.

So overseas we did what we do; we went and fucked us up some wogs. First in Afghanistan (where, in justice, the tricksy bastards who smote us were lurking and, besides, it was a wretched hive of scum and villainy, anyway) but then in Iraq (which had nothing the fuck to do with 9/11 but, hell, Saddam was a right git and his sons had stupid names (Uday? Who the fuck is named "Uday"?) and we'd been itching to pimpslap him since back in '92) and then pretty much all over the Arab world, with drone aircraft, anyway. Busy, busy little Yankees!

But at home we were even busier! We did some things we hadn't done - much - before; we set up secret ways to spy on people (who were supposed to be Evul Terrists but, hey - it was SECRET. So who the fuck knows?), we started files on everyone who was different and scary; Muslim clerics, peace activists, chicks with hairy pits, Mormons (oh, wait, no...Mormons were only scary to teabaggers. Oh, wait - most of the people we spied on were scary to teabaggers. Carry on).

We passed something called the "USA PATRIOT Act" which let cops and spies do all sorts of cool stuff they'd been forbidden to do for years because, well, the last time they did it they railroaded a bunch of people for stuff they didn't do and spied on domestic political "enemies"...and that was just the part we KNOW about - supposedly there's this "Secret" PATRIOT Act that lets the door-kickers and snoopers do a lot MORE stuff, except, y'know, it's fucking SECRET, so we have no fucking idea what it involves.

We jammed a bunch of different agencies - the Coast Guard, the DEA, the guys who inspect poultry - into this monster superagency, called in the "Department of Homeland Security", tossed an assload of money at it and told it to go and...do stuff to scary brown people. Or something. We opened secret prisons and put secret prisoners in them because...well, it's SECRET, dummy, so we didn't know exactly why they were there except our Leaders told us they were bad, scary people, the "worst of the worst".

Except the ones we let go because, well, they turned out to be goatherders, or innocent Canadians, or carpet beaters ratted out by the guy who was sleeping with their wives.

Yeah, that.

But, anyway, I think we've pretty much pegged the stuff that Zenpundit's guy said we should "re-examine"; a bunch of wars abroad and a bunch of domestic snooping and spying at home.

So let's "re-examine" them. Let's. Let's put on our Yankee Thinking Caps and try to figure out whether there was anything different we could have done about all that crap.

Wars and Rumors of Wars

Believe it or not, I don't actually think that the original, 2002, 114th Afghan War (surely they must be up in at least the low three figures by now, right?) was all that bad a move. Probably could have been done a little slicker with some cunning diplomacy, an assassination and a bribe or three, but, really - they're Afghans; feud, revenge, making an affray, putting in fear...that's cake and ice cream to them. Even the Taliban probably expected the hiding they got. It's the Afghan Way, the central Asian version of a chicken in every pot; a cluster bomb in every Islamic Center.

Now, having done the traditional punitive expedition, the notion of hanging around trying to kill enough Pashtuns to turn the place into Waterbury with more goats was simply stupid. But that was eclipsed by the Really Big Stupid; Iraq.

And, frankly, there is only one way to "re-examine" Iraq. Aggressive war is a crime under the Nuremburg verdicts.

We hung people like Jodl and Ribbentrop and Tojo for it.

Until Dubya and Dick and Wolfie and the rest are hanging alongside them we will never be able to "re-examine" Iraq in any sane fashion. Admitting that we - that members of our elected government, with our tacit approval - committed a war crime (that lead to the useless, meaningless deaths of thousands) and many subsequent crimes is the only possible first step to "re-examining" that lunacy and preventing its repetition.

And that, we will never do.

And the other thing we will never do is "re-examine" the two main pillars of our treatment of the Middle East; the Israel First, and the Your Gas Is Really Our Gas policies.

We made a conscious decision to put Israel's welfare before our own selfish interests back in 1948. All the old State Department hands - the guys who had made their bones in the Middle East, the guys who (mostly) were defenestrated by the Red witch-hunters after State "lost China" in the late Forties and early Fifties - warned Truman about that. But we made our bed, and we choose to continue to lie in it.

You know how I feel about Israel our "ally". But I am a very small minority, and I accept that so long as we have Israel's back - with all that entails, such as supporting pro-Israeli/anti-Islamist dictators like the Mubaraks and the Sauds - we put ourselves at odds with the bulk of the Middle Eastern Arab and Muslim populations.

So, too, our incessant need for petroleum, which means our need for pliant bobos or buyable clowns on the gaddis of the petroleum states. So we prop up the Shah in Iran, or the Gaddafi's in Libya, or the Malikis in Iraq, regardless of the enmity...and until the wrath...of their own peoples becomes too great.

But in the process we ensure ourselves of a constant, running, low-grade warfare with certain elements in the Islamic world. There is no element of the foolish "Islamofascism" or "hating our freedoms" so beloved of the GOP's wingnut brigade. Rather, they hate our Israel, or they hate our porn, or our bare-legged women, or our greed for their petroleum, or their disregard for their lives.

This makes them no better (and no worse) that we. They are acting selfishly, their selfish interests will always collide with ours if we persist in the policies we have pursued - and we show little or no interest in or willingness to change them - and so we are fated to encounter these Islamic characters until either we change or they do. There is no real other option.

We simply cannot have Israel, cheap Arab petroleum, and peace with the hard-core Islamists and Arab nationalists.

So that "re-examination" leads to the grim conclusions that we are in for a long, long century.

The Laughing Policeman

On the Home Front, however, what holds us back is not inevitable collision but moral and political cowardice.

We have erected, brick by brick, a monstrous edifice of surveillance and secret machination. Little in U.S. history since the Alien and Sedition Acts, or perhaps some of the most extreme lawlessness enacted in actual wars (such as Lincoln's violation of habeas corpus or Roosevelt's Japanese internment) can equal the sheer grandiosity of this vast and secretive erection. We have granted, out of our fear and anger, immense powers to our most uncontrolled servants and trusted them to remain servile.

Why, I do not know.

And, by and large, these powers have gone unneeded and unused for the demolition of actual "terrorist" plots and plans. Most of the domestic acts of "terror" have been foiled by simple citizens, or random customs agents, or street cops snitched on to someone. Several of the most "nefarious" plots appear to have been largely the work of government agents, who have tracked down various disgruntled and unhinged individuals, coaxed them, coached them, made their weapons for them, even driven them to the "terror" site before arresting them.

And many of these powers are even less comprehensible than that, like the 21st Century equivalent of the lettre de cachet, the "national security letter", that cannot even be mentioned under pain of imprisonment. We cannot know if the lettre de...excuse me, the "national security letter" has been misused...because those against whom it has been used cannot speak of their misuse, and if they attempt to do so they will find themselves in another modernization of Bourbon justice, the Chateau d'If of the "secret prison".

Can you imagine a United States with "secret prisons"? With nameless prisoners, latter-day Monte Cristos but in their orange jumpsuits and hoods? With secret letters demanding secret interrogations, carried on in secret and then buried below further layers of secrecy, lowered into a well a midnight, never to be known?

Is this the United States we pledged to as children? And if not, why not?

Because of some raggedy Islamic fantasists plotting in some dumpy motel in Lahore?


In a sane world we would shake our heads like a dog shaking off water, and immediately eighty-six about 99 percent of the ridiculous security rigamarole we've invented since 9/11, starting with the "PATRIOT" Act, the AUMF, and continuing from there. We'd relegate "terrorism" to the nuisance status it deserves and making in the province of our State Department and our spy agencies, who could make the appropriate recommendations to Congress and the President when they spotted another bin Laden lurking behind the arras.

Because, as I said, he will come. When you fight an old enemy long enough he will throw out the occasional Mosby, or bin Ladin, or Francis Marion.

But sending out troops to beat the hustings where he may be born...or sending in police to snoop and sneak on Americans guilty of nothing more than disliking WalMart or protesting foreign policy...is worse than a crime. It is a mistake, and one that we have been paying for this long decade.

But...

Again, to undo all of this harm would be to admit that we were sniveling, mewling cowards to begin with. To admit that we fucked up dozens of people's lives for no better reason than our own bed-wetting fears. And to accept the calumny due us for being frightened little weasels too small to deserve the freedoms we so boldly lay claim to, and yet so quickly piss away rather than face any potential for harm.

And we would rather give up ALL those freedoms than accept that.



So, in brief; abroad we cannot have peace with a segment of Islam - unless we radically change our goals and interests in the Middle East, which we have and continue to show no interest in doing - while at home we will not have liberty - unless we radically accept responsibility for our own panicked fuckups as well as the risk inherent in living in an open society.

So in that sense the dead of 9/11 really DID die in vain, or worse - their deaths have made their nation a smaller, meaner, more secretive, less dynamic place.

We were given a chance of greatness and instead we went shopping - on credit - whilst fools and knaves led us into dark places.

"It is by our own feathers, and not by others' shafts, are we now stricken"

Decimation

I thought after last year that our long national indulgence in the compounded delusions of self-pity and self-righteous anger were starting to fade.But for the tenth anniversary of the events of 11 SEP 2001 has brought out all the usual idiots parroting all the usual tropes; It's was all about US! OMFG it was Pure Evil! It was Such a Shock 'Cause We were just Minding Our Own Business when We were viciously mugged!Well, okay, so we've had ten years and we're STILL thinking about this.

(Anybody want to make a bet as to whether Pearl Harbor was still front page news on 7 DEC 1951? No? Didn't think so. It was a very different war in a very different time, and in many ways were were a cruder, harder, simpler...but more sensible people fifty years ago.)

So let's get a couple of things out of the way first.

That an Islamic attack of some sort was successfully completed on U.S. soil was an entirely rational and expected result of the Middle East policies we had been pursuing for decades; since 1948, at the very least. This doesn't make OBL or AQ any more loveable or "justified". But you bankroll, arm, and act as consigliere for one of the local mobs in a bad part of town, don't be surprised to wake up with a horse's head in your bed some morning. It ain't an "if", it's a when, goombah, capisce?That it succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its Saudi maker is unquestionable. If 9/11 was a battle and you looked at it trying to define "Who won 9/11?" the world's tallest dead Saudi would have to be the winner, hands down. For the cost of a relatively small number of expendable fanatics (and the bombing and occupation of a stone-age tribal wasteland back into the stone age) he sent his target rampaging through the Middle East, bombing, shooting, and - worst of all - acting like the least competent imperial power in history. Too meek to conquer, too clueless and viciously self-protective to woo, too stupid to realize the difference...Osama must look back at the past ten years and the present position of his target, exchange incredulous looks at the demons tormenting him, and all three of them must collapse in helpless laughter. Satan in all his genius couldn't conceive of a richer foul joke.That the most significant, durable, and successful effect it has had has been the erection of a monstrous internal and external surveillance and propaganda contraption that extends across multiple agencies and continents, absorbs billions of dollars and tens of thousands of careers and lives...and all in pursuit of this chimera. Al posted the link to a Naval War College journal article in the preceding post. In it the author bemoans the costly, inept behemoth we know as the Department of Homeland Security.Because it is a massive boondoggle ginned up by the world's last superpower to oppose the efforts of a handful of raggedy-assed clerics and Muslim fabulists dreaming of Caliphate in dumpy rooms in Third World shitholes that, even if successful, would be unlikely to do better than 9/11 - that is, kill a relative handful of Americans compared to the number who drive into utility poles while texting every year?

No.

Because "...we need a longer term strategy for dealing with terrorism overall. Perhaps the most disappointing non-event of the past ten years has been the complete failure of America's intellectual infrastructure, including its colleges and universities, to create a reserve of expertise similar to that funded by the U.S. government in the wake of the Soviet challenge in the 1950s."

Got it?

The threat from a tiny band of poorly-funded, tactically-incompetent, Islamic boneheadsis and should be considered the modern equivalent of the challenge posed by the world's only other global superpowermassively armed with blue-water fleets, intercontinental bombers, an trained army of spies and assassins, and, oh, yeah, fucking nuclear ICBMs.

So one would think that this tenth anniversary of the moment we started the geopolitical equivalent of slamming eleven vodka and Red Bull shooters, stripping down to our skivvies, and leaping into the beer tub down at the local lesbian softball victory party swinging a length of tire chain and shouting "I can whip any bitch in the park!" we'd be looking around sheepishly at all the angry bull daggers, picking our saggy wet Jockeys out of the crack of our stinging ass and wondering what the fuck we had been thinking.

(Stops. Sighs. Shakes his head.)

Instead of indulging in an orgy of self-pity, maudlin sentimentality, and self-righteous victimhood.

But we won't.

Acta est fabula?

Other than the usual fulminations of the tinfoil-hat Right, I note that this year's annual beatification of the Dead of 9/11 seems to have been relatively low-key.

Have we finally begun to see beyond the events of 2001? Does this mean that we can finally put it in the Forgotten Days file along with Pearl Harbor Day, VJ-Day and Arbor Day?Or is this just an off-year for Islamic Terra drumbeating?

Or could it be because I was on the woods west of Chehalis - Twin Peaks country, folks - and was off the net and missed the ritual parading of the bloody shirt?

Lemme know what you think.

The Boy Who Cried "Terror!"

I'm tired of telling the same story today. So I'm going to tell a different one.

There once was a nation bored with politics and governing itself responsibly. So it chose to pander to its baser instincts and went out and found the most incompetent sheepdog it could find. While the sheepdog amused itself with crony capitalism and faith-based sheep-shearing, a wolf crept up and killed some of the sheep. The nation cried out in fear and anguish; "Wolf! Wolf! A Wolf is chasing the sheep!"The villagers came running up the hill to help the nation drive the wolf away. They stood beside it, and held its coat and mopped it's brow while the nation went in among the woods where the wolves lived and burnt down part of the forest, killing some wolves and putting the others to flight.But then the nation's leaders saw some foxes that had nipped their ankles years before. With a crafty smile, the leaders spun tales, lied and frightened the nation into thinking the foxes were wolves.

"Wolves! More wolves! We must attack the wolves before they attack us!" The villagers were a litle more skeptical, but they gathered around all the same. Several helped the nation attack the foxes, killing many, and in the process setting alight several nearby farm fields.But when they arrived at the sheepfold after the killing was done, they found no wolves, only the bloody corpses of foxes, some dead sheep and a goat or two that had been killed in the fracas. The nation sneered at the sight of their angry faces.

"Don't cry 'wolf', nation," said the villagers, "when there's no wolf!" They went grumbling back down the hill.

But the nation continued to sing out; "Wolf! Wolf! The wolf is chasing the sheep!" He shouted this when hawks flew by. He shouted it when a herd of cattle ambled past the base of the hill.To his naughty delight, he watched the villagers startle and run up the hill to help him drive the wolf away.

Every time there proved to be no wolf - or the wolf turned out to be a sick coyote, or a tame wolf, or some dogs, or a hot babe dressed up in a wolf peltto entertain the male readers of this story, or any number of things that were not really dangerous threats to the nation or the other nations - they grew more angry. The began to repeat with increasing vehemence; "Save your frightened song for when there is really something wrong! Don't cry 'wolf' when there is NO wolf!"

But the nation and it's leaders just grinned, scratched their asses and watched the others go grumbling down the hill once more.Later, he saw a REAL wolf prowling about his flock. Alarmed, he leaped to his feet and sang out as loudly as he could, "Wolf! Wolf!"

But the villagers thought he was trying to fool them again, and so they didn't come.

At sunset, everyone wondered why the nation hadn't returned to its position of pride and honor and wealth within the village. They went looking for the nation and found it weeping."There really was a wolf here! My honor had scattered, my wealth is spent, I am in tatters, unable to control my worst impulses and falling to hubris, stupidity and shortsightedness! I cried out, "Wolf!" Why didn't you come?"

An old Frenchman tried to comfort the nation as they walked back to the village.

"We'll help you look for your lost honor in the morning," he said, putting his arm around the youth, "But you'd be well advised to remember: nobody believes a liar...even when he is telling the truth!"

December 7, 1948

By the seventh annversary of Pearl Harbor, the year 1948 had been an eventful one:

New Jersey opened the year with a shiny new State Constitution. The first color (!) newsreel showed the 1948 Tournament of Roses Parade and the Rose Bowl. The first stirrings of NATO were heard in Brussels, while in India Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse. A whole bunch of new nations turned up: Sri Lanka, Israel, South Korea, The Hells Angels were founded! President Harry Truman signed the Marshall Plan authorizing $5 billion in aid for 16 countries. The Costa Rican Civil War ended in April, while the Arab-Israeli War started in May. Public Law 557 permanently established the Civil Air Patrol as the auxiliary of the United States Air Force.Canada admitted the Newfies to the Dominion, an act they've surely regretted since.

The freakish June flood of the Columbia River wiped out the WW2 Kaiser factory town of Vanport, Oregon within minutes: 15 people died and tens of thousands were left homeless.Most of the "tens of thousands" were black, and the racial profiling and ghettoization of these people in Northeast Portland that began that 1948 summer has sickened Portland for generations.

Also in June three armed men hijacked the Cathay Pacific passenger plane Miss Macao and shot the pilot. 1 of 27 onboard survived the crash. Albert I, launched into space from White Sands, New Mexico, becomes the first Space Monkey. Also in June, a State of Emergency was declared in Malaysia for communist insurgency.

The Coptic and Ethiopian Churches reached an agreement that lead to the promotion of the Ethiopian church to the rank of an autocephalous Patriarchate. Five bishops were immediately consecrated by the Patriarch of Alexandria, and the successor to Abuna Qerellos IV was granted the power to consecrate new bishops, who were empowered to elect a new Patriarch for their church.

In July Truman began the second peacetime military draft in the United States that marked an increasingly tense Cold War. He also signed Executive Order 9981, which ended racial segregation in the United States Armed Forces. The Cleveland Indians defeated the Boston Braves to win the World Series, four games to two, the last time the Tribe would see October for 47 years and the last ever Cleveland win.China was in the last stages of the sick debilitation Kuomintang rule and the East would soon be Red. The horrors of Mao were many years to come.

Truman defeated Thomas E. Dewey and Strom Thurmond for the US presidency. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi divorced his second wife, the former Princess Fawzia of Egypt and Geoffrey B. Orbell rediscovered the Takahē, last seen 50 years ago, near Lake Te Anau, New Zealand. President Rómulo Betancourt of Venezuela was ousted by a military coup while the Calgary Stampeders defeated the Ottawa Rough Riders 12-7 to win their first Grey Cup and completed the only perfect season in Canadian Football up to that time.Ozzy Osbourne was born.

In Tokyo, an international war crimes tribunal sentenced seven Japanese military and government officials to death, including General Hideki Tojo, for their roles in World War II.

Seven years ago today Mojo and I were in bed (the first plane hit, what, something like 6:10am PDT?). Her radio alarm clock went off and she whacked the snooze bar but not before I heard something about planes and towers and I got up and went out to the living room and turned on the TV and there it was.

I sat and watched, thinking "This is got to be some kind of islamist group". I got a call from my then-friend Jeff Lillebo; I can remember shouting into the phone "This is Pearl Harbor, goddam it! Pearl Harbor!!"

I was so furious. I volunteered for Afghanistan; I wanted to find bin Laden and his people and rain my artillery on them until there wouldn't even be parts big enough to bury. I burned, I was on fire with anger at the callous waste of life.And then it all went wrong.

Missing the World's Tallest Saudi at Tora Bora and then the foolish distraction of Iraq, and the callous misuse of our power. The lies, and the spin, and the bullshit, and the crony capitalism, and the plans to use my fury, all our fury, for political gain and the enrichment and empowerment of a group of ruthless neoimperial bastards.

Seven years after Pearl Harbor we had moved on. We weren't chasing Tojo and Hirohito: they were in the dock, or reigning under our hard gaze. We weren't spending billions to fight a "Global War on Fascism". We'd been there, done that, got the T-shirt three fucking years before. Nope. We were still worried, but now we were worrying about the Red Menace and Israel and the Two Chinas and the GI Bill and the new federal highways and unionization and television and rock n' roll and teenage rebellion.



Seven years after 9/11, we're stuck in Groundhog Day and I just don't care anymore. Bin Laden has become, like the flu or like natural male enhancement, something that
cynical hucksters use to bilk the rubes. For the past two years I've posted the usual solumn reflection on the innocent people who died that day.

Fuck that.

We lost the right to parade that goddam bloody shirt when the first baby died in a mistaken bomb run over Baquoba or hapless taxi driver got sodomized at Bagram Air Base.Now we're just another Great Power on the make, another Smedley Butler racketeer using our dead and our grieving to justify our own damn greed and fear.

Fuck that. Fuck all that. Who'd have thought that we would let nineteen yay-hoos with boxcutters and screwdrivers and a bunch of panicked politicans yank a nation so far off the road of national self-interest and sanity?

Update 9/12: Paul Campos over at Lawyers, Guns and Money says everything I've said and says it better. I like his money grafs:

"Consider that for every American murdered by terrorists on September 11, 2001, fifty have been murdered by ordinary everyday made-in-America violence in the seven years since.
Consider that for every American murdered by terrorists, somewhere between 200 and 600 Iraqis have died as a direct consequence of our invasion of that country: a country which had nothing to do with 9/11, although perhaps 100 million Americans still don’t understand this -- a fact which itself is a direct and intended consequence of the Bush administration’s calculated lies.
Consider that the money spent, so far, on the invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks would be more than enough to pay off the entire mortgage of every foreclosed home in the United States.
You will hear nothing like this from any national politician today, because the Cult of 9/11 considers any criticism of its central principle to be a horrible heresy.
Instead we will get phony mourning and simulated grief, from our leaders and our media, as they continue to pretend that the events of that terrible day justify the money, and the invasions, and the torture, and the lawbreaking, and all the other very real transformations of our national life that have been undertaken in the name of our dread of a threat that, in all truth, might as well be as imaginary as the killer in a horror film."

Well. Fuck THAT.

Quondam pulvus et umbra sumus

We were once dust and shadows.

Another year. Six, now, since that morning we woke up and it seemed like the world changed.

But it didn't. And six long years later it feels like sixty, or six hundred. The pain and hot, bright anger of that morning has twisted into a gray numbness. The small days of our lives since then have muted the emotions, the lies and arrogance of our "leaders" have deflected the anger and turned our suffering into suffering for others while the guilty have fled and evaded punishment. In our rage and revenge we have become like that we hated, and have grown prematurely weary in fighting what we don't understand, even in our fighting against ourselves.

I wish we could go back to that sunny September morning and change who we became, change who "lead" us into this dismal confusion. But I can't. And now whenever this day comes around I feel old, and tired, and wish the day be done.

"...in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori."
Wilfred Owen
--
I have to add...I'm getting very tired of writing these posts every 9/11. Every year that goes by the event seems more distant, sadder, just emblematic of a hideous waste and a sickness. How do you feel about this day?

Pulvis et umbra sumus.

Now we are dust and shadow...

I remember the morning almost five years ago. Mojo was still sleeping but the alarm had gone off and I'd heard some wierd things on the radio. I stood in the bright living room in the peaceful North Portland sunlight and watched nightmare occur on live television. I called my history teacher friend and remember shouting "This is Pearl Harbor! Dammit, this is a day that will live in infamy!"

I knew what I wanted to do, and felt like I could do. I burned like flame, hot and clean and sure. All I needed was a leader to tell me how to help catch the bastards that had attacked my country and killed my countrymen.

I knew there was backstory - that the attacks didn't just happen. I knew that my country hadn't been pure of heart in its dealings with the Middle East. At that moment none of that mattered. Regardless of what had happened in the past...now it was personal. I was ready to bear any burden: to fight, to give of my time and money and whatever my country called forth from me to give, to hunt down and punish the evil bastards that planned that day.

Every anniversary since then I've felt smaller, weaker, less certain and more confused, less fierce and more helpless.

My country has asked me and my neighbors for nothing. My brothers in arms fight on long past the time it took to end the great world wars, for a nation whose concern largely begins and ends with a made-in-China plastic magnet slapped onto a piece of sheet metal and forgotten to slowly gather road grime and fade in the sun and rain.

As I watched in horror, my "leaders" used that infamous day to divide liberals from conservatives, poor from rich, republicans from totalitarians.

I have watched the symbol of that day go from a flag raised above battered firefighters...


...to a hooded man on an MRE box and Oakley-masked, hard-faced troopers patrolling between still-shattered buildings in Ramadi.



I have watched people around the world turn from us, disgusted or sickened by our willingness to use that day to excuse our most infamous actions. I have ended a career I loved rather than let my family suffer the strain of an endless "war" without a vision or a foreseeable victory.

Five years on, the smoke from the fallen towers now looks like more like a pyre of the hope, honor and pride of the "Arsenal of Democracy".

Today let us pledge ourselves not to be distracted by hubris, greed and lies from the pursuit of those who killed the thousands of innocents. Let us resolve to be ever more vigilant of our own liberty in the face of those enemies who would want us to destroy those liberties.

Let us resolve that those who died that day did not die so that lies and excuses could make our country more violent, more aggressive and more secretive, but rather, as a better American than I once said:

"It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion... — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."