America Started as a Protest

Chicago Police, 1968

By Alan Caruba

So I am watching the police in Portland, Oregon drive the Occupy protesters from some area they choose, tearing down the makeshift living quarters, tossing the signs onto a pile to be carted off. All across America mayors have decided that the pattern of disease, crime, and uncivil behavior has lost its charm. “They’ve had enough time to make their point,” said one.

Most of us are still trying to figure out what the Occupy protests were all about. There was a lot of whining about having to actually pay back a college loan, a general unhappiness with banks, but it was both leaderless and unfocused. A protest just to have a protest.

“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times” said the narrator of A Tale of Two Cities, but it is always the best and worst of times, depending on whether you are old or young, have a roof over your head, and most of all a means to earn a living. Interesting phrase, “earn a living.” Pull it inside out and it says that life is not free. No matter what you want, there’s a price on it. It’s called the free market. Or taxes. Or both.

In my seventy-plus years, I suspect there was always a protest going on somewhere in America. Indeed, if you think about it, America started as a protest. “No taxation without representation.” The Revolution was six long years of protest, interspersed by a number of battles from Bunker Hill to Yorktown.

One year in particular stands out for its protests, 1968. I had just entered my 30s. My Army service was well behind me and I had no concerns about being called up to go to Vietnam, but that war was raging in 1968 and so were the protests against it.

On a parallel track the Civil Rights movement, despite the passage in 1964 of federal laws, was still going strong and had been joined by a feminist movement and a nascent gay rights movement. It was hard to keep track of who was protesting what, but in1968 they all seemed to come together during the Democratic Party convention in Chicago and that turned into a police riot against the protesters.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Occupy Wall Street has gotten is measure of media coverage, but in 1968 people were talking about Resurrection City, a protest to demand attention on behalf of the rural and urban poor. A shantytown was put up parallel to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It was organized by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In April, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis. The Resurrection City protest was all but over when, in May, rain of biblical proportions turned it into a slum, a very muddy one at that.

As the nation grieved Dr. King’s assassination and in the wake of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s announcement that he would not run for the office again, Kennedy’s brother, Robert, entered the race in mid-March. On June 4, after celebrating a primary win in California, a Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan shot him in the hotel’s kitchen. He died twenty-six hours later on June 6. Barely two months had passed since Dr. King’s death.

On August 26, the Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago. It would nominate Hubert H. Humphrey, LBJ’s Vice President as its candidate. The battles with anti-war protesters in Lincoln Park and a few nights later in Grant Park were the real news.

In November 1968, Richard M. Nixon, a Republican, was elected President. How close was it? Nixon received 43.4 percent of the popular vote. Humphrey won 42.7 percent. An independent candidate, a racist Alabama Governor named George Wallace, received 13.5 percent.

As 1968 wound down, Douglas Engelbart and fellow researchers at Stanford University announced the invention of the world’s first word processor that included something called “a mouse.” Elvis Presley made a comeback with a TV special on NBC. On December 24th, the crew of Apollo 8 sent back the first images of Earthrise and read from the book of Genesis.

There were 549,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam as 1968 came to an end. Nearly 17,000 had been killed in action that year.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The News from Iraq (as Usual) is Bad

By Alan Caruba

In the 1960s and throughout the 1970s it seemed that all I read or heard every day was about Vietnam. It dominated the news as its forces took on the colonial French in an effort to liberate the nation. The effort was led by Ho Chi Minh, a man who would have been regarded as a patriot had he not been a communist.

Ho was determined to unite both northern and southern Vietnam and, if he had to fight the French and take on the United States, so be it. You could have asked just about every general in the Pentagon if getting involved in a war there was a good idea and the only one who would have thought so would have been Gen. William Westmoreland who was willing to fight until the last dead American. Going to war in Asia is always a bad idea.

The problem at the time was the “domino theory” that said that a loss of any nation in Southeast Asia meant all the others would go communist as well. The result was that the U.S. lost the war and it would be a long time before it regained its fighting spirit. By then, the Draft was history and we had an all-volunteer military.

Vietnam slipped from the news pages and we began to read a lot about Iran after our diplomats were taken hostage in 1979 during the course of what would be called the Islamic revolution there. Bordering Iran is Iraq and it was the satrapy of Saddam Hussein, the local dictator. Iraq sat atop a lot of oil that generated a lot of money, but Saddam wanted more. He invaded Iran to grab off some oil fields. At the time, the U.S. was his ally. The war became an eight-year stalemate.

We stopped being his ally when he invaded Kuwait in 1990. President George H.W. Bush put together a coalition that drove him out in 1991.Then came September 11, 2001 and this time it was George W. Bush in office. After driving the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, Bush43 and his neocons turned their attention to Saddam Hussein. Largely unmentioned in the war that followed was the very long border Iraq shares with the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, a presumptive ally. The rest, as they say, is history.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a great success militarily, but a total disaster from the point of view of having no plans and not enough troops to deal with the chaos that almost immediately followed. Typical of the Middle East, everything is about one’s tribal and/or religious affiliation. When you add in the vast oil revenues at stake, the Shiites were soon fighting the Sunnis and the Kurds were fighting anyone trying to take over their province. It was a classic SNAFU, everything was FUBAR.

Bush43 finally put enough troops into Iraq to assert control, but the politics of the place is like herding cats or sticking your hand into a basket of snakes. That’s why headlines such as the one in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, “Iraq Factions Spar Over Security Force” are, no pun intended, the writing on the wall.

I can’t think of many Americans who want to stay in Iraq as a military occupying force and you can include me. President Barack Hussein Obama made getting out of Iraq a 2008 campaign theme and we are, in 2011, getting out.



Nouri al-Maliki

 And that’s the problem. Without the U.S. as a stabilizing, balancing force, Iraq is just going to go to hell. Yes, they have had elections there and a parliament, but Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is also running the ministries of defense, interior, and national security. Somewhere in Hell, Saddam Hussein is laughing…a lot.

For those who have not been paying attention, there is NO democracy in the Middle East; at least not the kind that doesn’t need an army and police to make sure the people don’t get restive.

When they do, as in the case of Egypt, the current dictator is deposed or in Libya he is chased, found, and then shot in the head. In Tunisia the dictator was forced to flee, while in places like the Sudan and Yemen, chaos reigns. In Syria, the dictator is busy killing protesters in the streets.

The odds that Iraq will devolve either into a dictatorship or break apart in some fashion or be run as a puppet state of Iran are very good.

The odds that we and/or the Israelis are going to turn parts of Iran into giant craters are also very good.

Sometimes you fight a war and discover the effort was a huge waste of money, men, and time. Curiously, they always seem to be a good idea at the time.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Football (and War) is about Winning

By Alan Caruba

The film, “Patton”, opens with George C. Scott giving an abbreviated version of General George Patton’s actual speech to the men of the Third Army on the eve of D-Day.

Today’s wars apparently require a different kind of general; one who gets combat ribbons for testifying before Congress and giving press conferences. They could win wars if the pukes in Washington would let them annihilate the enemy.

Patton’s actual speech was laced with profanity of the kind any man who has spent time in the Army or other branches of the service understood. Patton began by saying “Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle.”

“When you, here, every one of you, were kids, you all admired the champion marble player, the fastest runner, the toughest boxer, the big league ball players, and the All-American football players. Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards.”

The late comedian George Carlin had a routine in which he compared baseball to football. In baseball, he said, you play “in a park.” In football, you play in a stadium “on a grid.” Carlin knew that football is as much about war as it is about winning. The very image of a football player is a large, intimidating man clad in body armor.

The Superbowl is a clash of titans, men who have fought for every inch and every point until the whistle blows and the game is ended. We don’t go to the games or tune in on television to watch women play football.

We don’t want women analyzing the game afterward. We don’t even like seeing them interview the players on the sidelines. We do like the cheerleaders in their skimpy outfits. That’s the only place for a woman anywhere near the field.

Vietnam War veterans will tell you they were winning in the field and they were. The problem was that we had been in Vietnam for seven years by the time the politicians, yielding to a weary public, pulled the plug.

Fifty thousand-plus lives were lost, mostly due to a lack of resolve. Out of Vietnam came the doctrine enunciated by Colin Powell who had fought there and rose to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He said America must only go to war with overwhelming numbers and force.

That was applied in the first Iraqi war (1990-91) called Desert Storm and it worked. George H.W. Bush, probably because of pressure from Middle Eastern allies, stopped well short of going into Baghdad. It was left to George W. Bush to do, aided by our British and Canadian allies.

On March 20, 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom commenced. U.S. forces arrived in Baghdad with too few troops to control the crowds and with no plan beyond finding Saddam Hussein. What followed was yet another long, meandering war without an end date though combat has ended.

This has been repeated in Afghanistan. How long have we been there? Can anyone remember? Have we “won”? Is it, by any definition winnable?

Throughout the 2008 campaign, Obama, carped about Iraq and called Afghanistan the real war. As president he increased the number of troops in Afghanistan and it is still a stalemate.

We have troops in Korea, in Japan, in Germany. Even when we “win” we never leave. When not killing the enemy, we build schools and clinics. For this we get little thanks and no respect.

“Americans play to win all of the time,” said Patton. Well, we used to. Our victories since the end of World War Two have ended in stalemates. It’s not that we lack the capacity to win decisively and impose our will on our enemies; it’s that we lack the will to do so.

Unlike the Superbowl where millions tuned in to watch, I doubt you have seen any coverage of the war in Afghanistan in a long time. After a year, the Iraqis have managed to cobble together something they call a government.

We have two carrier groups parked off the coast of Iran and the Iranians have recently announced they are going to put some warships through the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean off the coast of Israel.

“Sure we want to go home,” Patton told his men. “We want this war over with. The quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards that started it.”

Good advice then. Good advice now.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Exiting Afghanistan

By Alan Caruba

Like others of my generation who lived through the Vietnam War, it was at the time the longest war that America ever fought. Now the longest war is the one in Afghanistan that began on October 7, 2001.

The Vietnam War began for the U.S. in 1963 when 2,000 military “advisors” were sent to aid the South Vietnamese government that had been established when the North and South was divided. In 1956, with U.S. support the South refused to hold reunification elections and a civil war ensued with the Communist North, beginning in 1958.

Suffice to say the South Vietnamese government was corrupt. It was a civil war and Lyndon B. Johnson’s intervention vastly expanded it in 1965. Along with the war, he launched his “War on Poverty” that would cost billions and achieve little except to expand the welfare state..

The public outcry against the war increased along with the casualties. It forced LBJ to forego running for a second term. From 1968 to 1973, efforts were made to end the war through diplomacy until in January 1973, during the Nixon administration, an agreement was reached. In April 1975, South Vietnam surrendered, thus uniting the North and South.

For ten years it seemed as if the war would never end. It tore the nation apart. Along with a lot of Americans I opposed the war. From the standpoint of the White House the war was seen as part of the larger Cold War but internally they were loath to admit that the U.S. military was not winning the war. These days the U.S. enjoys a robust diplomatic and economic relationship with Vietnam.

Following 9/11, the U.S. sent troops to Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. We are still there and the war, as noted, has become the longest in our nation’s history. After driving out the Taliban, we should have left, but we stayed on, supporting a corrupt government that Afghans do not trust. Presently, there are about 100,000 U.S. troops there, a significant military commitment.

The war in Afghanistan, according to Richard N. Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Affairs, is costing U.S. taxpayers between $100 billion and $125 billion a year. In 2010, the New York Times reports that U.S. troops experienced the highest combat casualties yet in the war; more than 430 service members died. Nearly 5,500 were wounded in action, more than double the total of 2,415 in 2009.

It is long past due for the U.S. to leave. It is a lesson the Russians learned after they invaded Afghanistan in 1979. It took ten years before they withdrew in defeat. The Afghans didn’t want them there and they do not want the U.S. there. We will leave and the only question is when.

The problem for America and the rest of the world is a Middle East in the grip of Islam, a religion that opposes Western values and modernization. It will remain in turmoil for the foreseeable future and it will have to be resolved by the people of its nations.

Isolating Islam from the governance of those nations and the maintenance of democratically elected governments must ultimately be secured by those in Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and the most tribal of these nations, Afghanistan.

In Pakistan today there is a significant debate over whether a Western-style government can prevail in the face of the barbarism of the Taliban and the threat of al Qaeda whose way of governance is through murder and terror. The Pakistani middle class knows what is at stake.

The presence of American and allied troops in Afghanistan and Iraq only exacerbates the prospect of progress toward a stable Middle East, a process that may well take decades or longer. Meanwhile, we are draining the treasury of the United States and spilling the blood of our troops.

Leaving Afghanistan will change little in a nation that has successfully resisted invaders for centuries. Meanwhile, the U.S. is in the process of drawing down troops in Iraq where we have set in motion the first steps toward a modern nation freed of its demonic dictator, Saddam Hussein.

There is much to be done to save America from its present financial crisis. Not spending billions in far-off lands is a good step toward achieving that.

© Alan Caruba, 2011