| breecher@lycos.com 2006-12-27, 9:25 am |
| On Sun, 24 Dec 2006 22:01:26 GMT, jazzerciser@hotmail.com (-) wrote:
>
>http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed116.html
>
>
>Addendum to Clausewitz
>by Fred Reed
>
>
>DIGG THIS
>
>
>It's all but official: The war in Iraq is lost. Report after leaked
>report says so. Everybody in Washington knows it except that
>draft-dodging ferret in the White House. Politicians scurry to avoid
>the blame. One day soon people will ask aloud: How did we let 3000 GIs
>die for the weak ego of a pampered liar and his desperate need to
>prove he's half the man his father was?
>
>The troops from now on will die for a war that they already know is
>over. They are dying for politicians. They are dying for nothing. By
>now they must know it. It happened to us, too, long ago.
>
>The talk among pols now is about finding an "exit strategy." This
>means a way of pulling out without risking too many seats in Congress.
>Screw the troops. We must look to the elections. Do we really want an
>exit strategy? A friend of mine, with two tours in heavy combat in
>another war, has devised a splendid exit strategy. It consists of five
>words: "OK. On the plane. Now." Bring your toothbrush. Everything else
>stays. We're outa here.
>
>It is a workable exit strategy, one with teeth, and comprehensible to
>all. But we won't use it. We will continue killing our men,
>calculatedly, cynically, for the benefit of politicians. The important
>thing, you see, is the place in history of Bush Puppy. Screw the troops.
>
>Face it. The soldiers are being used. They are being suckered. This
>isn't new. It happened to my generation. Long after we knew that the
>war in Vietnam was lost, Lyndon Johnson kept it going to fertilize his
>vanity, and then Nixon spoke of the need to "save face"-at two hundred
>dead GIs a week. But of course Johnson and Nixon weren't among the
>dead, or among the GIs.
>
>I saw an interview on television long ago in which the reporter asked
>an infantryman near Danang, I think, what he thought of Nixon's plan
>to save face. "His face, our XXX," was the reply. Just so, then, and
>just so now. Screw the troops. What the hell, they breed fast in
>Kansas anyway.
>
>Soldiers are succinct and do not mince words. This makes them
>dangerous. We must keep them off-camera to the extent possible. A GI
>telling the truth could set recruiting back by years.
>
>The truth is that the government doesn't care about its soldiers, and
>never has. If you think I am being unduly harsh, read the Washington
>Post. You will find story after story saying that the Democrats don't
>want to do anything drastic about the war. They fear seeming "soft on
>national security." In other words, they care more about their
>electoral prospects in 2008 than they do about the lives of GIs. It's
>no secret. For them it is a matter of tuning the spin, of covering
>tracks, of calculating the vector sum of the ardent-patriot vote which
>may be cooling, deciding which way the liberal wind blows, and staying
>poised to seem to have supported whoever wins. Screw the troops. Their
>fathers probably work in factories anyway.
>
>Soldiers do not realize, until too late, the contempt in which they
>are held by their betters. Here is the psychological foundation of the
>hobbyist wars of bus-station presidents. If you are, say, a Lance
>Corporal in some miserable region of Iraq, I have a question for you:
>Would your commanding general let you date his daughter? I spent my
>high-school years on a naval base, Dahlgren Naval Proving Ground as it
>was then called. Dahlgren was heavy with officers, scientists, and
>engineers. Their daughters, my classmates, were not allowed to
>associate with sailors. Oh yes, we honor our fighting men. We hold
>them in endless respect. Yes we do.
>
>For that matter, Lance Corporal, ask how many members of Congress have
>even served, much less been in combat. Ask how many have children in
>the armed services. Look around you. Do you see many (any) guys from
>Harvard? Yale? MIT? Cornell? Exactly. The smart, the well-off, the
>powerful are not about to risk their irreplaceable sit-parts in
>combat. Nor are they going to mix with mere high-school graduates,
>with kids from small towns in Tennessee, with blue-collar riffraff who
>bowl and drink Bud at places with names like Lenny's Rib Room. One
>simply doesn't. One has standards.
>
>You are being suckered, gang, just as we were.
>
>It is a science. The government hires slick PR firms and ad agencies
>in New York. These study what things make a young stud want to be A
>Soldier: a desire to prove himself, to get laid in foreign places, a
>craving for adventure, a desire to feel part of something big and
>powerful and respected, what have you. They know exactly what they are
>doing. They craft phrases, "Be a Man Among Men," or "A Few Good Men,"
>or, since girls don't like those two, "The Few, The Proud." Join up
>and be Superman.
>
>Then comes the calculated psychological conditioning. There is for
>example the sense of power and unity that comes of running to cadence
>with a platoon of other guys, thump, thump, thump, all shouting to the
>heady rhythm of boots, "If I die on the Russian front, bury me with a
>Russian c__t, Lef-rye-lef-rye-lef-rye-lef..." That was Parris Island,
>August of '66, and doubtless they say something else now, but the
>principle is the same.
>
>And so you come out in splendid physical shape and feeling no end
>manly and they tell you how noble it is to Fight for Your Country.
>This might be true if anyone were invading the country. But since
>Washington always invades somebody else, you are actually fighting for
>Big Oil, or Israel, or the defense industry, or the sexual ambiguities
>who staff National Review, or the vanity of that moral dwarf on
>Pennsylvania Avenue. You will figure this out years later.
>
>Once you are in the war, you can't get out. We couldn't either. While
>your commander in chief eats steak in the White House and talks tough,
>just like a real president, you kill people you have no reason to
>kill, about whom you know next to nothing-which one day may weigh on
>your conscience. It does with a lot of guys, but that comes later.
>
>You are being suckered, and so are the social classes that supply the
>military. Note that the Pentagon cracks down hard on troops who say
>the wrong things online, that the White House won't allow coffins to
>be photographed, that the networks never give soldiers a chance to
>talk unedited about what is happening. Oh no. It is crucial to keep
>morale up among the rubes. You are the rubes. So, once, were we.
>
>
>
>
>
>December 18, 2006
>
>Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well
>and the just-published A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be.
>
>2006 Fred Reed
And the political hacks in Washington DC refuse to seal our borders
against the flow of illegal aliens.
Max
>
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