On superiority, reasonableness and incompetence

I received an email today, not unlike many we all are getting. It was from a former co-worker, who happens to be Jewish and who is distressed about events you-know-where.

He said,

There is never justification for any crime no matter the reason. Insanity prevails in this world and this sad incident is but one result of the hate we have for each other for perceived reasons. Muslims hate other Muslims, Muslims hate Israelis, Muslims hate Jews, Muslims and Kurds have no use for the other, Muslims and Christians are opposed, Sunnis and Shiites, and on and on. Whites and blacks...... Insanity brought on by differences and devoid of tolerance and understanding. The world and the U.S.............. GOPers and Dems, Christian right and left.

This got my mind going, and out came the following reply:

Re the first part of this, I have often wondered how the world - the buildup, the attitudes, the leaving behind of rational thought - came to such intensity in the 1930s as to turn into WWII. Of course, it also happened before WWI as well, but I know much less about that period, so I have no opinion on that. But the little I know of the 1930s is that Hitler encouraged the German people to believe that they were special, and then he fed that and fed that.

I read a great history of the 20th century that talked at length about how the Germans had no intention at all of fighting the English and French, whom they considered fellow civilized Europeans. However, they did NOT think that of the Slavs and other Eastern Europeans. These Hitler saw (and he either talked the German Volk into it or they already believed it and he simply fed it) as literally subhuman. As Jewish, you can identify with that attitude of his, I imagine. Along the way, they came up with the idea of "Lebensraum", or "living space"; the Germans needed Lebensraum, to spread out their Aryan bloodlines. The whole point here is that this was a group that saw itself as better, superior, to others.

Germany was being starved for room to grow (or at least they thought so), and all those open plains to the east - Poland, Belarus and especially the Ukraine - beckoned to them mightily. The whole purpose of invading Poland was to get to the Ukraine. Hitler's plan was to seize the lands to the east and exterminate the people who lived there, leaving it available for the German Volk to live in and to feed their nation. This was in the 1930s. They had already, at that time, come up with a plan to exterminate people they saw themselves as superior to.

The fact that all that ended up with World War II ties into what the current antagonisms may lead to.

Aside: It didn't go the way Hitler figured it would: He completely thought that he would have to fight the Soviet Russians, and pretty damned soon, as soon as he crossed over Poland. But when the English and French declared war on Germany - catching him completely by surprise. He had thought they were too big of wimps. He also didn't think that they would put themselves on the line for those inferior Slavs. Hitler adjusted to the declarations of war by the Brits and French by agreeing to a Non-Aggression Pact, so that he wouldn't have to fight a 2-front war. But after France was taken in about a month, and the collapse of the Brits that ended in the evacuation at Dunkirk, Hitler thought the western front was at least neutralized, so in the summer of 1941, he returned to the east and invaded Russia. Had it not been for the weather, he might have won that war, too.

All - ALL - of the hatreds that you talk of are connectable to one thing: A group who thinks of itself as special. The Muslims with their, "Their is no God but Allah, and his one prophet was Mohammad" are one. The Jewish people, with their belief in themselves as "The Chosen People". Sunnis with their belief that Mohammad's leadership passed to his next in line. The Shiites, with their belief that Mohammad's leadership passed to his son. (I might have those reversed.) The Americans, with their continuing belief in a Manifest Destiny, the later version of which includes the hegemony of the world. The Christians, with their beliefs that Jesus was the one and only son of God, and that his followers are special and on the brink of ascending to Heaven to be at the right hand of God in the Rapture, and that the simple existence of Israel as a nation is proof that this time period is the time for that ascending. GOoPers, with their resurrection (actually it never died in the first place) of the idea of the divine right of kings, wrapped in the disguise of "free markets", which is their mechanism for the economically powerful to devour those who are not (the followers get their thrills in this vicariously, as do fans of sports teams). The Liberals, with their belief that their logic is the only valid logic extant, and which they belabor ad infinitum, thinking that any sane person could not possibly think different (if you don't think so, tell one that global warming or ozone depletion are not actually proven science). Historical Americans, with their belief that the indigenous Americans were inferior savages, easily believed that it was their right to steal 3,000,000 square miles of real estate, and used their military to affect that thievery and their legislature to bless it as just.

Aside: Hitler (or tried, anyway) did nothing the Americans themselves didn't do a century before. Before WWII was over, Hitler's forces killed at least 8,000,000 soldiers in the East and 7,000,000 civilians, so he did manage to go a long way toward his goal. (By comparison, the U.S. total dead in the war - including the Pacific - was only 295,000.)

What do these groups all have in common? Each one sees itself and its fellow followers, as superior. That entitles them to something, they believe. For some, it is the extermination of those who don't agree with them. Thus, you get jihads, crusades, Karl Roves, Richard Nixons, Hitlers, "Trails of Tears", Manifest Destinies, pogroms, slavery, and military conflicts. It is no accident of history that in nearly all of the U.S. wars in the 20th century, and up to now, one strategy of our government was to demonize the opponent: The Kaiser, Hitler, Hirohito, Mussolini, Stalin, Khruschev, Vietnamese "gooks", Mao, David Ortega, Muammar Qadafi, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Slobodan Milosevic, Muslims in general, Kim Jong-Il . . . Were/are ALL these people or peoples actually as evil as our government has declared them to be? To my mind, it is far more likely that we have propaganda at work.

Belief in the superiority of one's viewpoint and entitlement is - IMHO - the root of all these conflicts and increasingly belligerent positions. In every one of these antagonisms, at least one side thinks it is entitled to something. I actually think it is both in all of them but I could be mistaken. America thinks it is entitled to run the world. It is convinced that it is the savior of the world. What a load of crap! The Jewish people took the land that they claim is theirs, but which had been in the possession of what we call the Palestinians since the Romans tossed the Jews out in 73 AD (the ones they didn't exterminate on the spot). Had the Jews of the time been patient, and waited for the Roman Empire to fall, they - like the rest of the Mediterranean and Europe - would have simply inherited the land. When they decided to revolt, the Romans kicked their butts. (I remember an account that when the Romans came into a district during the Jewish Wars, they killed every man, woman, child, dog, cat, donkey and cow they laid eyes on.)

Having two people claim the same land as their own is ALWAYS going to produce conflict. (And yet, I believe it can be settled!) Obviously, both of these groups thinks it is entitled to that land. So, it will go - in any given period - to the one with the biggest dick (back in 73 AD, the Romans; at present the Israelis; in the future, who knows?). But that means the other side will have an axe to grind.

Just 6 years ago, many of these antagonisms were in a calm period. All of these were being managed somewhat capably, and had been for at least a decade - some of the antagonisms for two or three decades or more.

Differences do NOT have to end in antagonisms. Reasonable and competent people can manage differences among themselves. However, in order to do so, they have to be in position to affect events. If the positions from which to affect events are denied them or are placed in the hands of unreasonable people (Hitler and Cheney come to mind) or incompetent people (Bush comes to mind), then I believe that chaos will begin to take hold and will grow as long as the situation holds that way.

Incompetence stands alone, but unreasonableness is a quality that is tied to belief systems. Those who consider themselves superior can (and IMO do) believe that they don't need to be reasonable to those they consider their inferiors. In this is what I above called the root of all these antagonisms. One is reasonable only with others one acknowledges to have more or less equal standing; inferiors are treated differently, with disdain. Look through the list of antagonists you mention, and all of them have one or both parties disdaining the opponents. Until that disdain is eliminated, no reasonableness can ensue.

In today's world, the one position that is most able to affect events, is the Presidency of the US. It could be argued that what has changed in the meantime is that the most powerful position in the world has been inhabited by an incompetent. I suggest that the following formulas are prevailing:

Political unreasonableness = political chaos
Political incompetency = political chaos
Political disdain = political chaos

I think there is no doubt that if the US Presidency was held by a reasonable and/or competent person, all if the chaos will subside, possibly even some of them will disappear. If competency came to the fore, where it could affect events, a whole panoply of possibilities becomes available; until that time, no progress can be made. If reasonableness was allowed a foothold in any of these antagonisms, the effect would be seen as miraculous. Where the world stresses reasonableness, conflict disappears. It is not a miracle; it is people respecting each other.

No reasonableness is possible as long as incompetency holds the floor. Incompetency does not have the capacity to affect events, except incoherently, and incoherence equals chaos.

We have chaos now, and we will continue to have chaos until competency steps to then fore. (That, IMO, was what Kerry's candidacy offered, but we will now never know for sure. Kerry was a very reasonable man, but his lack of courage blew his chances to bring competency and reasonableness to the world stage.)

. . . . TD

The Absolute Worst Argument for Staying the Course

Is "staying the course" even close to sanity? . . .

From the Washington Post's Jonathan Weisman and Anushka Asthana, on July 20th, there is this article:

GOP Lawmakers Edge Away From Optimism on Iraq

Faced with almost daily reports of sectarian carnage in Iraq, congressional Republicans are shifting their message on the war from speaking optimistically of progress to acknowledging the difficulty of the mission and pointing up mistakes in planning and execution.

Rep. Christopher Shays (Conn.) is using his House Government Reform subcommittee on national security to vent criticism of the White House's war strategy and new estimates of the monetary cost of the war. Rep. Gil Gutknecht (Minn.), once a strong supporter of the war, returned from Iraq this week declaring that conditions in Baghdad were far worse "than we'd been led to believe" and urging that troop withdrawals begin immediately.

And freshman Sen. John Thune (S.D.) told reporters at the National Press Club that if he were running for reelection this year, "you obviously don't embrace the president and his agenda."

"The first thing I'd do is acknowledge that there have been mistakes made," Thune said.

Rank-and file Republicans who once adamantly backed the administration on the war are moving to a two-stage new message, according to some lawmakers. First, Republicans are making it clear to constituents they do not agree with every decision the president has made on Iraq. Then they boil the argument down to two choices: staying and fighting or conceding defeat to a vicious enemy.

The shift is subtle, but Republican lawmakers acknowledge that it is no longer tenable to say the news media are ignoring the good news in Iraq and painting an unfair picture of the war. In the first half of this year, 4,338 Iraqi civilians died violent deaths, according to a new report by the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq. Last month alone, 3,149 civilians were killed -- an average of more than 100 a day.

I honestly can't remember or find the blog (probably on Dailykos or Rawstory or HuffingtonPost), who took those figures and ratioed them up to what the percentages would be in the U.S., then reflected on what would be the reaction in the U.S. if that were the case.

Check out this math: The U.S. has 300 million people, Iraq 25 million (a ratio of 12 to 1), so the numbers here would be over 1,200 a DAY in the U.S. - over 438,000 over the same period. What in the world would we do with numbers like that??!! How crazy would people be about numbers like that? Well, that is what we have brought upon Iraq.

If we had all known before taking out Saddam that it would turn into this, how many people would have supported it? How many Congressmen would have voted for this? And if they wouldn't have voted for it, why do they continue to drag their feet about getting our boys the hell out of there?

If we had an occupier being the cause of the deaths of that percentage of our people, what would we call the occupier? Stalin? Hitler? Genghis Khan? Pol Pot? Vlad the Impaler? Genocidal maniacs?

The Nazis rained terror on Europe from at least 1939 to 1945 - some would put the beginning in 1937. Using the more conservative value - 6 years - that 438,000 in Iraq would be 2,628,000 dead in 6 years, if it was the U.S. and Hitler was running things here. So, the next time you hear someone go ballistic about comparisons of the Bush regime to Hitler, there isn't much difference at all.

While the U.S. is not doing most of that killing, much of it is certainly being done because the U.S. is there. And every day we stay there, something between 25 and 100 Iraqis die. And the numbers are getting worse.

Is the occupier responsible for what goes on under their watch? If we had 400,000 deaths in a year in the U.S., or 2.6 million over 6 years, would we, the people of the U.S., assign any responsibility to our occupiers for those kinds of numbers?

Well, just think about it. Had the collaborating French government had numbers similar to those in WWII, would the Nazis have been held to a large part responsible for it?

It is not unserious speculation that we would have had Nuremburg-like courts in France, had that been the case.

...A good portion of the article goes on to discuss the merits of staying and the merits of pulling out. At least some sanity has been creeping into the thinking of some on the right, although certainly none of the sanity has as of yet resulted in any actual Congressional action (and won't for a long time to come):

The evolving Republican message on the war contrasts with the strong rhetoric used by House and Senate Republicans recently in opposing a deadline for withdrawal from Iraq. During a debate last month, Gutknecht intoned, "Members, now is not the time to go wobbly." This week, he conceded "I guess I didn't understand the situation," saying that a partial troop withdrawal now would "send a clear message to the Iraqis that the next step is up to you."

He came to that conclusion after only ONE month? Well, those quotes above might allow for him to have actually thinking himself about going "wobbly".

"If we don't take the training wheels off, we will be in the same place in six months that we're in today," he said.

Republicans and some conservative Democrats who have backed the president's call to stay the course are finding it increasingly difficult to square their generally optimistic rhetoric with the grim situation on the ground in Baghdad and other cities.

"This escalating trend . . . represents the greatest danger to Iraq as it threatens to erode the government's authority," Ashraf Qazi, the U.N. envoy to Baghdad, said in a statement. "The emerging phenomenon of Iraqis killing Iraqis on a daily basis is nothing less than a catastrophe."

But it is the nature of the violence that may be forcing Republicans and some Democrats to temper their public assertions about the war -- even as they insist that the administration cannot pull out without precipitating an even worse situation. Masked attackers wielding heavy machine guns have killed Shiite mothers and children in a market and hauled Sunnis off buses to be slaughtered in broad daylight. A suicide car bomber killed 53 Tuesday in Baghdad after he beckoned a crowd of day laborers to his explosives-laden minivan.

The same was exactly true in Viet Nam in the early 1970s, that "if we pull out, there will be chaos and mass killings." Well, there are two responses to that POV:

1. Could it get much worse than it already is?
2. If we stay, this goes on and on and on.

That last one is - to me - the bottom line: As long as we stay, it will go on and on and on.

Ergo, does anything but leaving Iraq make any sense?

YES, there will be chaos for a while. There is chaos NOW. In Viet Nam, the chaos went on for a relatively brief period, as the Communists took control rather quickly. Collaborators were identified, rounded up, and many of them were killed, while many were sent to re-education centers.

It is my humble opinion that the Iraqi collaborators with the U.S., like their brothers in arms 30 years ago, will lose to the "enemy". Many will be shot. Many will be re-educated, in one form or another. Many will leave before being caught.

But the carnage will begin to end.

"Staying the course" by the U.S. will accomplish nothing - except to get many tens of thousands more Iraqis killed than if we leave.

It reminds one of the saying, "Better off dead than Red".

Oh? Is it really?

If 400,000 Americans were being killed per year under an occupier, I wonder how many Americans would agree with an occupier whose pundits wrote, back in their home country, "Better off dead than under a democracy"?

I cannot think that there is even one piece of historical fact that staying under the current circumstances would DIMINISH the number of dead.

Staying the course is only a way of TRYING to save face.

The only question right now is this:

How long do we follow such logic before we realize it does NOT save face?

Those in the Congress who talk such talk (I won't call it blather, though I was tempted) can be forgiven their innocence.

In the Bush regime, however, they mouth that blather, not because they believe it, but because they still believe that the U.S. oil companies can control Iraqi oil. So, their agenda drives their bleatings. They cannot face up to the fact that it is a lost cause. Only time and reality can ever wake them up to that. And each day goes by is another 10,000 votes against the GOP in 2006 and 2008. So, the clock is ticking on their hopes of salvaging something from Iraq.

And in the meantime, 100 Iraqis a day DIE. And there is no indication that it will change for the better in the future. As Gutknecht said, "If we don't take the training wheels off, we will be in the same place in six months that we're in today."

And six months after that. . . . and six months after that. . . .

Appeasement - When and how does the world stand up to the U.S.?

Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.


In his latest article in the New Yorker, Last Stand - the military's problem with the President's Iran policy, Sy Hersch writes:

"Rumsfeld and Cheney are the pushers on this - they don’t want to repeat the mistake of doing too little," the government consultant with ties to Pentagon civilians told me. "The lesson they took from Iraq is that there should have been more troops on the ground" - an impossibility in Iran, because of the overextension of American forces in Iraq - "so the air war in Iran will be one of overwhelming force."

Now, how much force is "overwhelming force"?

When does "overwhelming" become genocide?

When does another invasion of aggression become more than the world can stand for?

In the late 1930s, Hitler absorbed - at the point of a gun - Austria, in the Anschluss, which was a declaration that the Germans and the Austrians were "one people", but to the world outside Berlin it was a gobbling up of one country by another in building an empire. The world was not happy, but it tucked its tail between its legs and went whimpering home. Hitler's generals and advisors almost all thought that the British and French would step in and punish Germany. Hitler was proven right, as the "Allies" sat on their hands.

After World War I's devastation, the War to End All Wars begat a peace movement the likes of which the world had never seen. Disarmament was all the rage. The western powers mistakenly believed that they had all the military that could cause any harm, and that if they melted down all their weapons the world would never see war again - at least on a large scale. Germany at the end of The War had been proscribed from raising more than a token army, so Germany was a non-entity in their thinking. Germany, to them, had no army; it had already been disarmed at the end of 1918.

Then on October, 1938, Herr Hitler reached out and touched another neighbor as he sent troops and tanks to swallow the Sudetenland whole. (It just may have mattered that the Sudetenland was the location of very sizable deposits of uranium, by the way...) What was the world's reaction that time? Appeasement. Neville Chamberlain is still seen as a coward of Biblical proportions for not standing up to Der Führer. Chamberlain had no choice, though, as the armies of the west were hollow shells (and not the artillery kind). There really was nothing they could do about it. Hitler once again trumped the west and his advisors, as he correctly surmised that the pared-down armies did not have the manpower, arsenal or will to put their foot down and make him back off. Hitler was not bluffing, but the west was. He called their bluff and they had no cards to play; therefore Chamberlain folded.

How did Hitler have the cards while they didn't? Well, he had pulled an end run on them and had raised an army in secret, training them in the recently "acquired" lands to the east, where the western powers were little capable of keeping an eye on him. Just as Prohibition drove alcohol underground and drug laws drive drug production underground, the building of the German military was done underground.

Had they called him on either maneuver, Hitler might well have backed down, but we will never know. If Hitler had never been right about the spines of the west, his followers and the world would not have been taken for the worst ride of the 20th century.

Fast forward to September 1, 1939, on the German-Polish frontier - only 11 months later. Hitler once again sees neghboring territiry that he wants for "die Volk" and in which to spread the German "Kultur". He had decided that they needed "Lebensraum" (living space), and the fertile plains of Poland, Belarus and the Ukraine beckoned. All he had to do was invade, then get rid of the less than Arian Slavs, and all would be well with the world. By this time, Hitler had determined that he had the most potent (literally and figuratively) army (and certainly air force) in the eowlrd and that no one - as it stood at that time - could hope to stop him from doing as he bloody well pleased.

Adolf had figured that west would not intervene; they had no interest in what happened in the east. Or would they?

...

As Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney and their neo-Nazi/neocon advisors stand poised to invade Iran, the sane world may have to soon make a decision, to intervene. They, also, hope to spread their culture - democracy, they claim, but in reality oligarchy and Fascism - to the far corners of the world (at least those corners whose oil they want to not lose control of). They (our sons and daughters, actually) will go in (as this article has shown they plan to do) with all their guns a-blazing, with their latterday version of the Blitzkrieg, known as 'shock and awe', to overwhelm the natives (who they will immediately label "insurgents" and "terrorists"). They are convinced that they (we) have the most powerful military in history (even as we sit bogged down in Iraq, a country of 1/3 the area and populace and 1/10th the military capacity after 12 years of UN sanctions), and that no country can withstand our carpet bombing or our high-tech guided weapons. What a horrible, horrible disaster they are bringing upon the world. And they have no idea that they - like Michael Douglas' character in the movie "Falling Down" - that they are the bad guys.

Like Hitler, Bormann, Goering, Heydrich and the lot, they are convinced that they have found the coolest toy set on the planet since walking into the WHite House that day in January, 2001, and have been enamored of it ever since. With that toy set, and its million non-toy soldiers, they are sure no one in the world will say, "This far and no more." It freed their latent bully tendencies to run rampant over the world and sanity. If I had to label them, I would call them a pack of sociopaths, with the closest group in history to them would be none other than Adolf, Goering, Dr. Goebbels, Bormann, Himmler and Heydrich. While most of us would be offended by such comparisons, something tells me they would revel in them.

...

If not when we invade Iraq, if not when we invade Iran, then when will anyone stand up to the criminals who claim to be our representatives before the world? We can yell and scream (and get our names on no-fly lists and in FBI folders), and they don't have to listen to us one whit.

A bully only knows the messages sent by knuckles smashing them in the eye socket or in their dental work. The rest of the world, combined, has the wherewithal to stop the U.S. The cost may be greater than the 50+ million ded of World War II. Europe, in particular knows how heavy a cost that is, and they are unwilling to step into that hell hole again. In the 1930s, no one in the west was willing to repeat WWI, and look at where that got them: their non-hard-headed reasonling only created a worse situation.

The question for now must be: Will they recognize the need early enough this time to stave off an even worse holocaust?

We know that they are almost to a man (sans Tony Blair) against the Bush doctrine of "Walk stupidly and carry a big Dick on your right hand". But will they ever have the will to put their collective foot down? It is doubtful. Leaders who have lived a lifetime without need of war/no war decisions are going to dodge those decision for as long as they possibly can. Ask Chamberlain about that. . .

If they do not, then the world may have many more dead than even WWII.

Let us hope not. Let us hope that someone, some military 'deciders' around the world can find a way to head the Bushies off at the pass. Ironically, it may fall to the Russians to man the majority of the army that saves us from an American President.

From the bulk of this Hersch article, it is clear that the U.S. military is trying to revolt (on OUR behalf, may I add) and trying to talk the Village Idiot and his evil twin out of becoming the first Adolf of the 21st century.

One of the unnamed four-star generals said to Hersch,

"The system is starting to sense the end of the road, and they don't want to be condemned by history. They want to be able to say, 'We stood up.' "

That general has my support, for what it is worth. . . God bless them if they can, indeed, stand up.

. . . . TD