Ted, I figure i should select this as the second of the three paragraphs
that points out an interesting set of problems - and of course I will start
here because, well, it's in the middle of my professional concerns:
'getting the scab labor out of low intensity warfare theory
implementation.'
On Thursday, November 15, 2001, at 07:56 , Ted Morgan wrote:
[..]
> As for Nicaragua, I'm not sure what the point is of citing the
> disaffection of Commandante Zero with the Sandinistas, etc. unless it
> means that the unsaintliness of the Sandinistas is for drieux (like it
> was for the US propagandists at the time) sufficient 'grounds' for a US
> operation designed to destroy the popular base of support for the
> Sandinistas through what amounts to US-generated, backed, trained, &
> supported state terror (Contras) in order to insure there be no
> 'independent development' in Central America that could spread (rapidly
> one suspects) to US-supported/trained/armed/etc. police-terror states
> like El Salvador & Guatemala that posed (in US propaganda and media like
> the NYTimes, etc.) as "fledgling democracies..." etc. etc. And of
> course, the same foreign policy framework applies to the postwar history
> of US interventions from the Middle East to ... Southeast Asia. Not just
> a tired and discredited argument, but one that threatens 3rd world
> peoples to this day.
[..]
Allow me to try an argument by analogy. Yes, it is true that I have
upgunned
this from Mac OS 9 to OS X - but this does not change the fact that to many
of my professional peers I remain a Sun Bigot, even if I like the OS X's
round
GUI - and find it an acceptable development platform for doing the code
monkey
stuff. So unlike the pietists who ran off and actually got jobs with apple.
com
the fact that I dumped my efforts to get the MicroSoft desktop almost like
an
operating systems for this Mac, did not make me a MacHead, since I had been
working with a Series of Sun Desktops before that, and simply shifted to
the
'server and desktop' approach because one can make Sun boxes headless...
hence
It sits in the lab, I sit here, and work out which is the compromise with
which.
{ Ok, so I think the itune thingie is cool, and having all of this running
over a real BSD kernel provides for the best of both worlds. }
After letting this sit for a day I think I can untangle my own 'issues'
into
the failures of the sixties to work out who was suppose to be on which
sides
of which simple sets of Bifurcations. I think that many of the 'activists'
from the period, both those trying to stop the war by winning it, and those
trying to stop the war by other means, have more in common with each other
than
they do for that 'vast silent majority' in between who still are working
out
for themselves what they did and what they should have done.
Half of what I hear from the basic kvetching about the True Believers who
should be 'in the movement' sounds amusingly enough like the problems that
occur on the other side of the fence, where there are True Believers who
can
not deal with the VVAW crowd. It's as if the world were suppose to be
cleanly
partitioned into
Anti-War and Pro-War
even if there were a bunch of WWII vets in the Anti-War movement, who had
other
issues on the plate than that war itself is immoral and gross.
In like manner there were those who were 'anti-war' in that they were not
merely
opposed to the american involvement in the vietnam operations, but were
active
supporters of the NVA/VC military operations - and actively carried
forward the
mental containment that targetting a market hamlet on market day was
'revolutionary
justice' while accidentally killing civilians was proof positive of the
whole
evil immoral american imperialism. Some were actively involved in
supporting
the Sino-Soviet Operations, and some of those were active duty members of
the
military for the good old capitalist reasons that Money Talks.
But a part of the problem is that once one moves out of the simple
bifurcation
of "Peace XOR War" into the grey shades that make up the Post WWII world,
there
is this collection of things 'technically' referred to as 'low intensity
warfare
theory' - that covers the twilight world between the two theoretical
extremes. The
big ugly is that this 'grey zone' was as much a bone of contention inside
the
military as outside. We can go through the whole thing about Special Forces
and Marine CAP and... over and against Westmoreland's Big Battalion Sweep
models
over and against the SEAL/LRRP/SOG players - and on a good day we can
decide
if the CIA's directorate of operations should be considered an active
player
in this space.....
But then again, as most folks are learning, while it was COOOOOL to have a
Che Gueverra Poster up in the old college Dorm, and Yes, he did finally get
back to Cuba and a Heroes Funeral, there are those inside the Castro
Organization
who considered him an Egotistical Zealot.
So the simple fact that as an egotistical pedantic, it is obvious to me,
that
the rhetoric of 'Total War' went south with the soviets getting their first
operational nuke, since we were at that point on the fast track race to the
actual ability to KILL THE PLANET - this did not take away the basic
problem
that there have always been 'limited wars' - Realistically the american
involvement in WWII got no where near the level that the Russians threw
into
it - so while it is culturally cool to think of WWII as 'the last good war'
and hence that majikally all we need to do to 'win the war in vietnam' was
to majikally shift to 'total war' - is the naivete of those who do not
spend
time with Professional WarMongers. There are many jokes about SAC's motto,
"Peace is our Profession, the killing we just do for fun..." but
realistically
they understand that if we step up, and the radio asserts:
"I authenticate...."
that most of the world will understand why Dr. Strangelove had to be
written
as such an absurdist film, the alternatives are more than impolite.
We likewise have the problem that the Kennedy Brothers sorta got it, as
they
worked out their new diplomatic language in the middle of the Missiles of
October - and we have been trying to figure out how that game plays -
especially
now that the age of detente has transmogrified itself into the ambiguity of
the multi-polarist dialogs.
But this leads to the problem that there ISN'T the simplistic detachment
that
allows for
Military Operations Here, Beyond this Is Diplomacy
if anything those of us from the WarMonger side of the line can live in the
blithe naivete of our simple booleans, 'The living and the dead', that is
clearly not grey enough to allow the obligatory diplomatic solutions to
meander in the midst. Except of course for the minor problem that we all
have party apparachniki who will bring along their opinions to the process.
So yes, I had a sense of professional respect for Commandante Zero, and his
decision to bail on the Sandindista's did play into the process of
re-evaluating
how 'free of Moskva' the movement really was. And yes, it was a bit
messier in
the post vietnam era, what with Cuban Draftee's doing combat patrols in
Angola
under the avowed marxist regime fighting the CIA backed Freedom
Fighters... But
I do not recall that anyone was out in the streets calling for Cuba to end
its
draft and bring its boys back home. Even if the CORE freaks didn't get it
when
Mugabe sent Ian Smith on a good will tour after the Rhodesian War ended and
the state of Zimbabwe needed to maintain good relations with the West...
But in
the current light of the parlimentarian crisis there, perchance the
Congress
on Racial Equality was perchance right, that the Zimbabwean State was still
going to be racists..... perchance not the way that they had meant it.
It wouldn't be till the late eighties that we would learn that MI-6 had
queered
the bets, by turning over the Tudeh, Communist Party, in Teheran to the
Mullahs,
while we all had made book on Tudeh to win in the wake of the fall of the
Shah.
Oh well, some people just forget how to play cricket.
As for 'threatening third world people' - I think a part of the big ugly of
the nineties was the vaccuum - since we were cutting back on funding over
seas operations, since RedHorde&Co. had bailed on their half of the cold
war.
We funded destabilizing the Soviet Puppet Regime in Kabul and then backed
away from offering any sort of support for transitioning that country to a
market economy that could be integrated back into the global economy. We
still
have not sorted out what the war on narco-terrorism is/was/should be - and
as
such have left many people in the third world at risk to the drug crazed
freaks
in the 1st world who can afford to be trendy. One wonders how many of
those SoHo
fashion heads who gave heroin a second chance now get to wonder in public
about
the small technical that they were funding the same folks who came back at
them
on 9/11....
I'll admit it! No questions asked. My analysis of Glasnost/Peristroika and
the force deployment patterns said:
"Hey drieux, we gotta get a real gig, these folks are gonna
cheeseball."
So i bailed, went back to college to get the CompSci Degree, wound up
divorced
and trying to make a living here in SillyKonWalley, trying to distance
myself
from the wonderland background of spooks and spies. I was, quite literally,
FREAKED to find out just a few months ago how far out of it I was when
friends
sent me the URL for the new AN-100 series. And all I could do was laugh
about
them finally 'getting it' about 'backward compatibility' and market forces,
since that new family, is not only Ergometric, but comes in your choice of
the NATO 5.56mm, 5.45 Soviet AK-74 round, and the Venerable M1943 7.62x39!
So while I originally intended to rant about the civilianParasites of both
the left and the right - those who enjoy playing at being revolutionaries
and/or Freedom Fighters without taking the time to become actually
technically
proficient in the art - I guess upon reflection, who knows, they may have
had more fun at their pretend games.
I'm sure I have ranted about the sheer madness of 'band aid' raising money
to save the starving in Ethiopia, while the marxist regime had blown a
comparable amount of money on rebuilding their armoured formations after
the botch up of the Ogaden War - and the sheer amusement that the Eritrean
Liberation Front had transitioned from being a Red Terrorist Organization
to being the paid puppets of the Saudi House.... But maybe the real
solution
is finding a way to end the need for Bosnian Resistance Fighters Providing
Covering Fire so that their families can get water from the only remaining
tap that is under constant Serbian Sniper Fire. Maybe in some way that will
not oblige the nice folks in america to get too upset about the fact that
wars are still impolite processes.
Who knows, Bush Campaigned on getting us out of 'Nation Building' and then
true to his staunch anti-war draft dodging tradition, up and didn't call up
the selective service boards to provide the Leg Infantry... And it looks
like he's about to gut our National Strategic Nuclear Arsenal to a mere
third of its current warhead count... We will just have to see what comes
of all of this - why who knows, he might just disband the Selective Service
Registration Process as a 'diplomatic message' that we are stepping away
from 'military first' approaches to getting other nations to the cease fire
agreements that will toss the whole process back into 'all politics is
local'.
Who knows, americans might just notice that there are actual countries and
other cultures out there, beyond the mere tourist brochures.
With any luck, my son will never have to decide that he has to shift the
way he wears his cellphone and pager, since, the load rides too close to
how one does it if one has to worry about getting that second magazine up
and reloaded quickly. Maybe my daughter will not have to know why we always
used the modified weaver stance.
Maybe this time, 'the war stops with me.'
ciao
drieux
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sun Nov 18 2001 - 21:43:49 EST