A rare day for truth and it seeps out of New York City!

Today’s New York Times has a few articles that are startling in their simple handling of raw and basic truths.  The first one is here and involves the rarified atmosphere that the Pentagon and its war planners live within.  These people are fine soldiers and sailors, airmen and marines.  In fact I am sure that they are the very best at what they do in the Western World. 

The problem is that they are not members of a Roman Legion.  They have a very difficult time with this.  You will see what I mean as you read the report. Talk about out of touch!  Wow!

Here are some quotes from this short article entitled As the Commander in Chief Deliberates, Frustration Builds Within the Ranks to get your attention:

“The thunderstorm is there and it’s kind of brewing and it’s unstable and the lightning hasn’t struck, and hopefully it won’t,” said Nathaniel C. Fick, a former Marine Corps infantry officer who briefed Mr. Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and is now the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington. “I think it can probably be contained and avoided, but people are aware of the volatile brew.”

Last week the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Thomas J. Tradewell Sr., gave voice to the concerns of those in the military when he issued a terse statement criticizing Mr. Obama’s review of Afghan war strategy.

“The extremists are sensing weakness and indecision within the U.S. government, which plays into their hands,” said Mr. Tradewell’s statement on behalf of his group, which represents 1.5 million former soldiers."

Let me just lay this out.  There is a war industry in this country and it is closely allied to the security industry in this country.  They make crap up.  They lie.  They twist the facts.  They tell us black is white and up is down so that a few thousand people can make millions and millions of dollars from tax money outlays while we here in the States are suffering unofficial unemployment at roughly 18%. They are not patriots.  They are parasites.

Are these Islamist and fanatical people that want us dead dangerous?  Certainly.  Are they terrorists in any real sense?  Well let me answer that question this way.  From our point of view they are attempting to destroy us, the great American Republic, because we are everything that they hate.  They are terrorists.  We pretty much all believe that.  But are we correct?

From their point of view they are ultra-Orthodox right wing Muslims that want the Land of the Infidel to be annhilated (that is us) because Israel is our ally and we support them.  Because we are non-Muslims and do not agree with their theology.  Because we do unclean things like drink whiskey and have sex outside of marriage and have abortions and do not segregate men and women for educational and religious purposes. 

And they want us dead for other reasons. We do not have arranged marriages. Many of us are not religious and see a Diety as nonsense.  To state this simply and plainly, we are not clean in the sense that a Muslim is spiritually clean from their point of view.  We do not have the Five Pillars of Faith as they do to help us through life.  We do not see the Koran as a holy book.  We are not believers in the sense that they are believers. From their point of view, we are the spiritual version of the Walking Dead.  From their point of view we are godless and therefore forfeit all right to life.

We are less than Muslim.  That makes us a target.  But does that make them terrorists? Or does that make them violent and dangerous ultra-Orthodox Muslim Puritans? 

The difference may seem small but it is crucial. 

If they are terrorists they have no value system that we can appeal to in order to stop the violence. We have to eradicate them all to stay alive. But, if they are Puritans, we stand a chance to shame them into peace by using their own value system against them.

We simply point out that the Koran instructs them to leave us alone or they are in danger of eternal damnation.  There are parts of the Koran that would back up this assertion quite well.  The Koran says that "believers in the book" (that would Jews and Christians) have the mark of God upon them.  They are to be unmolested.  Any moderate Muslim would know this.  But so far we have left moderate Muslims out of the defense equation as far as I can see.  We do not appeal to them for help.

This is the job of the State Department to know this and to use it for our defense.

The Offense Department however has a different view. "Kill them all." That is a problem when one out of every four people on this planet is a Muslim.  The world does not hold that many bullets.  That is billions of bullets.

But once again, we have senior military officers en masse at the Pentagon showing "impatience" with the President for trying to find a lower level solution than world war to head off our problems in Western Asia. 

It is time for reality therapy to take hold at the Pentagon and at the Service Academies.  This is not the Roman Empire.  This is a federal republic.  Civilians govern here and the officer corps waits for the civilians to give them their orders. 

It is a sloppy and uneven system for any military system to accept as the norm, but it is how a democracy operates.  We do not want a fascist state here where the military is at the apex of government.  Why does the Pentagon and its sycophant war industry captains have a problem with this over and over, decade after decade?  It is driving us into the poor house.  We simply cannot afford all of this so called "security".

Here is another quote from the article:

"A military policy analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing senior Pentagon leaders, said that “the military lives in a very rarefied environment,” and that “they are not out there every day having to meet citizens who say, ‘What the hell are we doing?’ ”

Senior military officers, the analyst said, “are smart guys, but they do not have the daily pulse of the American public in their face. They tend to interpret politicians who give voice to it as being weak, but none of this works if the public gives up on it.”

Amen to that. Finally we hear the voice of reason in this Republic.

In other news, there is a piece by Bob Herbert that says it all from an economic point of view.  Trickle down economics, the favorite philosophical child of the GOP, does not work.  Just look around you.  That article is entitled Safety Nets for the Rich and it is here.

The article contains the truest words I have read from a journalist in the last thirty years.  Here they are:

"We cannot continue transferring the nation’s wealth to those at the apex of the economic pyramid — which is what we have been doing for the past three decades or so — while hoping that someday, maybe, the benefits of that transfer will trickle down in the form of steady employment and improved living standards for the many millions of families struggling to make it from day to day.

That money is never going to trickle down. It’s a fairy tale. We’re crazy to continue believing it. "

Reagan started this "trickle down" nonsense and Dubya was its most insane proponent.  Drive around your neighborhood and look at the homes in foreclosure.  Look at the people you know who are out of work or underemployed and ask yourself a question.  Were they right?  Does it work?  I do not think so either.  So what are we going to do to make up for the lost decades of the wealth transfer?

As of this moment 23% of all American wealth is controlled by less than 1% of the population. How do you feel about that?

And we do not need to be literally pushing money by the boatloads overseas in continually occuring and consistently bloated defense budgets every year so that a few thousand people in the war industries can make millions from our naive vision of our security situation. This is literally insane and must end now.

We need a defense budget in the area of about $300 billion dollars every year.  That amount of outlay can defend us just fine.  We are now approaching $660 billion dollars each year.  We are urinating away the futures of our children and grand children so that perhaps twenty thousand captains in the war and terrorist industries can make millions.  We are literally impoverishing our own families for the sake of Dick Cheney’s friends.

How do you feel about that?  Your life is spiraling down every week so that their lives can be filled with growing and bloated war and terror industry fortunes every week.  Do you get this yet?  Are you beginning to see the picture here?  Do you intend to stay silent concerning this outrage? 

That is what I thought.

In this story President Karzai of Afghanistan, the guy who just stole the election, has bowed to international pressure apparently and is willing to participate in a runoff election for a new government to be installed.  How charming.  And this guy is our ally!? 

We have Americans presently dying and killing for the sake of this guy and his government?  Are you kidding me? Can this really be happening?  This is the kind of democracy we export by force of arms? A little pondering here about what we are exporting is in order I would think.

And in this article by the Associated Press, President Obama is publicly standing firm on his original Iraq pullout date of next August (i.e. 2010).  I am more than a bit bothered that our Iraqi "pullout" leaves behind 50,000 American military advisors.  Personally I think it is political deception to call this a pullout when this many troops are staying behind.  But what the heck, what do I know?

And finally from the On This Day section of the Times we have the following quote:

"On Oct. 20, 1973, in the so-called Saturday Night Massacre, President Nixon abolished the office of special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, accepted the resignation of Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and fired Deputy Attorney General William B. Ruckelshaus."

This is a just a little window into what happens in this republic when citizens like you and I turn a blind eye to government usurpation of our powers to govern ourselves.  We must not let something like this happen again.  We must never again allow the incredibly powerful to treat all of us like the incredibly stupid.

Get informed and get involved in governing, even if it is only a weekly email to your congressman.  An informed veteran is a strength to his friends and a horror to his adversaries.  Stay informed and involved. It is our only hope to have a voice in our own government.

CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)