If America Really Cared

If America really cared about its military veterans, it would insist that every member of the military be paid a living wage, and no military families would need food stamps or food banks to eat.

If America really cared about its military veterans, it would insist that the full range of medical care and health care be made available, quickly and at little or no cost.

If America really cared about its military veterans, it would insist that veterans receive training and jobs commensurate with their military responsibilities.

If America really cared about its military veterans, it would not knowingly elect leaders who will sacrifice the lives and limbs and mental health of military personnel by sending them to fight less than necessary wars, prosecuted primarily for ego, reputation and to enrich the few.  And it would use lawful means to get rid of such leaders whenever and however they arise.

War and the American Electorate

Before the State of the Union and its focus on the economy, I wanted to say something about foreign policy issues, and particularly the issue of war and peace.  The GOPer debates are showing clearly that their candidates (except for Ron St. Paul) are clueless Cheny clones, pandering to a delusional and perhaps illusional base.  The candidates' generally warmongering attitudes could very well plunge the world into more wars, even nuclear wars, while bankrupting the country in the process.

That's the good news.

Because part of their cluelessness is totally misreading the majority of American voters, who are clearly sick of stupid wars and all their costs.  Barack Obama won the presidency largely on his promise to end the war in Iraq.  He ended the war in Iraq, and that's going to be a major reason he will win reelection.

The GOP candidates arguments are the same as the Cheneyites, except cruder, if that's possible.  But this time the counter-arguments are going to be made by the real President and the real Secretary of State, with solid foreign policy accomplishments, including one that has to be obvious even to the generally uninterested voter: they got rid of Osama bin Laden and crippled al Queda and its ability to harm this country or its citizens.  Less obvious--though just as ignored by the GOPer candidates whose only possible tactic is lying, which they do regularly--is the success so far of U.S. strategy on Iran.  It's still a dangerous situation, but efforts short of war now underway are effective.  A little demonstration of that, and it will bolster the public's clear opposition to engaging in another war.

The Obama administration hasn't been perfect.  They haven't succeeded in closing Guantanamo, and it remains a stain and a scandal and a moral tragedy. Many of the excesses of the Patriot Act and so-called anti-terrorism tactics that violate civil rights, human rights and any civilized conscience, still remain.  But it's interesting that a journalist has chronicled President Obama's relationship with the military hierarchy, a story of progress resulting in reasserting civilian control after eight years of abuse.  Other parts of the bureaucracy have changed slowly and unevenly to match actions with the goals and principles the Obama administration brought with them.  I have high hopes for real progress on all these matters in a second term.

In a way it is similar to another story--by Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker-- which purports to follow President Obama's learning curve on the limitations of presidential power.  As a student of history, I doubt he was entirely surprised by either the power of the generals or the lack of presidential power, although it's likely that the lessons are a lot more impressive in reality.  But at least in the abstract, I understood these as a teenager avidly following the Kennedy administration.

 Newsmagazines followed JFK's disenchantment with the generals after the Bay of Pigs, and his amazement at their Doctor Strangelove-like advice during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Between the two he learned to trust his own judgment and assert his control.

In end of the year interviews--I think even after the first year, and certainly the second--he stressed the limitations of presidential power.  It was a theme of two popular political books of the time, which I eagerly read, naturally, and still have: Presidental Power  by Richard E. Neustadt and Decision-Making in the White House by his own long-time advisor and presidential assistant, Theodore Sorensen.  (Since Sorensen also supported Obama and they met, I'd assume he knows of this book.)

 Yet it was after understanding these limitations (and successfully defying the generals in the Cuban Missile Crisis), that JFK engineered his two boldest initiatives: the successful effort to get the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed and ratified, and introducing the Civil Rights legislation that became the basis for the historic laws passed after his assassination.  Both changed America and American politics.

So there are two points here, I suppose: President Obama will be an even better President in the next four years, having learned what he learned in the first four.  That's not unusual, but in our times, it could be very important for the country and the world.

But the point I started with is this: Americans are for all intents and purposes anti-war.  If the economy offers some hope, President Obama will be re-elected simply on the strength of his record in ending the war in Iraq, winding down the war in Afghanistan, and his largely successful efforts to achieve justifiable American goals without the bluster and bullying and especially the whine of bullets.   GOPer candidates are on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of the electorate on this.

Militaryness

I admit to being (pleasantly) surprised that the media played the Rolling Stone revelations primarily as the failures of General McBeermouth rather than embarrassing comments about the Obama administration. But while President Obama's strong action and the strong statement that accompanied it have ended a crisis and boosted his image as a leader, those comments are eventually going to provide new fodder for the Rabid Right and their insurrectionist hysteria. Until now their insanity was focused on domestic delusions (and climate, or as they would put it, weather.) Those comments provide opportunity to revive the Dem image of being incompetent on military matters. For them it will be another reason this guy should be overthrown.

This business also focused attention on the Afghanistan war. I don't support it, but I support President Obama's plan to bring it to a conclusion by 2011. He didn't start it, but he has to end it. The immense amount of money it costs as well as the attention that should be placed on more important matters, not to mention the morality of it all, means to me that it must be ended on schedule, if not sooner.

Only the Rabid Right would now think that's a radical position. But then they can't be too happy either about the most effective TV ads now running that promote clean energy--a brilliant series sponsored by VoteVets.org.

The Hypocritical Oath

There's a war on Americans that has killed twice as many U.S. veterans in one year as were killed in Afghanistan since 2001. It's the war against universal health care.

A new Harvard Medical study finds that 2,200 vets under the age of 65 died last year because they didn't have health insurance.

This is only one item in the scandalous treatment of veterans. I'm not going to join in all the hyperbole about soldiers that's customary on Veterans Day. The military is not the only way to serve and protect, and heroism used to mean something more than the pious name given to every member. But the hypocrisy of a country that doesn't take care of its veterans, that skimps on care and allows huge loopholes in coverage, is simply disgusting.

But this is a specific instance of the war against universal health care now being waged, which even victimizes the veterans that the hypocritical patriot mouths will praise today. It's a war on the many--especially the least powerful--by the very powerful few, as most wars are.

It's a war that has already watered down even the strongest health care reform proposals currently being considered. But former President Clinton is right--something is better than nothing. If universal health care had become law in 1997, those veterans would not be casualities of this war, nor would the estimated 45,000 Americans who die each year because they have no health care coverage. And as baskeball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said Tuesday, as he revealed his serious medical condition that fortunately he can afford to have addressed, "It’s a just and noble cause to make health care available to everyone."

Veterans Day 2008

President-elect Barack Obama with Tammy Duckworth, Iraq war vet and double amputee, currently Secretary for Veterans Affairs in Illinois.

Are We Fit To Live?

If you really take it all in, the news most days tells you that the human species is not fit to live. What we've done with our power is scandalous to the extreme. We destroy the planet that sustains us. We destroy the habitat and the lives of the life that also sustains us, and the creatures that are our only known companions in the universe. And we destroy each other--we kill and maim strangers, and we kill and maim members of our own communities, and those entrusted to our care.

We look at Darfur and elsewhere in Africa, in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, and anywhere there is cruel violence and great poverty, disease and lots of guns, and the only reactions possible begin with horror and shame. But we in the U.S. don't any longer have to look that far. Apart from the normal neglect of the poor and physically and mentally ill, and besides what our firepower is doing elsewhere, we can look to our torture camps, our prisons and our own armed forces, just for starters.

Today we see what one man has endured, with hardly a peep from his community, or another man treated perhaps with less violence but with the kind of injustice that should not be tolerated in this nation. (Both of these links are to Glenn Greenwald's excellent blog, but they in turn link to the appropriate New York Times reportage.)

This violence--and there is no other name for it--extends to our own. Today's NPR report is the latest to highlight the scandal of how the U.S. military treats its own--specifically in this case, those with mental and emotional trauma caused by the warring that the military sends them to do. But the U.S. military and U.S. government shirking their responsibilities to soldiers in the most cynical ways is even more widespread than this. Substandard medical care, and the refusal to even give that; using every pretext and gimmick and trick to deny veterans their benefits; the failure to take care of soldiers' families, and on and on.

The denial of mental and emotional trauma benefits is part of the denial of mental and emotional trauma, which is part of the lie of military service: because they are afraid that if the true cost is known, they will have fewer bodies to throw into battle. Yet it has been clear for a hundred years that virtually noone who has been in battle or even in the armed services escapes some mental and emotional consequences.

And why do authorities get away with torture under any other name? How could so many people be held and subjected to torture without charge or trial for so long, without journalists clamoring for facts and the community clamoring for the truth? It's the denial that is the cold part of war fever.

War Fever--it is expressed in so many ways, actively when bloodlust takes over, passively when flagwavers get a thrill regardless of consequences, and darkly threaten anyone who isn't feverish, who asks questions. We've known about War Fever since before Shakespeare--that's part of what "let loose the dogs of war" means--and yet it comes upon a society in the 21st century as if brand new.

What must we do to deserve to live as a society, as civilization, as a species? We have to get better. To do that, we must first of all believe that we can get better. We aren't fated by human nature or selfish genes or any other propaganda that soothes our conscience while it promotes the interests of those who exploit us for their wealth and power. We must have hope, and faith in ourselves. And all of this will be harder than the reflexive excuses or reversions to violence, projection, scapegoating and denial, and all the other easy steps in the perennial spiral to self-destruction.

Then we have to do something about it. We can't throw up our hands--and apparently it's not enough to know the facts of how we behave badly. We must develop and use the skills that will help us to be better.

We can't revert to managing behaviors because some greater power will punish us. We have to go beyond other kinds of fevers that draw their power from guilt and despair of who and what we are, and that in the guise of religions inevitably lead to the exploitation by the few and war of sect against sect in the name of love and truth.

From traditions and new knowledge in the West and the East and everywhere in our world, we have skills and vocabularies that begin with self-knowledge and embrace better ways of communicating and resolving conflicts. Jung issued his great cry nearly a half century ago--that our problems begin in the human psyche, and yet we know nothing about it. And what we do know, we don't use.

This is hardly a gooey sort of prescription. Because in the course of learning about ourselves, our psyches and our nature as human beings in this world, we learn how we are manipulated and exploited to serve the selfish and cynical interests of the destroyers, and how we can prevent their efforts from succeeding.

We have a long way to go, in a very short time. Whether we as a species and a civilization are fit to live--in the Darwinian as well as the moral meaning of those words--will be decided by our interactions with the planet, with each other and within ourselves.