The Enemy Below

I don’t know when it has ever been more difficult than right now to be an optimist. And I really want to be optimistic, especially now.

It is not the same as the days during the Cold War, when alarmist officials had school kids drilling for a nuclear strike. Thankfully we’ve grown out of that naiveté and learned that such things would be utterly useless.

Oh, but don’t get me wrong here. I’m not claiming that we have actually learned anything; and I’m about to show how I know this. Keep in mind, nothing here should surprise you. That’s the very basis for my assertion that we have failed to learn from past mistakes or even basic world history.

At, and even in the last year of World War Two’s end, we were exultant, jubilant. We had a right to be, on some level. The war shook the whole Earth. Very few and isolated were those who did not know what was happening. Those who did were, in the first few years of it, convinced that the world was ending. No other war in history could match it for its sheer number of slaughtered. No other war could match the ferocity and depravity shown by every belligerent engaged in that war. The horrors of the Great War had not gone away, and in fact the treaty Germany was forced to sign was what a wounded young rifleman in the war used to galvanize the German people, which got him elected. By the time he used a state of emergency act to take complete power, it was too late. He mesmerized the people. He was an orator of the highest order. He made promises the people believed he could keep. Yet he ultimately destroyed so much, beginning in his own country, that history remembers him as nothing more than a monster. Except for those in the neo-fascist pockets that have existed ever since he died by his own hand.

But when he was gone and Japan had been occupied, we for some reason grew too full of ourselves to remember the missing, the dead, the wounded and the disabled. Nothing exists in Hollywood, not now or in the untold number of motion pictures lost to us because of time and careless storage, could ever show the succeeding generations what it was like back then. Cities blacked out at night, mostly along the coastal regions because of the threat of submarines. Shortages of every commodity you can think of, all the way down to cigarettes. Families broken apart because husbands were overseas and shit happened at home. Faithful wives who were burdened by returning spouses that were not the same men who left, scarred forever by seeing and doing things that induced severe trauma. And men who by societal restrictions and expectations could not show weakness nor give vent to their scrambled emotions and dared not cry. Such men who did these things were often shunned and very often hospitalized or institutionalized for being crazy. Because anything we didn’t understand was an aberration to be tucked away. Out of sight.

None of this taught us anything retainable except that we now had the most formidable military the world had ever seen. Pearl Harbor could not happen again.

Then came the Soviet Union, and Cold War espionage. Again, no one learned; there was a housing and baby boom, sunglasses and convertibles, filtered cigarettes, drive-in movies. The Korean War, never officially a declared war, was but three years of nothing compared to World War Two; even if it never had a resolution, and still exists in a suspended state by a scrap of paper. Only those who had direct relationships with the killed and wounded suffered, and again, it was unmanly to show pain. Emotion. Everyone just wanted to forget. There were a few films the war provided a backdrop to, but who cared? You went to see Gregory Peck and William Holden. Fighting like men.

It’s amazing, the extent of our ignorance, arrogance and hypocrisy; even nurses and other women who served were killed in both wars but nobody dared say so. Not just because they were women and it was a different time. Anyone with a shred of empathy had to picture what their last days were like, especially when they were captured and never came home. Oh, there are documents that prove the atrocities. No one bothers to look them up; no one reads about them. We dare not look the devil in the eye.

I suppose that what happened next could have been avoided. It certainly should have been. But powerful men have always misused their power, always with horrifying results. Reading anything more than a high school history book will open the eyes of the most callous among us. How did we get involved so tragically in Vietnam, after so many years of French forces being chewed up by the Viet Minh? Who was stupid, who was arrogant enough to think we were going to win? We made one mistake after another, that’s true enough, and we ended up quitting. But our biggest mistake was going there in the first place, and it brought us nothing but grief. It led to this very moment. Politics in America shifted with the election of Richard Nixon, his use of the dog whistle campaign which appealed to anyone who didn’t know what he was doing. And as the political right shifted more to the right in the following years, so did the left, which now sits more or less where the right once was. Essentially it is a moderate body, which leaves progressives in the left, and progressives are virtually unelectable. Oh, there’s the odd one or two out there who’s in the House or Senate. But they’re going no further. By definition, they divide the left, as we have seen.

It was the shift to the far right that drove the advisors and influenced George W. Bush to invade two countries in the Middle East in such quick succession. Again, we utterly failed to remember history. We had learned nothing. And this time, it was different. The protesters against the wars in Iraq were laughed at, scorned and attacked, whether in public or online. It was happening, and that was it.

Now it came time to sow the seeds of the next global conflict. We had finally invaded Iraq for essentially no reason. I remember people warning the president to be cautious, to be patient. When we actually invaded, I was horrified. At the time it was my view that it was a dreadful mistake. As the body count for U.S. troops rose, we were fed a smorgasbord of lies. And idiots like Geraldo Rivera proved it was a mess as he was an “embedded” journalist who was kicked out of Iraq “to be dropped off at the Kuwaiti border,” because he drew a map in the sand during a live broadcast for Fox News, then proceeded to map out the location, and the next movement of, the 101st Airborne. Holy hell. Geraldo came back here, got into some kind of sexual harassment scandal, and proved, for anyone who had missed years of clues, that he was a villainous, depraved shithead.

Never before had we made such dire mistakes. While engaged in Vietnam, we had also bombed and even had infantry inserted into Cambodia and Laos, which was just about as stupid as you could get. Bombers and fighters sortied from Thailand, involving that country in the war. We can’t know what would have happened if the war had continued, but one thing was very clear: we had a prime opportunity to learn, to be humbled, to look back at the civilian body count, and emerge better than what we were.

That didn’t happen.

If you’re going to start a war, you first need to know the cause is righteous. The last time we fought righteously was World War Two, and we didn’t start it. If not a righteous cause, then there are consequences, and those are many and come in all sizes. We also hardly started the Korean Conflict, but at least it can be argued that it saved, and continues to save, the lives of many in the south who would be otherwise starved, executed or enslaved.

The incursion into Iraq was not righteous. Saddam Hussein was playing power games and using cheap mind tricks on the United Nations inspection team. It was a gangster, literally a man who loved mafia movies, who played these ridiculous games. He was a nut. Any weapons of mass destruction he may have had were gone. He had even ordered aircraft to be buried in the sand. We bombed civilian buildings on still more false information. The Iraqis took civilian casualties that have proved impossible to count. Which count is the most accurate between various sources cannot be determined. Since bodies ranged from little left to even bury to those buried without record keeping to the documented dead, the figure simply cannot be known. Estimated counts vary from one-to-two hundred thousand and upward to six hundred thousand and more. Since it is a political subject here, any discussion involves heated debates. Over 4,000 U.S. soldiers were killed; 31-32,000 wounded.

As much as I grieve for them, this isn’t the reason I feared the Iraq War. What I had feared was that we would eventually pull out of a country we would leave weak and destabilized, leaving it open to annexation by Iran. This was a legitimate fear, I reasoned, because the only country in the entire region with the most reason to try it was Iran. They’d been at war, both sides hated each other, and it was made worse by religious beliefs. Not all of Islamic faiths are divided between good people and terrorists, as so many thought. Muslims in general are, in my experience, nice people. I’ve never had a conflict with them, have even called some friends. But there are distinctions in the faith as there are in, for example, Christianity. And, as with the latter, there has been violence as a result. Our failure to take cultures and religions into account and to understand them is just as bad as ordering bombing missions on civilian targets based on a lack of reliable Intel. These are fatal mistakes, the kind which come back to haunt those who make them, and more than likely, the people they serve.

We’ve made enemies, and in the Trump administration, that’s terrifying. Infamous already for either ignoring advice and turning over personnel from kitchen staff to interns to secretaries of state, Trump has no interest in diplomacy and no capacity or tolerance for common sense. Indeed, he is the antithetical model of a diplomat. He is a firestarter. He conducts government business with a social media account, even though most of it is babbling propaganda, he stiff-arms our closest allies, pokes sticks at world powers like China, and worships the Korean dictator, who in turn shows the world how moronic Trump really is. And Russia Gate has failed to corner him or stifle his arrogant grandiosity. Elizabeth Warren wants to impeach him; Nancy Pelosi not so much. They and others have made it likely that the man will win reelection. The democrats can’t get their shit together. So many candidates cloud the picture that the nominee is virtually doomed, because the voters will be divided, as in 2016, and either revenge-vote for Trump or abstain. We saw this in the 2016 election. Although Clinton won the popular vote, it wasn’t enough. And the reasons were many; democrats who would never vote for a woman (remember I said that the left has shifted to the right? Well, here’s a bit of that showing up) abstained. Russia had interfered but we’ll never know to what degree; Professor Emeritus at M.I.T. Noah Chomsky has said the the Mueller investigation may have found some bits of proof of collusion, but they will not amount to much; Russian interference was more of a slur and fake news campaign on social media pages set up as news outlets.

But before you go blaming it all on Clinton being a woman and a rabid smear campaign against her, and democrats in general, let’s look closer at the Republican party. Chomsky also said that they must obey their true masters, corporations, because that’s where their money – the real money – is. Obviously. And, legally or otherwise, they fund republicans. Especially since Nixon’s first election. Now, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, to drop two names, well, the party was able, eventually, to shut them up. Before that happened, one wrecked John McCain’s presidential campaign and was key to his defeat while the other was even further off the rails. In fact, Bachmann was unable to blunt the damage her own party refused to shield her from. They threw her to the wolves because she wouldn’t shut up, and her own defense against being called a moron and a witch only dug her deeper.

But there are still some incredibly stupid republicans out there, in state legislatures, in Washington. Hell, they’re everywhere. Recently in Wyoming, Senator Boner (R) sponsored a bill to ban capitital punishment. Rare for a republican, but it failed. One reason: Senator Lynn Hutchings who actually said that she was grateful for Capital punishment on the grounds that it gave us a resurrect Jesus. She didn’t mention the fact that innocent men die horrible deaths in execution, or that execution has proven not to be a deterrent to crime. She must have forgotten to mention also that it costs less to imprison a man for life than to execute him. But to use the crucifixion of Jesus as a reason to kill people, that’s truly twisted. And that’s the mentality we’re dealing with here. She’s not far from Trump, who time and again has unabashedly showcased his low I.Q. and his snotty attitude as well as a horrific disregard for human life.

Trump has dispatched a carrier strike group featuring The USS Abraham Lincoln, a Nimitz class carrier, to hostile waters off the coast of Iran. This, in response to what National Security advisor John Bolton, who is a walking dipstick, cited provocative goings-on in Tehran. Before we get to that there is one thing we need to keep in mind.

The first one is a letter sent to Tehran from Republican Senate members in March, 2015. It was condescending and threatening, telling Tehran that the Congress was unlikely to approve of President Obama’s Iran treaty. They said it would render Obama’s deal useless and that he was limited to two four year terms, but senators could endlessly serve six-year terms. Translation: “You’re all cocky now ain’t ya, boys? No matter. In the end you gotta deal with us.”

What a bunch of bullies and twits. But it shows that the party’s hardline attitude toward Iran is based on money and emotional bullshit. They hate Iran; hated Obama more. Why would Republicans want a nuclear peace treaty with Iran? They want to nuke the place. And they’re chummy with Saudi Arabia, which welcomed Trump but was astonished at his language and everything else, perhaps most of all by his obvious ignorance and racial phobias, which he cannot hide, hence the need to have people like Sean Spicer lie for him. Of course you’d be challenged at once for bringing up the fact that Saudi Arabia was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

And their most bitter enemy? Iran. Naturally.

So now Republicans have finally been able to get Trump to send a strike force to threaten Iran. The Honest Abe and support ships are sailing in harm’s way.

It’s a mistake. Iran has a defensive capability that, it is clear, the White House has chosen to ignore. It’s has ballistics that can absolutely get through to, and damage, our ships. In the water, there are mines and subs. Trump has also sent bombers to the area, but now we’re getting close to causing a war; something we must not do.

Below the sea Iran is a formidable enemy, but in the skies or on land, it won’t matter.

It would spread within hours. It could involve Iraq, which would quickly fall. Then there is Israel. We’ve had to restrain them from opening salvos in the past; this time we may not be able to. Knowing that Repubicans are fickle with Israel, wavering between support and totally ignoring them, it pays to recall that during the Obama administration, Benjamin Netanyahu ignored protocol, appearing before Congress without consulting with the president first. He was motivated not merely because of racism, but primarily Obama’s policies regarding Israel. This was a historic moment in U.S. politics. It helped Repubicans leverage a power they were not rightfully taken. Already they had shown a will to eliminate the checks and balances our government is based and relies on because they hated having a black president. McConnell and Boehner came right out and said that their main mission was to derail Obama and see to it that he was a one-term president. That didn’t work, so the Senate blocked whatever they could, dealt their own foreign policy, and ended up with the election of Donald Trump. This was because they were unable to silence him, much as they had effectively silenced other nuts like Bachmann and Palin, even though during the campaign a drunk Sarah Palin showed up at a fish fry, seemingly at random, and spoke total nonsense. But it worked in the Repubican’s favor; she achieved what they had not been able to since the loss of John McCain to Obama. She totally marginalized herself as a drunk and a mentally unstable player. They wanted to do the same thing to Trump, but he was unstoppable. He appealed to the hardcore conservative white vote with his choppy, babbling elitist speeches. This base was ready to swallow every drop of poison he spat at them. He appealed to both white men and women who were hysterically convinced that they were being marginalized and threatened. Those fears were irrational, but for them, well founded. Thus began the association between white supremacists and Donald Trump.

Now we have a president who is proven an extraordinarily bad but habitual liar, whose actions with immigrants alone prove him a barbarian. Sending naval and Air Force personnel to the Gulf can only mean that he is contemplating war, and one that need not happen. Beyond the obvious mistake of dispatching B-52 Stratofortress bombers, which were shot down by simple SAMs over Vietnam, the mistake of this operation in the first place is terrifying.

Every country in the region and beyond has intelligence gathered and knows that shots will likely be fired. They’re ready. We have military assets in three countries across the gulf from Iran. And Iranian forces have positioned missiles to coastal locations, and this is troubling, but it’s meant to be. They anticipate the final approval of the administration’s reversal of the U.S. – Iran nuclear peace treaty. Not only would that free them to resume work on nuclear power and weapons development, but remember, Trump has already provoked them with economic sanctions. Tehran has advised businesses to protect themselves by altering business practices; none of them are particularly worthy of mention, but it does, in whole, demonstrate Iranian leadership’s cleverness and capacity to think critically.

We are about to engage an enemy that need not be an enemy, but Repubicans have been seeking such a confrontation for years. Using Trump’s idiocy, they’ve made it happen. Without respect and diplomacy, shots will be fired. Could anyone be surprised that a global war may follow?

Too many things got us here.

And we have failed to learn anything along the way.

What’s worse is, the very people who should have stood up to his lies have all caved to those lies. Their principles were suddenly gone. Those people have empowered him.

Now…

We are on the brink of disaster.

If you don’t believe this, go back only a few days. Trump vowed to place more tariffs on Chinese trade. The Dow immediately took a nose dive because what Trump doesn’t realize is that China will not pay and American businesses will. The only way to survive a hit like that is for them to pass those costs down to consumers. Our retail prices, what we pay for at checkout, will rise. Donald Trump is as stupid with business as he is with politics. He’s lost billions in his own business endeavors; he’s only survived because he simply refuses to repay his creditors. Thus he turned to borrowing overseas, including in China and Russia, because other Banks cut his credit. Truly a stupid con artist. This man is the one sending your sons and daughters to the Suez Canal.

It’s not a warm and fuzzy thought, is it?

I wish I could be an optimist, especially now.

I can’t.