[Vision2020] Free Speech and Crazy Bush

[Don Kaag]

Bob:

You cited "the principals of war".  You didn't mention which ones, or 
whose.  I guess I assumed you were referring to  the most prominent, 
accepted definitions.

Incidentally, Mao, whose book on war I carried in my rucksack in 
Southeast Asia, wrote, "truth comes out of the barrel of a gun".  Yet 
another eternal martial verity.  (I still have the book... it is rather 
scruffy and worn.)

And as for Sherman, he was just doing his job, assigned by Grant, which 
was to deliberately devastate the Confederate heartland and kick the 
soul out of the South's civilians' will and ability to continue the 
war.  He held no personal animus against the South, despite the carnage 
he and his men wrought in Georgia and South Carolina.  In fact, he was 
married to a Southerner, and his treatment of both military and 
civilian Southerners in the post-war South was sympathetic, honorable 
and generous.

U.N. sanctions have given Saddam Hussein the opportunity to hold his 
own people ransom to world opinion.  The sanctions allow Iraq to sell 
oil and use the proceeds for humanitarian purposes:  food, medicine, 
etc.  It has been the deliberate policy of Saddam and his Baathist 
regime to use that money to bolster their military, to continue to 
invest in research and production of weapons of mass destruction, and 
to build yet more palaces for the Hussein family and their cronies, 
while meticulously videotaping sick children and starving peasants for 
the international media.  This is the moral equivalent of kidnapping a 
kid, holding a gun to her head, and threatening to shoot her if the 
police don't cave in to your demands.

I would like to see conclusive evidence of Saddam's weapons programs, 
too, which is why I don't approve of a war with Iraq at this time.  If 
we don't have any, then war should be a non-starter.  If we do have 
compelling evidence, however, the President and Congress have a 
constitutional responsibility to protect U.S. citizens by preemptively 
removing or destroying them before he doles them out to Hezbollah or Al 
Quaida or some other lunatic fringe Islamic group and we have another 
occurance of the World Trade Center, this time perpetrated with 
biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons.  The existence of these 
weapons is why the U.N. applied, and has continued to enforce, 
sanctions against Iraq in the first place.

Regards,

Don Kaag



On Thursday, January 30, 2003, at 02:41 PM, Bob Hoffmann wrote:

> Thank you, Don, for the references.  Since "he with the most 
> references wins," I guess you won.  If we were keeping score on the 
> most relevant references, you'd be tying your sneakers at the starting 
> line.  I never sought to define war.  I merely spelled out the 
> conditions under which the U.S. now engages in war.  You haven't 
> assailed my views on that.  You merely quoted a man, Patton, who a 
> long time ago was fighting a real war, one which he conceivably could 
> have lost, as evidenced by the huge body counts on both sides.  World 
> War II and a U.S. attack on Iraq are simply not comparable in any 
> intellectually stimulating or morally equivocal way.
>
> I hope you don't think Clauswitz the final authority on the definition 
> of war.  While he was a great military theorist, there are reasons 
> intelligent people study more than one theorist, and they also study 
> practitioners.  To whit, Mao Tse Tung, whose war craft accomplished 
> something singular in all of history:  Uniting a nation of one billion 
> people.  Mao defined war quite simply as the destruction of one's 
> enemy.  I propose that the U.S. has done wonders in uniting both 
> Maoist and Clauswitzian theory.
>
> Could I also give a reference from another man fighting a real war, 
> William Tecumseh Sherman:  "War is Hell."  This definition is no less 
> valid than Mao's or Clauswitz's; it simply has a different 
> perspective, one that every Iraqi can take to heart, and few Americans 
> can understand in this day of vast American military supremacy.
>
> I don't know who put Clauswitz on his head, but it has also been said, 
> "Diplomacy is war by other means."  We see this in the U.N. sanctions 
> on Iraq, which have resulted in more dead (overwhelmingly civilians) 
> than the actual military strikes on Iraq.
>
> In the conduct of this diplomacy/war, the U.S. has caught Iraq in a 
> beautiful Catch 22.  If Iraq is found to be harboring weapons of mass 
> destruction, it will be attacked.  If Iraq is not found to be 
> harboring weapons of mass destruction, that is proof of its 
> noncooperation, and it will be attacked.  U.S. seems bent on attacking 
> Iraq under any circumstance.  This from a benevolent administration.
>
> With regard to secret evidence, I'll apply the observations of another 
> political theorist, Noam Chomsky.  He notes that the purpose of covert 
> actions are not to keep secrets from the people under attack.  The 
> people of Nicaragua under the Sandanistas, for example, knew that 
> their harbors were being mined, their crops were being poisoned, and 
> their civilian villages and institutions were under attack by 
> mercenaries funded by the U.S.  The purpose of covert actions was to 
> keep these attacks a secret from the U.S. public, which might object 
> to its tax dollars being used to terrorize a far weaker neighbor.
>
> And so we segue to secret evidence against Iraq, which, I submit, is 
> being kept secret not due to considerations of the enemy, but due to 
> considerations of U.S. public opinion.  After the first U.S./Iraqi 
> "war," the first Bush administration admitted that it mislead the 
> press and the public about Iraqi troop movements, claiming that Iraq 
> was not withdrawing from positions along the Saudi border, but in fact 
> reinforcing them.  Admittedly a lie to gain and maintain public 
> support for military action.  When we cannot believe the non-secret 
> evidence presented by an administration bent on war, why should we 
> believe secret evidence?
>
> Bob Hoffmann
> 820 S. Logan St.
> Moscow, ID  83843
>
> At 05:04 PM 1/29/2003 -0800, you wrote:
>> Bob:
>>
>> So, knowing that you are the repository of all things military, and 
>> thinking that I somehow did a brain dump between graduating from, and 
>> then teaching in, the United States Army Command and General Staff 
>> Course, I went first to the syllabus and then to the indicated 
>> reference, Karl von Clauswitz' "Vom Krieg"(On War), searching for the 
>> generally accepted definition.
>>
>> It seems that the people who fight wars define one as "The 
>> continuation of diplomacy by other (violent) means".  That's a lot 
>> different than " We only attack countries that have no real 
>> possibility of fighting back", and "under the principles of war, if 
>> your enemy cannot fight back or reasonably defend itself, there is no 
>> war, merely a massacre."
>>
>> Can you cite an accepted reference for this definition?  If not, 
>> perhaps you should read von Clauswitz and maybe Nicolo Machiavelli 
>> more closely.  And by the way, although I am not particularly 
>> enamored with a war in Iraq, it is my earnest desire that all wars 
>> the United States becomes involved in be concluded speedily, with 
>> maximum force applied consistant with the mission and its goals, and 
>> with the fewest possible U.S. casualties.  You would prefer, perhaps, 
>> a bunch of American kids coming home in body bags?
>>
>> General George Patton once said to his troops before battle," It is 
>> not your job to die for your country... it is your job to make the 
>> other poor, dumb, S.O.B. die for his!"  A lovely sentiment.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Don Kaag
>
>
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