Vietnam on The Huffington Post

David Quigg: Part Exposé, Part Cover-Up: 1968's My Lai Massacre Photos Have Big Lessons For Citizen Journalists

2009-11-24T05:03:43Z

The front page of last Friday's edition of The Cleveland Plain Dealer included a story headlined "Photographer destroyed photos of soldiers in the act of killing." Before I type even one sentence more, I want to make clear that I have never ever done anything brave enough to make me believe I am better than Ron Haeberle, the Army combat photographer in that headline.

Decency really demands that I try to imagine myself in Haeberle's boots, entering the soon-to-be-infamous Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai with fellow U.S. soldiers on the soon-to-be-infamous date of March 16, 1968.

Would I, as Haeberle did, have had the guts to carry my Army-issue camera and a contraband camera of my own that day? Would I, as Haeberle did, have had the guts to snap photos as my fellow soldiers marauded through My Lai, slaughtering hundreds of Vietnamese men, women, and children? Would I have had the guts to bring my film back home to America at the end of my deployment? Would I have had the guts to develop the film? Would I have had the guts in 1969 to corroborate reporter Seymour Hersh's My Lai massacre exposé by bringing my photos in to my local newspaper?

I just don't know. I really don't.

So if I slip into moral-superiority mode here, please just stop reading. This post's usefulness rides entirely on whether I can confine myself to spotlighting the journalistic implications of this quote from Haeberle's new interview with Plain Dealer reporter Evelyn Theiss:

I realized that there's no way I can really release photographs showing who the actual persons are doing what. I figured I'm not going to point my finger at any one soldier. I'm there. I'm part of it. I'm as guilty as anybody else. Not for shooting a person, but for not reporting it. It's just like one big cover-up. But there are photographs I could have pinpointed who did what and the actual falling with the smoke out of the muzzles and stuff like that. It's just kind of [pause] a decision I made myself.

Haeberle went on to talk about getting a visit from an Army investigator assigned to probe the My Lai massacre:

He asked me the question: Did I have any more photographs? So I said no. I answered him honestly. But I never said the words, "I destroyed them." ... I never said that. So what the Army got are some photographs that really aren't worth something unless somebody talks about them. Like a photograph's worth 1,000 words. These photographs aren't worth anything unless somebody actually talks about them.

There were limits to the justice that military prosecutors managed to wring from the evidence that hadn't been destroyed or otherwise covered up. As Theiss wrote in last Friday's Plain Dealer, "Twenty-six soldiers of the 50-member unit were initially charged with criminal offenses for their actions, but only Lt. William Calley was convicted of premeditated murder."

People -- here and in Vietnam and all over the world, really -- can take these facts and these new quotes from Haeberle and judge him however they choose.

But I'm focused on something else. It's not some epoch-changing idea. It's not something that will require a lot of words. I simply want today's would-be "citizen journalists" to consider this: Even though Haeberle's shocking photos appeared in a newspaper, they do not qualify as journalism.

They could have been journalism. But they weren't. They lost their claim to being journalism when Haeberle destroyed photos, when Haeberle cut the tongue from his own work, when he turned his photos, as he said, into images that "aren't worth anything unless somebody actually talks about them."

It's not that all of Haeberle's photos needed to run in a newspaper. In fact, it's doubtful that anything so gory and disturbing would have. Rather, one value of the destroyed photos would have been this: to give editors as complete a sense as possible of the story behind the corpses in his surviving photos.

Whether our next iconic, history-making image is shot by an amateur with a blurry camera phone or a pro lugging around state-of-the-art gear, the person behind the camera should aspire to journalism, should photograph both the beatings by the riot cops and the crimes of the rioters. That's a lot to ask. Most of us, thrown suddenly into a news event, will fail to create some ideal journalistic record. So perfection and seasoned professionalism cannot be our standard for citizen journalism.

Rather, our standard must grow out of the next stage, the editing stage. Citizen journalists must not do today's equivalent of what Haeberle did. Citizen journalists must not give in to the urge to un-take a photo, to click delete and banish the evidence for the parts of a story that shame them, their cause, their friends, their country, their species. In citizen journalism, we might as well rename the delete button and think of it as the "cover-up button."

If people resist pushing that cover-up button, we stand a real chance of having robust citizen journalism. If people don't resist, we will slouch more and more toward citizen propaganda. That would be a great shame.

Huffington Post blogger David Quigg lives in Seattle. This piece originally appeared on his personal blog. See "What Will Vietnam Think of Army Combat Photographer's New My Lai Revelation?" for further thoughts on Haeberle's disclosure.

Jim Calio: Talk to the Taliban

2009-11-20T15:33:06Z

Sooner or later, we will have to talk to the Taliban. It's inevitable, so why delay? It's clear that we cannot "win" in Afghanistan in the traditional since of "winning" -- that is, wiping out the enemy. The Afghans know that the U.S. will some day be leaving their country, but they will not. After all, it's their country, they live there.

It was true in Vietnam, and it's true in Afghanistan.

After years of propping up sorry, corrupt and ineffective governments in South Vietnam, the U.S. finally decided to enter into peace talks with the North Vietnamese. The same should happen with the Taliban in Afghanistan. This doesn't mean that we should give in to any demands, only that we should open negotiations.

Our willingness to talk is our opening gambit. We should make it clear that we are not going to abandon our bases in Afghanistan, at least not in the short term; we will keep them there to make sure that there is not a revival of Al Qeda camps. They can't stop us from doing that. But we must also know that, sooner or later, we will have to talk to the enemy--and sooner means that more lives will be saved.

Matthew Hoh, Daniel Ellsberg Discuss Aghanistan, Vietnam Wars (VIDEO)

2009-11-18T21:11:01Z

Matthew Hoh and Daniel Ellsberg, recently sat down for a conversation about the war in Afghanistan.

Matthew Hoh made headlines late last month when he resigned from the U.S. State Department. Hoh, 36, became the first known U.S. official to resign in protest over the war in Afghanistan. Ellsberg, gained notoriety in 1971, after he leaked parts of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times as part of an effort to end the Vietnam War, a war that he argued was "a wrongful war."

Below are two clips from Hoh and Ellsberg's exchange documented by Brave New Films.

Both wonder what the US is doing in Afghanistan, arguing that American hubris is one of the things keeping the country from learning the lessons of the Soviets' War in Afghanistan.

Watch

Watch

Vietnam Fears Facebook Blocked By Government

2009-11-17T07:44:35Z

HANOI, Vietnam — Vietnam's growing legions of Facebook users fear that the country's communist government might be blocking the popular social networking Web site, which has become difficult to access over the past few weeks.

Facebook has more than 1 million users in Vietnam, and the number has been growing quickly since the company recently added a Vietnamese language version of the site.

Veteran Returns To Vietnam To Build Houses, 40 Years Later

2009-11-14T18:01:16Z

CNN:

He is a former Marine who has lived with battleground nightmares for 40 years and now plans a return to the land that haunts him.

Veteran's Day: Your Stories and Memories

2009-11-11T15:26:46Z

In honor of Veteran's Day, the HuffPost asked readers to send in stories and videos about those who served and how war has impacted your life. You can share your story here. We received an overwhelming response from veterans themselves, as well as their friends and family members. Here is what people wrote:

Charla A. from Killeen, Texas spoke movingly about the loss--in one sense--of her brother:

I lost my brother in Iraq. As is customary, two soldiers never knocked on the door to my family's home to bring us the news of his departure.

We never had to go through the painstaking task of planning a funeral. There was no obituary to submit, no memorial service to attend. No one called to offer their prayers, support, or condolences. It was not necessary to put his last affairs in order, no business was left unfinished.

He was not married, and leaves behind no children of his own. He does leave a grieving mother, a brother who used to be his right-hand man, two younger sisters, a nephew who adores him, and countless other friends and family members.

Our grief process did not start immediately after we lost him, but it lingers and persists to this day. We miss his once easy smiles, his presence, and his personality. Today, nothing is the same, and day after day we wonder when things will go back to normal; if things will go back to normal. All we know is that there is nothing we can do to ease our loss, to stop the pain.

We will hold on to the memories, and we all look back and remember the good times we shared with him.

When I say I lost my brother in Iraq, most people would assume he is dead. Contrary to that, he is alive; living and breathing. We didn't lose my brother to an IED, a roadside bomb, friendly fire, or intense enemy combat. We lost him to a battle he fights daily within his own mind; mental illness. When he returned, none of his injuries were visible, he seemed to come back and fit right back into things. It took months for us to realize that the young lively Army private that we dreadfully sent to Iraq, never returned. Instead, we got a person that none of us recognize.

It is hard to be around a person you love while they are mentally ill, because that person is no longer who you have always known them to be.

On this veteran's day, I just want people to realize that the effects of war are long-lasting, and that there are thousands of veterans and active duty soldiers who suffer silently. They are dying inside, fighting battles within themselves that many of us could never, will never, understand. Many families are in my family's shoes; they have sent soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan, only to have them return and be completely different people.

Pray until something happens, and never give up hope. God bless my family and yours, God bless America!

Dennis Sprague from Murphy, North Carolina asks us to remember the lessons of past wars and how they affected those who fought in them:

I was in the Marine Corp from '65 to '69; all of '66 in Vietnam. I just recently learned about being exposed to Agent Orange; Dioxin. Of the 30 or so symptoms listed for Dioxin, I have about 20. My hearing was bad enough to keep me from becoming a police officer after I got out, and the ringing in my ears hasn't stopped since qualifying in boot camp. I have also just learned that I probably can't get any medical help from the VA. All of this doesn't matter. What does matter is that the lesson of the futility of the War was lost; no one remembers or cares and it continues today for a new generation. Damn the "military industrial complex."

Jim Pankey from Hemet, California is proud to be part of the veterans community:

I'm a Vietnam veteran and spent almost 3 years in the Armed Forces Retirement Home (formerly Naval Home) in Gulfport, Mississippi. I was privileged to get to know men and women of the various branches of services from WWII, Korea, Vietnam, lesser known military actions like Panama Lebanon, and Kosovo...when I left in 2005 it was a sad departure for me, leaving this Home of Heroes and seeing the beginning of its demise.

The spirit of the members of the armed services is alive and well, and I am proud to have served.

I lost friends and relatives in wars, and my family on both sides lost members in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. The enemies were human, too, and lost even more. I think war is terrible and should be a last resort, not the spearhead of diplomacy.

Here's to the souls of the lost. Rest In Peace.

Dave McGrath from Idaho Falls, Idaho laments how little care veterans receive when they return home:

When I left the service, there was no party, no transition service, no support. This wasn't so long ago. No education. No preparation for what's next.

I've made it - and made it well - but all without support of any "mechanism" to ease me back into the "system" or at least to civilian life. I had the Montgomery Bill - but who has time to use it when you are raising a family? The bills are NOW - and they aren't waiting for school.

And my transition was in the best of times - between wars, with a nation flush with cash.

I don't think past vets had it any better.

I don't think current vets have it any better.

America - you don't care for your warriors - unless they are dead. And then you just give them sterile monuments of steel, bronze or marble. That is cold comfort.

I have siblings who have served. And now I have children who serve. I am proud to have served - and proud of their service. But I warn them: your nation does not care for you, and will not care for you - whether come back broken or seemingly whole. You are doing this for you. You are doing this for your hope. You are doing this for what you think can be - what could be. You are doing this for what should be.

Tomorrow I will go to work. For a government institution. Tomorrow (if it is like every other Veteran's Day for the last 13 years since I left my beloved service) no one will say "Thank you." No one will recognize the service. No one will acknowledge that there is a warrior in their midst. Of course corporate will send their obligatory email. But my coworkers don't even know. The fact of service is an embarrassment to them - it means something is probably wrong with me.

But, its OK. I didn't do it for them. I did it for me. For what I hope for. For what can be. For what I hope should be. It is good they don't realize that they are dependent upon the sacrifices of others like me. For what they have. For their dull, dull lives.

Douglas Stevens from Lindstrom, Minnesota wonders why soldiers who fought in the cold war aren't considered veterans:

I am an unemployed veteran, without health insurance coverage, unqualified for VA benefits because I only spent 6 years in the Army during the Cold War. My comrades and I were guarding Pershing nuclear missiles 80 km from communist Germany. We helped bring down the Berlin Wall. People died in our unit.

Yet we are disregarded as veterans. We won our war, on the front lines, on alert most of the time. Yet, we do not qualify for VA benefits.

Maybe someday, we will ALL be counted as soldiers with equal rights.

Finally, David Trevino from Lavonia, Georgia, who hails from a family with a tradition of military service, gives us his perspective about the nature of war.

War is a motherfucker, man.

All that energized metal can really jack you up.
Seriously.
Put you in a gallon-sized body bag.
Put your mangled bits in wheel chair for life.
Put your head in a scary place.
It's a bad thing to get into.

I know.
I was a captain of Marines during Desert Dumb-Dumb.

It is a motherfucker.

And not just for the dudes dressed as shrubs.
Pretty rough on their kids, too.
Looking at someone else's daddy come home missing parts.
Looking at someone else's daddy come home in a box.
Looking on the evening news for your daddy.
It's some awful shit to lay on a child.

I know.
My father was a colonel of Marines during Vietnam.

War
is an absolute
motherfucker.

Unless,
of course,
you're selling GI socks to Uncle Sugar.

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Paul Abrams: A War Tax: A Strategic, Fiscal and Political Imperative

2009-11-06T11:57:49Z

President Obama is about to make a momentous decision: whether and to what extent to commit the United States to continuous war in Afghanistan. It is the most difficult decision I think this, or any other president, has probably confronted.

History provides conflicting advice. Foreign occupiers of Afghanistan always fail and, at the same time, our abandoning Afghanistan after the Afghans defeated the Soviet Union arguably left a political vacuum that the al-Qaeda coddling Taliban filled. Unlike his predecessor, this President has been able to get the significant Pakistani cooperation in going after terrorists in the FATA region, and it is unclear (to me) what impact leaving Afghanistan would have on that relationship, and the stability of the nuclear-armed Pakistani government.

Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry correctly pointed out that none of the options in Afghanistan are good -- that, thanks to the Bush/Cheney legacy, all we are left with is to find the least bad alternative.

Nonetheless, it has become far too 'easy' for presidents to commit us to war. Other peoples' children fight, die and are wounded. Only a tiny fraction of the country is mobilized and actually sacrifices. It is conducted on borrowed money. Indeed, candidate Kerry's oft-quoted "I voted for it before voting against it" was a vote on paying for the Iraq War (he was for it) that was defeated, and so he voted against it.

If the president wants to continue and/or raise the commitment, and there is even the remotest chance of achieving anything meaningful, we are going to have to be there for the long haul. The "long haul," however, on borrowed money is a non sequitur. Hence, for strategic reasons, a war tax paying-as-we-go for whatever operations the president determines is a strategic imperative unless the decision is to cease-and-desist. The idea of continuing or raising the commitment for a long haul when the long haul is unaffordable and thus impossible is a cruel waste of life and limbs and time and money and prestige.

A war tax is also a fiscal imperative. For all those concerned -- as I am -- about our debt on the one hand, and the need, on the other hand, for fiscal stimulus to prevent a slide back to depression and reform health care and create a new energy economy and make our education world-class and and rebuilding our infrastructure and provide baby boomers their retirement and medicare (and, even those elements that some might argue could be funded by tax cuts, it is still a fiscal loss and, if permanent, an even greater budget burden than temporary seeding through direct government expenditures), paying for the wars via a war tax enables the President to fund what he is doing at the proper levels and not further indebt us to other countries.

It is worth reminding ourselves that a high level of foreign indebtedness is a reduction in sovereignty -- the other party(ies) can brandish our debt as a weapon very much like banks are foreclosing on peoples' homes. Although the rightwing will never support a tax for anything, their calls for American strength ring hollow as they allow the US to become more dependent on the good will of countries and people they despise by not paying for the wars they trumpet so long as other peoples' children fight them. (Question to Joe Lieberman: which one of your kids is volunteering for Afghanistan?)

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it is a political imperative. Without a draft, and without a war tax, 99.9% of Americans do not have to sacrifice at all to continue the war. It is too easy for war to become, for 99.9% of us, more like a video game played out on television (that rarely shows more than a snippet of pain, suffering and life long injury).

The Bush Administration was keenly aware that having to pay for the Iraq War would cost it support. That is why they lied about its projected costs. That is why they bristled when General Shinseki told the truth about the number of troops required for a post-war occupation (we could all do the math).

And, that is why Republicans voted against paying for the Iraq War. John Kerry's description of the vote was certainly a verbal gaffe, but it contained a strong dose of substance.

Continuing the Afghanistan war is already unpopular when the question is put, but it has not stimulated major televised hearings or debates, and it is likely that President Obama can order 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 thousand more troops to Afghanistan without a controversy searing into the consciousness of the American people because it does not touch most of us directly. It will be a story for about a week or two.

An Afghan war vote in the Congress accompanied by a war tax to pay for it would force Republicans to make a choice between their mindless opposition to any taxes and their (equally) mindless all out support of any war. The President would be politically foolish to allow them to have it both ways -- i.e, disagreeing with whatever the President does militarily, but not having to show how much they really support military action by their willingness to pay for it.

For strategic, fiscal and political reasons, therefore, there ought to be a "war tax" enacted specifically to fund continuing operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and sunseted when those military actions have finished.

Warring on borrowed money must cease. If people, especially those who can afford it, are not even willing to sacrifice a portion of their wallets for this cause, how can we ask others to sacrifice their lives and limbs?

Jeffrey Shaffer: Our National Journey? Get Out A Map

2009-11-04T15:02:20Z

Once again, Iraq and Afghanistan are making headlines nearly every day. But
while most media attention focuses on car bombings and combat casualties,
other disturbing events in the region are slipping through the news cycle
almost unnoticed.

A short item that caught my attention on October 5th revealed that
between 2002 and 2008, the US sent Pakistan $6.6 billion to help the
Pakistani armed forces battle Islamic militants. But two US Army generals
told the Associated Press that only $500 million was used for military aid
and the rest was diverted "to the domestic economy and other causes, such as
fighting India."

Think about that: Six billion dollars of our money vanished into the
bureaucracy of then-president Pervez Musharraf with no auditing or other
accountibility. I wonder how many other people saw the story? I found it
on page A-12 in my local paper.

Later, on October 11th, I read a story on page A-14 about Baghdad
residents who held a street march to demand improvements in public services.
In the 7th paragraph was this fact: "Iraq was twice forced this year to
slash it's budget, from $79 billion to $58.6 billion, because of falling oil
prices." These kinds of dots are easy to connect. Budget shortfalls
excacerbate infrastructure problems which fuel public discontent thus
creating new opportunities for extremists to exploit.

I can describe our predicament in one sentence. It was spoken by
President Harry Truman in late November of 1950. Having been informed that
a full scale Chinese intervention was underway in Korea and UN forces were
starting a massive retreat, the President met with his staff and said,
"We've got a terrific situation on our hands." He knew the Chinese attack
would create serious new problems for American defense strategy, diplomatic
policy, and domestic politics, problems that would persist long after he
left office.

If I had five minutes alone with President Obama, my suggestion would be
to reach out quickly and communicate the importance of the big picture to
the entire country. For one moment, put aside the debate over sending more
troops into combat and talk about the long road ahead.

This is exactly what President Franklin Roosevelt did with a radio
address on the evening of February 23rd, 1942. It was one of his most
compelling "fireside chats," and prior to the event FDR put out the word
that he wanted every person listening to have a map of the world on hand.

In her book No Ordinary Time, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin says the
president told his speechwriters the maps were important because "I want to
explain to the people something about geography--what our problem is and
what the overall strategy of the war has to be."

For Mr. Obama, I'd suggest a special appearance on CNN's Situation
Room, with maps displayed on every giant screen. Show us the vastness of
territory that encompasses Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. Then keep
going west, through Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, and Algeria. Remind
everyone that when longtime leaders such as Gaddafi and Mubarak pass on, the
transition to new regimes may be difficult and dangerous, and create an entirely
set of policy problems.

I'd also urge Mr. Obama to look directly into the camera and issue this
challenge: "To all viewers between the ages of 18 and 34---how do you
envision daily life in America fifteen years from now? Your generation
will spend a long time dealing with the the fallout from events that will
taking place on all those big maps in the near future."

During the Vietnam era, college campuses were part of an intense
national debate about the war. But these days there are no "Teach-ins" and
you never hear the term "student mobilization." The obvious reason for
this difference is that young people these days aren't being drafted.

We can debate the pros and cons of military conscription endlessly. But
no one can dispute that it was a powerful motivator in getting huge numbers
of Americans to think seriously about US military commitments in Vietnam and
throughout southeast Asia.

Conscription meant that millions of draft-eligible citizens, and their
families, were directly connected to foreign policy decisions. When
President Nixon ended the draft, that connection was broken.

I'm not calling for a reinstatement of the draft. But it would be great
if someone figured out a way to bring back the collective energy of those
years and focus it on a wide range of current issues. How long should we
support combat operations in a foreign country? What are the limits of US
military power in the Islamic world? How much money and manpower are we
willing to expend in that region during the next ten or fifteen years?

Having said all this, I now realize we have TWO terrific situations on
our hands. The first one encompasses myriad potential threats in a volitile
region of the world. The second is this fact: too many Americans in every
age group are unaware, or don't care, that the first situation even exists.

Robert Scheer: Keeping Afghanistan Safe from Democracy

2009-11-04T03:36:44Z

The most idiotic thing being said about America's involvement in Afghanistan is that the best way to protect the 68,000 U.S. troops there now is by putting an additional 40,000 in harm's way.

People who argue for that plan clearly have not read Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's report pushing for escalation. The general is as honest as he is wrong in laying out the purpose of this would-be expanded mission, which is to remold Afghanistan in a Western image by making U.S. troops far more vulnerable, rather than less so.

He is honest in arguing that American troops would have to be deployed throughout the rugged and otherwise inhospitable terrain of rural Afghanistan, entering intimately into the ways of local life so as to win the hearts and minds of a people who clearly wish we would not extend the favor. He is wrong in indicating, without providing any evidence to support the proposition, that this very costly and highly improbable quest to be the first foreign power to successfully model life in Afghanistan would be connected with defeating the al-Qaida terrorists.

As the president's top national security adviser has stated, there are fewer than 100 al-Qaida members left in Afghanistan and they have no capacity to launch attacks. These remnants of a foreign Arab force assembled by the U.S. to thwart the Soviets in their hapless effort to conquer Afghanistan are now alienated from the locally based insurgency.

As Matthew Hoh, the former Marine captain and foreign service officer in charge of the most contested area, said recently in his letter of resignation, we have stumbled into a 35-year-long civil war between rural people "who want to be left alone" and a corrupt urban government that the U.S. insists on backing. Hoh, who quit after a decade of service in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote that he was resigning not because of the hardships of his assignment but rather because he no longer believed in its stated purpose:

" ... [I]n the course of my five months of service in Afghanistan ... I have lost understanding and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan. ... To put simply: I fail to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war. ... Like the Soviets, we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by its people. ... I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul."

Just how unrepresentative was amply demonstrated in a very low-turnout election which the U.S.-backed candidate, Hamid Karzai, won after stealing one-third of the ballots he claimed for his victory, according to U.N. observers. In a message of congratulation to Karzai, President Barack Obama made reference to the need for reform and an end to the corruption that is endemic in the Karzai regime but then stated, "Although the process was messy, I am pleased to say that the final outcome was determined in accordance with Afghan law, which I think is very important."

What law? A runoff was avoided only when Karzai refused to accede to his opponent's demand for changes in the election commission that had stuffed the ballot boxes.

When Bob Schieffer of CBS said of the election "the thing was a fraud," White House senior adviser David Axelrod had the arrogance to defend the rigged process as having "proceeded in the constitutional way." Just what is it we are telling the world about our belief in the integrity of elections? It is no different from our having extolled those garbage elections that occurred with great regularity in Vietnam during the war there, a point made to great effect by Hoh:

"Our support for this kind of government, coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency's true nature, reminds me horribly of our involvement with South Vietnam; an unpopular and corrupt government we backed at the expense of our Nation's own internal peace, against an insurgency whose nationalism we arrogantly and ignorantly mistook as a rival to our own Cold War ideology."

Obama must know the truth of those words and should heed them before he marches down the disastrous path pursued by another Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson -- who, we now know from his White House telephone tapes, sacrificed the youth of this country in a war that he always knew never made sense.

Mark Axelrod: Dien Bien Phu, the Battle of Zhawar and the Battle of the Grand Canyon

2009-10-30T11:40:29Z

Let's pretend. Let's pretend that a foreign country has decided to attack the United States mainland. Originally, these intruders had planned to infiltrate from the far northwest entering off the coast of Bellingham and slowly make their way across the panhandle of Idaho to Montana. Of course, the US military would have been tracking their movements from Colville to Sandpoint and into the Kanisku National Forest as they drove eastward towards the nuclear sites in the Dakotas which they so desperately want to capture. But on-ground reconnaissance suggested that taking the northwest passage was not a good idea. Instead, they decide to invade from the south, from Baja California and so they land at Puerto Peñasco, Mexico. They have studied well. They have maps and photos. They have satellite pictures and computer enhanced topography. The one thing they don't have is direct knowledge of the terrain and a palpable sense of the determination of the American people to thwart foreign invasion.

And so, as they progress north from Casa Grande to Prescott to Williams and finally to the Grand Canyon itself, they discover they're in trouble because The Battle of the Grand Canyon will be their ultimate defeat. Why?

One need not go into all the parallels between and among the imaginary Battle of the Grand Canyon, and the real battles fought at Dien Bien Phu and Zhawar to figure it all out. One can really reduce those things to something patently simple that every invadee knows about its invaders: "I know my land better than you." It's a lesson the French learned in Vietnam and the Soviets learned in Afghanistan and that's why they left. It is a lesson the United States did not learn from the French or the Soviets and so we keep repeating what Santayana only needed to say once. Perhaps Eisenhower knew it best when he said, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." Perhaps, that would coincide with Santayana's Law of Repetitive Consequences since there doesn't seem to be any clear understanding of the disasters of perpetual military engagement while ignoring historical resonance.

In 1963, the number of US troops in Vietnam was approximately 17,000. Four years later, the number was approximately 485,000, a year after that, 535,000. To put that in proper perspective that's equal to the population of Oklahoma City. So, from 1963-1968, the number of US troops in Vietnam increased by about 32 times and even with an army the size of Oklahoma City, we couldn't defeat the Vietnamese for the same reason that the army which invaded the US was decisively defeated at The Battle of the Grand Canyon.

Of course, the irony of the Vietnam War is that according to the US State Department, "U.S. relations with Vietnam have become increasingly cooperative and broad-based in the years since political normalization. A series of bilateral summits have helped drive the improvement of ties, including President George W. Bush's visit to Hanoi in November 2006, President Triet's visit to Washington in June 2007, and Prime Minister Dung's visit to Washington in June 2008. The two countries hold an annual dialogue on human rights, which resumed in 2006 after a two-year hiatus. Vietnam and the United States signed a Bilateral Trade Agreement in July 2000, which went into force in December 2001. In 2003, the two countries signed a Counter-Narcotics Letter of Agreement (amended in 2006), a Civil Aviation Agreement, and a textile agreement. In January 2007, Congress approved Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) for Vietnam. In October 2008, the U.S. and Vietnam inaugurated annual political-military talks and policy planning talks to consult on regional security and strategic issues. Bilateral and regional diplomatic engagement expanded at ASEAN, which Vietnam will chair in 2010, and continues through APEC. The two sides have consulted regularly on a broad range of international issues at the UN Security Council, where Vietnam has a seat (January 2008-December 2009) as a non-permanent member."

So, after all those years and all those deaths, the US and Vietnam are not only "trading buddies," but buddies on several fronts. One could easily make an argument that those troops who lost their lives or lost their limbs in that losing war lost them in vain. One could make that argument since Vietnam, albeit a "buddy" of the United States is still under control of the Vietnamese Communist Party and though the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon "falling domino theory" has not held, what held for the US-Vietnam War and the Soviet-Afghan War will likely hold for the US-Afghan War and that does not bode well for the United States; namely, "I know my land better than you."
I shall refrain from repeating Santayana at this point.

Harvey Wasserman: Is This Tom Friedman's "Walter Cronkite Moment" on Afghanistan?

2009-10-29T14:41:18Z

The Iraq war's chief New York Times cheerleader has reversed field on Afghanistan. Does it mean there will be no escalation?

In early 1968, after the devastating Tet Offense, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite pronounced the Vietnam War unwinnable. Lyndon Johnson knew he had "lost middle America" and soon declined to run for a second term. The war dragged on for seven more hellish years. But the hearts and minds of the American public had been lost.

Tom Friedman is no Walter Cronkite. His Times column is influential in certain circles, but has nowhere near the nationally unifying force as Cronkite's evening broadcasts.

On the other hand, his admonition to "Don't Build Up" in Afghanistan indicates that the Pentagon PR blitzkrieg demanding more troops has failed in key corporate circles.

Friedman's arguments are both strategic and monetary. "We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interest to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan," he warns.

Ceding (finally!) the inability of the United States to dictate to countries that don't like us, Friedman manages to make the whole argument without mentioning Vietnam. He never even hints at the possibility that the US might not actually have the RIGHT to interfere in the politics of other nations.

But in this case he says the military's plan to pour troops into "stabilizing" Afghanistan "is a 20-year project at best, and we can't afford it."

This stunning admission comes alongside Friedman's signature assertion that "we are the world. A strong, healthy and self-confident America is what holds the world together and on a decent path."

What he fears is that "a long slow bleed in Afghanistan" could doom the United States, and thus the planet. "Shrinking down in Afghanistan will create new threats," he concedes. "But expanding there will too. I'd rather deal with the new threats with a stronger America."

Above all, we "desperately need nation-building at home."

Thomas Friedman is nothing if not a megaphone for the corporate elite. He supports atomic power and consistently pumps global trade agreements, US military adventurism and top-down decision-making in ways that can draw howls of outrage with a single smarmy sentence.

His Times cohort Roger Cohen has been selling the war as hard as he can. Puff pieces on hawk General Stanley McChrystal's global campaign to build military support for a massive escalation have been filling the Times's pages for weeks now. It recently concocted a non-story about the "impatience" of the military brass awaiting tens of thousands of new troops. It gave front page billing to McChrystal's completely inappropriate campaigning with NATO commanders who love McChrystal's demand for more troops but likely won't be sending more of their own any time soon.

It's impossible to assign tangible value to Friedman's loss of faith in escalation. But those of us hoping to avoid a catastrophic dive off the Afghani abyss have expected nothing but grief from this mainstay of the Iraqi catastrophe.

That a key cheerleader for that war is now waving his editorial pompoms for de-escalation can only be good. Let's make sure the White House gets the message.

--
Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.

Ron Kovic: A Letter to the President

2009-10-28T13:01:00Z

Dear Mr. President,

As a former United States Marine Corps Sergeant who was shot and paralyzed from my mid-chest down on January, 20th, 1968 during my second tour of duty in Vietnam, and who has lived with the wounds of that war for the past forty one years, I am writing this letter to you deeply concerned with General Stanley A. McChrystal's request for a troop escalation in Afghanistan.

Escalating this war and deploying more of America's sons and daughters to this conflict is a huge mistake -- another Vietnam disaster in the making. We are at a crucial turning point Mr. President and the decision you are about to make in the coming days and weeks may very well be the most important decision of your presidency. I cannot begin to comprehend the thoughts going through your mind as you contemplate this difficult decision, the awful burden it must be.

Many of us who served in Vietnam promised ourselves long ago that we would never again allow what happened to us in that war to ever happen again. We had an obligation as citizens, as Americans, as human beings to raise our voices in protest. We could never forget the hospitals, the intensive care wards, the wounded all around us fighting for their lives. Those long and painful years after we came home.

In your recent address to the VFW on August, 17, 2009 in Phoenix, Arizona, you stated that the war in Afghanistan was a "war of necessity." I remember as I watched and listened to you that day wondering if you had any idea what you were getting us into, if you knew anything of Vietnam and the painful lessons I and others of my generation had learned from that war. You were three years old when I joined the Marine Corps out of high school in 1964, seven when I was shot and paralyzed in 1968, ten when I joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and began to protest against that war.

There were the trials and days and nights I spent in jail in my wheelchair feeling more like a criminal than someone who had once risked his life for his country, but I continued to speak. Perhaps it was survivors guilt or my own need to be forgiven and keep others from coming back like me, but as I sat before those crowds I began to open up my heart in a way I had never done before, sharing everything; all the horrors and nightmares, all the things I had locked deep inside of me, and had for so long been afraid to say. It was an extraordinary time Mr. President, an agonizing time, a time of great conflict, a time of great sorrow, and a time that would forever change the way we saw our country and the world.

In your book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream you spoke of that time, the Sixties, admitting that you were, "to young to fully grasp the nature of those changes, too removed to see the fallout on Americas psyche." I write this letter to you Mr. President as both a survivor and witness to that time and someone who must live with the consequences of a decision made by our government and it's leaders four long decades ago.

Physically and emotionally Mr. President I have struggled to live with the enormous challenge of being paralyzed. It is not an easy wound to live with. There are the bedsores and the catheters, the urinary tract infections and high fevers, the lack of sexual function, spasms, and terrible insomnia that torments you in the night. Each morning you wake up wondering how you're going to make it through another day. There is an entire body that does not feel or move from your mid-chest down and constantly you are lifting yourself up from your cushion in your wheelchair to keep your skin from breaking down.

You struggle to look normal, to fit into in this world again after all that has happened to you. It all seems so overwhelming at first Mr. President, but somehow you find a way to continue on. There are the anxiety attacks and the horrifying nightmares, the depression and thoughts of giving up. You're scared and you try your best to hide all that you've lost, all that you're going through every day, you can't move or feel anymore. It is an overwhelming and unspeakable injury Mr. President, but you go on. You do your best. You've got to keep living. You've got to keep getting up every morning no matter how crazy it all seems.

The years pass and you're still alive. You're amazed that after all these years, all the frustrations and confinement, in and out of bed, hospitals, fevers, IVs, wetting your pants, soiling the sheets, nightmares, anxiety attacks, insomnia, that you are still here, still in this world. Yet you continue on to make the best of what is left. You try to sit proudly in your wheelchair everyday trying not to lose your balance. It is amazing how normal a person can look if he only tries. You do your best to get back into life again but you know deep down inside that nothing will ever be the same, that you have lost more than most people could ever imagine, sacrificed more for your country, short of dying, than most of your fellow citizens could ever comprehend. It is a horrifying wound.

You watch your friends and fellow veterans die year after year from alcohol, drugs, suicides, a shot gun blast to the face, a car crash, an over dose, festering bed sores, toxic shock syndrome, pneumonia, homelessness, destitution and the loneliness of being forgotten. You see it all and you know that there is no flag, no parade, no welcome home that can ever make up for what you and the others have lost, for all that you have seen and endured; all those speeches, Memorial Days, Fourth of July fireworks, slogans and rhetoric about freedom and sacrifice and how, "necessary" this or that the war was, and If we did not stop them there than they would surely come to get us here.

It's way too much for a young man to see -- way too much for anyone to comprehend. Yet you go on. You do your best to block it out, to focus on the beauty of life -- the more positive things. You are amazed at the resiliency of the human spirit. You tell others how grateful you are to be alive, how you believe your wound is a blessing in disguise. And though that may be true, there are still moments in the early morning as you lie alone in your bed, slowly awakening to the wound one more time. You think, you ponder, you reflect on all that you have lost -- all those years, all that sorrow -- they come flooding back. For all the healing, despite all that you are now grateful for, all that you cherish and love; for all the goodness and kindness, despite the beauty of this still very beautiful world and all the hope and promise that it represents. But it lingers, that sorrow, that sadness. If but briefly for all that was lost for all that can never be again.

~ Ron Kovic

Robert Naiman: "Lessons in Disaster": If Obama Caves to the Pentagon, He's No Jack Kennedy

2009-10-27T12:18:51Z

President Obama knows better than to agree to General McChrystal's proposal for military escalation in Afghanistan. He read the book.

On October 7, the Wall Street Journal reported that top officials of the Obama Administration, including President Obama himself, had recently read Gordon Goldstein's book on the path to U.S. military escalation in Vietnam: Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam.

The Journal reported that, "For opponents of a major troop increase, led by Biden and Emanuel, "'Lessons in Disaster' ... encapsulates their concerns about accepting military advice unchallenged."

Indeed, a central theme of the book is President Kennedy's willingness, on the question of ground troops in Vietnam, to do what President Obama has not yet done regarding demands for military escalation in Afghanistan: stand up to the U.S. military and say no.

Journalist Seymour Hersh, a close student of the U.S. military since he broke the story of the My Lai massacre, says the U.S. army is "in a war against the White House - and they feel they have Obama boxed in." Hersh says the only way out is for Obama to stand up to the Pentagon. "He's either going to let the Pentagon run him or he has to run the Pentagon," Hersh said. If he doesn't, "this stuff is going to be the ruin of his presidency." The only way for the U.S. to extricate itself from the conflict, Hersh says, is to negotiate with the Taliban. "It's the only way out," he said. "I know that there's a lot of discussion in the White House about this now. But Obama is going to have to take charge, and there's no evidence he's going to do that."

There's a conventional wisdom now that Obama simply can't "take charge," because it's politically impossible. According to this view, McChrystal's request sets up the Republicans to blame Obama for "losing Afghanistan" if he doesn't agree to McChrystal's request (even though, as Fareed Zakaria notes in the Washington Post, over the past 18 months, troop levels in Afghanistan have almost tripled).

But Goldstein's book strongly argues that President Obama could say no to the U.S. military. The perceived threat to the U.S. from "international Communism" was at least as powerful a bogey in American politics in 1961 as the threat of international terrorism is today.

Goldstein notes (p. 30):

[I]n the fall of 1961, Kennedy's most senior advisers almost unanimously warned him that the odds were sharply against avoiding a catastrophic defeat in Vietnam unless the president approved the first increment of a ground combat force deployment that might ultimately reach six divisions, or more than 200,000 men.

Yet Kennedy rejected every proposal to send combat troops to Vietnam.

Kennedy also rejected U.S. military demands for U.S. military intervention in Laos (pp. 46-47) In April 1961, Admiral Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations, argued "strongly and repeatedly" that without U.S. military intervention in Laos, "all Southeast Asia will be lost." The majority of Kennedy's advisers supported the deployment of combat troops to South Vietnam, Thailand, and government-controlled positions in Laos. If that failed to produce a cease-fire, Kennedy was advised to use tactical nuclear weapons against Laotian guerrillas. If China or North Vietnam intervened, those countries should be bombed and, if necessary, attacked with nuclear weapons.

Instead of taking any of this advice, Kennedy pressed for a diplomatic solution, bringing about a cease-fire and eventually an agreement for the neutralization of Laos.

Kennedy's willingness to stand up to military and civilian advisers who seemed to automatically advocate the most militarily aggressive U.S. response to any situation was informed by the debacle of the Bay of Pigs invasion, when Kennedy was badly burned by bad advice - not just advice that was bad in the sense of being wrong in its predictions, but advice that was deceitful - bad in the sense of "bad faith" and withholding key information. The same advisers who demanded U.S. military intervention in Laos had advised Kennedy to approve the Bay of Pigs operation - the invasion of Cuba by U.S.-supported Cuban exiles. Before the invasion, Kennedy's advisers talked up the great prospects for success. In approving it, Kennedy made clear that if it failed, he would not authorize direct U.S. military intervention to save it. When - predictably - the operation failed, Kennedy's advisers demanded direct U.S. military intervention to save it. In fact, the documentary record shows that the CIA knew the operation would fail without direct U.S. military intervention, but withheld this information from Kennedy, and that their plan all along was to box Kennedy into a situation where he would be compelled to involve U.S. forces. By Kennedy's own account, the CIA and the military didn't believe that a "new president" would stand up to them. (p.40)

When you read this history, you see Vice-President Biden's prediction that President Obama would be "tested" in a new light. Yes, President Obama is being tested - but not by foreign adversaries. President Obama is being tested by the Pentagon.

President Kennedy was no dove. Kennedy was willing to violate international law and Kennedy was willing to authorize the killing of people in foreign countries who had committed no crime against the people of the United States. What Kennedy was not willing to do was commit U.S. ground troops to an unwinnable war in Vietnam. And he wasn't willing to commit U.S. ground troops - as some of his advisers were - in the belief that protecting U.S. "credibility" meant that it would be better to fight and lose than not to fight. You don't have to be a dove to understand what President Kennedy understood: putting U.S. troops on the ground somewhere doesn't automatically make you more powerful. Indeed, it could make you less powerful, because, all other things being equal, a person with more options is more powerful than a person with fewer options. And if military escalation closes off opportunities for diplomatic and political solutions, it makes you less powerful.

Some people at the top of the Obama Administration clearly get this. Indeed, the Journal reported that, "Administration officials in the Biden camp fear they too could close off the path to a more peaceful resolution of the conflict if 40,000 more troops are sent."

This is the key danger in approving McChrystal's request. Of course, in the short run, sending more troops almost surely means that more U.S. troops will die and more Afghan civilians will die, and that would be bad enough. But the even greater danger is that it might make the eventual, inevitable political resolution of the conflict more difficult, thereby prolonging it and causing many more needless deaths.

National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy believed that after the U.S. escalated and "Americanized" the Vietnam war in 1965, a diplomatic solution was "not viable." Repeating this mistake - making a diplomatic resolution "not viable" - is the great danger in McChrystal's request. Bundy said later that Congress knew perfectly well what was at stake when President Johnson escalated U.S. involvement in 1965, and deliberately chose not to be involved. That observation is even more relevant today. No one in Congress can claim ignorance of a debate that has been aired in the media much more than the 1965 escalation decision was. If Congress isn't speaking up, it must be that they're not hearing enough from their constituents.

As former Marine captain Matthew Hoh recently wrote in his letter of resignation as a top U.S. official in Afghanistan,

"I want people in Iowa, people in Arkansas, people in Arizona, to call their congressman and say, 'Listen, I don't think this is right.' "

Now there's a great American patriot. Do what he says.

Joel Epstein: Explore War and Rethink Afghanistan

2009-10-20T15:23:28Z

As anyone who knows me knows, I've always had at best an ambivalent relationship with the military. Coming of age as I did during the tail end of the war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, like many of my generation I have always been highly skeptical of military speak and assertions by the American military leadership that its missions are noble and grand. And to miss the irony of President Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize as he pours more troops onto the fire in Afghanistan would be like missing the coverage of Michael Jackson's funeral or Roman Polanski's current digs in Switzerland.

Admittedly, I have lived a charmed life as far as military service goes. But as those who have driven with me know, I'm no pacifist and if called to serve, I would. The fact is, I've never been asked and now that my skin is wrinkled and my hair is turning gray I doubt I'd be much use on the battlefield anyhow, except perhaps behind the wheel of a tank.

While some may resent that I make no apologies for not volunteering for the armed forces it's who I am and I sleep just fine in the bed I've made. When registration for the draft was reinstituted during my college years I reluctantly signed on, waiting until I'd received a thoughtful reminder from the boys at the Selective Service. If you looked at my lineage, I guess you could say it's hereditary. The last male in my direct line to serve in the military was my maternal grandfather who proudly served his country in Brooklyn while attending engineering school at Pratt Institute. His honorable discharge sits framed in my home. Another ancestor cut off his trigger finger rather than serve in the Czar's army, while legitimate medical dispensations kept my father and his father out of the service, though I suspect my grandmother would have found another way to keep her son out of harm's way if she needed to.

Two uncles did serve proudly during the Second World War, one with the Marines at Iwo Jima and the other at the Battle of the Bulge where he took a bullet for his country. Choice words about their commanding officers aside, to this day, both men speak often and proudly of their service and country. But formed as I am by books (though I could never get through it) like the Pentagon Papers and the music and dark humor of Bob Dylan and Tom Lehrer, my regard for the military has been minimal at best. I expect I will go to my grave as skeptical of generals as I was as a 19 year old driving 8 hours from Ann Arbor to Washington to protest the country's military involvement in El Salvador. If I understood Chomsky I might be able to better articulate my distaste for war and an unrestrained military but I could never get past the fact that he looked too much like my trombone teacher. In any event, anyone that self righteous can't be correct all of the time.

Since life for me lately is about surprises, given my military pedigree I was pleased to recently find myself choked up during a preview of a short film entitled, Fish Out of Water. The film which is due out on November 11th (that's Veteran's Day for those of you like me who didn't know), was produced by Explore, a special project of the Annenberg Foundation. The film's title is a riff on the wisdom of Lao Tzu, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." Fish Out of Water profiles the important work of Sun Valley Adaptive Sports (SVAS) a nonprofit the Annenberg Foundation has funded to support its work helping wounded warriors with their recovery and reintegration into society.

Since 2007, about 1.65 million U.S. troops have been deployed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Given the nature of the conflict and "improvements" in munitions including IEDs, traumatic brain injuries have become the most common injuries of the wars. A recent RAND study found that about 200 veterans have suffered spinal cord injuries and 1,200 amputations, but around 325,000 have suffered traumatic brain injuries and 300,000 suffer from PTSD. According to Tom Iselin who runs SVAS, "The general public believes the signature wounds of war are a guy in a wheelchair or a guy with an amputated leg or arm. But the real signature wounds of war are the invisible wounds -- traumatic brain injuries, PTSD, and major depression."

Explore's mission is "to champion the selfless acts of others" and who can think of anything more selfless than losing life and limb for one's country. While the Weavers singing "Study War No More" remains my theme song, studying war isn't the same as studying the origins of conflict and the consequences that wars cause. Explore's film and another from the Brave New Foundation entitled, Rethink Afghanistan, are worth a look. Both films present the complex, harsh, and enduring legacy of the Iraq and Afghan wars. Explore's tag line is, "Never stop learning." Sage advice, especially in these strange times when a barrier breaking and inspiring president named Barack Obama is accepting the Nobel while expanding America's troop presence in the curious and insoluble conflict in Afghanistan. And from what I read, there aren't too many fishing rods amidst the materiel U.S. soldiers are packing. Maybe we should reel them in before it's too late.

Joseph A. Palermo: Wall Street Is More of a Threat to Obama's Domestic Agenda than Afghanistan

2009-10-20T15:02:29Z

"Deficits don't matter." When Vice President Dick Cheney uttered this famous line he was making a political judgment, not an economic one. In 2001, when the newly selected President George W. Bush and his posse rode into Washington they immediately began in earnest the chicanery, lying and recklessness that we came to expect throughout the subsequent eight years. They promised there'd be great benefits for our nation if the Republican Congress passed a massive tax cut aimed at Bush's wealthy friends, corporations, and campaign donors.

This call for fiscal abandon came after years where we heard squawking about the danger of budget deficits from Newt Gingrich and other Republicans, as well as from conservative pundits and Blue Dog Democrats. And one of the loudest voices decrying budget deficits in the pre-Bush years was the Chair of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan. The proposal coming from the Republican president and the Republican Congress was a tax giveaway to the wealthiest Americans and corporations that was certain to blow a hole in the federal budget and add $1.7 trillion to the national debt.

As head of the Federal Reserve it was Alan Greenspan's job to tell the Bush gang that after the sacrifices made to pay down the debt a new round of Reagan-style tax giveaways to the rich and corporations would be a bad idea. That line would have been the "conservative" position to take. Instead, as the high priest of all things economic, Greenspan testified to Congress giving his imprimatur to the Bush administration's kleptomania.

Greenspan's easy money policies aided and abetted Wall Street's pumping up "the mother of all bubbles." And along with the federal budget deficit he encouraged (and the Republicans' drunken spending spree that followed) the money ordinary Americans circulate was buried under a mountain of new debt and new claims on the money supply from Wall Street. By 2006, Wall Street was throwing around 7.5 times as much money ($10.299 trillion) than was being spent by Main Street ($1.367 trillion). Greenspan also sat back and watched when an exemption to the "net capital rule" was passed in 2004 that allowed investment banks to exceed the maximum debt to equity ratio of 12 to 1. Soon Bear Stearns' debt to equity ratio jumped to 33 to 1 and Merrill Lynch's ballooned to 40 to 1. And a lot of this leveraged debt was wrapped up in collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and other toxic derivative sludge.

We all know how the story plays out: In October 2008 the Congress, with a gun to its head from Wall Street titans and in the middle of an election season, forked over $810 billion of the taxpayers' money to bailout some of the greediest and most short-sighted market players ever to exist in the history of capitalism.

Today, just over a year later, with Goldman Sachs and other bailed out financial institutions turning big profits and paying out bonuses to their luckiest gamblers we continue to see the "real economy" in free fall. There are about $70 billion in crappy mortgages due to be "reset" in the next eighteen months, so there's no end in sight to Americans being thrown out of their homes. Unemployment continues to climb (albeit at a slower rate) but the deep hole that needs to be filled to replace the jobs lost will take many years of robust economic growth. The Congress, always in hawk to Wall Street, is dragging its feet in passing anything near the sweeping regulatory restructuring that is needed if we are to prevent Goldman Sachs and the rest of the gang from exploiting their "moral hazard" by using the federal treasury as the mother of all "credit default swaps." We can't even get the Democratic Congress to create a Pecora Commission with subpoena power to explore the extent of the criminality that led to the current crisis with the aim of modernizing the Securities and Exchange Commission to challenge the kleptocracy.

At some point, as the journalist Matt Taibbi and others have pointed out, our nation's Treasury seems to have been usurped by the former Goldman Sachs CEOs and other executives who both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush thought would make great Treasury Secretaries.

President Barack Obama's economic team headed by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and presidential adviser Larry Summers, like Alan Greenspan, are the wrong people doing the wrong job at the wrong time. They are catering to the whims of Wall Street when they should be mad as hell and representing the interests of Main Street. When FDR tapped Joseph P. Kennedy to be the first chair of the SEC he did so because Kennedy understood the swindles that needed to be policed because he had practiced them himself. Geithner and Summers understand the problems but so far they have not shown the will or desire to do anything about them.

There is currently a lot of hand wringing about the possibility of the war in Afghanistan, as costs rise and public support wanes, destroying President Obama's domestic agenda just as the Vietnam War brought down Lyndon Johnson. But whatever Obama decides to do in Afghanistan is of little consequence compared to Wall Street's ongoing "plutonomy." Either President Obama and the Congress tame and bring under control the white collar criminals who run Goldman Sachs and other "too big to fail" institutions or else there isn't going to be a "domestic agenda."

John Graham: Afghanistan -- Winning Lessons from Vietnam

2009-10-19T13:33:10Z

There are many differences between our wars in Vietnam and in Afghanistan. There are also similarities we can't ignore, including the vital need for an indigenous government that commands broad-based popular support.

I know the Vietnam part of it pretty well. In Vietnam, I was a civilian officer in CORDS, a joint civilian/military command that led American nation-building efforts in the country. For eighteen months in the early seventies I was in charge of all US development and civil affairs work in Thua Thien Province, fifty miles south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separated South Vietnam from North.

CORDS was set up to do in Vietnam what the US is finally doing in Iraq and is now starting to do in Afghanistan -- put major resources into "winning the hearts and minds" of people under intense pressure to hide enemy operatives, supply them with food and intelligence, and help them plan and conceal booby traps and mines.

I'm proud of the job that CORDS did. Operating under a security umbrella supplied by US and, for a time, South Vietnamese troops, CORDS built schools, health clinics and fish ponds. We gave training sessions in everything from public administration to farming. We had teams in the villages and we built stable and honest relationships with local people. Our work not only brought people to support our side; it often led to actionable intelligence that helped root out enemy cadre hidden in plain sight.

Yet neither US military might, nor CORDS, could prevent the collapse of America's efforts in Vietnam.

That collapse was made inevitable by the pervasive corruption and incompetence of a succession of governments of South Vietnam--and here lies the lesson for Afghanistan.

Corruption and incompetence kept any of the governments we supported in Saigon from gaining the minimal popular allegiance needed to make them viable. When I left Vietnam in 1972, the regime of Nguyen van Thieu was a house of cards, held together by a pervasive cronyism that put incompetents in key positions at every level, where many of them skimmed a good living off US aid funds.

The culture of cronyism that governed South Vietnam did more than undermine the government's competence to fight a war. Putting inept and corrupt people in positions of power drained popular support for the war from ordinary people in cities, town and hamlets all over the country -- and built support for the Viet Cong. In Huè, the capital of Thua Thien, the people had every reason to hate the Viet Cong, who had killed 3,000 of them in the infamous Tet Massacre of 1968. But the citizens of Huè hated the Thieu Government almost as much as they hated the Viet Cong. Always a center of political unrest, the city was the scene of many protests against the distant government in Saigon, and that government responded with political crackdowns, arrests and worse. In 1971, when Thieu ran unopposed for another term, the people of Huè, knowing a rigged vote when they saw one, stayed home.

The situation in Huè may have been more fragile than elsewhere in the country but it was not unique. The Thieu government was hated and feared by many and loved by none. Without a permanent American presence to prop it up, its demise was certain--and therefore so were the war aims of America in Vietnam.

I don't have any first-hand knowledge of what's going on in Afghanistan, but I can read.

The Karzai government seems eerily reminiscent of the government of Nguyen van Thieu in Vietnam 40 years ago. Nearly all observers report a culture of corruption and cronyism. The recent election is widely judged to have been less than free and fair. Local officials who are honest and competent risk being sacked if they don't go along with the clique in Kabul. Popular allegiance to a central government is feeble or absent. And in Afghanistan, opium money lubricates all of this.

These conditions all but invite the Taliban to return.

General McChrystal's initial efforts seem on the right track. At the strategic level, it makes sense to draw back from exposed combat bases and put resources into protecting and supporting CORDS-type efforts in villages and towns. But success at the local level will mean nothing if the corruption and incompetence in Kabul continue to generate hatred at worst and apathy at best.

The US should push hard for a government in Kabul with an acceptable level of integrity, competence and legitimacy -- and do it without making any government seem an American puppet. The current election process needs to be widely seen by ordinary Afghans as free and fair, even if that means doing the whole thing over. We should not be sorry if Karzai goes. We stayed with Thieu as the Devil We Knew -- and went down with him.

The leadership of Afghanistan needs the skills to bridge factions and the toughness to face down or outmaneuver warlords who will not cooperate. There must be serious efforts to cripple the opium trade and the income it generates.

Start this at the top and rely on CORDS-type operations to implement a nation-building strategy down to the village level. A more resolute focus on nation-building might also finally attract more help from our NATO allies.

Is that even possible in Afghanistan? I don't know. And even if it once was, after seven years of neglect, it may now be too late.

If that kind of government cannot be found or constructed in Afghanistan, then there is no hope and we should get out, focus on Pakistan and leave enough military might in the region to prevent Al-Qaeda from using Afghanistan/Pakistan as a base to attack us.

It would be painful to leave Afghanistan to its feudal fate. But it would be even more painful to be forced out, five years and many body bags from now.

John Graham
graham@giraffe.org
johngrahamspeaker.org

Trish Kinney: Vietnam, Agent Orange and Secretary Shinseki's Timely Decisions

2009-10-16T10:24:23Z

A small article appeared on the bottom of a right-hand inside page of USA Today this week with the headline "VA May Ease Rules for Vietnam Vets." The story, acknowledged as first reported by the New York Times, was short and required further research to understand. What it boils down to is that three new medical conditions may gain presumptive status as to their causal relationship to Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam. These conditions, Parkinson's disease, ischemic heart disease, and B cell leukemias will join an existing list already presumed to be caused by Agent Orange exposure including prostate cancer, respiratory cancers, soft tissue sarcomas, Hodgkin's disease, multiple myeloma, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki was quoted as saying, "Since my confirmation as Secretary, I've often asked why, 40 years after Agent Orange was last used in Vietnam, we're still trying to determine the health consequences to our veterans who served in the combat theatre. Veterans who endure a host of health problems deserve timely decisions." Indeed, and with due respect, Secretary Shinseki.

I spent twenty years working with Vietnam combat veterans as a result of two years of intense research for my first film, Home of the Brave. I received hundreds of letters and phone calls from Vietnam veterans who were willing to tell their stories, mostly for the first time, for this work. The stories were so disturbing, reflecting the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) of their tellers, that I experienced PTSD symptoms myself from continuing exposure to their trauma, and actually underwent treatment at my local Vet Center in order to complete the project. The film was used as an education and therapy tool in schools, family counseling centers and veteran treatment facilities and also aired on PBS.

Later I served as President of Operation Freedom Bird for many years, accompanying fifty hand-selected veterans in PTSD related treatment at the VA and their counselors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (the Wall) in Washington, D.C. each Veteran's Day. A difficult but ultimately healing experience of sharing, bonding, confronting and remembering, the Vet Center counseling staff believes that the participants may receive as much as four years worth of therapy in those few short days.

My memories of the trips are powerful and unforgettable. Standing in front of black granite in the dead of night in the cold November air, I watched as the men first reached out to touch the names of those whose stories were linked to their own and listened as they began to tell those stories that had been bottled up inside for so many years. We took veterans to the Wall who were very sick, some with the "presumptive diseases," and, in some cases, later attended their funerals. At our end-of-day sessions each evening, counselors gently guided the discussion away from anger and frustration with the VA and its delays and denials, instead focusing on healing and renewal.

Throughout my work on the film, and in all my years with Operation Freedom Bird, I never met a Vietnam combat veteran who said that combat was worse than the treatment received at the hands of the American people upon returning home. Being rejected and spurned by their own country was a violation of a sacred trust, often setting their PTSD in stone. When their physical issues began to intensify, and the frustrating struggle increased to prove that Agent Orange caused or contributed to their cancers, their children's birth defects, and other serious ailments, rejection of benefits and related care by the Veterans Administration sent them further into depression and despair. Families broke up and lives were shattered. Many veterans, due to both the physical and emotional toll of their service, did not survive.

While we were shooting the film over a three day period, we shared lunch with the camera crew. Deeply moved by working on this intense and raw material with the cast of real Vietnam veterans, the head cameraman addressed us all for the first time on the final production day. He was 10 years old when his brother was killed in Vietnam. His parents were so ashamed of his service that they put all his personal effects as well as all family photos and reminders of his life in boxes in the attic, as though he never existed, his brother said. After having the privilege of working on Home of the Brave with the veterans, he said he would take his summer vacation that year, go home to Iowa, and get his brother out of the attic.

The Vietnam combat veterans I know are loyal, dear friends who once guided me through my own close encounter with death as a high risk cancer patient. They taught me how to stare down death without looking away and worry about survivor's guilt later. They taught me how to think of chemotherapy as my army of foot soldiers and the loss of my hair to be the result of friendly fire, good fast growing cells accidentally killed by the chemicals. A bear hug from a Vietnam combat vet often held twice the healing power of any medicine. They were there when I needed them most to support and encourage. I am heartbroken that we, as a society, haven't been there for them when they needed us the most.

Being an eye witness over the years to the post-war emotional and physical toll of Vietnam service, I can honestly say that I am glad that the Agent Orange presumptive list has been expanded but puzzled by the secretary's comments about veterans deserving "timely decisions." I am afraid it is a little too late for that.

Cenk Uygur: Did Bush Screw Up Afghanistan Worse Than Iraq?

2009-10-14T12:27:48Z

Right now, there is a debate as to what President Obama should do in Afghanistan. As there should be. Should he send in more troops? Does it make sense to escalate the war without a viable partner in the Afghan government? Will this be his Vietnam? Woh, woh, woh ... whose Vietnam?

What is not being talked about enough is the disastrous situation George Bush left for Obama in Afghanistan (as he did in just about every aspect of government). What the hell did Bush do in Afghanistan for over seven years? Apparently, not a damn thing.

Do you know how many troops Bush had in Afghanistan in early 2008? He had an unbelievably small contingent of 26,000 troops in the whole country. At the same time, he had 160,000 troops in Iraq. I don't know if you know this, but Iraq did not attack us. The people who did attack us on 9/11 lived in ... Afghanistan.

Now, that's past tense of course. The leadership of Al Qaeda now resides in Pakistan. Why? Because that's where Bush let them escape without much effort. I've written before about how Bush let Osama bin Laden get away, it appeared without trying very much at all. But here's what you can't argue with - Bush did not try at all in Afghanistan. He didn't give a damn. 26,000 troops -- are you kidding me? Right now, we're having a debate if 65,000 troops are anywhere near enough or if we need 40,000 more troops.

Bush's gross indifference to the war in Afghanistan is being overlooked, understandably because of how badly he mangled the other war he started. But there is an excellent case to be made that Bush screwed up the Afghanistan War more than the Iraq War. It's a hell of a competition. In the one case, he tried, which is usually disastrous for him. And in the other, he didn't even bother, which can be argued is morally worse. What was the mission of our troops there for all those years? What did they die for?

Watch More Young Turks Here

UPDATE: AOL Poll -- Which war did Bush screw up worse? Iraq or Afghanistan. Vote here.

Magda Abu-Fadil: Full Throttle to Hyperlocal News in Czech Republic

2009-10-12T16:53:29Z

Coffee, snacks, social media, reporting, producing a paper, online publishing?

This isn't your typical café or newsroom. It's all of the above.

It's a news café where people in Czech communities can relax, meet, down some brew, see their local paper being produced, mingle with editors, contribute to the copy and even nourish its Web presence.

Coffee, snacks and news at Nase Adresa café (Abu-Fadil)

"The readers can go there and be in contact" with the pros, said Roman Gallo, director of media strategies at PPF, an international financial group that's invested in the project and operates in Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, China and Vietnam.

Editor at Usti edition of paper in northern Bohemia (Abu-Fadil)

The editorial team is available to talk to people and is in tune with the community's problems, he added.

Almost four months since its rollout, the project is attracting many fans, readers and browsers.

The paid-for weekly newspaper called Nase Adresa (our address in Czech) http://www.naseadresa.cz is considered a revolutionary business model, and "a new frontier for the newspaper industry," according to the Paris-based World Association of Newspapers' World Editors Forum that organized a study tour of the weekly's regional newsrooms.

It seems circulation is up for the different editions, traffic on its various websites is on the rise, and the cafés that form the centerpiece of the enterprise are bubbling with activities, like live rock concerts outside the storefront newsrooms.

They've even monetized the websites through advertising.

Paper's community involvement includes musical entertainment
(Abu-Fadil)

Even children are part of the editorial process. Their curricula include media literacy of the first order.

These young reporters gather news, write, and shoot pictures and/or video that is edited by coaches (real hacks) and supervised by their teachers.

"I would like to know how many newspapers you have in your countries," a girl sitting at a laptop in the children's section asked visiting foreign editors of the news café.

Czech student contributes to paper's content at news café through
school program (Abu-Fadil)

She was one of a dozen "tweens" preparing copy, checking sources, following a newscast on a TV screen behind her and listening to her journalist coach.

One wouldn't expect such an avant-garde approach to journalism from a country where the media were centrally controlled (and stifled) a mere two decades ago.

At first, PPF http://www.ppfgroup.nl thought it had to get experienced journalists to run the papers but later realized that training young people was the key to the venture's success.

Thirty percent of the paper's content is generated by communities pro bono, and 20% of the copy is unique, not repurposed from the web.

According to Nase Adresa, half the new subscriptions are from walk-ins to the cafés after a cup of java and a chat. Circulation is not more than 30,000 copies for all seven pilot districts.

Residents of those areas feed the papers with over 50% of their news, views, pictures, and more. If this bold experiment succeeds, 200 other hyperlocal weekly papers and 700 websites will blanket the 10 million-strong Czech Republic in the coming year or two.

Each paper can operate with as few as five full-timers and a phalanx of freelancers or community reporters. Nase Adresa editor-in-chief Petr Sabata said the monthly cost of personnel averages 8,300 Euros ($12,267).

Petr Sabata, Nase Adresa's editor-in-chief for all local newsrooms
on a hyperlocal paper's makeup (Abu-Fadil)

A cutting-edge central newsroom, or Futuroom, in Prague supports the local teams.

Futuroom http://www.futuroom.cz/en and Nase Adresa complement each other with the former providing a multimedia training center in the Czech capital that also serves as an innovative lab where journalistic formats and news production vehicles (including text, pictures, film, sound and interactive graphic designs) are tested.

Futuroom even sells its own infographics to newspaper clients.

Futuroom (PPF)

The building also hosts Junioroom, where about 30 school children ages 10-16 attend a summer camp, learn from journalists, and practice journalism in the field.

Roman Gallo explains Futuroom's operations (Abu-Fadil)

"Print isn't dead, and hyperlocal news is the future of newspapers, with new players," said World Editors Forum director Bertrand Pecquerie. WEF http://www.wan-press.org/wef/articles.php?id=2 organized the study tour and a conference on the 2015 Newsroom for some 25 editors from around the world.

Carol Hoenig: One Self-Published Author Gives a Story of War a Soul

2009-10-12T15:59:25Z

Yesterday I posted a review for Kristen J. Tsetsi's novel Homefront. After seeing my previous reviews for some other books here on The Huffington Post, Kristen asked if I'd consider reviewing her novel. Once I heard what the subject matter was, I agreed. I'm glad I did. I was so intrigued and impressed by this book that I needed to ask the author some questions about the story itself and how it came to be self-published. I invite you to read the interview I conducted with Kristen:

Q: Thank you, Kristen, for taking the time to answer my questions about Homefront, a novel about someone waiting for a loved one to return home from war. What inspired you to write this particular story?

A: And thank you so much (truly) for your interest, Carol. The story was inspired by how important I think it is to dispel the myth of the stoic, valiant, yellow-ribbon, cookie-baking, proud and strong supporter -- because looking at people that way doesn't leave room for the cracks, the weaknesses, the real and hard and surreal time spent hoping the person you love isn't killed that day. It allows us to gloss over this very real and horribly tumultuous experience, as if it's one of the lesser side-effects of war instead of what it really is: something that leaves people feeling numb for a year. Something that sends people to therapists. Something that causes people to lose their hair because they're so distraught. They lose sleep. They lose any sense of normalcy. (For how military spouses say they're affected, in their own words, I invite you to read a segment of an unscientific survey I conducted some time ago.)

I've been writing for a long time, and what's always interested me as a writer is the subtle, but consuming, power of emotions, so when months after my husband's (boyfriend, at the time) return from his deployment to Iraq, I still found myself irritatingly quick to cry when remembering or talking about his absence, and knowing this was something thousands of others were going through, I knew it required a deeper literary exploration than it had been given. And, fortunately, I'd been writing about emotion almost exclusively, so I was reasonably confident I could find a way to make this experience real for the reader.

The story was also inspired by my frustration that as these wars (wars everywhere, for that matter) go on, as deaths continue, soldiers and those who love them are too frequently turned into one-dimensional Uniforms and Yellow Ribbons. Homefront makes them real people, and it turns war into something more than a convenient topic for people to argue about when they feel like having a political debate. It was inspired by my desire to communicate something Iraq veteran Charlie Preusser took from the novel and wrote me about in an email after his reading of Homefront:

Being in Iraq sucks beyond comprehension. It only gets worse with time. I always just figured that folks back home were bored, or felt the absence of those deployed as an inconvenience. I get it, now. People so often tell the stories of soldiers at war, and thereafter in stories about protest and strife riddled with dissolution. These stories are so often event driven and formulaic they somehow miss the greater depth of the story. They don't really tap the emotion that runs deep. You gave it a soul. As a veteran, I thank you.

Q: What a wonderful, heartfelt response to your novel. That must have been gratifying to receive.

You have a number of different characters, all very interesting and fleshed out to believability, meaning they are flawed. Besides Mia who, like you, is a former English professor, cab driver and lives in Tennessee, are any of the other characters based on people you know?

A: A few. Donny Donaldson is the strongest representation of a real person, a Vietnam veteran I met over a decade ago when I worked for a telemarketing company in Minnesota. Donny is actually a watered-down version. The real man was, if you can imagine, more erratic than Donny. And our relationship, which was an unlikely friendship based on a mutual need for someone -- anyone -- to talk to, wasn't much different from the one shared by Mia and Donny.

Other Homefront characters have elements of real people I knew. Shellie the cab dispatcher, Paula with the smoke-scratched drawl, and Lenny the night driver are character sketches of people I worked with in the cab stand. The others -- Denise, Olivia, Brian, and even Jake -- are more representative of different types of people. But even the smallest characters have to have flaws, or they won't be believable as people.

Q: Mia, the protagonist is such a strong character. I could feel her anger at a situation she couldn't control throughout the novel. Since this is semi-autobiographical, was she helpful in getting you to come to terms with your feelings about your boyfriend being a soldier in the army?

A: I never had any issues with Ian being a soldier. I don't think Mia does, either, until closer to the end of the novel. What I understood very well with Ian, though, and what I wanted Mia to learn, is that you don't have to personally want to be in the military to have an appreciation for what drives others to join or how much it can come to mean to them to be a part of it while they're in. Many people can't imagine why anyone would join the military, or why anyone wouldn't get out as soon as they could after going through one deployment. Mia's own issues with this are explored so that others, when reading Homefront, will come to understand it a little better along with her.

Q: Your book is published by Penxhere Press. Could you tell us a bit about them? In addition, I see that you have support from http://www.backwordbooks.com/. Would you tell our readers about this?

A: I published Homefront myself using a POD distributor, and as my own publisher -- but still a publisher -- I needed a name. I chose Penxhere because in Albanian (I'm half Albanian) "penxhere" means window, and fiction (any kind of writing, really) is a window to any number of worlds.

Henry Baum and I are I guess what you'd call the founders of Backword Books. (Two others were involved in the beginning, but they dropped out early because they were incredibly, incredibly busy with other projects.) Backword Books is a collective of indie authors/publishers whose novels have, without the benefit of having a traditional publisher, proven themselves with the most important audience: readers and critics. Some have even achieved wide media coverage. While not opposed to traditional publishing (and, in fact, we're in favor of it), we recognize indie publishing as a viable option and strive, through our collective, to make known that good self-published work IS out there. Backword Books has seven authors: R.J. Keller, Christopher Meeks, Henry Baum, Andrew Kent, Bonnie Kozek, Eddie Wright, and myself. So far. We're growing.

Q: Did you try to get a literary agent for Homefront?

A: Absolutely! That was my first step. I queried and queried and queried, and while I received favorable responses to the novel, there just wasn't a fit until recently. I have an agent now. A wonderful, supportive, patient, and hardworking agent who not only feels strongly about Homefront, but who believes it's just a matter of time before it's picked up.

Q: What has been the response so far to your novel?

A: When I started writing seriously (after reading Kate Chopin's "Story of an Hour"), it was because I wanted to write something that would mean something to people, that would affect them the way "Story of an Hour" affected me; something that would make them feel understood, or less alone, or less guilty about feeling and thinking what they think and feel and would never, ever tell anyone they're thinking or feeling. The responses to Homefront from literary critics have been overwhelmingly positive, which is more gratifying on a professional level than I can begin to express, but the responses from soldiers, veterans, and military spouses who, like Mr. Preusser above, or like Army wife Beth K. who wrote to say she's read the book three times because it makes her feel understood at a time when it's important to be understood, are the most meaningful. These people were affected, and if you affect people who are living the real-life situation depicted in any story it means you did it correctly.

Q: What are you working on now as a writer?

A: I've just released a collection of short fiction as an ebook, Carol's Aquarium. The collection includes a few short stories that, like Homefront, take you inside the experience of having a loved one at war, a few stories are illustrations of the relationship tension we all know and love, and a story or two explore love as it is rather than love as we think it should be. (Carol's Aquarium is available on Smashwords, Scribd.com, and is also a Kindle book.)

I'm also working on a new novel with the working title The Year of Dan Palace. In Dan Palace, a single event causes a man, Dan Palace, to believe he must live the rest of his life as if he'll die any day. And he does live that way, but at the expense of those around him.

Q: Do you have any advice for writers?

A: Um, it would depend on the question. I think my advice changes from day to day. Today, my advice is to read my advice to people who take writing advice.

Thanks, Kristen, for taking the time to discuss Homefront and your writing life. I wish you every success in your career.

Jim Selman: Health Is A Function Of Participation

2009-10-07T18:09:57Z

I remember this phrase from the Est Training in the 1970s. It was one of the maxims the people received at the end of the program in 'the little book of aphorisms.' This booklet was filled with Werner Erhard's insights on life and basically reinforced the idea that 'this is it'--life is what it is and reality doesn't care what we think. The point was to stop being victims and 'make a difference.' It was a great experience for hundreds of thousands of folks looking for answers to life's big questions like "Who am I?", "What is my purpose?", "What's it all about?"...and on and on. The fact is that, in spite of Vietnam and a lot of social unrest, those were exciting times when young Americans were beginning to wake up and take responsibility for their world.

I bought into the whole idea, resigned a partnership in a big firm, and went to California to learn what the 'New Age' was all about. I ended up working for and with Werner Erhard for almost 12 years. The movement was all about transformation and how human beings could participate in bringing about real change by participating with others in various ways. We participated with Werner in the creation of dozens of initiatives including:

* "The Hunger Project" (to create 'the end of hunger and starvation as an idea whose time has come', a project that is still working around the world to achieve that objective)
* "The Breakthrough Foundation" (that delivered programs for youth at risk), and
* "Transformational Technologies" (that introduced transformation to the business world and first conceived the idea of coaching as an alternative to traditional command-and-control management).

Today I am continuing to work along with millions of others (many of whom never heard of Werner Erhard) to bring about a transformation in how we relate to each other, the future and our circumstances in general.

In addition to my corporate work, my focus is on working to transform the culture of aging so that our later years in life are as meaningful and filled with possibility as when we were younger. I see 'age' as one of the aspects of living that we so take for granted that we never consider that it is just an interpretation. We have a choice in how we experience living at every age. Moreover, it is something we all share that can bring older and younger people together in confronting many of today's more intractable problems.

As I approach my 68th birthday, I am grateful for everything and everyone in my life. I am healthy and feel as much energy and enthusiasm for living as I ever have. I don't know if it is just 'good genes' or the fact that I am still passionately engaged in and committed to the various interests I have. I do know that the more I participate in meaningful projects, the healthier and happier I seem to be. This is what ElderingTM is about--staying in the game, sharing the best of who we are, making a contribution to the people and the things we most care about.

I invite everyone who is committed to participating in bringing about the transformation of our institutions and our world to sign the Eldering Manifesto and then put your "wisdom into action".

© 2009 Jim Selman. All rights reserved.

Foreign Policy Roundtable: Afghanistan: Echoes of Vietnam

2009-10-07T17:07:52Z

HOTSPOT: Afghanistan

It's a mess. It has a newly-reelected president, who may or may not have won by stuffing ballot boxes, and a hornet's nest of insurgents, intent on imposing a Flintstone society of beards, burqas and banishment of all outsiders. In the midst of all this are thousands of western troops, most of them American, intent on defeating the Stone Agers and helping the country move into free, modern times. It seems an impossible task, and it sounds vaguely familiar, doesn't it?

By James Dobbins

In February, just a month after he took office, President Obama ordered an additional 17,000 soldiers and marines to Afghanistan. Weeks later, he dispatched 4,000 more.

In his own review of strategy for victory, the new American commander there, General Stanley McChrystal, reportedly concluded that he needs as many as 40,000 American troops above current levels. Anticipating this request, many Democrats and a few Republicans are questioning the wisdom of sending any reinforcements, and some have instead begun to argue for a substantial drawdown.

Beyond that, polls are showing that Americans are increasingly skeptical about this conflict, and citizens of other nations contributing troops, such as Britain, Germany, Canada, and the Netherlands, are even more negative.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Now that U.S. involvement in Iraq has finally begun to require fewer resources, Afghanistan is the new focus of American and European anti-war sentiment, and increasingly Obama's critics are drawing on the analogy of Vietnam. They assert that the United States and its allies are bogged down in a long, inconclusive conflict in support of a corrupt and incompetent government against an elusive, popularly based enemy operating out of an untouchable cross-border sanctuary.

In fact, the two societies, Vietnamese and Afghan, and the two insurgencies, Viet Cong and Taliban, could hardly be more different. Yet the conflicts may, in the end, have a similar impact on American public opinion. And that could have a similar impact on their outcomes. The most decisive battles over Vietnam were fought for the heart and minds of the American people and the most decisive defeat was in the U.S. Congress. The contest for Afghanistan is now being conducted over this same terrain.

In 2008, President Obama campaigned on a promise to withdraw American troops from Iraq and reinforce those in Afghanistan. The first pledge generated the most comment at the time. Then, 10 days after Obama defeated Senator John McCain, President Bush effectively removed withdrawal from Iraq as a source of controversy by committing the United States to removing all U.S. troops from Iraq by 2011.

Debate over the second pledge - redoubling U.S. efforts in Afghanistan - has been growing ever since.

The military situation in Afghanistan was deteriorating when Obama took office and continues, with mounting violence and expanded insurgent influence over large parts of the country. Opinion polling shows waning Afghan public support for the U.S. and NATO military presence and for the Afghans' own government over the past several years.

Afghan opium production is down this year, but the drop may be due in part to depressed prices from bumper crops in previous years. Plausible allegations of widespread fraud in presidential elections two months ago portend an even more fractious political environment and diminished public support for the Afghan government in the future.

Obama and other supporters of the engagement in Afghanistan cite the attacks of 9/11 and argue that without U.S. and NATO forces, Afghanistan would likely again become a sanctuary for a global terrorist leadership intent on more attacks against the United States and its allies.

The president has moved away from his predecessor's emphasis on democratization as a rationale for that American presence. At the same time he has stressed that helping the Afghan government win the confidence and support of its people is key to American success and eventual withdrawal. Doing so, he has argued, requires that the population be protected from Taliban intimidation, and this in turn requires additional U.S., NATO, and Afghan forces until sufficient new Afghan military and police can be trained, equipped and deployed.

Critics of the growing troop commitment point out that al Qa'ida is largely absent from Afghanistan, having found refuge in neighboring Pakistan. Facing its own fundamentalist insurgency, Pakistan has largely lost control of its frontier regions bordering Afghanistan.

Obama's critics recall Afghanistan's long record of successful resistance to foreign incursions, from the British in the 19th century to the Soviets in the 20th. They argue that as long as both al Qa'ida and the Taliban can find sanctuary in Pakistan, the conflict in Afghanistan will remain an unwinnable side show.

Instead, they propose that the United States cut back its military commitment on the ground and keep al Qa'ida off balance and on defense by using air and missile strikes from afar, as it is already doing against terrorist networks in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.

For years, the war in Iraq diverted resources from Afghanistan. Obama has characterized Afghanistan as a war of necessity, in contrast to Iraq, a war of choice -- and a bad one at that. Yet as controversy over Iraq fades, this comparison, perhaps accurate and certainly powerful in its time, has dwindling impact. In its place is a new controversy, Afghanistan as the new Vietnam.

There's no debate about how that war turned out, but little agreement on why. The insurgency in South Vietnam had been reduced to manageable proportions by the time American troops departed in 1973. Counterinsurgency thus largely succeeded, yet the war was still lost when North Vietnam launched a conventional invasion in 1975. Vietnam thus offers material for both sides in current debate over troop levels in Afghanistan. Those who argue for a better resourced counterinsurgency campaign can point to the tactical and operations successes in Vietnam. Opponents recall the strategic failure.

Unfortunately for General McCrystal's advocates, it's the latter image that lingers most strongly in our national psyche.

James Dobbins was special envoy for Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo during the Clinton administration, and the first envoy for Afghanistan in the George W. Bush Administration. He is the author of After the Taliban: Nation Building in Afghanistan (Potomac Books, 2008), and directs the RAND Corporation's International Security and Defense Policy Center.

Rethink Afghanistan : Filmmaker Robert Greenwald "Took A Lot Of Grief" For Movie On Afghan War Policy

2009-10-07T15:32:38Z

The left-wing filmmaker behind a documentary that questions U.S. policy in Afghanistan says he "took a lot of grief" and lost progressive donors when he began making the movie "Rethink Afghanistan."

Robert Greenwald's latest effort criticizes the U.S.'s current approach to the war in Afghanistan, even if it tarnishes the image of Pres. Barack Obama by association.

James Campion: Afghanistan: The Original Quagmire

2009-10-07T12:24:06Z

The United States must leave Afghanistan now.

Not in eleven months or after careful discussion and continued study to determine an undisclosed time, but now.

Soon after, it must leave Iraq.

These and other difficult but sound decisions are only debatable because it is today, and not four or five or six years ago when these hard choices should have been made, instead of the slack-jawed flag-waving, ribbon-tying jingoistic miasma we received. Back then, if you had asked any voter if this country would still be embroiled in two wars seven or eight years on, they would have chuckled, even bristled with fear, and fobbed it off as doom-speak and defeatist thinking by a paranoiac borne of anti-American rhetoric.

If only we could have employed a time machine and fast-forwarded the mood then to now, we may have seen how literally insane it is to continue to call what is going on in the Middle East a policy or a strategy or any clearly defined idea that unfolds into a serviceable conclusion.

But, alas, there will be no conclusion. It will drag on another five, ten years. And when it threatens to die down something else will pop up to take its place. Iran? North Korea? Maybe it will finally spill over into the real threat, Saudi Arabia - or maybe the home base of true tyrannical charm, China. Nah, too much money to be made; comrades of convenience can abuse all the civil rights and unleash all the terrorists they please, just keep the oil and loans a-comin'.

Ah, but, don't fret; you can wager for the rest of your natural born life there will be American foreign military presence wasting our money and stealing our children to not "win" somewhere.

And what the hell is "win" anyway? Can anyone describe what a victory over terrorism would look like? Is it possible? Of course the answer to these and other rhetorically sarcastic queries is no. It is not possible. It will be as it is now; nothing but stemming the tide, waiting them out, bleeding them dry, showing strength, taking the fight to them, all adding up to a slag heap of blood and treasure that will surely bankrupt the United States as it did the last in a long series of history's fading super powers, the Soviet Union.

Nope, there will be no exiting Afghanistan or Iraq anytime soon.

And why not?

The government needs it.

War is nothing more than another in a spectacular line-up of wasteful, inefficient, badly orchestrated and overly funded government program.

All these yahoos waving signs about tyranny and government take-overs of health care had better start turning their attention to our greatest mismanaged money-pit; the War Machine. With the money poured annually in this finger-in-the-dam waiting it out policy in the Middle East you could bankroll the education, health concerns, and retirement of the entirety of North, Central and South America.

This is why our president is "taking time to sort out details on Afghanistan" or some such folderol? When running for the office in 2007, Barack Obama visited Afghanistan and concluded that it was not only winnable but crucial to the war effort, then campaigned diligently on the "right vs. wrong" war ideology: Iraq = Wrong, Afghanistan = Right. The imbecilic college rah-rah mentality of grass roots political hysteria took this as some kind of anti-war slant, just as the poor suckers who were waiting for Obama to legalize gay marriage or even drugs - the latter of which, by the way, would defeat the Taliban in less than thirty days while also rescuing our suicidal farming industry.

But that must all seem like a dream to Joe Cool now that at the conclusion of the bloodiest month in Afghanistan in eight years of baseless meandering, the president hasn't bothered to speak to the general running things over there but once since he was sworn in. Oh, and before people are all up in arms about this nugget of info, where has your press been? More importantly, where has your outrage been? Since the blatantly fascist ban on the control of the media's coverage of returning coffins was lifted, only the Associated Press bothers to cover the dead shipped back from these completely useless and utterly winless exercises in abject murder and destruction, all under the appropriation of our beloved nation and on our dime.

Shit, did you even know that Cindy Sheehan is still protesting out there?

Yet, without our vocal participation, much of which is wasted daily investigating the president's citizenship, which party asshole might be calling the other nitwit a killer, whose lousy children are being indoctrinated into some political mind frap, and an agonizing series of insignificant television personalities trading on unchecked hearsay as some kind of invincible factoid, the powers that be continue to dangle these criminal acts of global stupidity as if a philosophical, and worse still, political carrot of victory. And for the oddest of reasons, we as a people continue to bankroll and support this crap, and allow our brave and impressionable youth the fast lane to its slaughter.

When it comes to endless military campaigns, America goes beyond simple amnesia; it dabbles in a rare stew of revisionist lying and slapdash illusions sold as patriotism. Thus, we are trained to swallow impish notions that to cease making one abysmal mistake after the next is "cutting and running" or "giving up" or forefend, "quitting."

This, of course, is nonsense, like most of the lies perpetuated by the Dullard Brigade; many of whom with different names from different ages poured our money and blood into stone-cold failures in Korea and Vietnam and now Iraq and soon Afghanistan.

The Democrats won't stop it. The Republicans sure won't. Congress refuses and the president, the one who rightly railed against this cycle of madness appears to be fine with letting it continue.

Of course the generals keep asking for more troops. This is what generals do. Then the guilty and confused in the legislature come running to us with their hands out to get us to pay for it. This is how it goes, over and over and over and over and over until you are dead and a new set of saps take the reigns.

Forget about the national debt and political ideologies weighing heavy on the future of our children.

They'll be too busy fighting and dying for that endless and most popular, bipartisan government program: War.

Vietnam Man Jailed For Democracy Slogan

2009-10-07T11:18:58Z

A court in Vietnam has sentenced a man to three years in prison for hanging a banner over a bridge in Hanoi which called for multi-party democracy.