February 23, 2019: At The Waterfront, Partisan Cauldron, Dinner Is Served

Back in the day there was a program, originally on NBC, called “Wild Kingdom”. Hosted by zoologist Marlin Perkins, the program featured tales from the wild as a means of introducing urbanites to the ecology of the planet. Normally, it would feature a particular species as a 'family' would wind it's way through the seasons, usually ending with a mating scene. Perkins would always save the best for last as a means of keeping the old man glued to the screen long enough for the rest of the family to enjoy the program.

Anyway, I recall a particular episode, sometime in the late 60's, in which Perkins was featuring the life of lions, observing from a distance the behaviors of a lioness and her cubs, as she gave birth, nurtured, and then instructed the young miscreants on the ways of the world; necessary lessons in survival. As the program droned on, waiting for the inevitable mating scene—which was as close to real copulation as one could see on television in those days—Perkins, while observing the playful behavior of the cubs as the lioness took them down to the river to drink quipped “and she will tolerate no nonsense at the waterfront.” Words that have stuck with me for half a century. No nonsense at the waterfront.

In the aftermath of the great wars of the last century it was the position of both political parties that, following the wisdom of the jungle, “debate ended at the waterfront”. This meant that whatever the differences between the political parties, partisanship did not extend to foreign policy. We might quibble within the house, but we would present a united stand to the world. It was during these times that we forged our great alliances providing an umbrella for the rebuilding of war-torn Europe and Japan, as well as aiding nations emerging from the yoke of colonial domination. The world knew who we are and where we stood. America was as good as it's word.

All this began to unravel in the wake of Viet Nam and Watergate. The war split the nation into warring factions and ever since the country has not been able to go forth with anything like the national unity that it presented to the world decades earlier.

But it is one thing to honestly debate what many rightly saw as a colossal national futility inviting national humiliation; it is quite another to use foreign policy for real or imagined partisan advantage. It is the stature of the United States that has been the bedrock of global hope and aspiration; But nonsense at the waterfront is rapidly eroding our standing in the world.

In 2015 John Boner, then Republican Speaker of the House, invited Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington to speak before a joint session of Congress. (1) Usurping President Obama's role as Head of State, the Speaker did this in order to shore up domestic political support without consulting either the State Department or the White House. At about the same time, nearly two-score Republican senators sent a letter to the leadership in Iran warning Tehran that any agreements reached with the Obama administration would not survive his presidency. Then, sure enough, the Scum made good on the pledge withdrawing from the nuclear agreements a few months after Caesar Disgustus seized power.

And he seized power by criminally conspiring with hostile foreign nationals in a conspiracy against his own country for crass personal and partisan reasons. Treacherously he not only seized power but has used the office to not only service the interests of Putin's regime but to further divide the country in part by throwing all policy—foreign and domestic—into a heated partisan cauldron. Everything is now seen through a partisan lens—right down to reporting itself. And, since our intrepid Caesar conflates all interests with his own, the Rescumlican party is being further dragged down the rabbit hole that is tRUMP in wonderland.

Not only does this nation no longer present a united front to the world but, by lacking consistency, we have undermined our integrity.

It has been observed in these columns that Disgustus projects onto others his own shortcomings. When he says the system is 'rigged' he means that he has rigged it; when he calls his opponent 'crooked', he means that he himself has disjointed limbs; when he told the country that the whole world was laughing at Obama he means that soon the whole world will be laughing at him.

And so it was at the United Nations when, at his appearance before the body, the general assembly broke out in riotous laughter when Disgustus stood before the world and claimed that he was the 'greatest' of them all.

But the world has stopped laughing. With the western alliances in tatters, vice president Pence was found last week in Munich at a security conference. Referring to Senator Lindsay Graham and other dignitaries, the body returned tepid applause. When he brought greetings from the 'greatest' of them all Donald J. tRUMP, the vice president was greeted with a studied stone silence. A silence betraying a deep underlying contempt. This was further demonstrated when outgoing German Chancellor Merkle savaged tRUMP and his administration in a video presentation to great applause while tRUMP larvae Ivanka sat silent in the room.

And now, after consulting not his diplomats or security chiefs but Vladimir Putin on negotiations with North Korea, he is off to Vietnam to meet Kim Jung-Un in a desperate attempt to distract from testimony his personal attorney is about to give before Congress and the nation.

Reagan told us about 'the bear in the woods'; the Republicans famously see the world as a jungle. But, apparently, they missed that episode about the lions.

We all know what happens when you play with fire, when there is nonsense at the waterfront: dinner is served.

“An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”

Impeach and Imprison.

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1. See previous post: March 11, 2015: Generation of Swine, Mendacity of the Swine, Deeply

Offensive Performances.

May 4, 2015: Commitment to Folly, Experience Powerless to Instruct, In all the Papers

 

“That no instruction should have been drawn from constant and adverse experience; that the same confidence should have repeatedly grown from the same failures”

          ------Edward Gibbon, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”

As noted in the previous post, Gibbon’s observations concerning Europe’s persistent commitment to failure and folly reveal a truly troubling aspect of human nature.  The internal logic governing every conflict in which sacrifice must be vindicated by more sacrifice quickly assumes command of the commanders.  The conflict in short order assumes its own justification often pushing the conflict past the ‘sublime’ into the ‘ridiculous’, conflicts that can transcend years, decades, even centuries.  What is remarkable is that so little instruction is drawn from the experience.  Experience, it appears, does not teach; lessons go unlearned.

A few brief recent examples may be instructive concerning the changing nature of war and the lessons unlearned.  The American Civil War was a bloody affair, killing nearly 600,000 men as a result of poor sanitation and treatment of wounds, but also because the tactics of war were not equal to the innovations in weapons and armament.  With the introduction of the mini-ball and later the repeating rifle weapons became much deadlier at longer ranges producing horrendous casualties whenever a general ordered a frontal assault on an entrenched defensive position.  The Federals suffered great loss at Fredericksburg, Lee and his Confederates were to do the same a few months later at Gettysburg.  Yet as late as 1864 we find General Sherman making just such an assault at Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia with the wholly predictable results. 

One would think that lessons would be learned.  But even though the European powers had observers on both sides of the line during the American Civil War, as well as the British engagements in the Boer conflict in South Africa later in the century, the lessons went unheeded.  Accordingly throughout the First World War the commanding Generals could think of no better strategy than to amass thousands of men and have them walk in tight formations into the teeth of machine gun fire.  One would assume that one or two encounters would be sufficient to teach a lesson that should have been learned decades earlier by simple observation.  Experience, it appears, proved powerless to instruct, and the world was left to witness attack after attack for four long years.  At the Battle of the Somme alone the British suffered 60,000 casualties on the first day, but the battle raged on for another two months.  Repeatedly employing the same tactics both sides suffered losses of over a million men before it was over, with very little ground gained or lost.  As late as 1917 at Ypres, the British force advanced again this time gaining only a few miles at a cost of a quarter of a million men before they were driven back.  In the end it wasn’t the military that found a solution but the civilian leadership that demanded the introduction of tanks and mortars in a last ditch effort to break the stalemate.  Such is the folly of war.

April 30 marked the 40^th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.  From the beginning of the recent conflicts in the Middle East we have been assured by our leadership, citing the examples of Algeria and Viet Nam, that we will win these ‘wars’ against an ever growing insurgency throughout the region.  From Afghanistan to Iraq to Yemen and Syria the Middle East is exploding before our very eyes as the insurgent forces gather strength.  Still we employ many of the same tactics, losing in the bargain the hearts and minds of those in the region.  Not only have we failed to learn the military lessons, but we failed to learn the more important historical lesson: that as is in the case of the Crusades so it was with Algeria and Viet Nam.  We lost those conflicts, it was in all the papers. Experience has proven powerless to instruct.

 

 

December 17, 2011: The End of an Error, What Lurks Beneath, Hang in the Balance.

This year witnessed two important, if not earth-shaking events: the end of Glenn Beck’s stint on Fixed Noise and our military withdrawal from Iraq. What these will mean in the coming years will, from this vantage point, be difficult to surmise but one can only hope for the best.

After years of haranguing his audience with increasingly shrill, paranoid and, at times, delusional commentary Glenn Beck had become an embarrassment to even the likes of Roger Ailes at Fixed Noise. It is difficult to say at what point his daily tirades went over the line but for those of us who never thought we would live to see the day that the depths of journalistic depravity would never be sounded at the Murdock flag station it was indeed a happy day to see the fool crawl back under the rock that is talk radio; but we are left with only half a victory knowing that he still has the microphone and can still poison the well of public opinion. Why is it that these conservatives are such corpulent ignoramuses? Why is it that they all have the same prison pallor? Why is it that they every one of them--Boortz, Limbaugh, Beck, Rove, Coulter--all have that same pasty countenance one normally encounters when one overturns a rock to reveal what lurks beneath? Perhaps this is why John Boner spends so much time in the tanning booth, for they all know that their moribund ideas will not withstand the light of the noonday sun. In any event cable television, if not talk radio, has become that much more civilized.

Speaking of civilized, the Iraqis’, in the immortal words of Bob Dylan, now too have god on their side. It was announced this week that the United States is completing its military withdrawal from Iraq after nine and a half years of conflict. Much was made of the events here in the States with the nightly news showing the American Flag being lowered for the last time in Baghdad juxtaposed with scenes of welcome home celebrations as our soldiers return to their homes and families. The press, as always, has given a veneer of success and happiness to the event with the implication being that the withdrawal was at our initiative with the Iraqi government ready to step into the breach. John McCain, always the polecat at the barn dance, looking for yet another way to savage this President and lamenting the premature end to his hundred-years war, took to the Senate floor to condemn the administration for pulling out of the beleaguered country.

The truth is otherwise, for the United States did not go into that good night voluntarily or quietly. In fact for months the administration negotiated with the Iraq government to allow us to leave several thousand Americans in the country holed up in military bases that would serve as a quick strike force should trouble (say the nationalization of the oil fields) develop. The Iraqis, eager to further legitimize themselves by ridding the country of foreign occupation balked. Even so the final stumbling block, it has been reported, proved to be the question of “extraterritoriality” wherein U.S. forces were subject to U.S. not Iraqi law. Having had enough of the likes of Blackwater shooting up the country only to be tried and largely let off by U.S. authority using U.S. military justice, the Iraqis balked at continuing the practices. The result was that we were, not so politely, asked to leave. And so the curtain falls, and we witness the end of yet another error.


Of course the supporters of the conflict will rightly point to the nascent Iraqi experiment in republican government and, misreading history, will claim that it was the much heralded ‘push’ engineered by George the Lesser, known in this column as ‘ol two-cows’ that was responsible for the successes that we have had. This has the salutary effect of legitimizing our military involvement and helps salve the wounded national conscience.

But even after nearly a decade and trillions of dollars in the effort it is difficult, at this distance, to speak with anything like confidence in the outcome. Just how far is the reach of Malaki’s government, how honest or efficient it is, and what is it’s span of control are, at this reading, matters of conjecture. I suspect only time will tell. What is clear is that the major ethnic and religious divisions still lurk just beneath the surface ready to re-emerge as soon as the United States is safely out of the equation.


The press, as always, follows the ambulance or in this case the pictures. Scenes featuring the changing of the guard and homecoming celebrations replete with assurances that it was our military intervention that made all the difference give this latest foreign adventure all the trappings of success that we gave to our dalliances in Cuba and the Philippines. In fact, what stability the central government in Baghdad now enjoys has much more to do with the several tribes and Sunni factions that --outraged by the arrogance and ruthlessness of Al Qaida --changed sides in 2007 and moved quickly to re-establish some semblance of order. Still, withal, one hears reports even recently of large scale suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism. How long the relative peace will last is still a question in dispute.

But there is also a larger story. The infrastructure in Iraq is still a shambles even in the wake of massive infusions of American aid. Electricity in Baghdad is available, in some neighborhoods, only a few hours each day. Sanitation systems are in ruin. Military roadblocks dot the landscape even in the nation’s capital. Why is that? Why after all these years and so much money are things still this bad? The answer is graft, corruption and the security issue. Billions have simply disappeared and security has been so bad that construction projects have been delayed or cancelled. How then can we see this as a success, and what does that augur for the future of the country? In the opinion of this observer we have done what we should have done, at least after the mistake to invade Iraq in the first place, and that is simply declare victory and go home.

But for the Iraqis and their government the end-game and our alliances hang in the balance.