Fighting (And Losing) The Last War...In Bunny Slippers, No Less

    It occurred to me --- as I untied my hiking boots in the airport so they could pass through an x-ray machine in order to add yet another layer of spurious safety to the mass illusion known as "Homeland Security" --- that I was fighting the last war.
        You know, as in that old axiom of futility, "Generals are always planning to fight the last war"?
    In the 1930s, the generals of France were preparing to fight the battles of 1914-1918. In the 1910s, they were preparing to refight the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. And when American generals squared off for the Civil War, the big shots were hooked on the doctrines of Napoleon and Jomini.
    And so it goes, back to the first hominid who was counting on teeth and claws -- until his opponent picked up a rock.
    America, the battle of the Shoe Bomber is over. Al-Qaeda is as likely to send over another sneaker attack as it is to buy tickets for another five Arabic-looking guys with box cutters. It's not likely to send another tender full of kaboom out to a U.S. Navy vessel in a Yemeni port, either.
    Strangely enough, Japan didn't spend the rest of WWII trying to sneak up on Hawaii, either.
    In fact, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 have something in common besides the obvious: Both were the opening gambits of limited-objective wars.
    Japan didn't imagine it could "conquer" America, any more than Al-Qaeda imagined that 9/11 would "defeat" us. Japan's war planners hoped to sink enough of America's Pacific fleet to buy many months' grace for its occupation and fortification of oil-rich Southeast Asia. They gambled that, by the time we were ready to strike back, their position would be too strong to make war worth our while.
    They gambled wrong.
    Osama and company's 9/11 objective was not to conquer America -- as if! -- but to reap tremendous political profit in the Muslim world. Al-Qaeda bet that America's overkill response would galvanize anti-imperialist, anti-Western elements from Algiers to Sarawak.
    They bet right.
    End of war.
    That's right. In a limited war, the player who achieves his war aims and is alive to tell the tale is the winner. Al-Qaeda got what it wanted (i.e., a hell of a lot of publicity and recruiting momentum) and we didn't. (We didn't get Osama, we didn't get all the Taliban, we didn't get a stable Afghanistan --- hell, we didn't even get to keep our allies' sympathy.)
    War is an instrument of policy, and unless you are so cynical as to believe that neocons in the Bush Administration knew of and welcomed a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil (as an answer to the prayers of the Project for a New American Century) you have to concede that the "War of 9/11" --- including the Battle of the Shoe Bomb -- is a done deal. The Bush Administration certainly thought so, as it settled for far less than Osama's head on a pike and started a brand-new war of its own.
    It's worth noting that the essential strategy of terror/guerrilla warfare is to tie up maximal amounts of your enemy's manpower, wealth, resources and strength-of-morale at minimal effort and cost.
    I got dizzy, waiting for my shoes to be screened, when I tried to calculate the extra hours expended by all the Americans who would have to arrive hours early and wait in airport lines that day so they could give up their toenail clippers and penknives (while the smokers among them were permitted to carry on high-tech lighters that would have made Richard Reid a successful martyr). My head swam, imagining the sky-high stack of dollars being spent on airport security measures and forces -- not to mention on Homeland Security pork projects like far-from-the-border Border Patrol stations and infrared goggles for the East Nowheresville Volunteer Fire Department -- that aren't doing a thing to protect us against the next war.
    But individual Americans, I noticed, are often more flexible and foresightful than their leaders. The man in the picture, glimpsed in the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport, had embraced the Transportation Safety Administration's recommendation that air travelers wear slip-on footgear. Since we're forced to facilitate our own full-body frisking, why stop with shoes? Like Americans everywhere who'd happily surrender a few "rights" to score some "security," he's ready to slip out of something more comfortable...

--- HistoryBuff

More On Border Patrol's 'Whiteness Checkpoint': NY Public Radio

    Pat Bradley of Albany-based WAMC, Northeast Public Radio, reported today on growing opposition to the proposed permanent Border Patrol presence in Hartford, Vt. (see earlier post, ‘The Whiteness Checkpoint’). Here’s a link to an MP3, which includes a soundbite from yours truly.

--- HistoryBuff

Christo's 'Gates': A Perfect Moment For Content-Free Public Art

    Perhaps it was a bad idea for a history buff to approach "The Gates," Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Feb. 12-28 installation in New York's Central Park, by way of Columbus Circle.
    The roundabout at the park's southwest corner is, after all, a monument to consequentiality: Atop his 40-foot pillar, Christopher Columbus looks around Manhattan like the guy who made all this possible--- which, in some measure, he is. Though he's now dwarfed by the innovative architecture of telecom corporate HQs, the Admiral of the Ocean Seas still demands his props. (So does gilt William Tecumseh Sherman, guardian of the park's southeast entrance: To rate one of these spots, you have to either discover a new world or burn down an old one.)
    And entering the park by the circle's Merchant's Gate is like running a referential gauntlet. The major distraction is the U.S.S. Maine Memorial, a 1913 massif carved with the names of the crew of the battleship that blew up in Havana Harbor in 1898, providing the dubious pretext for the Spanish-American War. (Headlines screamed, "SABOTAGE!"; later investigations whispered, "accident.") But statutes, plaques and commemorations of various kinds are everywhere, especially when you reach the foot of the Mall and step into the arcade of curling elms and bronze penmen known as Literary Walk.
    Of course, by then we'd passed between several hundred of "The Gates"' 7,500 bright orange paired pylons, and under an equal number of flapping, bright-orange clouts of nubbled synthetic fabric. They were pretty, despite the fact that the advertised "saffron" orange wasn't really all that far off from everyday U-Haul orange. The light of a bright winter afternoon sometimes filtered through the drapery to impart an orange glow to park pathways. And how could all that effort at outdoor dress-up not be cheery? Yes, it was a $23-million effort, admirably organized and engineered, but the park would likely have been quite as beautified by so many hanging flags of all nations, or donated quilts, or super-size beach towels printed with poems from Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”
     But of course, "The Gates" was devoid of all such possibly divisive or limiting or ennobling content, and so was merely, and quite pleasingly, pretty.
    Surrounded by statues of Shakespeare and Byron, Halleck and Burns -- none of them great statues; but then again, I'd venture to predict that "The Gates" won't make anyone's 21st-century Top 100 in 2099 -- it was hard not to question the meaning of meaningless public art. Central Park itself is an artwork, a huge, evolving "installation" of a complexity and profundity that makes "The Gates" seem like a pencil doodle. And its content is a sermon on citizenship and civic virtues. "The Gates" succeeded, I think, because they invited us to celebrate this treasure--- but in that sense, they had no more intrinsic meaning than the gallery light that shines on the "Mona Lisa."
    What does it mean that we're embracing public art that, of itself, says nothing to the public? What does it mean that the most prominent recent proposals for meaningful public art -- e.g., the World Trade Center rebuild and the WWII memorial on the mall in D.C. -- are specimens of bombastic kitsch?
    Well, "art" that isn't about anything is the ultimate escapism. And kitsch is, in the main, the art of egregious self-congratulation. Neither intends to say anything accurate about who and what we are. (By contrast, though Columbus, Sherman, Shakespeare and the other Central Park statues are more or less hagiographic, they do proclaim our intent to embrace their works.) As the first celebration New York has thrown for itself since 9/11 (New Year's Eve doesn't count; it's for the cameras), the content-free "Gates" seems to say... "Let's not think too hard."
    And that DOES ring true. Public art -- once devoted, as was Cleopatra's Needle, the 2,500-year-old Egyptian obelisk set up by the Metroplitan Museum, to the details of history and the ideals of civilization -- may have to play it safe in a society currently devoted to accepting the indefensible. How does one design a monument to preemptive attacks upon weak and distant neighbors? To nonexistent WMDs? To the government's bold assertion of the right to torture and hold without charge foreigners AND U.S. citizens? Columbus symbolizes visionary daring; Sherman, God's "terrible, swift sword" scything slavery and rebellion. Who would care to be cast in bronze as the embodiment of our brave attempt to exercise direct control over the lion's share of Middle Eastern oil reserves?
    And since it's considered disloyal to even mention that last motivation -- despite its prominence in pre-war neoconservative game plans -- and since all the offered excuses for invading Iraq fell apart, this is a remarkably content-free war. Such a conflict can only be prosecuted by a nation with a remarkably content-free collective consciousness.
    And that does seem to be what we're becoming. Francis Fukuyama got "The End of History and the Last Man" wrong. He thought that free-market capitalism and liberal democracy had triumphed over competing ideologies (e.g., Soviet-style communism) and that capitalism and liberal democracy would co-reign over the future. He somehow didn't foresee that --- sure as the collapse of the Soviet Union would lead to a U.S.-China superpower struggle -- capitalism and liberalism, left all to themselves, would not co-exist but duke it out. And right now, capital is hitting liberal democracy right where it lives: in reason, information, memory and debate.
    It was one thing for the Hearst papers to shout incendiary half-truths in 1898, when any major city had several important newspapers offering in-depth coverage of the truth's other halves. Today, FOX News is the only "news" source for half of a non-reading nation, and informs that half so badly that most still do not realize Saddam Husseim had no WMDs and nothing to do with 9/11. The slice of all network news time devoted to reporting (high overhead) international and national stories of consequence is now much smaller than the whopping helping devoted to (cheaply produced) lifestyle and local crime segments, and it's shrinking to the size of a parsley garnish. Capitalism is unmaking journalism, dismantling the Fourth Estate. The bottom line is that content costs too much -- and that's fine, since a lot of that content would only embarrass and inconvenience the very corporations that own the news media. News-wise, history-wise, we're entering an era of extremely noisy silence, of bright, quick cuts to emptiness.
    Walking back out of the park, out of "The Gates"' blank orange blare, I passed the Maine monument again. This time I noticed that the names of officers and crewmen on its northwest side -- carved just 92 years ago -- were already almost illegible, smoothed away by acid rain.

--- HistoryBuff

Uniting Islamic Resistance -- Just As We Did In 1902

    American troops invaded Moslem territory "`in order to prevent war.'" They "learned too late" that American actions "had unified the Moslem leaders who had traditionally fought among themselves."
    It sounds like a gloss on reluctant admissions by President Bush and Pentagon officials that America's Iraq war has made common cause between "foreign jihadists," Al-Qaeda and diehard Baathists. But the quotes above come from historian Stuart Creighton Miller's book, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903.
    One hundred and four years ago, American troops were sent to occupy the largely Moslem southern islands of the Philippine archipelago. America had "won" the Philippines in the brief, breathtakingly optional Spanish-American War of 1898, a war sold to the American public as a crusade to free Cuba from Saddam-like Spanish strongmen such as Gen. Valeriano "Butcher" Weyler. But America ended up in possession of Spain's entire overseas empire, and many Filipinos -- expecting liberation, not occupation -- were less than grateful for the change of ownership.
    It took our army two years to destroy the Filipino patriot militia that had helped oust the Spanish from Manila, the colonial capital on the island of Luzon. As always happens when foreign troops pursue indigenous guerrillas, civilians suffered the most. An American general estimated that one-sixth of the population of Luzon died before resistance collapsed.
    Not surprisingly, in 1901, when American forces arrived in the Moslem islands to the south, they met with alarm and defiance. Moro tribesmen fought the soldiers however they could -- sometimes with swords against Gatling guns. Though they occasionally savaged unwary U.S. platoons or companies, it was mostly a war that killed a single American soldier today and another tomorrow. Acting on orders, army troops slaughtered Filipinos by the tens, by the scores, by whole villages.
    American policies unified Moslem groups long used to making war on each other. Consequently, organized resistance lasted far longer than any U.S. strategist had anticipated. In fact, despite massacres that depopulated entire districts, and the invention of a prototypical napalm to aid in burning villages, American troops never quite eliminated the Moro "insurgents": Their descendants are members of today's Moro Liberation Front and allegedly Al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf.
    Miller's brilliant 1982 study is one of the few exhumations of this catastrophe in print. That's no surprise: Soured by court martials that indicated their "splendid little war" had degenerated into a drawn-out atrocity, most Americans decided to forget the conflict before it was finished. And that's too bad, since a national memory of the Moro war's horrors could have warned us about Vietnam -- and Iraq.
    The analogies are not specious, and they're no stretch. For instance, anti-American feeling in the Middle East today is exacerbated by the perception that Americans are "crusaders" -- a perception supported by Lt. Gen. William Boykin’s “Christian army” rhetoric. In 1902, Maj. Gen. Adna Chaffee drove the reportedly America-friendly Sultan of Bacalod into rebellion when he commanded the ruler to "cease from troubling the progress of Christianity and make up your mind to be good."
    In 1902, Secretary of War Elihu Root observed that American soldiers fought evildoers in "a population among whom it was impossible to distinguish friend from foe." While figures for Iraqi civilian casualties of U.S. “friendly fire” are in dispute, one need only Google up a search such as “+"Iraqis killed" +checkpoints +civilian” to be reminded that U.S. soldiers have once again been put in a place where self-preservation encourages them to shoot civilians first and ask questions later.
    In Iraq, we're referring to resistants by that time-honored misnomer, "insurgents" -- fighters in opposition to lawful authority -- as we did the locals who opposed U.S. occupations and puppet governments in the Philippines, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Vietnam and El Salvador. We’re back to destroying cities and villages in order to "save" them, back to “pacifying” people who have learned to identify us with everything other than peace.
    Perhaps this war will eventually sputter out, like the Moro conflict. But the Moros' island strongholds were far more easily isolated from outside aid and reinforcements. Whether the generals like to admit it or not, Iraq's long borders are a strategic problem with precedents in Vietnam -- and Afghanistan. And the long list of Saddam's former enemies and rivals who now cooperate to imperil U.S. troops is a page out of 1902.

--- HistoryBuff

'The Whiteness Checkpoint'in The Boston Globe

(Jan. 19 update: This protest has now appeared in regional papers including the Valley News and Keene (N.H.) Sentinel. Thanks, VN, for permission to use Laura DeCapua's photo! Strong e-mail and letter-to-editors reaction gives hope that people may be ready to challenge "terror war" policy...)

    My op-ed on the Border Patrol's checkpoint in Hartford, Vt., appears in The Boston Globe today.

        ARRIVING a few minutes late, I told my students about a delay at the Interstate 91 Border Patrol checkpoint in Hartford, 100 miles from the Canada line.
        "Oh," a twenty-something student asked, "you mean the Whiteness Checkpoint'?"
        His classmates didn't laugh out loud. They just snickered, appreciating an apparently well-worn joke.   ... click to read rest of Globe op-ed!

    It's great to have this piece appear in the region's "hometown" paper. These new "terror war" checkpoints, far inside our borders, won't stop terrorists, but they do institutionalize racial profiling and promote the administration's "stay scared" agenda. Click for links to stories on the checkpoint's intrusive operations and proposed $9-million HQ.
    Global protests couldn't stop the Iraq invasion-- but couldn't national and local protests stop the building of this first of many proposed "inland" roadblocks?

Battle Day in Concord: Shades of Insurgencies Past

This op-ed originally appeared in the Keene (N.H.) Sentinel and other New England newspapers.

    We stood by the hundreds on the river's east bank, boosting our kids so they could see the redcoats march down to the old North Bridge.
    April 21, 2004 was as fair a Patriots Day as I can remember in Concord, Mass., where they re-enact the skirmish Ralph Waldo Emerson called "the shot heard round the world" – the 1775 affray that started our Revolutionary War. A late but vehement thaw raised the Concord River high up the pilings of "the rude bridge that arched the flood," and a surge of tourism all but overfilled the battlefield park.
    The King's men -- marching in cadence, festooned with the latest in military hardware -- certainly looked like world-beaters, the Old World's greatest army. How could they be defeated by the homespun amateurs marching down the opposite bank?
    It's worth remembering just what the British were trying to accomplish that day: Troops had been sent to rescue the sensible majority of colonists – at least a third of whom were Tories, and another third neutral – from terrorist groups such as the Sons of Liberty.
    Of course, even local Tories understood that England – for all its crusading rhetoric – was serving its own strategic interests. The prime minister's hard line had less to do with colonists' welfare than with British re-election politics. But British generals believed the insurgents could be pacified if top rebels were jailed. The primary aim of the march on Lexington and Concord was to capture radical leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock.
    In other words, the British raid had much in common with American soldiers' 1993 attempt to capture a warlord in Mogadishu – and present American attempts to arrest or kill rebel leaders in Najaf, Fallujah and other Iraqi cities.
    "What North Bridge showed," the British writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft has pointed out, "was that sheer technical superiority isn't everything in warfare. Historians have been telling us lately that the fabled Minutemen weren't such hotshots after all. ... But then, neither were those Somali fighters, who made up for it with ferocity and sheer numbers."
    By the time they reached Concord, the British knew they'd failed to catch Hancock and Adams. They burned rebel supplies – but nearby Minutemen thought the British were torching the village. Enraged, they marched on the North Bridge, receiving a volley that, among other losses, killed their drummer boy.
    That was the moment when the British expected victory. Astonishingly, though, Emerson’s "embattled farmers" stood their ground – and fired back. Outnumbered and – more important – outmotivated by men who believed they were fighting for family and freedom, the British turned and ran.
    For all the good the next few years' fighting did them, the imperial troops might just as well have marched straight onto their ships in Boston harbor and sailed home.
    The essential lessons of the long debacle had already been learned: Overwhelming military might is a clumsy instrument to use on a popular rebellion. Insurgents in faraway countries don't have to beat you to win; they just have to keep fighting. If rebels can't be cut off from supplies and reinforcements, their will to fight will outlast yours. Troop masses can't move as nimbly as individual targets, and troops moving in rebel territory almost never achieve surprise.
    But learning lessons and learning from them are very different things.
    On Patriots Day 2004, as always, the Minutemen stormed across the bridge and the British – dragging their wounded – scurried away, with our children firing plastic muskets at their backs. We cheered the occupying army's defeat, the insurgents' victory.
    But it felt more than a little strange.

--- HistoryBuff

America Needs to Talk About The “O” Word: Oil

  Alright, America. It’s time to talk about the “o” word.
  No, not that one. I mean the one we really avoid talking about. The one we’ll do shocking things to get. Our most wanton, shameful secret.
  Oil.
  We need to talk, because all our excuses for invading Iraq have come apart like philanderers’ alibis for motel afternoons. Now it’s time to come clean.
  Americans and oil: We’ve got a thing going on.
  Of course, we never meant to hurt anybody. But admit it: Sometime before the invasion, you thought something like, “Even if there’re no WMDs, it’s a good thing to sack Saddam – and it wouldn’t hurt to pay less at the pump.”
  So we went along. Maybe we had misgivings, but we didn’t join those few protesters in the park. We answered “No War For Oil” with rationalizations ranging from “It’s not that simple” to “One 9/11's not enough for you people?”
  We more or less fell for the administration’s lines: Osama links, yellowcake, anthrax-laden drones, intercontinental missiles.
  They never mentioned petroleum.
  And if we brought it up, it was like discussing honeymoon intimacies at a church supper. One shock-and-awe day, I confessed to a friend – a Vietnam-protesting lefty liberal – my worry that the whole thing boiled down to oil.
  “I can’t believe you just said that,” he huffed. “It’s so simplistic.”
  “But,” I asked meekly, “what’s the one thing you can take out of this huge mess – terrorism, Iraq, Israel, the Middle East, America – that changes everything?”
  “9/11!” he hissed. “9/11 changed everything!”
  “Well, no. It’s not new, people hating us because we support rotten governments for oil’s sa –”
  “Go wash your mouth out!”
  OK, he didn’t say that, but he meant it. Talking about post-9/11 policies in terms of oil was like reducing romantic relationships to sex.
  How crude.
  But what’s the one element you could take out of the mating game that would change everything?
  We like to focus on mating’s romantic elaborations, rather than its imperative essence. And we’re free to do that: Assuming we’re single and childless, we’re only playing with our own lives.
  Similarly, Americans would like to focus on romantic, heroic reasons for invading Iraq – on avenging 9/11, promoting democracy, fighting terror – rather than on the real one.
  But we can’t.
  We can’t, credibly, because all the lies have been exposed.
  We can’t, morally, because we’re playing with many millions of lives.
  So it’s time to talk about the “o” word. About all the “former” oil company operatives directing this war. About the only Iraqi facilities we protected from looting (hint: not hospitals, not banks, not alleged WMD sites). About the only reason America pays more attention to Iraq than it does to, say, sub-Saharan Africa. About America’s 20-plus million barrel-a-day habit, and who’s paying for it.
  About the only word that can explain all this administration’s decisions.
  Alright, not the only one. We also need to talk about that “r” word we just ran into: re-election.

--- HistoryBuff