Matt Taibbi: Why Can't We Talk about Peace in Public?

[marmar]

from RollingStone, via AlterNet:


Why Can't We Talk about Peace in Public?

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted February 28, 2007.



America's growing economic dependence on the hi-tech defense industry is creating a culture that views peace and nonviolence as seditious concepts.

"The fellas from 121 started showing up the other day. It's starting to sink in... I'll have to go home, the opportunities to kill these fuckers is rapidly coming to an end. Like a hobby I'll never get to practice again. It's not a great war, but it's the only one we've got. God, I do love killing these bastards. ... Morale is high, the Marines can smell the barn. It's hard to keep them focused. I still have 20 days of kill these motherfuckers, so I don't wanna take even one day off. " -- letter home from an unnamed Marine F/A -18 pilot in Iraq.

The above letter arrived in my inbox via an email circular sent by an acquaintance of mine, a defense analyst and former congressional aide named Winslow Wheeler. It came alongside a pained commentary by another former Pentagon analyst named Franklin (Chuck) Spinney, who is probably best known for the famous "Spinney report" of the mid-'80s which exposed the waste and inefficiency of many hi-tech Defense Department projects.

Spinney's career followed the classic whistleblower arc; after sending his courageous Jerry Maguire letter on Pentagon waste up the bureaucratic flagpole, he was nearly buried by his own bosses only to be saved from ignominy at the last minute by the intercession of Senator Chuck Grassley, who invited him to air his findings in Congress.

Spinney ended up on the cover of Time magazine a week later and soon thereafter began a new career as a much sought-after expert on the inner workings of the military-industrial complex. Like another famous post-Watergate whistleblower, Karen Silkwood, Spinney ended up inspiring a Hollywood feature film -- although in this case no Oscars were forthcoming, as the key role in the lighthearted comedy The Pentagon Wars was played by Cary Elwes instead of Meryl Streep. Brutally, Kelsey Grammer also made an appearance as the film's heavy.

Now retired and living in the Mediterranean, Spinney briefly returned to the States and somehow got hold of the above letter by a Marine pilot involved in close air support missions in Iraq. Spinney's commentary about the pilot ran as follows:

Here is a "warrior" who brags about killing for killing's sake, but the people he kills are just spots on the ground that disappear in clouds of explosions. He describes the joy of war at a distance and sees nothing of its horrors. You won't find any descriptions of blood, broken limbs, trauma or destruction in this email. You won't even find reference to his own feelings of menace or fear -- not to mention their noble counterweights courage and esprit -- just braggadocio on the subject of killing. Of course, his targets are all insurgents: no sense of any human capacity for doubt on that point. ... Hopefully, the man who wrote this ghastly thing is an aberration and not at all representative of the men and women in our military. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/48601/

[eridani]

1. Another salient quote

The reason I'm even writing about Spinney's letter this week is that we're now just seeing come into focus the first outlines of the rhetorical parameters for the 2008 presidential campaign. Among other things, I'm seeing a lot of TV commentators pound home the theme that the Democratic party needs to shed its reputation for "pacifism." An article I saw about Rudy Giuliani last week saluted the former mayor for being sensible on Iraq without being a "peacenik." After four years of Iraq, we still can't talk about peace in public! This evil bullshit has been buried in the commercial media's descriptive campaign language seemingly forever by now, but it may be time -- in the wake of this Iraq disaster -- to start thinking about where it comes from and what effect it may have on the national psyche.

I believe that Marine pilot is driven by the same forces that render the presidential candidacy of someone like Dennis Kucinich impossible in America. A country that feeds itself through the manufacture of war technology is bound to view peace, nonviolence and mercy as seditious concepts. It will create policies first and then people to fit its machines, finding wars to fight and creating killers to fight them. If that's true of us, and I think it is, our troubles won't be over even if someone brings the Iraq war to an end. We'll be treating the symptom and not the disease. And the reason our elections are a sham is that the disease is never on the table. Excepting the occasional Kucinich, no one in either party is interested in trying to change who we are, no matter how sick we become.

[marmar]

2. Yep. Good stuff.

n/t

[Jack Sprat]

3. Bellicose American chip on the soldier

The World War II vets and their generation grew up in an anti-war isolationist environment and I never saw much chest-beating among them, including my father who was a rifleman in France and Germany. He never professed a hatred for the Germans or their people. He obviously wasn't a pacifist, yet he was not happy over our war in Vietnam from the outset.

My generation of Vietnam vets seem hardened to war and not nearly as reluctant to watch their sons go to war. Generation X will have to speak for themselves. I, personally, admired my parent's generation much more than my own, but few of them are left.