Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 1973 Editor's Choice: 19
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So what's the plan?
[Read the article: The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Before I get jumped on for that one, I mean it seriously, and I am not talking about Republican talking points to batter unprepared Democrats in Congress with.
I keep reading about the Administration ignoring the clear voice of the people, the people have spoken, yadda yadda (sp?).
Bullshit.
The sleeping giant has issued a grunt of discomfort, a prelude to either really awakening and saying something or rolling over to continue snoring.
Let's do a comparison, shall we?
We've had a midterm election in which the Democrats squeaked into power and the public answered a few opinion polls and wrote a few letters. We're only at the beginning of any hearings, the Democrats in Congress are still battling with demons, and the Supremely Badly Run Protest Groups are doing a pisspoor job of organizing a rally for March 17 for the fifth anniversary of the start of the war, seemingly oblivious to St. Patricks Day. The powers in opposition, on the blogs, are still echoing the indoctrination of the 1980's and 1990's that protest is bad, or at least doesn't accomplish anything, those people in the sixties were all a bunch of --- choose your adjective, you wouldn't want it on your resume.
What ended the Vietnam War? The American people voted in 3 presidential elections for a peace platform, not one midterm. There were mass rallies in the streets comprising millions of people. The October 15th demonstration produced 2 million people rallying, not just in Washington or New York, but in every community across the country. The universities were by and large shut down the next spring. Shut down. There were people dying at Kent State and Jackson State, there was birdshot being fired into crowds at San Francisco State. Tens of thousands of people burned draft cards, went to Canada, starved themselves below the limit, disappeared. There were exposes in the major newspapers, government officials going dissident and publishing classified documents, people breaking into Selective Service offices, congressional hearings by the yearful.
In the end, the mistakes made by an antiwar movement that operated with no plan were used by people like the neocons to galvanize support and facilitate return to power of the perennial hawks. The fervor of the moment produced people grouping together and marching around in fatigues calling for revolution and the end of the U.S. government. You would go to a meeting that was supposed to be for a peace rally, and someone would get the floor and deliver a lecture on how many inches of sand to put in a wine bottle before poring the gasoline in. People went on pilgrimages to airports to spit on returning soldiers and call them baby killers.
I am convinced that this time we need to be a lot shrewder than people are being. During the sixties we were opposing the entire government to oppose the war: Republicans, Democrats, and everything else. This time, the neocons function much more like a tightly knit insurgency. Why else do you think that Glenn's, and other's, comparisons between Cheney and bin Laden fit so well? So it is a long term battle for, and I'm sorry if this offends people, hearts and minds. It's the unstable solution I wrote about before. You need to make no mistakes, insurgencies pounce on every mistake you make and use it to rally support. There must be no "baby killer" chanters this time, or the time loop will execute another time and we will be back here trying to stop the next war in 40 more years.
But the level of wakefulness of the sleeping giant needs to go up. Way up. And if there is no plan, we will surely make as many mistakes as last time, and cause the next neocon insurgency twenty years from now, just like Versailles caused the rise of Nazism. Start with the troops. We aren't accusing them of being baby killers, unless they happen to be named Matthis or Petraeus, isn't that right? Has anybody read Thomas Ricks "Fiasco", in which the attitude of these men was spelled out at length? They've believed in not shooting since 2003, but since they are now running the show, they are hated quantities, in league with the Evil Ones, right?
Get smart people. It isn't because the Republicans have been chanting what's your plan trying to shift blame that it needs to be considered.
What is the plan? What are we going to do about our obligations under Geneva 4 to provide security and civil government up to a year after we end our part of the conflict? We didn't occupy Vietnam, we allied ourselves with a warring party there, we could withdraw. And we didn't start the conflict there.
This time we did occupy, this time we did start the conflict, this time we have an insurgency of neocons in our government to reckon with, this time we have the wisdom of the past. What is the plan? Or do you want history to repeat, and another few million to die?
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I knew people who did it, and there were reports of it elsewhere
[Read the article: The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Forgive me, not a latin scholar, what is medias res?