[rollei_list] Re: OT: Miscellany
- From: Marc James Small <marcsmall@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2007 13:42:55 -0400
At 01:16 PM 9/10/2007, Robert Lilley wrote:
>Memory lane - My youngest son is in a Stryker unit in Iraq (2nd Cav Reg
>patrolling Sadr City). What is interesting is that he arrived in Iraq a day
>after his 21st birthday in August, 2007. I arrived in Vietnam on my 21st
>birthday, October 15, 1969 - also Moratorium Day which all my civilian
>friends took part in. He is my third son to have a tour in Iraq. Ya think
>we would have learned.
Well, my son is very much a civilian and is back
to the Small family norm: for close to 300
years, my people have only served during moments
of extreme national crises, and then did so
willingly. No one in my direct family, for
instance, was ever drafted, as we always
volunteered. My son, a committed geneaologist,
smugly reminds me that he is staying loyal to the
tradition. (My father and I and a distant cousin
were the only three to ever stick around long
enough to retire from the military: the others
were always in the front door when the US
declared War and out the back door when Peace
broke out. None of my family served in Korea or
Viet-Nam save for that distant cousin, who pulled
a hitch in Nam shortly before she was retired. I
never met her and Dad last saw her around 1940.)
"Moratorium Day" brings back a lot of memories,
as I was in college then. I detested these rapid
Leftist denigrators and negativists but, at the
same time, I fervently opposed US involvement in
South-East Asia but did so from the opposite
political track: I am a rational anarcist and,
thus, a committed isolationist. At the time, I
viewed the Viet-Nam War as an outgrowth of the
nutso activism of Kennedy and Johnson. I had a
lot of friends who were protesters: at the
Viet-Nam Day protest in May, 1970, I got into a
shouting match with the protesters and told them
all that they'd sell out immediately after
graduation and become suits and so they did: all
of them whom I know ended up as senior corporate
executives or stock-brokers or the
like. Whenever I run into one of these guys
today, they deny that they were there or just say, "well, that was then ..."
Douglas MacArthur, from the 1930's, firmly
opposed any US military involvement on the Asian
mainland. He adopted this position for several
reasons but, primarily, from a visceral
understanding that the US political system would
never be able to define "victory" in such a
conflict in any realistic way, so that the
conflict would end up with US casualties
resulting in a most unsatisfactory truce, at the
best, if not outright defeat. (Yes, it was his
holding of this position which ended up getting
him fired for very muddy reasons by Truman, a
Pyrrhic victory which forced MacArthur onto
Civvie Steet but removed any remaining
possibility of Truman's re-election in 1952.)
The US committed combat troops to Viet-Nam
without any concept of WHY we there or WHAT we
were trying to accomplish by our presence. We
have done the same in Iraq. I have no time at
all for Cindy Sheehan and her ilk but I still
feel that we should load up and pull out. We
lack the ability to control Iraq -- when the
British had riots in Fallujah in 1924, they
resolved the issue by bombing the town and
inflicting upwards of 5,000 civilian
casualties. We lack the resolve to conduct such
a war (and kudos to us for feeling that way!) and
so we have no business there. In the end, the US
should only go to war when US national interests
are at stake, and there are just no such interests at play in Iraq.
Sorry to rattle on at such length, but the
mention of Moratorium Day resonated with me!
Marc
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
---
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