The Chuck Hagel Rants - Part the Third: What is it this time??

The honeymoon is definitely over. What is it with these Republican? They're going to filibuster a war hero, a man wounded in action twice? And all because he dared to call the Iraq war what everyone else in American except John McCain and the hard right fully understands - that it was a monumental piece of stupidity? Or is it because some Republican staffer made up this group called 'Friends of Hamas' and spread the word that they and Chuck Hagel are BFFs? Or is it because the Republicans are now basically the evangelical party and their base is absolutely convinced that unless Netanyahu gobbles up all the West Bank, then the end of days will never come, and if the end of days never comes they won’t get - dang, I forget the word! - yanked up out of their cars and through their kitchen windows by the Anti-Christ or whomever and fly on up to heaven while the rest of us poor suckers – including, I assume, Jews, who (sorry Pat Robertson) aren’t going to be magically converted to Christianity on that day - just sit around down here wondering where the crazies went, while secretly breathing sighs of relief that come what may we might at least now have some sanity in our government? Is that it?

The Repubs are beneath contempt. A short while ago Bobby Jindal said the Republicans would never be back in the majority until they learned to stop being the Party of Stupid. Given the events of this past week, I think liberals (and this Eisenhower Republican) can rest easy for a while longer.

The Chuck Hagel Rant - Part the Second

I was prepared to work myself into a lather over further Republican intransigence on the Chuck Hagel nomination.  Our buddy and heroic Gulf War veteran Senator Lindsey Graham (who served his country sitting at a desk in South Carolina processing wills for soldiers who did deploy) says “Chuck Hagel is out of the mainstream on most issues regarding foreign policy.”  That's fine, if by mainstream you mean current Tea Bag, Evangelical Christian, Neo-Con borderline insane foreign policy positions, then yeah, the man is way out of the mainstream.  But so, I hope, are most Americans after a decade of ill-advised war.  At least this Eisenhower Republican / Obama Democrat is.  I prefer a little - what's the word - oh yeah, realism in my foreign policy.

Anyhow, as I said, I was prepared to write a diatribe, when I happened to stumble on a speech Chuck Hagel gave at the University of Nebraska almost six years ago.  The man seems plenty real and plenty mainstream to me.  Some excerpts (the snotty parenthetical remarks are my own):    

"In the Middle East of the 21st Century, Iran will be a key center of gravity…a significant regional power. The United States cannot change that reality.  To acknowledge that reality in no way confuses Iran’s dangerous, destabilizing and threatening behavior in the region. Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism and provides material support to Hezbollah, Hamas and other terrorist groups. Iran publicly threatens Israel and is developing the capacity to produce nuclear weapons. Iran has not helped stabilize the current chaos in Iraq and is responsible for weapons and explosives being used against U.S. and Iraqi military forces in Iraq (yeah, the man sounds like a milquetoast, doesn't he?).

Our understanding of Iran is limited and incomplete. We have not had formal diplomatic relations with Iran for nearly three decades. Diplomatic contact at all levels is severely limited. We have no constructive military contact. Economic ties remain essentially severed as well. There is deep distrust and suspicion on both sides regarding intentions and motivations. Put simply, the United States and Iran do not know one another. This unfamiliarity, distrust, and lack of engagement risks producing disastrous consequences. When countries do not engage, the risk of misperception based on faulty judgments spawns uninformed and dangerous decisions.

The United States needs to weigh very carefully its actions regarding Iran. In a hazy, hair-triggered environment, careless rhetoric and military movements that one side may believe are required to demonstrate resolve and strength…can be misinterpreted as preparations for military options. The risk of inadvertent conflict because of miscalculation is great (Remember World War I, anybody?).  The United States must be cautious and wise not to follow the same destructive path on Iran as we did on Iraq. We blundered into Iraq because of flawed intelligence, flawed assumptions, flawed judgments, and questionable intentions (the man's a born diplomat, he didn't say 'out and out lies').  The United States must find a new regional diplomatic strategy to deal with Iran that integrates our regional allies, military power and economic leverage."

Sorry, Lindsay (and John McCain) but the man sounds eminently reasonable and - dare I say it - mainsteam to me.  And the man got two Purple Hearts - always a plus in my book.  That's as compared to Senator Graham, whose Gulf War wounds consisted of hemorrhoids from sitting at that desk all day long (yeah, I've got 'em too, Lindsay, and damn do they hurt - maybe not as much as a bullet, but ouch!  I feel your pain, fellow veteran).

Said my piece.  And now, back to the taxes.

Garveys and Guns - It's Complicated

My late father was a sportsman.  That term had a particular meaning back in the ‘40s, ‘50’s and 60’s.  It didn’t mean he played basketball (the man was 5’ 5’’ for God’s sake) or sat on a couch Sunday afternoons watching football.  It meant he took to the woods and fields each November, and for men of his generation, taking to the woods in the late fall involved rifles and pistols and shotguns.  It wasn’t remarkable, or questioned, it’s what Midwestern guys did – they went hunting, or if it wasn’t hunting season, you found them knee deep in cold, running water, stalking the wild trout.  And if they weren’t hunting or fishing, they were reading about hunting and fishing.  Dad had dozens of outdoor magazines lying around the house, things like Michigan Out of Doors, The Michigan Sportsman, Game and Fish.  I believe I even saw a few copies of American Hunter from the National Rifle Association, back from the time when Wayne LaPierre had his own hair and the NRA hadn’t turned batshit crazy.   No one thought it unusual, or evidence of a flawed character.

In fact, the only character flaw in the Garvey household was my own – I couldn’t stand hunting.  It wasn’t so much the killing – which didn’t happen all that often – but for me, hunting was 1) boring and 2) cold!   We didn’t have the nice synthetic / cotton blend thermal long johns back in the ‘60s when I was invited to join the men out on the back 40.  No sir, what they had were good ol’ prickly union suits you wore under baggy corduroy pants that you tucked into cracked, rubberized boots, which you attempted to insulate with three pairs of wool socks.  You wore a wool shirt, a couple of old sweaters, and last year’s good coat that you grew out of, all of which bulked you up to the point you looked pretty much like Ralphie’s kid brother in “A Christmas Story”.  And I still froze.  I quickly began looking for any excuse to avoid the annual trips Up North.  Eventually, Dad stopped asking.  Thank God, my brother Glenn – the next in line in the Garvey brood – took to it with the same zeal as the old man.

But the thing was – and is – that while I hated the cold, I loved to shoot.  Bing, Bang, Boom!  Music to a kid’s ear.  Dad took me skeet shooting a half dozen times over the years, and it turned out I wasn’t half bad.  Of course, I haven’t shot skeet in something like 16 years, not since the summer I was failing as a manager at the accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand, yet somehow got included in a department outing to a private club in the middle of Lake St. Clair.  I spent the time being my usual embarrassing self, sucking at three hole golf, nearly falling down a ladderway on the partner’s yacht, spilling lunch on the new walking shorts my wife got me especially for this occasion.  Late in the afternoon, the partner took us over to a wooden walkway built along the shoreline, where some of the club attendants had lugged a couple large metal trunks.  He unlocked one, reached in and pulled out a polished, oiled shotgun.  There were four of us, I recall.  Each got a gun and a little box of shells.  One of the club house guys stood behind us and launched little clay discs out into the lake.  And I nailed ‘em.  By God, I nailed ‘em.  Everyone else got one or two; me, something like eight out of ten.  No one could believe it.  One day of glory out of four miserable years.  They let me go the following spring. 

But I digress.

 This last summer, Pat and I visited our son Rob, Captain W. R. Garvey, at Whiteman Air Force Base outside of Kansas City.  He had a little treat for me.  Bright and early Sunday morning, we drove a half hour out into the countryside to a local firing range.  It was nine, nine thirty in the morning, and already 90 degrees.  The place was tres rustic, a field of dried-out weeds surrounded  by trees.  It had three shooting lanes, each with a wooden table at one end and a big mound of dirt to catch the shots at the other.  One was short, one was medium, and the third was long – although I can’t remember the lengths.  The short lane was already in use by four young men Rob recognized as part of the security detail at Whiteman.  A thin, ancient, bent over man in bib coveralls had taken the long one.  He had a cardboard box set down about twenty feet in front of him, and was proceeding to shoot it with the smallest pistol I have ever seen.  The studs to our left, on the other hand, were equipped with serious firepower.  They had two rifles and one short, thick, black thing with a removable magazine sticking down below it.  The sounds around us went plink, plink, boom, boom, KAPOW!!  And when the dust settled, plink, plink, boom, boom, KAPOW!! again.    

 

Rob’s weapons were more mundane, a Ruger 22 caliber rifle with a 10 round magazine, and a Beretta M9 with a clip that holds 15 rounds if you squeeze them in, but usually no more than twelve.  (And yeah, Wayne, I’m using ‘clip’ and ‘magazine’ interchangeably – so sue me, it doesn’t make one damn bit of difference to what I’m writing.)  According to Rob, the Ruger is a "classic" rifle that a lot of kids learn to shoot on, and the M9 is the government-issue sidearm for officers.  Both are semi-automatics.  And way, way more fun because they were.  If I could’ve fit a 30 round clip / magazine / bullet holding thingie to the Beretta, it woulda been even more fun.  And I’m guessing I’m not the only person feels that way.  Couple the fun part with the Midwestern (or name your region) hunting ethos, and a general ‘mind yer own goddamn bidness’ attitude’ and you get an idea where some of the reasonable resistance comes from.   Of course, I’m omitting the Tea Party, Second Amendment-er, mouth frothing, Obama-is-a-Muslim /  fascist / communist-aching-to-deliver-this-country-to-the-devil contingent that drives the rest of the resistance.  My fear is that the combination of the two will be enough to stifle any reforms.  And unless those fighting for change can win over the reasonable opposition, we may be in for a couple more Columbines, Virginia Techs and Newtowns before we get serious about changes to gun laws. 

There, said my piece.  Now back to doing the damn taxes.   

The Chuck Hagel Rant, Part the First

I was using the new iPhone at work this afternoon to surreptitiously surf the web and see what was up with the Chuck Hagel confirmation hearings for Secretary of Defense.   (So sue me, beloved current employer, why else do you have a guest network, eh?).  What a farce.  Is there anyone - ANYONE - left in these United States besides John McCain and six Republican senators who thinks the Iraq war was anything other than an unmitigated disaster?  4,488 of our sons / daughters / mothers / fathers killed.  Thirty three thousand wounded.  Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed.   Ethnic cleansing of Sunni and Shia, not to mention Christian and Jew.  $757.8 billion spent in direct cost alone, per Pentagon estimates, which don't include the billions spent on indirect costs like servicing the debt on money we borrowed to pay for the damn thing.  And for what?  So W could prove he was just as much of a man as his father?  So Dick “I had other priorities” Cheney could make up for blowing off the Vietnam War?  So we could overthrow a secular dictator who hated Islamic terrorists, and who waged a ten-year war to the death against Iran and the Ayatollahs?  (A war that ended in a tie, but you get my drift.)

 But Saddam was a murderous tyrant, you say.  And it is our moral duty to depose murderous tyrants!  Well, if that were the case we would've invaded half a dozen Central American countries where we installed our own thugs, wouldn't we, Senator McCain?  Or maybe Egypt, and gotten rid of Mubarak.  Dang, didn't see us doing that, did you?  It's like the saying goes - he may be a bastard, but he's our bastard.  And if you only off the bastards you don't approve of (a policy I happen to approve of) then you surrender all pretense of morality, and by the way, welcome to the world as it actually exists.   

 The worst of it, in my jaded view, is that we took a “force in being” and turned it into a force in reality, and for no good reason.  A force in being?  It's a play on an old naval term - a fleet in being.  A fleet in being, as in Kaiser Bill's Germany early in the 20th century, is a couple dozen big ships with big guns sitting in a harbor and maybe occasionally sailing out to sea for a firing exercise and then returning to port to drink schnapps and eat schnitzel.  The mere fact of this fleet and the threat that it might be used drove the English mad with worry.  Until, of course, war came, and despite early losses, the Englanders figured out how to master the Germans, and the High Seas Fleet ended up scuttled at the bottom of Scapa Flow.  It's the same on land.  A big, powerful army is at its most imposing and fearful before it is used.  Once it's in battle - especially a battle far from home - if the enemy can last long enough, it figures out that army's weak spots and begins to hold its own.

In my view, that's what happened in Iraq:  we took the world's most powerful force in being, turned it into a force in reality and proceeded through a series of incredible blunders to end up looking less like the liberators we assumed we were, and more like your garden variety conquerors, i.e.:

1. Not stopping the looting after Baghdad fell,
2. Dismissing thousands of Iraqi army officers and civil servants because they were members of Saddam's Baathist party, even though a man couldn't get a decent job in Saddam's Iraq if he wasn't a Baathist - thank YOU, Paul Bremmer - thus destroying the two groups we needed to help keep the country under control, and
3. Locking up and abusing prisoners in Saddam's old torture palace (an excellent piece of P.R. - NOT!)

All of which gave the opposition - and there were bucket loads of opposition - time to figure out our weak spots.  They could never defeat us, but we could never quite defeat them.  Until, of course John McCain's beloved surge.  Was it a success, the surge?  Yes or no, Senator Hagel?  Yes or No?  Yeah, John, it was a success.  That plus the Sunni Awakening in Anbar Province plus U.S. military payments to Sunni leadership (nothing like bribing your enemy to lay low - another tactic I heartily agree with) allowed us get out of that hell hole with a semblance of honor.  And in that, Johnny Boy, the Surge succeeded.  But in nothing more.