Defense and Education - More newspeak

Yet another loose note from the Bush days:

The Dept. of Defense is headed by Terence Bell.  Defense of a nation is the passing of traditions and knowledge from generation to generation.

The Dept. of Education is headed by Casper Weinberger.  The U.S. seems to be trying to educate lots of people that the U.S. government knows best by hitting them over the head with a big stick.

Addendum on 2014-08-21:

Have we learned anything since then?  We still have many who think the U.S. should be responsible for hitting others over the head with a big stick.

Syria – A letter to the President of the United States

I posted the following on "Contact Us" at http://www.whitehouse.gov.

Before you were born, the Department of War became the Department of Defense.  Unfortunately, several times since the Department of Defense has become the Department of Offense with disastrous results for troops, our citizens, the economy, and other countries' views towards us.

If we are truly to have a Department of Defense, what is the threat that dictators like Assad pose towards the U.S.?  Is he going to invade us?  If we invade Syria you can rest assured that action will breed terrorists who will invade us.

If Assad is a threat to the region, don't Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait have enough U.S. equipment to take on Assad?

If the U.S. sticks its nose into Syria, it will only give these countries cover to not take action themselves, leaving us as the fall guy when things go badly.

Quote of the day: Negotiate with who?

"As another defense minister, Moshe Dayan, once observed: 'If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.'”
- Bill Keller, "Chuck Hagel's War", New York times, 2013-01-20

If the United States were a Christian nation…

…it would follow the "second greatest commandment", "do unto others as you would have them do to you."

We do not want other countries invading us.
We do not want other countries assassinating our leaders.
We do not want other countries stationing troops in our country.
We do not want other countries dictating our choice of leaders.
We do not want other countries to have nuclear weapons.
We do not want other countries having bigger or more powerful militaries than we do.

And then there is, "for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword".

We can only be considered a peace-loving nation when the State Department has a bigger budget than the War Department.

National Security? The emperor and his clothes

This morning at coffee, various wars came up in the conversation.

I mentioned Andrew Bacevich and his books, especially "Washington Rules, America's Path to Permanent War".  I said that the Department of Defense has become a vast bureaucracy where few question many of the assumptions.  It's another case of nobody noticing the emperor has no clothes.

A World War II veteran, shot down over France, hidden by the Resistance, and smuggled out through Spain, said, "Department of Defense!  It should be called the Department of Offense!"

Later, another person who comes up with many good puns, which unfortunately we soon forget, asked, "Does an immortal emperor have no closure?"

If the national security bureaucracy thinks it is immortal in its path to permanent war, we certainly will have no closure.

To support the troops, don't support the wars

The Duluth News Tribune, 2010-07-18, had two somewhat opposing views about "Support the Troops".

David McGrath wrote "Empty gestures often equal hollow support".  He is concerned that "Support our troops" is sending a contradictory message to young people "between embracing soldiers and embracing wars."

The Duluth News Tribune disagrees in "Support the troops? Absolutely".  Children can tell the difference between "paying tribute to military members… isn't the same as endorsing war."  But, the writer then qualifies that with "as long as parents and other adults take the time to explain."

Unfortunately, too many adults aren't making the distinction, or at least aren't making it clear, in their own behavior.  When they use phrases such as "defending our freedom" and "serving our country" to describe military members, they shut off any discussion of how our freedom is being defended and what service is really being done for our country.  And this is the discussion that a democracy really needs.

We too often, as citizens and as writers, do not strongly question our leaders' motivations in waging war.  We take without qualification their definition of "the enemy" and "protecting our country".  One of the greatest smoke screens was to rename the Department of War as the Department of Defense.  Have any of the wars waged since World War II really been against an enemy that had any serious chance of invading the United States?  Or have these wars been grand geopolitical games played by "leaders" who really didn't know much about the countries and the people involved?

Coincidently, before I read these articles I had borrowed from the library "The Limits of Power, The End of American Exceptionalism" by Andrew J. Bacevich.  I had only gotten through the first chapter Saturday night, but almost every page had insightful and powerful statements about the American follies and hubris in its recent wars.  After a description of Reinhold Niebuhr's prescience about the current world situation, Bacevich writes, "Realism in this sense implies an obligation to see the world as it actually is, not as we might like it to be.  The enemy of realism is hubris, which in Niebuhr's day, and in our own, finds expression in an outsized confidence in the efficacy of American power as an instrument to reshape the global order." (p. 7)

Before you jump to the conclusion that this is another "liberal rant", the jacket describes Bacevich as a "conservative historian and former military officer".  See Wikipedia for more details.  He also writes for The American Conservative, his latest article being "Will Iraq be forgotten as well?"

I am with McGrath that we should provide veterans with "a good job…, tuition for college, financial credit…, and the very best health care for veterans."