Welcome to 201k.com - A Commonwealth Perspective.

From: "Nan H"
To: editor@201k.com
Subject: Good Job!
Date: Thu, 27 May 2004

I really appreciate what you have to say. Sometimes, I wish you would say it more often, but, when you do post, it's very, very insightful. Thank you.

I especially appreciate your perspective on the tragedy of the Nicholas Berg incident. 40+ men, woman, & children were killed at a wedding because of an incredible American belief in better to be safe than sorry. If they were so sure that these were insurgents, why didn't they arrest them? Or at least, go in and verify the situation? To easy to just obliterate them from a helicopter gunship.

I am old enough to have talked to Vietnam veterans. I talked to one veteran who was a helicopter gun man (don't know the actual term). He told me that he and his crew flew around Vietnam looking for something to kill. When they couldn't find human targets they made do with water buffalo. He and his crew had completely objectified the Vietnamese. To me that is happening all over again in Iraq. 40 Iraqis at a wedding? 1 Nick Berg. Only a very jaded American would not think that there was a terrible imbalance.

Nan

Thanks, Nan, for both your compliments and your comments. We confess to a minor spell of melancholy upon realizing that things have gotten so bad that our over-arching cynicism would strike you as "very, very insightful".

In the past we may have been occasionally right in the way a broken clock is--twice a day--but the sad fact is that nothing short of utter cynicism would lead one to any sort of political insight on either the Bush adminsitration or the Republican party in general.

We can offer one cheap trick, though, that has yet to fail us as a means of getting into the heads of the Bush administration: when you consider their actions, statements and motives--on any subject--don't think of them as officials of a representative democracy who consider themselves public servants entrusted with the responsibilty of doing what is best for the whole country and accountable to the citizens; think of them as the top executives of the largest corporation in the world, who consider it their right to make decisions based on their own agendas and desires--and the agendas and desires of their shareholders (i.e. donors) --and who consider the rest of us as nothing more than employees who are lucky to be here, and who should unquestioningly accept whatever nonsensical edicts descend from the home office.

Seen this way, you'll suddenly understand, say, Ari Fleischer, who wasn't so much press secretary to the President of the United States as he was "vice-president for public relations". He read the memos from on high, and his attitude was that if you didn't like what the company had to say, you could leave.

Snow and Greenspan aren't public servants: they're from Finance and Accounting. And they say the numbers are what they say the numbers are. You got a problem with that, you can start sending out resumes to other countries to work for. Got it?

Now that's a piece of cynicism you can take to the bank. Because that's who these people are. It's all George W. Bush has ever been.

Anyway, we appreciate the compliment. And we'll try to go back to a more frequent posting schedule, though life does intervene. As we've said before, we accept posts from readers (subject to editing), so one way to keep the content flowing here is to keep sending your thoughts. See, for example, the excellent comments in the posting below this one.

As for your Vietnam gunship story, we appreciate that you recognize the crucial distinction that 201k is not taking the "Arab side", but is merely pointing out the blinding idiocy--or more likely the disingenuous hooey--of expecting the Arab world to care about the death of one American.

We truly believe that Americans would value lost Arabs lives if they knew about them. We are cynical about today's Republican party, not about Americans in general. The proof is the effort to keep the truth from them; someone knows that Americans would not tolerate it. We are a good people.

Soldiers of all nationalities do things in war that people otherwise would not. That's the horror of war. And that's why those at the top who define the mission must be very careful, and must follow strict rules. Humanity learned this lesson painfully in the 20th century--the old world powers in World Wars I and II, and America in Vietnam. Yet the Bush administration threw those lessons away in an ideological heartbeat.

They come dangerously close to being "corporate criminals playing with tanks". They've abandoned the rules of warfare and the rules of diplomacy for the rules of the hostile take-over. They've used the full weight of the United States military--in large part contrary to the best military analysis--to carry out a "mission" that was hatched by civilian ideologues working in well-funded right-wing think tanks.

And the likihood is that they will never pay for it. Poor kids who signed up with the military to get ahead in life will pay for it. American civilians at home and abroad will pay for it. U.S. diplomats will pay for it. But the gang at the top doesn't care--and you know, they truly don't-- about those people. Hey, they'd say, if they thought no microphones were near, they enlisted; if they don't like it they can go elsewhere when their hitch is up.

And like so many big shots who walk away--or fly off to Aspen--while thousands of regular people are left with lost 401ks or lost limbs or lost family members, the architects of this war will fly back to wherever they came from, richer and more well-connected than ever.