Friday, July 22, 2005

Cut the Baloney

They have us, you know - President Bush and Prime Ministers Blair and Howard. We’re running around saying that London and Madrid are paying the price for the preventive war in Iraq, but they’re replying, quite correctly, that the terrorist attacks on the West began long before our shock and awe treatment of Baghdad.

We say – know - that we’re right, but they simply trump us with the facts – the true facts. Or do they? In actuality, they’re simply sophists arguing irrelevant points. Our enemy is al Qaeda – and all of the splinter groups that are operating in its name. Our argument should never have been framed by stating that the jihadists are blowing up innocent Spaniards and Brits because we attacked Saddam.

Rather, our major thrust should be that we are encouraging the proliferation of terrorist ideology and the recruitment of Islamists intent on destroying us by having created a breeding ground of disaffected bombers based on a set of circumstances that have proved to be incorrect and that seem close to unraveling toward the absolutely false.

The Iraq War was undertaken because Saddam’s military had weapons of mass destruction and was in the process of developing even more deadly systems. Further, Saddam’s regime was acting in concert with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda against the West. After all the inspections and commissions, we know now that these reasons were wrong. Moreover, it looks as though the reasons were not only false but they may well turn out to be known to have been false before Coalition forces set foot on Iraqi soil.

Clearly Afghanistan was a different story. The Taliban was overtly harboring al Qaeda leaders and was protecting hundreds of terrorists and their training facilities. After 9/11, we demanded that Afghanistan give up the criminals who openly proclaimed responsibility for the attacks in the United States and for many others against our interests abroad.

We moved into Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban and routed al Qaeda. But, instead of finishing that task, we moved to topple the Baathist regime in Iraq. In the process, we lost our focus on the hunt for Osama bin Laden. While we put them on the run, we did not finish the job. Resources that could have been used in a fight that the American people overwhelmingly supported and in which virtually all civilized nations agreed were instead diverted away from Afghanistan and committed to the War in Iraq that nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on the West.

Now we have two open sores, and our military is bogged down in pacifying two nations. Our leaders have committed us to a war that is killing hundreds and wounding thousands of our troops, a war that his killed tens of thousands of people we claim to be befriending, a war that is costing billions of dollars, a war that was unnecessary, a war that slows our fight against our enemies.

Stop saying the War in Iraq caused the attacks in Spain and Great Britain. It didn’t and it’s giving the perpetrators of this illegal preventive war ammunition to tweak your noses. Let’s get our stories and our facts straight.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Monday, July 18, 2005

Put the Blame on Plame

Much has been made about the Valerie Plame case, but one point that I’m sure is high one the list of CIA undercover operatives that I haven’t seen made in the media is the impact of her outing on national security. I’ve seen it said that Plame’s life is in danger, but I think that’s hyperbole.

What bothers me is – if indeed the lady was an undercover agent charged with turning foreign nationals to our side – that all of the foreign nationals she recruited are in mortal danger, along with folks she didn’t recruit but with whom she might have become friendly with during her tours in other countries.

Clearly, those who dropped the dime on Plame, whether or not they broke the law have damaged the ability of our agents now operating in other lands to recruit people to our side.

It’s an old story. Someone identifies those who’ve been won over and they pay with their lives, and it endangers the lives of current CIA agents in the field doing recruiting. My guess is that this side of the story is being ignored by the administration as it serves its short term goals. Sadly, it also hurts the long term interests of the nation.

The right wing is jumping up and down in defense of those identified as the sources of leaks while ignoring the real damage to the nation. Shame on them!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Sunday, July 17, 2005

Stab in the Back

In 1918, German military leaders recognized that continued fighting could lead to the collapse of their forces with extraordinary negative results on the nation. The determination to sue for peace was made and an Armistice ending the fighting in The Great War was signed with the allies.

This turn of events was a shock to the German people who had been supportive of the war and, seeing their army still occupying significant territory of enemy nations, were led to believe that high level treachery was responsible for the humiliating end to hostilities. Thus was born the `Stab-in-the-Back’ theory whereby their valiant soldiers, after glory in the East, were sold out when victory in the West was still possible.

Our commander in Europe, General John Pershing, was prescient in seeing the Armistice as a likely failure without a clear demonstration to the German people that their military had been defeated in the field of battle. He was overruled in his recommendation that the fighting continue.

Attempts at democratic government in Germany after World War I failed due to the horrible peace treaty ending the war and the terrible economic depression that was felt across the globe. Adolph Hitler cleverly exploited the armistice, the Treaty of Versailles, the bad times, and – as much as the other reasons – the `Stab-in-the-Back’ to achieve political power and begin his quest to control Europe.

Since World War II, the U.S. has fought many wars in which the goals were less than the complete conquest of those fighting on the other side. Many Americans who had come to understand the nature of the power the nation had developed and acquired as a result of our involvement on the war and our growing economic might were appalled by the limited goals set out by our leaders in the new age.

The Korean War led to one of the great internal conflicts and tests of our Constitutional institutions. General Douglas MacArthur, representing a very popular strain in the body politic, went public with a demand for far more than just a stalemate on the peninsula. The conflict boiled over when President Truman relieved the general of command. The brouhaha that followed included a strain of the earlier `Stab-in-the-Back’ argument raised in Germany. President Truman became for a time one of our most despised presidents and chose not to run for reelection based on the likelihood that he would lose.

The `Stab-in-the-Back’ argument did not fit the situation in Vietnam nearly so well. Despite sending significant forces to the war, stalemate was never achieved, and it was likely that far greater force would have to be applied if a real victory or even the appearance of one were to be achieved. By the time the conflict reached its final stages, there was a growing consensus in the population that the war could not be won within the limits of sacrifice the nation was willing to undergo. Besides, after long fighting, many of the original supporters of the war had become its opponents.

But, as pointed out most clearly by Andrew Bacevich in his recent book, The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, the neoconservatives, the Christian Evangelical right, and a body of military intellectuals seized upon the low point of Vietnam to make an argument that can easily be construed to have more than a passing resemblance to the `Stab-in-the-Back’ of old, and the resurrection of military power was a clear result of their push.

Over the next generation the coalition on the right capitalized on such arguments to advance itself politically to achieve substantial control over the federal government. By the time of our attack on Iraq, It captured both Houses of Congress and the presidency.

I’ll skip the arguments of whether we should have attacked Iraq. My position that the war represented a preventive rather than preemptive attack and should never have taken place is known to my readers.

We are in Iraq with all of its broken crockery. We’re backing a process that may lead to a national government that will be accepted by the various ethnic and religious elements to the point that it may hold together. The President as Commander-in-Chief has stated that we will stay until he is certain that the government of Iraq reaches that point. Such an outcome over the next four years would be the best possible result.

Sadly, the seed has been planted that if the U.S. is not willing to stay the present course in Iraq we will betray our troops and their sacrifices. This, of course, sets up a national referendum for the 2008 election cycle in which the voters will have to choose between prematurely bringing home the troops or by continuing the adventure into the indefinite future. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said that defeating the insurgency could take up to twelve years.

At this point, the far left, the Democratic Party, and most independents see such an election contest as a positive thing. They see a change in the party controlling the White House and the probable capture of one House of Congress between now and then as great outcomes. Absent startling change in the situation, unless I die or am incapacitated, I will be voting for this outcome. (Please no laughing if I don’t make it.)

But this will not be the end. Nothing ever ends in politics and the seeds of disaffection have already been sown. Failure to stay the course is tantamount to a `Stab-in-the-Back’ for the troops who have sacrificed so much for us. The pendulum that is clearly swinging in the direction of those with a realistic outlook of foreign policy could move back the other way in the blink of an eye.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Thursday, July 14, 2005

TRUST BILL - REALLY!

Why should you read my novels – or anyone else’s? Frankly, there’s no reason to unless I – and they - prove worthy of your trust. Why should you read my blog? Again none, except for two tiny benefits compared with the books; they’re free and they’re short – bargains in cash and time. My words are no more valuable than anyone else’s - unless you have developed a certain minimum level of confidence in my thoughts or comfort in my way of expressing them, yet I regularly ask for your precious time. That’s ridiculous!

Your time is the most valuable thing you have to offer any commentator, so you should rightly reject demands by those asking you to consider their points of view. Still, without outside opinion your life would much emptier. You have to trust somebody. Some would more readily buy into many of the positions of the New York Times; others would be more comfortable with The Wall Street Journal. I could go on with this comparison indefinitely and, for example, juxtapose Rush Limbaugh and Jane Fonda, but you get the point; there are an indefinite number of points of view all seeking your time.

Al Bundy of Married…With Children was way ahead of Wild Bill. Many of the Bundys of the world whose lives were changed by playing high school ball decide that their best shot at the brass ring would be to open sporting goods stores. Likewise many among us who like to eat or, especially, cook, decide they could easily and profitably run restaurants. Sadly, most of such dream roads lead, like Al’s, not to the Biblical Hell but to selling women’s shoes, to bagging groceries or, worse, to writing government memos.

But those with strong opinions never learn. We‘re just not as smart as Al Bundy; we won’t simply fail, drop it, and smell the socks. We’re know it alls who understand terrorism, the War in Iraq, or whatever and can’t stop telling you that George has it all wrong. Is Rush Limbaugh that much smarter than everyone else? When listening to him – which I do far more often than my liberal friends would like to hear – I often find him funny but almost never compelling. But old Rush has tens of millions of listeners, so who’s Wild Bill to say the man is a charlatan milking the red state rubes and their disaffected blue state blowhards?

When Wild Bill makes a statement, many get angry. “I’ve known that jackass for fifty years, and he hasn’t made any sense yet. Who does he think he is, Rush Limbaugh?” The better question might be, who does Rush think he is? Rush Limbaugh?

All of us seeking your time, if not your money, hold ourselves out to be not only communicators but great pontificators. But who says that Richard Cohen, Rush, E. J. Dionne, Jr, Robert Novak or Wild Bill is worth a fig or a minute? Well we can start with publishers and station owners; they bet their money on these guys – okay, and Maureen Dowd and Ellen Goodman, et al – and gals. Still the blogosphere is now loaded with tens of thousands of madmen and madwomen screaming to be heard.

What’s a reader to do? Trust Bill! Not really, but as you sample you’ve got to take some chances. Some of the bloggers are nuts; others are so clearly partisan is to be unworthy of your attention and, of course, that most precious of all things, your time.

All I can do is promise to be as thoughtful and reasonable as I can be, and I’ll even try to be clear and down to earth in my presentations. I won’t KNOWINGLY steal from anyone else’s material. And I’ll try to entertain while presenting my point of view.

I’m quite flattered that despite having gone on semi-sabbatical many of my regulars and an occasional newcomer will check in to see if I’ve posted anything new. While this used to be a daily electronic rag it has become a semi-monthly, at least until the next election cycle rolls around but it’s heartening to know that people are at least glancing at the site.

So even if you’ve read one of my novels, if I’ve amused you even slightly, get out there and tell somebody else to spring for one.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Thursday, July 07, 2005

This is London!

In this dangerous new world and deadly new war we’re in, people have a great interest in America’s reaction to previous crises, especially as it relates to those in our midst suspected of treacherous behavior.

Quite by chance, I’ve been studying such matters for many years. I must make the disclaimer that I am not a true scholar of such events and movements but rather an avid amateur reader. Long before 9/11, I was taken by the Sacco and Vanzetti case and wrote a novel about it. There can be no doubt that during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that a significant number of immigrants and citizens were smitten by the philosophy of anarchy. Most people take anarchy to be the absence of government and a chaotic state in society. But in its long life in America and Europe, anarchy was and is a well thought out – if silly – philosophy. In it man was an innocent and good creature until the forces of materialism corrupted men who used the levers of power to enslave the masses to the forces of materialism.

My bottom line with regard to Sacco and Vanzetti was that they were clearly committed anarchists. Whether they were guilty of the two murders for which they were executed has kept far more experienced scholars than Wild Bill in fodder for going on a century. When I began my review of the case, I thought that they were innocent. After much reading I tend to think the Morelli gang of Providence did the bank job for which their lives were taken by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1927. But Sacco and Vanzetti may indeed have done it. My true complaints about the case were about the way they were abused by the legal system. In this, I have not changed my mind even a slight bit.

After America’s experience with anarchy from the mid nineteenth century until the end of the Soviet experiment just over a decade ago, you might think that socialism, anarchism, communism and related approaches to governance and economic organization would have taken a long holiday, but it is clear from the reaction of at least a sub set of the protesters against globalism that anarchy is alive and kicking as are many other philosophies of redistribution of wealth.

The anarchists in America were indeed violent. There were many incidents of terror attributed to them, and I suppose that a good number of them were actually committed by these people. In the aftermath of World War I, President Wilson’s government worked hard to eradicate these cells of law breakers – to the point that the civil liberties of all were threatened. Many people attribute the Sacco and Vanzetti case to this overreaction. At least as it goes to their treatment under the law, I agree.

Since it is known by many that I’ve been working on a novel about the Japanese Internment during World War II, people, especially those who pride themselves on open mindedness concerning the aftermath of 9/11, continually assert that we must not allow what happened to America’s Japanese immigrants and American citizens of Japanese descent in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor to be visited upon America’s resident Muslims. I completely agree.

But there are significant differences between what happened in the days leading up to and following Pearl Harbor and those surrounding 9/11. The attack on Pearl Harbor was perpetrated by the Japanese government and military. So far as I have been able to determine, not a single resident alien or citizen of Japanese ethnic stock was ever arrested or convicted for an act of supplying strategic information to the Japanese government or for an act of sabotage against this country. Yet some 110,000 ethnic Japanese were removed from the Western parts of the country and deprived of their freedom – some for more than four years, simply because of their race and ethnicity.

The situation today is far different. The nation and its leaders, including President Bush have gone out of their way to differentiate between Muslims of many ethnic groupings and the terrorists who carried out the attacks of 9/11. But the great differences in the events of 1941 and 2001 is that the former were carried out by a nation state with no proven assistance from within the nation while the latter was conducted by agents of al Qaeda operating within our midst.

It appears to me that our government, an imperfect institution of laws and men, did not respond as well as it might have in either instance. In World War II under circumstances described by many historians and novelists, we gathered the Japanese together and exiled them internally until the threat receded. In the aftermath of 9/11, the government lashed out in a preventive war against Iraq. The reasons given for the war have proven to be incorrect, but we are caught up in that war and in the larger war against those who attacked us in September 2001. Iraq is now clearly part of that war and we must muddle through it as best we can in the fight against terror.

But what are we to make of the potential terrorists in our midst. Wild Bill an absolute opponent of the War in Iraq does not dispute that there are jihadists among us who would kill and maim our citizens as they killed and wounded innocents in Madrid last year and as they did today in London. How should we react? Certainly not by rounding up our Muslim friends and neighbors and putting them in concentration camps.

But we are demanding that our government protect us from these evil people. What should the government do? For starters they better examine our position in Iraq to see how we can get off this tiger’s back. When we turned on Saddam, we committed resources that might well have been better used in Afghanistan, a nation whose government was harboring our adversaries and which thus became our enemy. The Taliban remains elusive and has not been eradicated and remains capable of attacking our small force in the country. Al Qaeda, clearly wounded and on the run, still commands the allegiance of cells of terrorists around the world who would destroy us. But our forces are tied up in Iraq where al Qaeda operatives have made common cause with domestic insurgents with different goals – even probably toward the United States and its allies.

Is our country truly at war? The president says we are, but those of us who lived through World War II find day to day life significantly different in these two wars, as we might expect. But the one great resource that focuses our attention on the states of the Middle East, oil, is of greater concern nearly three years into the conflict than at the beginning. The latest version of a national energy policy does almost nothing to reduce our dependency on this commodity for many years to come. It would be one thing if our citizens were consuming this resource in spite of the policies of our government, but that just isn’t the case. Our national policy encourages us to travel, drive, and enjoy our gas guzzling cars. There is no hint of sacrifice. The policy is that technology will ultimately save us from the rapacious nations now tormenting us with their oil policy.

Well Wild Bill has digressed from the subject of terrorists in our midst to national energy policy, a common error among the outraged. The true bottom line is that if we’re at war let’s put the nation on a war footing. First, let’s get the troops needed to support the new Iraqi government over there and let’s get them the arms and armaments needed to do the job. Let’s then be truly committed to get out of Iraq and to get the requisite resources to Afghanistan where they’re needed. Clearly that situation is becoming a problem again.

Let’s spend the money necessary to defend us against internal terror. We are not committed to doing the job. For example, the budget authority is for 10,000 new border patrol agents, yet the president has asked for only two percent of that figure.

The hollow talk that we’re fighting in Iraq to engage the terrorists there before they can come here must cease. With the carnage that occurred in London today the war is here as far as I’m concerned. Let’s get statements of support from all of the major Islamic institutions that they do not support the terrorists and let’s square away the problems identified in the intelligence and law enforcement agencies, pronto. Four years after we’re attacked is too long. The president is passing out Medals of Freedom to any number of people who did not do what was required of officials in their positions. Working hard 24/7 is not enough.

This is a bad day. What happened in London should be common cause for all Americans. Let’s start sacrificing. Let’s cut the B.S. and start doing the right thing.

Blog on!

Wild Bill