The Fog of War

_____ Fog of War ____

Events in Iraq are unfolding the same way they have been for almost a year – dizzying yet familiar in that nothing is a surprising anymore. Though the headlines are fading, but the fog of war has yet to lift from this ancient land. American troops are still dying at a rate of about one a day, which is a bit lower than it was over the summer before the Army devised tactics to counter urban ambushes and the infamous “improvised explosives.” Helicopters are now flying more erratic routes to avoid surface-to-air missiles. Though the death of any man is tragic, this is not what should worry us. What should worry us is the growing prospect of civil war in Iraq – and that’s seems precisely the aim of the insurgents.

Because American targets are becoming harder to hit, the new Iraqi police have become cannon fodder to the nihilistic insurgents. In one week in February, at least 150 Iraqi police died in car bombings. The intent is clear: minimize the raw numbers and morale of the American proxies once sovereignty is allegedly restored this July and troops begin pulling out of urban areas.

Once we begin urban withdrawal, these men will be doing our bidding on the streets of Baghdad – fighting terrorist and crooks alike. These men will be the protectors of the Governing Council; American GI’s will try to act only as backup. It would seem the larger strategy is to force an American withdrawal under fire. They intend to do this by sucking us back into the cities or to become actors in a civil war to play the part of the neo-colonialist that never intends to leave. We cannot win with that role.

Let us not forget the historical example Al Qaeda & Co. intends to follow – the Mujahideen resistance in Afghanistan. There they patiently brought a superpower to its knees and sparked the collapse of an entire empire. That was on the Soviet’s own border, we are half a world away. This prospect should scare Republicans and Democrats, friend and French alike. It is time that both parties put resources and minds together to create a serious but flexible exit strategy from Iraq.

We must not overreact and play into their plans, but we must not retreat because we are under fire. By reacting the way they want us to, staying because they are still violent, we are playing into their plans. This is precisely the endless conundrum the Israeli's are in. If American GI’s are still patrolling the streets of Baghdad two years from now, we will have lost this battle in the Terror Wars. If American GI’s are still patrolling the streets of Baghdad five years from now, we will have already lost the War.

Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker Current Events Bush Iraq Quagmire Terrorism

Spacemen

-- New Spinnaker Column --

This month President Bush announced ambitious, and ambiguous, plans to return man to his rightful throne of discovery. After falling astray for the past two decades with the Shuttle program it’s about time NASA is given a new mandate. America needs to see, as we did 30 years ago when man first landed on the moon, how much we can accomplish as a people that we cannot do us individuals.

The problem with the Shuttle was that it was always a problem looking for a solution. It wasn’t practical in any meaningful sense. It was only huge and costly. It was built around the idea that by factoring in economies of scale, the shuttle would quickly pay for itself making bi-weekly deliveries of satellites and/or people into space. This is why it was designed to be reusable. It turns out those giant Saturn V rockets that sent man to the moon and later delivered a space-station in one load was cheaper.

To justify the existential problem of the Shuttle at the end of the Cold War, NASA resurrected the idea of a giant multi-national space station. This idea has come to fruition with the nearly complete but totally useless International Space Station (ISS), the only real purpose of which is to keep the Shuttle useful for another decade. Now, we learn that Hubble is going to be left for dead because NASA needs to complete ISS before the Shuttle retires in 2008.

There are at least two alternative views to Bush’s vision of where we should go from here. One undercurrent with rising popularity is that we abandon space programs all together, considering that these two NASA rovers cost us half a billion dollars to build and land rovers 300 million miles away from the problems here on Earth. The problem with this approach is that it relies on a perfectionist fallacy, where we must tie our hands behind our backs and do nothing outside of the physical boundaries of our nation until every internal problem is fixed.

Another emerging view is that we stop government-funded manned exploration all together, allowing robots to do the scientific work and allow the free market, via space tourism, to build an affordable gateway to the stars in a way that NASA has not. This is exemplified through a $10m contest called the X-Prize. In the spirit of the contests that jumpstarted aviation, investors are hoping that entrepreneurs and backyard engineers will be able to build the first commercially viable manned vehicle capable of leaving Earth’s atmosphere, taking at least two millionaire tourist up with them.

As with most cases, private enterprise and government programs can co-exist peaceably together so long as the government gets out of the tourism business as soon as someone claims that X-Prize. The government must learn its lesson from the Shuttle, however, and have a clear plan for the manned space program so that we never again have to loose valuable scientific tools like Hubble for pointless projects like the ISS has become.


Tags: Treyopia Current Events Bush, space moon mars shuttle NASA hubble HST

On The Reasons for Your Conditioned Apathy

-- For an Essay Contest held by the Supervisor of Elections on how to appeal to an 18 y/o to vote. $2500 prize, cross your fingers --


You have allowed yourself to become a tool of the system, friend. Through your apathy, you have given in to their want that you remain silent and unnerved at the prospective future that they have assigned you. In this state of idled potential, they are tearing down your future for gain in their lifetime.

Tax cuts sound great, right? They are - for your parents. Our elected leaders have greased their generations’ wallet and left us the bill. According to the Treasury Department, the bill was $6,987,116,908,679.61 on January 9th. If you think that sounds like $24,065.08 for every man, woman and child in America, you’d be right. That’s your bill. So far. Next year, our government projects that it will spend another half trillion dollars beyond its means. That’s another $1,700 in 12 months, which would take 330 hours at minimum wage to pay back if they weren’t also taking out social security that you won’t be receiving. That’s a lot of burger flippin’, buddy.

Meanwhile, your parents are getting checks in the mail from the government because they elected a guy who told them what they wanted to hear: that they’re paying too much back to their creditors. Why can’t we elect teachers who tell us that we do too much homework? These from the same folks who tell you to save a little bit in every pay check for a rainy day. Oh, and I’m sure you already know that every loan has interest? And you stand ignorant, blindly following like a sheep, allowing them to ruin your credit at their leisure. How much of that tax cut did you get back, anyway, to help you pay for that $7 trillion credit card?

That Social Security tax you see on each pay check isn’t even going to you. It’s going to your parents. See, Social Security was modified by Lyndon Johnson to alleviate the poverty of the elderly. However, everyone gets this welfare when they retire – rich and poor. You actually get more when you’re rich. The problem is there are too many “old guys” like our parents that will be hitting retirement age about the time you get settled into your first career. Right now, Social Security is drawing in a surplus because enough people are working. It’s all supposed to be going into a Trust Fund, but it’s not. $35 billion of that surplus was spent this year. As it stands now, there’s enough surplus to last as a year after we reach deficit levels. Many are projecting that by 2037 , Social Security will be bankrupt – meaning that either we pay more taxes to pay for our parents and their friends who should be supporting their own retirement, or we have to cut entitlements down.

Europe just experienced a supposedly freak summer heat, killing tens of thousands. Some New England towns just received the coldest temperatures ever in their recorded histories How many Storms of the Century have we had in the past decade? Icebergs the size of states are breaking off Antarctica, but your parents won’t put in someone who will sign treaties like the Kyoto Protocol to put a dent in greenhouse emissions. They wanted someone to tell them what they wanted to hear again: It’s not 100% proven that we’re causing the climate change – it’s probably just volcanoes, not SUV’s and jumbo-jets. Besides, they’ll be long dead when the ocean reclaims this swampy sandbar we call home.

Because you don’t vote, you can’t drink. You’re letting your parents decide how old you can be to buy a beer. Because you don’t vote you probably have friends in jail because they were in possession of a small amount of marijuana. Because you don’t vote, your sex education classes are being watered down to teach abstinence, something I’m sure you know works well because there weren’t any teenage mothers at your high school, right? Because you don’t vote, any gay friends you might have can never be married to the ones they love– not even for 24 hours like Britney Spears.

Because you didn’t vote, you never had a say as to whether that buddy of yours that joined the armed services after high school was shipped off the oil fields of the middle east. You never had your say about whether the fighting was for love of freedom or treasure. The 600 men and women that have died, and thousands that have been wounded, since the beginning of the Terror Wars never had your blessing because you didn’t care. How many dead men has your buddy seen since you bought your new Playstation?

In the rest of the world politics is embedded into culture. Those our age understand, or at least want to believe they understand, the consequences of actions that their leaders, and America’s leaders, make. Most any European can tell you the history of post-war American foreign policy better than you can. Your political apathy is only the means that leads to your submission and resignation from the political process. No actor or musician on MTV’s “Rock the Vote” will expose to you these complexities, the reasons you’ve been conditioned into apathy. The end result of this apathy has been completely ignored by these talking heads and authority figures in favor of asking you, as a favor, to fill out a punch card on the firstTuesday of November.

Perhaps Nixon was wrong, you are too young to make such decisions on your own. You need the voice of your elders to speak in your place. They know what’s best for you. You don’t know what a voting booth looks like, so why should you decide how those tax dollars you make waiting tables or stocking shelves are spent? Perhaps it would be best to just fork over your entire paycheck to them. It’s always easier when you don’t have to think about it, right? Of course they don’t want you voting. Why would they want you to? Would you want a teacher that gives more homework? Would you want your parents to vote?


Tags: Treyopia Current Events contest Apathy voting America Elections essay

Impressions on Africa

-- a short assignment in a class, i was supposed to write what my pre-class impressions on Africa were ---


Africa awakens inside of me the demons of my mind – the demons of Marx, Malthus, Hobbes, conquest, genocide, and eugenics. For all the pain and anguish there are no clear cut answers, only gut-churning emotional impulses. How does one account for such a large scale failing of human endeavor? Blame it on the people, the conquerors, the neo-imperialist investors, or perhaps by into the non-linearist myth that they never even tried to modernize and “civilize” – none of it fits just right.

My father flew out of N’djamena the night al Qaeda blew up the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1997. He was working for Esso/Exxon as the communications director for their Saharan oil drilling project. The two pieces of memorabilia from Chad he keeps on his desk are an ancient but giant 10-megabyte hard drive he pulled out of a working computer there, and a picture of himself in front of a company Cessna surrounded by fifteen militiamen armed with rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikov rifles taken as he went to examine a desert satellite Earth Station. He flew out of the State’s as a mildly racist Kentucky-bred white male born to the upper class in middle of the 1950’s; he flew out a hardened eugenist of a time seven decades past. This was his only way to rationalize the grinding poverty and misery he saw in one of the poorest countries on Earth.

My second my lucid memory of Africa is inside of a French hotel room watching the BBC report as their headline the first African “world war,” which was the violence surrounding Mobuto Sese Seko’s demise. It was at that point that I understood the difference between American news media and the rest of the world’s news. Not every nation produces enough wire reports to talk about itself for an hour every night on every network, and nor does sub-Saharan combat have the same appeal or glamour that a thirty-six hour celebrity marriage does.

“National” division to weaken and conquer again was the Western response the anti-colonialist movement. Perhaps all that ended was the occupation. The white man drew borders in the African mans land not on tribal, historical, geographic or religious realities but rather on where on white army met another. Outside of Egypt and the Horn, African countries will never transcend merely being states instead of nations. This weakness, coupled with the events at Bretton Woods, made the new colonial masters: the banks. It was always wealth and relative power against other Europeans that the colonialist wanted out of Africa, but the latter involved occupation and became too bloody and costly to endure – so “civilized” man left at the same time, but left behind them a dependency trailing back to their colonial masters.

Overheard conversation of Africa is awash in Malthusian beliefs that AIDS is nature’s way of taking care of a surplus, that is to say useless, population on the planet. Academic lectures on international security skip over Africa, attributing what goes on there to some Hobbesian nightmare of the state of nature not worthy of the same time given to more civilized and courtly means of killing one another with shinier weapons. Sub-Saharan Africa is the holocaust of our time – the one truth that refutes even the best political or socio-philosophic theory.


Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Africa AIDS Malthus Hobbes Congo