WAR

I have written before that , if I had to summarize my life in one word, it would be WAR.  We used to have a break between wars: WW-I to WW-II, WW-II and Korea, Korea and Vietnam, Vietnam and 9/11..  But now it seems to be a continuum where there is a short period of a lowered war effort (like now) only to shortly have a resurgence, and we seem to be seeing the early stages of escalation now from a president who vowed to end our wars.  Both Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham are proposing we need to go back to major war in the Middle East to defeat ISIS.  Actually this is an odd view where there is a split in the Republican Party because Rand Paul and Donald Trump are agin' it.  I wonder what historians will eventually say about this period?  Perhaps it will be called the 30 Years War or maybe 50 Years War.  I don't know.  So how long can we stay at war when only about 1% of the population does the fighting, but the costs of the war are done on borrowed money.  Will it eventually lead to the destruction of America as a Great Power?

TORTURE

In my classification, there are two types of torture: physical pain and mental pain.  The worst type is physical pain.  It seems hypocritical of us to try enemies for physical pain like waterboarding and then do it ourselves and say it legally is not torture.  Physical pain is torture.

Mental torture includes things like sleep deprivation which has been said to get the best results.  Our enemies have used it and we adopted it.  I'm not sure it is a crime.  I would tend to say it isn't.  I don't know what long term damage it does to the recipients.

People speculate on how more modern parts of warlike drones - will be viewed in 10 years, largely because of collateral damage.  It is naive to think that using group troops instead of drones would result in no collateral damage or even less collateral damage.  Plus how many of our troops are you willing to sacrifice to get the target?  I  support drones, but not indiscriminately.  If in 10 years it is decided that they should be illegal, then so be it.

It is incredible to think that war should be done in a surgical manner involving only military personnel.  War is messy and violent.  In WW-II, how would you classify the Dresden and Tokyo firebombings and the Hiroshima and especially Nagasaki* atomic bombs?  Such events were not made against military targets but in an attempt to break the will of civilians and their leaders.

* It seems like we dropped it because we had it.

"GOOD OLD DAYS"

I sort of miss the "good old days" of Presidents Ford who ended U.S. occupation of Vietnam, Carter with only the American embassy hostages.  Called by Democrats a "Warmonger," President Reagan stubbornly refused to go to war over three major Embassy attacks (twice in Beirut and one in Kuwait) plus the Marine barracks disaster, and at least when he went to war, he at least picked someone we could beat - Granada. President Bush (41), of course, did have Desert Storm (Iraq I) and his "invasion" of Panama to capture Noriega, but the things calmed down again with President Clinton with his drive by shooting in Iraq from American military airplanes.  Clinton, who had several terrorist attacks, also is distinguished by winning the only war won without "boots on the ground" - Kosovo - won by air power alone.  Those are about the years closest to peace I have seen in my 83 years since Japan invaded China in 1937.

This comparatively "sleepy" period from 1974 through the 1990s was preceded by WW-II of President Roosevelt, Korea of President Truman, and Vietnam of Presidents Kennedy,Johnson, and Nixon and succeeded by the Afghanistan and Iraq II wars of President Bush (43).  Now we can add the Iraq III/Syria war of our "peace" President Obama.

GUANTONIMO AND FRANZ KAFKA

Franz Kafka is known for his dark novels.  Of particular note here is Der Process or the Trial in which a man is arrested by some remote authority, but he is never told what he did.  It sounds a lot like what has happened to the  prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, some held for more the 12 years without ever being indicted for anything.  Some time in the future, I believe this period will be considered a dark period in American history rivaling the internment of Japanese Americans (and, lesser known, some German Americans) during WW-II.

Within the last few days, five "major" prisoners were released from Guantanamo Bay Prison for "house" arrest for a year in Qatar before being released.  John McCain who seems never to have seen a war he didn't like calls these men "the hardest of the hard core."  We Americans get kind of hysterical about our enemies and attribute to them some super human qualities, able to destroy America by themselves.  We were even afraid to put them into high security U.S. jails for certain they would escape and do much harm.  We didn't even trust them to American civilian courts for fear they wouldn't be convicted.

As has been pointed out, these five have been "out of commission" for a dozen years so are "way out of the loop."  Also they are members of the Taliban and not al Qaeda (though they are rumored to have al Qaeda connections) so it is not clear that their mission is to destroy America so much as rule Afghanistan.*  However, it wouldn't surprise me if they had worked up a great hate for being incarcerated for so long.

If we know so much about them, why haven't they been tried, much less indicted?  One is said to be wanted for war crimes (Mullah Muhammad Fazi) for the murder of thousands of Afghan Shiites in the 1990s, but why wasn't he released for trial?  They have just been held under the lame excuse that since they are not being held within the U.S., they are not protected by the U.S. Constitution.  But they were being held in a U.S. Naval base which for purposes of running for President of the United States is approved (McCain himself was born in the Panama Canal Zone in a U.S. military base and ran for President).

I have little to say about Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was promoted to Sergeant while a prisoner of the Taliban.**  It seems he was a deserter and may well ultimately have exchanged one type of prison for another.  I wonder why he volunteered for the Army?  His father looks like he has become a Muslim with the free form beard and comments.  But I do feel sorry for Susan Rice who has fallen on her sword a second time for the President in describing Bergdahl as captured on the battlefield.  Well, I suppose you can describe the whole of Afghanistan as a battlefield.  Morning Joe Scarborough has said he wonders who in the White House hates her.

* http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/01/us/bergdahl-transferred-guantanamo-detainees
** http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/01/us/bergdahl-deserter-or-hero/index.html

THE BREADBASKET OF EUROPE IS NOW A BASKET CASE

The title of this piece, that regards Ukraine,* is not original with me, but I couldn't resist using it.  But I am getting increasingly upset with certain politicians who insist on undermining our President in foreign relations.  Prominent, of course, is senile John McCain who seemingly never saw a war he didn't like; however, when pressed by Charley Rose as to what should be done over the Soviet, I mean Russian, occupation of the Crimea said that the first thing he would do is to freeze the foreign assets and visas of the Russian oligarchs, something that Secretary John Kerry has mentioned as a possibility.

I'm also disappointed in Lindsey Graham, Senator of South Carolina, for his comments making fun of the President in a serious international incident, as, at times, he has shown some statesmanship.  Supposedly the reason he is doing this is because of his Tea Party challenge in his reelection bid.  Unfortunately, this puts his reelection ahead of his country.  He seems to think that we should have bombarded the leader of Syria even after the promise of getting rid of the poisonous gases.  Unfortunately, there are no good solutions in Syria as if  Assad is overthrown the real civil war will begin with the likelihood that the country will become a conservative Muslim state like Iran.   As awful as the situation is in Syria, perhaps the best state is a status quo.

At the age of 82, I do remember some things in the lead up to WW-II, and the Russian occupation of the Crimea to "protect" the Ukrainian citizens of Russian heritage reminds me a lot of the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland** to protect citizens of German heritage at the very beginning of WW-II.  I don't recall any news about threats to the Russian speaking peoples anywhere in Ukraine.  And Putin does seem to be trying to generate an excuse for more occupation of Ukraine by having some of his soldiers shoot over the heads of some Ukrainian troops:
But not every scene was so calm. Video showed more than 100 unarmed Ukrainian troops trying Tuesday morning to return to Belbek air base north of Sevastopol, only to have Russian forces fire warning shots over their heads.***

As the situation in Ukraine is still in flux, I have little more to say at this time.

History of Ukraine:

Crimea has had a long and complex history but more recently for more than 300 yrs it was a part of Turkey, then in 1783 became a part of Russia, more or less, and then of the Soviet Union.  Mysteriously, Kruschov gave the Crimea to Ukraine in 1954.  Speculation is that he was drunk at the time.  Crimea has spent little time as an independent nation though it was called the Autonomous Republic of  Crimea.  It became recognized as a part of Ukraine by Russia in 1997.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Crimea).

Eastern Ukraine has been largely Russian since late in the 17th century.  In 1991, 75% of ethnic Russian said they no longer identified themselves as Russian and 55% voted for Ukrainian independence.  Many Russian speaking Ukrainians bemoan the fact that Russian is not an accepted official language of Ukraine. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russians_in_Ukraine)

Western Ukraine likewise has a complicated history and was a part of Poland most of the time for several hundred years which ended in 1939.  After WW-II, Ukraine became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic with some independence from the Soviet Union.  West Ukraine is largely west looking.  Though the country is largely of the Eastern Orthodox religion, around 4 million Roman Catholics are present, mainly in western Ukraine. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Ukraine; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ukraine)

* http://www.infoplease.com/askeds/bread-basket-europe.html
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_occupation_of_Czechoslovakia
*** http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/04/world/europe/ukraine-russia-tensions/