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Snippets–No Kings Edition

The military parade was a benign surprise. It was not nearly as much about Trump as it might have been. And I liked it that a lot of the soldiers had big smiles as if they were enjoying themselves.

Even so, there did not appear to be much point to it. Our major national holiday is the Fourth of July. We all have absorbed some of the history about Independence Day, and it is a natural time for patriotism. Military parades at the conclusion of wars make some sense, as they tend to bring out our appreciation as we realize that too many soldiers are missing, and many whom we do see marching have been through harrowing times. On the other hand, I doubt few of us could have stated when the U.S. Army came into existence and why we were commemorating a date that has gone unremarked for 250 years. Quick. When was our navy created? The marines? The air force?

Perhaps wondering about the point to the parade makes me an outlier. The commentators on Fox News were convinced that it gave all of us a huge boost in patriotism. Seeing files of tanks made them more excited than Al Roker spotting the Snoopy balloon approaching Macy’s.

Wondering about the cost of parade, on the other hand, does not make me an outlier. With a projected price tag of $45 million (not including clean-up and extra police presence), the money spent on the parade could have funded 14 million school lunches, Medicaid coverage for 6,000 people for a year, housing assistance for 4,500 families, annual disability coverage for 7,200 venterans, etc. etc. (See https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hopewatch/5-things-washington-military-parade/). I wonder how many jobs cut by DOGE could have been saved.

Well, back to the parade. Time and again I heard the Fox commentators report that freedom is not free. I think it is fair to say soldiers have helped give us freedom both here and abroad, but I wish we would routinely acknowledge that others who have helped establish our freedoms include non-military patriots who fought for first amendment and due process rights for themselves and others.

A difficult truth is that the sacrifices of many soldiers have not always furthered freedom, for not all our military actions have expanded freedom, neither ours nor others’. Sometimes they have made us (or others) more unsafe or just furthered the interests of a small part of our country.  We have never mastered a way of honoring the warrior while questioning the war.

I will have to admit that the parade concluded with one terrific fireworks display — impressive even on TV. (I wonder how much it cost?) The explosions were well synced with the music. I heard the “1812 Overture,” which I often also hear on Independence Day. Why is a piece that commemorates a Russian victory over the French part of our patriotic days?

Of course, there was also “God Bless America.” Whenever it is played, it should be stressed that it was written by an immigrant from a group that was largely banned from entering the country a few years after the classic song was composed.

It seemed however that no one knew how to end the evening. It went on and on skipping past what seemed to be several natural ending points. It became like gold bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago—simply too, too much.

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Last week several governors were brought before a Congressional hearing apparently so members of Congress could demean gubernatorial patriotism. The governors’ states have sanctuary policies. A sanctuary jurisdiction does not mean that an undocumented person is safe from deportation. It just means that while state officials will continue to enforce state laws (as they were appointed or elected to do), they will not aid federal officers in enforcing federal immigration law. Federal officials imply that local officials are required to assist them. They must report to them whenever they know of an undocumented person. In other words, they must be an informer. That, however, is not the law. There have been societies where informing has been mandatory. They have included Nazi Germany, communist Russia, East Germany, and North Korea.

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Trump says he knows how to handle Putin, but Putin ignores him and creates more brutal chaos in Ukraine. Trump responds by tut-tutting. The U.S. had been negotiating with Iran to get us back to an agreement that Trump abrogated seven years ago. While Trump asked him not to, Netanyahu blew up the negotiations by blowing up Iranian facilities. It would seem that Putin and Netanyahu see Trump as just someone to play. It must be hard for the other players to keep smiles off their faces when Trump comes to the poker table.

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Almost every time I turn on Fox News, they are reporting about the mental decline of Biden during his presidency, a legitimate story. But I am surprised by how much they dwell on it. They also often try to say the electorate gave Trump a “huge mandate” in the last election, even though his margin of victory was the smallest in a generation and was much smaller than the mandate given Biden and Obama (and Clinton if we count only the popular vote). What Fox doesn’t seem to realize is that the more they stress Biden’s decline, the more they imply that voters were not so much selecting Trump as rejecting Biden.

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Sean Hannity, after bashing California and its governor, told his audience that if they wanted a safe life they should live in a red state. Hannity said that is why he lives in Florida. I pulled up homicide rates as a handy marker of safety. They varied slightly from year to year and by some methodological differences, but this result was typical: The five highest homicide rates were in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, New Mexico, and Missouri. These, of course, are not what you would call solidly blue states. The lowest rates were New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Utah, Massachusetts, and Maine. Florida was in the middle of the pack, higher than the rate for New York State (decidedly blue) and — get this — higher than the rate for New York City.

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The press secretary wears a large cross. When I see it, I remember the passage from the Gospel of Matthew that says, “Whoever prostrates and plastic ties the least of these in the field of lettuce and deports them shall find the Kingdom of Heaven.” But when I look for this teaching in my Bible, I only find something quite different about the least of these.

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Snippets

The article reported on the weightlifting prowess of women in their 60s, 70s, and even 80s. It concluded that the weightlifters showed that “age is nothing but a number.” Another cliché that is hooey. I have been four and now many multiples of that, and age has never been nothing but a number. I couldn’t drive when I was four and I have trouble cutting my toenails now. If anything, age has my number.

I have a friend whose memory is so good that he can remember sex.

I have thought it possible that Trump was a Russian asset, but now I have my doubts. I have wondered what Putin thinks about Trump proclaiming the United States won World War II, which Trump, disregarding the brutal killing that went on for months longer in the Pacific, maintains ended on May 8, 1945. Of course, one of the turning points of WWII, perhaps the turning point was Stalingrad. Trump should ask Putin how many Russians died during that war. And I am guessing that Trump never heard John and Paul’s song A Day in the Life with its line, “The English army had just won the war.”

Viewpoint is everything. What did one lab rat say to the other? “I’ve got my scientist so well trained that every time I push the buzzer, he brings me a snack.”

For the third straight year, Utah was named the nation’s top state, based on 71 metrics, including education, economy, and crime. The next four states were New Hampshire, Idaho, Minnesota, and Nebraska. The bottom five: Louisiana, Alaska, Mississippi, New Mexico, and West Virginia. I note that four of the bottom five are solidly red states.

I remember when conservatives railed against big government. However, our present administration is trying to take over Harvard. That sounds to me like big government. Where are those conservatives when you need ‘em?

How many Harvard graduates does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Just one. He grabs the bulb and waits for the world to revolve around him.

As a result of Defense Secretary’s war on DEI, West Point, according to a news article, is ordered “to remove any readings that focused on race, gender or the darker moments of American history.” The Defense Department told the Naval Academy to remove 381 books from the library. Hegseth’s order does not just prohibit the teaching of aspects of our history and society; it also commands that the service academies teach that “America and its founding documents remain the most powerful force for good in human history.” And I thought that Pete Hegseth thought of himself as a Christian.

A lot of people these days tell us that this country was founded on Christian principles or, sometimes, being more inclusive, Judeo-Christian principles. I assume that they do not know that North Carolina’s original constitution banned Jews from public office and that in other states only members of specified Protestant denominations could hold office.

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The Humanitarian War: An Oxymoron?

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          A few postings back, I asked readers to compare and contrast the Russian invasion of Ukraine with America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Some who responded saw nothing to compare. For them, Russia was evil and the U.S. good. Others took a diametrically different stance and saw the two events as fundamentally the same since both were based on lies, or–as those more generous towards America put it–on premises that should have been known to be false.           From a smart, learned, and thought-provoking friend, however, I got a more detailed and nuanced response about the two invasions in which he listed more than a few similarities and differences that I had not thought about.

More of his comments may be explored over the coming weeks, but one of them made me think about how extraordinary our Iraq invasion was. He wrote that while Russia invaded a bordering state for purposes of territorial expansion (or, at least, for creating a “neutral” buffer), the U.S. invasion did not contemplate a territorial expansion. However, my friend continued, protections of oil supplies may have been one (unstated) consideration for our actions.

          This is a difference between the two, and I have been grappling with whether this is an important distinction. In invading a neighboring state, Russia’s action is similar to many previous conflicts. Most wars I could think of started out at least as a border conflict. The boundary is in dispute or, as my friend suggests for Russia, one country wishes to increase its size by taking land next door or sometimes is acting to remove what it sees as an unfriendly neighboring government.

          On the other hand, the examples of one country leapfrogging thousands of miles to invade another nation were comparatively few. The World Wars started out with conflicts among neighboring countries. Others, such as the Falklands/Malvinas war was over disputed sovereignty of distant lands. Other long-distance conflicts were justified as defense of colonies. Some sought to spread religion—often Christianity, the religion of peace—while extracting riches, such as Spain in the Americas. Our Iraqi invasion, unless its goal really was just to control oil, was different.

          The stated reason was a humanitarian one. Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction—biological, chemical, and soon, we said, nuclear; history indicated that he was willing to use such weapons; and so he needed to be stopped, even though he was not a threat to the invaders, i.e., us. (Not even faintly credible evidence was presented that Iraq threatened the United States.) Instead, Hussein needed to be stopped because he was a danger to peoples and lands other than the United States. Our action was not in self-defense; we were only seeking good for others. Let’s all sing: What a comfort to be sure, that our motives were so pure.* We were going to war, we said, only with the most magnanimous of motives.** Oh, and besides, we were going to bring Jeffersonian democracy to what had been a dictatorial regime.

          However, the words of Francis Bacon come to mind: “A just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a lawful cause of war.” Although Russia claims that Ukraine is a threat to itself and to the Russian minority in Ukraine, only deluded people can believe that Russia has a just fear of those possibilities. Those “reasons” are only pretexts.

          Although we supposedly had “humanitarian” reasons for attacking Iraq, a country thousands of miles away posing no threat to us, they could only be good grounds, Bacon might say, if the United States had just fears that Iraq posed an imminent threat to its neighbors. However, we know that this was not true; Iraq did not pose such a threat. Unfortunately, U.S. leaders were acting something like Putin has: They first decided to invade Iraq and subsequently looked for justifications for that decision. If the Iraq war was not based on bald-faced lies as Putin’s invasion has been, it was based on the conjectures of fools who could not acknowledge the lack of evidence for the military action.***

          My friend has concluded that it is hard to justify an invasion of a sovereign state for any purpose other than self-defense or, perhaps, an internationally recognized humanitarian threat. That said, he continues, bad as the invasion of Iraq was understood to be at the time (and understood now to be even worse), the Russian invasion of Ukraine reflects a far greater violation of accepted norms and poses far greater dangers to world safety than our Iraqi actions.

          I agree that the Russian invasion of Ukraine poses a greater global danger than our invasion of Iraq, but that is because of the fear that Putin might use nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. If, however, Russia continues to use only conventional weapons, is the Russian action a greater danger to the world than our Iraq invasion was? We are seeing death, destruction, and millions of frightened refugees resulting from the Ukrainian invasion, but of course, that was also true of our action. The number of deaths resulting from our invasion and occupation vary widely. Nevertheless, Iraq Body Count, an organization that carefully sought confirmation of reported deaths, concluded that over 160,000 people died from the Iraq invasion with over two-thirds of them civilians. Other sources report much higher numbers: 600,000, 460,000, and 1,033,000 deaths. Refugee numbers also vary, but many sources have concluded that 2 to 3 million Iraqis became refugees because of the war.

          Moreover, the Iraqi invasion helped foster terrorism in places outside of Iraq. Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, I had occasion to meet with officials who had been in Israeli intelligence services. They were mystified by our action. They said that Iraq was not a state sponsor of terrorism in the Mideast. But Iran was. They said that an invasion of Iraq was sure to increase the influence of Iran in the Mideast, and this would be detrimental to Christians and certain Muslims in the region as well as a threat to Israel. They were right. Furthermore, while ISIS was formed before 2003, it came to prominence and gained strength soon after our invasion of Iraq, and it continued to flourish in the chaotic milieu that our military adventure helped to create. The Ukraine invasion has caused deaths and an extraordinary number of refugees, but I doubt that it will spawn international terrorism anywhere near the extent that our Iraq invasion has.

          What is happening in Ukraine is both a tragedy and frightening because the conflict could spread and/or escalate. Our Iraq invasion may not have produced the same fear of escalation, nuclear or otherwise, but it was also a tragedy.

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*In Man of La Mancha two women who will benefit if Don Quixote is locked up in a nuthouse, sing that they desire that result only because they are after his best interests. The Padre sings:

They’re only thinking of him.

They’re only thinking of him.

How saintly is their plaintive plea.

They’re only thinking of him.

What a comfort to be sure,

that their motives are so pure.

As they go thinking and worrying about him.

** Margaret MacMillan notes in War: How Conflict Shaped Us (2020) that humanitarian interventions such as our Iraq invasion “raise questions about who decides what is just and suspicions about the motives and goals of the intervening powers. Critics have argued that Western powers are simply cloaking their deeply-rooted imperialistic attitudes to the rest of the world in the fashionable new language. ‘Hypocrisy,’ as the Duc de La Rochefoucauld remarked, ‘is a tribute vice pays to virtue.’”

*** Before we launched our invasion of Iraq, I saw a TV interview of a congressional leader who had just emerged from an intelligence briefing. The congressman said that the briefing had given him an “intuition” that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He had just met with intelligence officials and had nothing more than an “intuition”?! That told me that the intelligence agencies did not have solid information showing Iraq had those weapons. Nevertheless, that congressman voted for the war. He had made up his mind to support the invasion and was only looking for grounds to justify it. I am sure that he was viewed as a “good” man, but he voted for death because he had an intuition.