Drones
A giant art installation in Pakistan got some attention. An international committee displayed a large picture of a child, in an area that receives many drone strikes. The idea is to make drone controllers more aware of the human life on the ground. This is a repost from 2014.
A few days later, a commentary appeared, This Giant Art Piece in Pakistan Won’t Be Making Drone Pilots Feel Empathy. The author said the *target audience* of the piece was the empathetic public, not the drone controllers. There is a link to an article, where the psychological impact of drone warfare, on the controllers, is discussed. People in Yemen have a different perspective.
The drone war has been going on for some time now. It began under George W. Bush, and was intensified under Barack H. Obama. The “right to life” moving lips have been strangely silent. There are indications that fewer children are being killed now than before. Since the drone war is conducted by the secrecy oriented C.I.A., there is little way to *confirm or deny* these reports. Nor is it possible to determine the financial cost of this program. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.
The Day Lincoln Was Shot
PG has read The Day Lincoln Was Shot. It is written so that the casual reader can enjoy it. There is a powerful history lesson here, and worth the twenty five cents PG paid at Book Nook. The pictures for this book report are from The Library of Congress. This is a repost.
This book contradicts another book PG read. Genius and Heroin reports that Mary Todd Lincoln had a bad headache on April 14, 1864. Some opium was found for her, and she was able to go to Ford’s Theater that evening. TDLWS does not mention this.
The story begins in the weeks leading up to “Good Friday”. John Wilkes Booth was in the crowd at Mr. Lincoln’s second inauguration. Vice President Andrew Johnson was also there, and made a drunken fool of himself. Mr. Johnson did not meet with Mr. Lincoln until the afternoon of April 14.
John Wilkes Booth was a famous actor, He made $20,000 a year as a performer. Mr. Booth was also a fan of the Confederacy, and launched a plan to kidnap Mr. Lincoln. There was an attempt to kidnap the President, but Mr. Lincoln did not show up as planned. The conspiracy of Mr. Booth almost broke up, and was reduced to four men.
The four men…John Wilkes Booth, Lewis Paine, David Herrold, and George Atzerodt … met at a boarding house owned by Mary Sarratt. Ultimately, Booth went to Ford’s Theater to kill the President. Lewis Paine and David Herrold tried to kill Secretary of State William Seward. George Atzerodt took a room at Kirkland’s boarding house, and was supposed to take out Vice President Andrew Johnson. Mary Sarratt was not involved in the plot, but was executed by hanging anyway.
In the weeks before Good Friday, a few things happened. On March 7, the door to box seven at Ford’s Theater was broken down, and the lock broken. On April 5, Secretary of State William Seward was badly injured in a carriage accident. On April 9, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses Grant, ending the War Between the States.
Part of the celebration was a theater party on Friday, April 14. Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln were to join Gen. and Mrs. Grant at Ford’s Theater. The show was “Our American Cousin”, starring Laura Keene. The Grants did not really want to go, and decided to catch a train to New Jersey. They wanted to see their children. Mrs. Grant had also witnessed a temper tantrum by Mrs. Lincoln, and was possibly avoiding the hot headed first lady.
Mr. Booth decided that this was the night for action. He went by the Kirkwood house, and left a note for Andrew Johnson. The idea was for the police to see the note, and think that Mr. Johnson was part of the conspiracy. This was foiled when Mr. Johnson’s secretary stopped by Kirkwood house, and picked up the Vice President’s mail and messages.
Ford’s Theater was prepared for the visit by the President. A barrier was taken out from between two boxes. Flags were hung around the building. At 9:00 pm, the President’s bodyguard, a Washington policeman named John F. Parker, got bored with the play. Mr. Parker went to Taltavul’s saloon, along with with Francis Burns, the president’s driver and Forbes, the valet. They were in the saloon during the action at the theater.
John Wilkes Booth was an experienced actor, and he knew how to follow a cue. At 10:15 pm, the player onstage said “Wal I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, you sockdologizing old mantrap”. Booth placed a derringer between Mr. Lincoln’s left ear and spine, and pulled the trigger. He said “Sic Semper Tyrannis”, and cut Major Henry Rathbone. Booth leaned over the edge of the theater box, and lowered himself to the stage. The spur of his right foot catches on the Treasury regiment flag. This causes him to land on his left leg at an odd angle. The leg broke.
While this is going on, Lewis Paine and David Herrold went to visit Secretary of State William Seward. He is laying in bed, covered in bandages, recovering from the carriage accident. The bandages get in the way of the knife that cuts him, and save his life.
The wounds to Mr. Lincoln are considered mortal. The President was moved to Peterson’s boarding house nearby. At 7:22 am on April 15, he died. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who served as acting President during the night, said “Now he belongs to the ages.”
The Obama Doctrine
There is a novella in the current issue of The Atlantic, The Obama Doctrine. It is written by Jeffrey Goldberg. PG was mining TOD for big words, to use in a poem. While doing this, he copied a few quotes. These quotes, and the commentary they inspire, are a good excuse for a post. The pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”.
“Obama would say privately that the first task of an American president in the post-Bush international arena was “Don’t do stupid shit.” Obama’s reticence frustrated Power and others on his national-security team who had a preference for action. Hillary Clinton, when she was Obama’s secretary of state, argued for an early and assertive response to Assad’s violence. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad … left a big vacuum, which the jihadist have now filled.” When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that “the questions we were asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is pro–stupid shit?” The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit.”
TOD has two parts. The first section is devoted to a decision not to bomb Syria. The second part is the result of a series of interviews that Mr. Goldberg conducted with President Obama. Apparently, bombing Syria would have been stupid shit. Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton bowdlerized this mantra. Apparently this is the job of the Secretary of State… to turn shit into stuff.
“Obama was also unsettled by a surprise visit early in the week from James Clapper, his director of national intelligence, who interrupted the President’s Daily Brief, the threat report Obama receives each morning from Clapper’s analysts, to make clear that the intelligence on Syria’s use of sarin gas, while robust, was not a “slam dunk.” He chose the term carefully. Clapper, the chief of an intelligence community traumatized by its failures in the run-up to the Iraq War, was not going to overpromise, in the manner of the onetime CIA director George Tenet, who famously guaranteed George W. Bush a “slam dunk” in Iraq.”
Syria had long been ruled by the Assad family. They are not nice people. The people of Syria wanted regime change. The Assads responded by killing lots of people. There was much hand wringing in the west about this. President Obama said that it would be a “red line” if chemical weapons were used. Then, reports of WMD use came in. The President needed to do something.
“He and McDonough stayed outside for an hour. Obama told him he was worried that Assad would place civilians as “human shields” around obvious targets. He also pointed out an underlying flaw in the proposed strike: U.S. missiles would not be fired at chemical-weapons depots, for fear of sending plumes of poison into the air. A strike would target military units that had delivered these weapons, but not the weapons themselves.”
Chemical weapons do not respect borders. If poison gas is released into the air, it will go wherever it wants to go. This includes Syria’s next door neighbor Israel. The role of Israel is the Syrian troubles is kept quiet. It is known that when the Muslims are fighting each other, they are not fighting Israel. This concept kept the Iran-Iraq was going for eight bloody years.
“Ninety minutes later, at the White House, Obama reinforced Kerry’s message in a public statement: “It’s important for us to recognize that when over 1,000 people are killed, including hundreds of innocent children, through the use of a weapon that 98 or 99 percent of humanity says should not be used even in war, and there is no action, then we’re sending a signal that that international norm doesn’t mean much. And that is a danger to our national security.”
In this statement, the President was talking about Syria. He could have meant any number of conflicts. Children in Gaza are killed by Israeli cluster bombs. Children in Africa are killed, often by other children, in dozens of wars and guerrilla conflicts. Children in American cities are killed by handguns. It goes on and on.
“I have come to believe that, in Obama’s mind, August 30, 2013, was his liberation day, the day he defied not only the foreign-policy establishment and its cruise-missile playbook, but also the demands of America’s frustrating, high-maintenance allies in the Middle East”
For years it has been a mantra that Israel is the only ally of the United States in the middle east. Of course this is nonsense, as anyone driving a car powered by Arab oil products should know. For Jeffrey Goldberg to acknowledge this may be the most startling thing in this feature.
But not the last. The article goes on, and on, and on. It is full of overblown talk like this: “Obama said that to achieve this rebalancing, the U.S. had to absorb the diatribes and insults of superannuated Castro manqués.” TOD reads like a Rorschach test. Those who admire the President will find confirmation for their opinions. Those who dislike Obama will also see much they agree with. It is a good question what Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton see. This is a repost.
More True Than Just True
“It isn’t that the bible is true. It’s that the bible is the precondition, for the manifestation of truth. Which makes it way more true, than just true. It’s a whole different kind of true.” Dr. Jordan Bernt Peterson talked, for four hours, on the Joe Rogan Experience recently. As Johnny Cash once said, “The lonely voice of youth cries, what is truth?”
Jordan Peterson’s Realization About the Bible came to him after a visit to the Museum of the Bible, in Washington DC. The truth about MOTB is quite a story.
MOTB “was founded by billionaire Steve Green, an evangelical Christian whose family owns Hobby Lobby.” There are thousands of artifacts from the middle east. This is where the problem starts.
Owners Of Hobby Lobby Ordered To Return Stolen Artifact To Iraq “The New York Times reported that a property law expert “warned company executives that the artifacts might have been looted from historical sites in Iraq” … reportedly ignored this warning and the president of Hobby Lobby, Steve Green, went so far as to travel to the United Arab Emirates to examine “rare Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets.” … It was later in 2010 that the family went on to purchase the 5,500 stolen artifacts for a whopping $1.6 billion.”
With the Iraqi government preoccupied with invasions from the United States, museum security became a low priority. After the regime change in 2003, the situation was out of control. Enter a naive, Jesus-happy billionaire, and what happened is not surprising.
After the Museum of the Bible Discovered Its Dead Sea Scrolls Are Fake … “Between 2009 and 2014, Hobby Lobby tycoon Steve Green snapped up 16 of the post-2002 fragments for his planned Museum of the Bible … Before the institution even opened, it put together a 2016 book, Dead Sea Scrolls Fragments in the Museum Collection (The book is now listed as [Retracted.]) It offered a scholarly analysis of the artifacts, but no scientific testing had been conducted. … other experts have been suspicious for quite some time. As the 430,000-square-foot museum’s November 2017 opening date approached, concerns over the fragments’ authenticity began to mount—one of the book’s other authors, Kipp Davis, even published an article raising the possibility of forgery.”
Museum of the Bible’s Steve Green, statement on past acquisitions “In 2009, when I began acquiring biblical manuscripts and artifacts for what would ultimately form the collection at Museum of the Bible, I knew little about the world of collecting. It is well known that I trusted the wrong people to guide me, and unwittingly dealt with unscrupulous dealers in those early years. One area where I fell short was not appreciating the importance of the provenance of the items I purchased.”
“It’s a whole different kind of true.” Pictures today are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library.”
War Letters
In the winter of 2003, it was obvious that America was going to war. Congress had voted approval, the modern version of a declaration of war. The troops, and supplies, were on the borders of Iraq, waiting for the order to go in.
PG felt the need to make a statement. There was no illusion that it would affect the overall decision to invade Iraq. However, PG wanted to go on record as being opposed to the folly to come.
It was a low risk act. In America, we have freedom of expression. This does not mean that the powers that be listen to the people. The only expression that matters is by people who pay the authorities. The people can say anything, but nobody in charge listens.
There were three representatives in Congress to contact. The two Senators were Saxby Chambliss and Zell Miller. The 4th district was represented in the House of Representatives by Denise Majette. She was new to Congress, having defeated Cynthia McKinney in the 2002 election.
The area that PG lives in is gerrymandered into different districts every ten years by the Georgia legislature. Today, PG is in the 6th district, represented by Democrat Lucy McBath.
The letters are lost in hard drive crash fog. It started out with the phrase “you were elected to represent me.” Apparently, this left Zell Miller out. He has been appointed to finish the term of Paul Coverdell. Democrat Zell Miller was appointed by Democrat Governor Roy Barnes to complete the term of Republican Paul Coverdell. After this, Zell Miller gave the keynote address at the 2004 Republican Convention. This is what Georgia has come to expect from Zig Zag Zell.
The anti war letter was not great writing. It basically said that the invasion of Iraq was not a good idea. The letter did not address the tax cut. In a bizarre move, Congress approved a tax cut, with an economically ruinous war on the horizon.
The responses to the letter are attached here. Denise Majette gave a thoughtful reply. She did not say “I agree with you” in so many words, but it is clear she is not gung ho about killing Iraqis. Miss Majette said, and PG agrees, that once the war begins, the debate should cease.
Saxby Chambliss sent two replies. Both talked about how well the war was going, and how wonderful it was to be killing people in Iraq. It is a good question whether his staff read the original letter from PG, which opposed the war.
In the 2004 election, Denise Majette ran for the Senate. Zell Miller chose to retire, and his seat was up for grabs. Republican Johnny Isakson won the Senate seat. Cynthia McKinney made a comeback, and won the fourth district House seat.
Saxby Chambliss was re-elected in 2008, and retired in 2014. The conflict in Iraq continues to this day. It is a disaster. The withdrawal of American combat troops did not end the civil war. Currently, Iraq is the scene for combat operations from the Islamic State military force.
The financial burden of the war has been immense. The military depends on contractors for many basic services, at increased cost to the Asian war financiers. The National debt has been increasing by a trillion dollars a year. Revenge for nine eleven, directed at a marginally responsible country, has been horribly expensive. Pictures for today’s entertainment message are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”. This is a repost.
The Narco State Rag
This feature was written July 13, 2010. In the past year, the United States has withdrawn from Afghanistan. Like most of that war, the withdrawal did not go smoothly.
Across the frontier from Afghanistan, the Russian bear is dealing with a heroin epidemic. Some say the United States suckered the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan in 1979. The disastrous war that followed led to the fall of the Soviet Union. We are still dealing with the karma.
Tom Dispatch has an audio feature about Afghanistan, and the many unanswered questions about our war there. We invaded Afghanistan to get revenge for 911, and looked for a reason later.
At the 3:06 mark on the tape, when Tom makes a comment Afghanistan being a narco state. PG had a flash of understanding about the reason behind this war. This may even have been powerful enough to ignore the reports about a terror strike in September 2001, and let 911 happen.
The rumors of CIA involvement in drug trafficking are wide spread and long term. When planes went to Central America in the eighties to bring arms to the contras, they came back to the United States loaded with cocaine. There are stories of collusion with the government in Cuba. There are many, many more stories about connections between the US government and the drug trade.
When the Taliban took over Afghanistan, they cracked down on the poppy farmers. Much of the raw opium for heroin/morphine/opium is grown in Afghanistan. This was not a pleasing for the CIA.
Could it be that the real reason for our involvement in Afghanistan is to ensure the flow of narcotics into the hungry world? This would be a big cash cow for the CIA, although not enough to justify the amounts of money being spent on the conflict.
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library.” TomDispatch is still operating in 2022. @TomDispatch is the twitter version.
Seven Score And Eighteen Years Ago
A vicious battle had been fought near Gettysburg, PA. It is widely considered the turning point of “Mr. Lincoln”s War,” the moment when the Union took the upper hand. It came at a horrible price, and a cemetery was built to hold this price.
The ceremony to dedicate the cemetery was held November 19, 1863. The headline speaker was Senator Edward Everett. The President was an afterthought. After it was over, Mr. Everett reportedly told the President that he said more in two minutes than he did in two hours.
The speech by Mr. Lincoln is an American classic. Schoolchildren are forced to memorize it. There are a few legends, many of which are not true. According to The Lincoln Museum , the speech was written on White House stationary, not the back of an envelope. The train ride would have been too bumpy to write. There is also confusion about what happened to the original text that the President read from.
HT to Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub. Pictures are from The Library of Congress. Measured in pixels, the picture of George Custer is 720×666. This is a repost.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
The Burning Of Atlanta
Around this time 157 years ago, Atlanta was on fire. General Sherman was preparing for his March to the sea, and wanted to destroy anything of value in the city. The fire is reported as being on 11-15 of November, depending on what source you use.
The November fire was the second great fire in Atlanta that year. On September 2, the city was conquered by the Union Army. The fleeing Confederates blew up a munitions depot, and set a large part of the city on fire. This is the fire Scarlet O’Hara flees, in “Gone With The Wind”.
After a series of bloody battles, the city was shelled by Yankee forces for forty days. There were many civilian casualties. General Sherman was tired of the war, angry at Atlanta, and ready for action. This is despite the fact that many in Atlanta were opposed to secession.
Click here to hear a lecture by Marc Wortman at the Atlanta History Center. Mr Wortman is the author of “The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta”. The hour of talk is fascinating. This is a repost. The pictures are from The Library of Congress
About this time every year, there is a post about the burning of Atlanta. One of the sources is a lecture by Marc Wortman. If you have an hour to spare, this talk is worth your time. One of the stories told is the tale of Mr. Luckie.
“According to folklore, two stories abound as to how Luckie Street was named. The first is that its moniker came from one of Atlanta’s oldest families. The other, probably closer to the truth, regales the life of Solomon “Sam” Luckie. Luckie, as it turns out, wasn’t so lucky after all. When General William Tecumseh Sherman first came marching through Atlanta in 1864, Luckie, a free Black man who made his living as a barber, was leaning against a gas lamp post in downtown talking to a group of businessmen. A burst from a cannon shell wounded him; he survived, but later died from his injuries. Folklore suggests that he may have been one of the first casualties of the assault on Atlanta. Luckie Street, an extension of Auburn Avenue, was later named in his memory.”
Marc Wortman wrote a book, The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta. The one star review, and comments to that review, are unusually detailed. Here is a selection.
“…People forget – or were never taught in school – that most Confederate soldiers descended from Revolutionary War patriots or were up-country poor sons of farmers. Many Confederate soldiers were relatively recent new arrivals to the U.S., semi-literate dirt poor immigrants from Ireland and Scotland who’d never had the chance to own even an acre of their own land in Europe. In the mix were well-educated, elite merchant business owning French Huguenot refugees of the Catholic Bourbon genocide of Protestants. These immigrants had nowhere else to go, 9 times out of 10 never owned a slave, and fought for the CSA to keep what little they’d hardscrabble carved out over a decade of arrival into the U.S.”
The War Between The States continues to be a source of controversy. After the Charleston church killings, many comments were made about the Confederate battle flag. (If you can’t talk about gun control or mental health, you talk about a symbol.) This led to discussions about the war itself. There were ritual denunciations of slavery, assumed to be the sole cause of the conflict.
The notion of autonomous states in a federal union was novel when the United States Constitution was written. The debate over federalism versus states rights continues to this day. States that want to legalize marijuana may be the next battleground. (Few are expecting secession over bong rights.) Many in the CSA saw the Union as being a conquering army, and fought to defend their homes. While slavery was certainly a factor in the creation of the CSA, it was not the only Casus belli. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.
November 11
Veterans day was originally Armistice Day. On November 11, 1918, at 11 am, Paris time (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month) a cease fire went into effect for “The great war”. Officials of the major armies agreed to the ceasefire at 5 am (European time). There were an estimated 11,000 casualties in the last six hours of the war.
At 11:59 am, U.S. army private Henry Gunther became the last soldier to die in World War I. “According to the Globe and Mail this is the story of the last soldier killed in WW1: On Nov.11, 1918, U.S. army private Henry Gunther stood up during a lull in the machine gun fire and charged the enemy. “The Germans stared in disbelief,” says the Daily Express. “They had been told that morning that the fighting was about to stop; in a few minutes they would stop firing and go home. So why was this American charging at them with his bayonet drawn? They shouted at him to stop and frantically tried to wave him back but… he hadn’t heard anything of the ceasefire.” A German gunner released a five-round burst and the soldier lay dead, at 10:59 a.m. In his recently published Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour, U.S. Military Historian Joseph Persico notes that Private Gunther had previously been a sergeant but was demoted after an Army censor read his letter to a friend back home, urging him to steer clear of the war at all costs. Gunther, who was in no-man’s land when the ceasefire news arrived, had been trying to prove himself worthy of his original rank.”
This is a repost. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.
Veteran’s Day is a bad day for a cynic. I appreciate living in The United States. Even with all of her flaws, I have a good life here. The role that Veterans have played should be honored. On the other hand, those who profit from war often exploit Veterans, for political mojo. Many of these people did not serve. Those who profit from war, without serving, deserve our scorn.
Veterans are often not treated well after their service. It is estimated that a quarter of the homeless are veterans. The services offered to wounded veterans are shamefully lacking.
Hugh Pharr Quin CSA was my great grandfather. He served with the Georgia State Troops, in the War Between the States. I prefer the USA to the CSA, or whatever would have followed a Confederate victory. The Union army had to prevail, over the various Confederate Armies, for this to happen. Do I dishonor my great grandfather by saying, we are better off that the other side won?
Veterans Day was originally Armistice Day. This was the day, 103 years ago, when the War to End All Wars ended. World War I was a ghastly bloodbath, in which millions died. It affected many of the problems that plague us today. I would be willing to bet that not one person, in ten thousand, knows what World War I was about. And yet, the men who fought in that conflict (I don’t think they had women soldiers then) deserve the same gratitude as those who fought in any other conflict.
The soldier…many of whom are drafted…doesn’t get to choose which war to fight in. The sacrifice of the World War II soldier was just as great as the Vietnam fighter, but the appreciation given was much greater. I grew up during Vietnam, and saw the national mood go from patriotic fight, to dismayed resistance. By the time I was old enough to get drafted, the Paris accords had been signed. For better or worse, there went my chance.
Smedley Butler
There was a feature the other day on the innertube called War is a racket . It was about a man with the unlikely name of Smedley Butler . Pictures for today’s adventure are from The Library of Congress. The video features an actor named Graham Frye in the role of General Butler. The video is courtesy of Smedley D. Butler Brigade Chapter 9 Veterans For Peace. This is a repost.
Major General Smedley Darlington Butler was a star of the U.S. Marine Corps. He lied about his age to enlist during the Spanish American War. Mr. Butler served in Philippines, China, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America and World War I. With the exception of World War I, most of these conflicts are forgotten today.
Smedley Butler received the Medal of Honor twice. “His first Medal of Honor was presented following action at Vera Cruz, Mexico, 21-22 April 1914, where he commanded the Marines who landed and occupied the city. Maj Butler “was eminent and conspicuous in command of his Battalion. He exhibited courage and skill in leading his men through the action of the 22nd and in the final occupation of the city…The following year, he was awarded the second Medal of Honor for bravery and forceful leadership as Commanding Officer of detachments of Marines and seamen of the USS Connecticut in repulsing Caco resistance on Fort Riviere, Haiti, 17 November 1915.”
After his retirement in 1931, Mr. Butler had a change of heart, and decided that killing for Uncle Sam was not such a great idea. He wrote a book, “War is a Racket”, and became a popular speaker. Here is a “money quote”… “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.”
Smedley Butler died June 21, 1940. Eighteen months later, America was at War again. How he would have reacted to that conflict is a mystery.
091121
This is my 911 story. I repeat it every year at this time. Every year I say this will be the last time. This year is a mess. We are destroying the village to save it. The action part of 091101 was over by 11 am. This quagmire drags on and on. Nobody knows how things will turn out.
I was at work, and someone called out that someone had run a plane into the World Trade Center. I didn’t think much of it, until I heard that the second tower had been hit, then the Pentagon, then the towers collapsed, then a plane crashed in Pennsylvania.
I focused on my job most of the day. There was always drama at that facility, and concentrating on my production duties helped to keep me saner. This was roughly the halfway point of my seven year tenure at this place.
One of the other workers was a bully for Jesus. He was a hateful loudmouth. After the extent of the damage became known, he shouted “They are doing this for Allah,” and prayed at his desk. The spectacle of the BFJ praying made me want to puke.
I became alienated from Jesus during these years. Once, I had once been tolerant of Christians and Jesus, as one would be with an eccentric relative. I began to loath the entire affair. I hear of others who found comfort in religion during this difficult time. That option simply was not available for me.
Pictures from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”. “This item is part of a collection of images of downtown Atlanta streets that were taken before the viaduct construction of 1927 – 1929. Some of the covered streets became part of Underground Atlanta.”
Greeted As Liberators
One thing that PG likes to do is investigate “things he has always heard”. With google, you can often find the source, and a few things more. Some urban legends are tough to trace, often because they don’t exist. Others pop up 575k results is .49 seconds. This is a repost.
The myth PG was chasing was the notion that government officials said our army “will be greeted as liberators” in Iraq. On March 16, 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney was on Meet the Press.
MR. RUSSERT: If your analysis is not correct, and we’re not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. I’ve talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. The president and I have met with them, various groups and individuals, people who have devoted their lives from the outside to trying to change things inside Iraq. And like Kanan Makiya who’s a professor at Brandeis, but an Iraqi, he’s written great books about the subject, knows the country intimately,… The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.
There are a few things to say 18 years later. Why did the Vice President have this much power? The VP is supposed to dedicate buildings and go to funerals. Dick Cheney was clearly a very powerful man, and he was not elected to that job.
Mr. Russert, rest his soul, seems to have gotten one detail wrong. The conquest of Baghdad went smoothly, with relatively few American casualties. It was the occupation that would be “long, costly, and bloody… with significant American casualties.”
There probably were many Iraqis who welcomed the change, Clearly, Mr. Hussein had some enemies, and there were some who did see the invasion as liberation. There were others who did not. Players in other countries saw an opportunity to come to Iraq and make trouble. The regime that was changed had many employees, who were bumped out of jobs. “The people of Iraq” were no more a monolithic force, all acting the same way, as the people of America would be if they were invaded.
Even if the Americans were “greeted as liberators”, there would be many challenges. The country had no experience in dealing with democracy. The different ethnic groups did not like each other. Sunnis were seen as having been privileged, and many were looking to settle the score. It seems obvious that these problems were not anticipated.
There is a debate in The United States about the use of torture. It seems apparent that “enhanced interrogation” was used extensively in Iraq and elsewhere. The use of torture would seem to be an admission that we were not greeted as liberators.
Chamblee54 
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