No money down, but the payments go on forever. The
only
people who win are the bankers and the contractors. We make
it easy to get in. But like herpes and condominiums, it is
hard to get rid of.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite
books was Starship
Troopers, (1959). It was written by a guy
(Robert
A. Heinlein)who was medically unable to be in a combat role
in World
War II.
In Starship Troopers, the planet Earth is ambushed
by an enemy, but ultimately wins the war decisively. This is
done with just the right combination of patriotism, leadership,
righteousness, brainpower, and brute force.
At the time it was
written, it was clearly a symbolic representation of World War II, an
allegory for Just War. It was later made into a popular movie. By then, it could
have been
seen as the
href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/defensenationalsecurity.htm"
rel="tag">PNAC vision for the Iraq War...
When I was in my mid-teens, old
enough to think
about the prospect of
being drafted (even though the
href="http://usmilitary.about.com/od/deploymentsconflicts/l/bldrafthistory.htm">draft
had just ended), my favorite book was
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War">The
Forever War (1974). It was written by a guy (
rel="tag" href="http://home.earthlink.net/%7Ehaldeman/">Joe
Haldeman) who actually fought in Viet Nam.
He was drafted, ended up being awarded the
href="http://www.purpleheart.org/military-order-of-2.html"
rel="tag">Purple Heart.
In The Forever War, the war went on and on and on,
not quite forever,
but for generations. The people of Earth had brainpower and
technology and an incredible will to fight. The soldiers were
just a little bit dehumanized. It was
clearly a representation of the Viet Nam war, and it turned out to be
an accurate prediction of how the Iraq War would turn out. It
is an allegory for Senseless War.
The Truthdig
cartoon, by Mike Luckovich, can be viewed as a symbolic representation
of the proposed Iran War. There are many parallels with the
housing crisis: catastrophic, long-term results, shifting of wealth
from poor to rich, betrayal by institutions that purport to be
trustworthy, consequences of malfeasance and a lack of transparency,
overt deceit, governmental complicity...
It is time for someone to make a movie of The Forever War.
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They could make the movie by simply projecting the Mideast wars forward 50 years, by which time every surviving American below the line (family fortune under $10 million) will have at least one member of his immediate family killed or crippled by the war, and there will be no oil left since it all goes to the war machine and the overlords enriched by it.
BTW, The Forever War is one I'm glad I read when it first came out. Its perspective is still serving me well.
One of the reasons that Europeans aren't so bothered by the lack of quick answers that GWB wanted in Iraq was that they've been marching back and forth across their own continent for thousands of years, and they're not done yet, despite the existence of the European Union. Long wars included the Hundred Years War between England and France (116 years), the Aceh war between the Netherlands and Indonesia (69 years), the Sudanese civil war (52 years and counting), the Guatemalan civil war (36 years), the Peloponnesian War in Ancient Greece (27 years) to the Vietnam War (18 years) to the ongoing "troubles" in Northern Ireland (33 years and counting). Not to mention the Cold War, which Russia seems determined to start up again, flying nuclear-bomb loaded Bear bombers on long range missions over the oceans just like they did in the sixties.
Iraq is just an eyeblink...