WhirledView

War Trash and Sadistic GI Guards

By PLS

“War trash” happens when the cannon fodder ends up alive at the end of the war, according to Ha Jin. At least that was the case with Chinese army units sent across the border as “volunteers” during the Korean War back in 1951-53.

Let me hasten to say that Ha Jin’s War Trash is a compelling novel, sub-genre prison camp survival. Part of me would like to spend this whole article convincing you to read it for the sheer pleasure that well-executed fiction can provide. But this is not a literary review. It is a cry of painful discovery because it offers a precedent for prisoner abuse by Americans some fifty years before the maltreatment of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. I had been giving myself the cold comfort that the torture condoned by the Bush administration was unique. Evidently it is not.

Author Ha Jin was born in China. His father was a veteran of the Korean War. These days Ha Jin teaches English at Boston University. He has won many awards for his fiction, including War Trash, which has been widely reviewed. Yes, I know that War Trash is fiction, but no one has disputed the essential accuracy of his depiction of prison life for captured Chinese combatants. (I found one that mentioned in passing the torture I’ll be discussing.)

Chinese soldiers evidently understood that there were three respectable options when they were sent into Korea. Honor required that they win the war, be killed while trying to win it or commit suicide out of shame for losing the war. But many let themselves be captured, at which point they were given a choice. They could make the anti-Communist UN forces look bad by requesting repatriation to “Red” China, or they could provide massive justification for the American-led intervention by choosing to be released, in time, to nationalist-controlled Taiwan.

Tourists and Travelers

Victor Kuzevanov, Director of the Irkutsk State University Botanic Garden and leader of my tour to Kamchatka, sent me a link to a thoughtful article on the difference between tourists and travelers by Bill Mueller.

A traveler is open to what is there. He or she goes with the express idea of discovering what is there and trying to adapt to it. The motivation is to expand oneself-to learn new things, to learn about yourself, to change and maybe if you are lucky to change someone else.

Tourists want to learn new things and see new things, but they may not be willing to risk changing themselves. They want guarantees ahead of time as to which of life's "To Do" list their precious money will buy: culture, food, scenery, physical activity, and even-God forbid, personal contacts. All noted by quantity and time.

Mueller goes on to describe untraveled schoolchildren travelers who were ready to experience what they found in Russia and a young woman tourist who never stopped complaining that everything she encountered was not up to her standards.

Slippery Stuff at Guantanamo

By PLS

The Bush administration never admits to being wrong.

Yet sometimes, even while mouthing a dreary old mantra as cover for failure, it's forced to change.

Detainee treatment at Guantanamo is a case in point.

We are still told that the prisoners are enemy combatants not covered by the Geneva Convention. We are still warned that each and every man of them (1) retains information that must be squeezed out for national security purposes or (2) is (or has been transformed into) such a hardcore hater of America that he will explode in a rampage of anti-US murder and mayhem if released.

But the drumbeat of criticism of the Guantanamo mess has indeed had an effect. The Pentagon has been forced to waste enormous amounts of money (this is unfortunate) on a dozen investigations that are not entirely reliable, since the fox was investigating the fox, but the process has been embarrassing enough to inspire a bit more circumspection on the ground. Trial procedures have been modified to provide for legal representation and some procedural safeguards. If the abuse has not entirely stopped, that which could be called torture seems to have ended, at least for now, while the heat is on.

More recently we have been told that the US is negotiating with Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrein, Egypt, Kuwait and Morocco to transfer detainees to their home countries, which are expected “to play a greater role in the prosecution of alleged terrorists.” The receiving countries are being asked to guarantee that the detainees will be treated humanely but not allowed to escape. This, of course, is the notorious process of rendition, whereby inconvenient humans are actually sent to torture or death, while the US like Pontius Pilate washes its hands in legalese. Such renditions will shrink the target of criticism that is Gitmo today. Despicable but clever, as always with the Bush administration.

Indonesian Inspiration for Iraqi Constitution Writers

By PLS

Iraq owns a large share of the world’s remaining oil reserves, but oil wealth is not always a blessing. As Iraqis struggle to write a viable constitution, the drafters would do well to look at post-colonial history in Indonesia and Nigeria. Possibly they’ve been too busy lately to pay attention to the rest of the world. In that case, US Ambassador Khalilzad and his staff might mention the cautionary tale of Nigeria. They might also bear more encouraging news: the agreement, signed a couple of days ago, that may bring peace to the Indonesian province of Aceh after three decades of guerilla war.

In Nigeria, which perennially tops world corruption indices, oil wealth extracted by international companies made generals rich. The rest of the country wallowed in poverty, and the area from which the oil was pumped became a textbook case of environmental degradation. The local people protested, going so far as to damage pipelines and steal oil they considered their own.

Eventually, the sometimes violent struggle for environmentally-sensitive extraction and fair distribution of oil revenues led to the hanging of one of Nigeria’s most talented novelists (among others). This was Ken Saro Wiwa, who was also an out-spoken environmentalist and a native of the exploited province. Shell oil looked the other way (at best) or (some say) collaborated. Nigeria, which also suffers from turbulent ethnic and religious divisions, continues to be an impoverished country rich in oil and kleptocrats, not a good model for Iraq.

Although Indonesia is a huge archipelago, the lucrative oil deposits are concentrated in one place, at the tip of the island of Sumatra, in the province of Aceh, which was once an independent sultanate. The perception–-no! the reality-–has been that the people of Aceh gained little from the wealth made possible by their own natural resources. When repeated demands for a greater share of oil revenues were spurned by the central government in Jakarta, 1000 miles away, on another island, an insurgency developed. The result was 30 years of civil war, in which at least 15,000 people are believed to have died.

Tuesday Stabilization Blogging

No, it's not about Iraq. We've had some lovely rain the past several days. The monsoon flow appears to have started. "Monsoon" evokes images of continuous drenching rain. That's not what we get in New Mexico, but it's the correct meterological term. Heating of the land creates a thermal low-pressure system for the same reason a hot-air balloon rises: the density of hot air is less than that of cool air. The low pressure pulls moisture in from the sea, in this case the Gulf of California. I'm hoping for more this afternoon.

Odd...

by CKR

The WaPo's online news today appears to be Saturday's. The editorials and op-ed's are dated today. It's 8:30 Tuesday on the East Coast. Presumably someone has told them.

I've double-checked it now and see what looks like new news. And a popup note from the editor that says that the first front page I'll see is tailored to the zip code I left when I registered and then I'll get the international page the second time or something like that. I don't recall which random five-digit number I left, but I vaguely think it may have been somewhere in Nebraska. Three-day-old news is good enough for the heartland, I guess.

The popup says I can change to the international page by doing something at "my" WaPo home page, which I've been avoiding because I just don't feel like telling the WaPo my inner feelings. It means I can't access the horoscopes, but you can't have everything. Oh well, more random character strings in dialog boxes, I guess.

As always, we are interested in your feedback.

Um, yeah. We try to keep our language nice here at WhirledView, so I guess I'll have to confine it to the e-mail.

Update: Fully automated e-mail response. Am I surprised?

War’s Deadly Seduction

B y PHK

There’s something special – and deadly - about the seduction of war. Chris Hedges, the New York Times anti-war, war correspondent who covered wars in the Balkans during the 1990s, described war - in his 2002 book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning - as a drug that produces a potent and sometimes lethal addiction. War provides the adrenalin rush. It is the high that makes life’s drab everydayness disappear – at least for a little while. It dulls the pain. Life in the war zone is lived on the edge, at an intensity inconceivable along the main streets of rural Midwestern towns or on farms in America’s South – or even in those hell, brimstone and pass-the-Starbucks-please fundamentalist mega-churches on the outskirts of the U.S. cities - from which all too many of today’s America’s military come.

I was reminded of the effects of war’s destructive addiction during the summer, when I saw Shirley Lauro’s play “A Piece of My Heart” at a small avant garde theater in Albuquerque where Ray Orley, a friend and former US Information Agency colleague, played the role of everyman in an otherwise female cast whose other members portrayed the lives of six American women who had served in Vietnam. The story intrigued me enough to read Keith Walker’s 1983 book of the same name and upon which the play is based. The book contains Walker’s interviews of 26 American women who each served 12 months or longer in Vietnam during the war.

I again thought of that same range and intensity of emotions while reading John Crawford’s New York Times August 14 op ed “Coming Home,” the poignant story of a reservist who served in Iraq from 2003-2004. I would guess that Crawford’s New York Times story is based on his book The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq although truthfully I have yet to read it.

Welcome to the World We Live In

By PLS

Things fall apart; the center will not hold.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats

There’s no Lego kit for building and delivering nuclear weapons, but we’re getting there. Not literally, of course. But the requisite knowhow and skills are no longer monopolized by the members of a very exclusive club, so the situation has become exceedingly complicated and very dicey. It calls for wisdom as well as strength. Yet how can any international actor, let alone the visionless, swaggering, blustering, notoriously anti-intellectual President Bush, develop a coherent, reality-based approach to national security in the face of developments as worrisome as these:

Pakistan, on August 11, announced the successful test-firing of a nuclear capable missile with a range of 300 miles. The Babur, as it’s called, could hit Delhi or Mumbai.

Pakistan has The Bomb, as does India, which had already developed a cruise missile called the BrahMos capable of returning the compliment. The BrahMos could reach any point in Pakistan from Indian territory.

Each country has deliberately named its missile with history in mind. Babur, having already conquered Afghanistan, swept down the Khyber Pass and became the first Mughul emperor of India. Brahma is the sustaining aspect of the Hindu trinity.

A double-suicide exchange between the fraternal twins born from Mother India in 1947 could wipe out tens of millions of people.

Nevertheless, there is no visible end to the arms race on the sub-continent. And it looks as if the U.S. is going to fuel that race. On July 17th President Bush reached an agreement with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that will allow India to obtain civilian nuclear reactors and fuel without relinquishing its nuclear weapons.

Critics of the accord point out that Pakistan will want the same deal. Legalists have a response. Pakistan cheated on non-proliferation accords to develop the bomb, but India never signed, so ex-pariah, now dubbed straight shooter India is not in violation. Given Pakistan’s importance to the Bush war on terror, or whatever it’s called now, we can be sure that a loophole will be found or created to keep Pakistan happy.