Thirty-six years ago, Peter Arnett interviewed an anonymous US officer in Vietnam who provided the famous quote “we had to destroy the village in order to save it,” after an artillery barrage that laid waste to a tiny hamlet. That quote served as another illustration of just how misguided American policy had become in Southeast Asia.
Now — three years after Arnett was fired from his positions at NBC, MSNBC, and even National Geographic for daring to give his honest opinion about the nascent war — the same America that was once shocked by the words of that anonymous soldier, has adopted those words as the core of our foreign policy. We’ve accepted the idea that it’s perfectly fine to destroy a village, a city, a nation, or a region. We’ve institutionalized the concept that peace can only be achieved through absolute obliteration of those who oppose us.
When Bush says “stay the course,” what he really means is “let it burn.”
While we see the growing chaos in Iraq, and the daily destruction between Israel and Lebanon as a sign of a policy gone badly astray, they see it as a good sign. Things are happening. Power is shifting. The pot is boiling. So what if a few children are – accidentally, mind you – lost in the gears. You have have to break a few eggs to make an omlet. You have to take down a mountain if you want to find the gold. You have to be prepared to destroy the world if you want to save it.
When Condeleeza Rice says that
a cease-fire would be a false promise if it simply returns us to the status quo
she means we have to keep shooting till no one is shooting back. The United States acted to block any call for cease fire, because any “premature peace” is anathema to the ideology that now rules America. It’s like calling for the furnace to be cooled before all the dross has burned away. Let it burn, says Condi, we need to destroy Lebanon in order to save it.
When right wing pundit Charles Krauthammer says
Only two questions remain: Israel’s will and America’s wisdom. Does Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have the courage to do what is so obviously necessary? And will Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s upcoming peace trip to the Middle East force a premature cease-fire…
He means will we have the guts to keep stoking that furnace night and day, and not be weakened by the sight of a little innocent blood. In Krauthammer’s words, Israel only took advantage of a “golden opportunity” to do what needed to be done. Europe is decadent. Only the strong dare take action, and to stop them would be a crime. Let it burn, says Charles, we need to destroy the Middle East in order to save it.
When Mona Cheren (who, by the way, says – without presenting any evidence — that Arnett made up that original quote in Vietnam) says
If a premature ceasefire were imposed, [Iran, Syria, and Islamic radicals] would be the clear winners. Only if Israel is able to punish Hizbollah severely will those aggressors be thwarted. A ceasefire stops the guns for a week. A victory can stop them for years.
She means that the only good Arab, is a dead Arab. Let it burn, says Mona, we need to destroy Lebanon, the Middle East, the free press, and anyone who gets in our way, in order to save them.
Do you think 6,000 deaths in Iraq is bothering those on the right? Do you think they’re concerned with what’s going on in Lebanon? They’re loving it. To them, this smells like victory.
And for all the efforts of the BBC, Reuters, Western academics, and the horde of appeasers and apologists that usually bail these terrorist killers out when their rhetoric finally outruns their muscle, this time they can’t. Instead, a disgusted world secretly wants these terrorists to get what they deserve. And who knows: This time they just might.
Nice that the NRO knows what we all “secretly want.” Burn, says the NRO, we have to destroy the world in order to save it.
Just today, Tony Blair suggested that a plan could be put in place to end the fighting. But the Bush administration showed that, no matter how often Tony might fetch Bush’s slippers, he’s not really part of the team. Rice reaffirmed the position that a cease fire would be “unenforceable.”
Great diary, Devil.
This is the newest version of “Better dead than red.”
I fear we are watching the beginning of WWIII, and the people who could stop it are cheering it on.
How long before Syria, Iran and Turkey are embroiled in this mess ? That was a serious danger just from the debacle known as Operation Iraqi Freedom.
I can see Bush raining down nuclear death on the Middle East, and the destruction of Israel will be an unfortunate bit of colateral damage. We will have to destroy Israel to save it, too.
So Bush can rejoice in the destruction of one group of semetic people, ruefully praise the “sacrifice” of other semetic people, and establish that cherished footprint in the smoking, radio active ruins of the Middle East.
Victoire!
We have become the pariahs of the earth.
You’ve got guys on the right, Gingrich among them, who are praying that Syria, Iran, and Turkey get involved. Let it burn isn’t enough for them. They’re calling for a wildfire that burns out the whole Middle East.
Maybe Newt thinks he’ll get a deal on some nice beachfront property if they just kill all those pesky Muslims.
I fear that even my level of cynicism isn’t high enough to catch up with the neocon agenda. Was this what they wanted all along, the firestorm that makes way for the new Imperial Pax Americana ?
You can see it in the way the right is defending those who have been involved in atrocities in Iraq. If Calley was around today, they’d make him a hero.
I don’t think the right is any different now than then — they’re just in more prominent positions and have more people going along with them. They did indeed try to make Calley a hero. I have some recordings from the era, and one of the songs is “Ode to William Calley.”
From Top 40: Country Music at War
to save them. That is a greast point. Will we add Syria and Iran to the list. Oh and I forgot about Palestine, and of course we are encouraging Ethiopia to have a go in Somalia just as they get their first peace in aeons.
How many must die? Why must people have the electric, clean water, food and housing removed from them?
Who are the real terrorists?
An unforgettable line from the movie “Apocalypse Now” which sums up the current neocon attitude.
Another line from the movie “The Horror, the horror.”
This time the whole world will burn. Doesn’t leave a lot of room for discussion about anything except how long it is going to go on.
You’re right about the NRO, but after five and half years of pimping Ghengis George & his band of hairy ape-men, I think the public has just about had it with kill it, burn it, blow it up foreign policy. I think that far-right collective is being trimmed to it’s original less-than-10%-size.
Rightly so.
Hope you are right, but they still have all the bombs, all 10,000 of them.
How can this ever be stopped,when warmongering world leaders and thier cabels, (who have control of the power and money) collude to continue wars? How can any ordinary citizens anywhere, (without that kind power and money,) ever get rid of these kinds of men, when our very election process has been corrupted? Has it gone so far over the edge there is not way to ever haul it back into balance? Has the war boulder racing down the mountainside finally picked up so much momentum to be stopped by anyone on the earth?
It’s questions like these that keep me awake.
Oh, scribe, your boulder figures in my nightmares.
I can see no short term solution.
Years ago I read Marilyn French’s “Beyond Power”. I thought it was one of the most important books of the 20th century. It is now out of print.
Her individual strongholds of commitment to “power to” rather than “power over” modeled on a nurturing mother/child relationship, make growing a garden a revolutionary act. Even in the dark age of perpetual war that seems, like a Greek tragedy, to be unfolding and expanding inexorably, these non-hierarchical, personal relationships can continue to function, and even grow in response to all the death and destruction. If enough of us can stay alive (and they can’t kill all of us; they need breeders, servants, and sex toys), a subculture with reverence for the earth, acceptance of the interconnectedness of all life, and rejection of hierarchical power over others may survive the warlords.
If we can’t make this shift in consciousness, humanity will devastate our only home; the dog-in-the-manger warlord mentality will HAVE to destroy the planet in order to save it.
If I manage to survive, I want to be in the same subculture you are, Susan, right beside you, working hard at putting it all back together in better ways. Women instinctively know how to create new life.
I recognize this dwelling on the dark side, but I’m not sure what it means or does. Is it pleasurable as some king of self flagellation? Does it prepare the mind for what might come? Should we in stead ‘do’ something? I think not. The entries above remind me of the movie Querelle and it’s theme song/lyrics kill the one you love. Written by Genet it was Fassbinder’s last and ‘best’ movie. In my mind two trains of thought are connected here:
Fassbinder, to me, says in Querelle that Germans were so alienated from each other, knew so much fear, so little love, that to experience the intensity of love they had to kill. On the one hand.
On the other hand I have come to see the Bush cabal as Psychopaths. They are not capable to see other people’s pain. Emotionally they are dwarfs. They have to go to extremes to be able to feel anything, anything close to love. Being unable to know love, they have to kill. That will still not satisfy them and they’ll have to kill more.
Hmm, read this by Jadczyk.
The “lesson” that certain military and political theorists learned from Vietnam was to limit US casualities by limiting soldiers on the ground. Today bombing is used more than ever before, even though it is not effective in warfare, and never was. All it does is kill people and destroy the infrastructure of civilization. Bombing always was primarily an act of terrorism. The technological distance it allows makes it easy for people to talk about bombing as if they were talking about a video game, or some abstract board game of concepts.
It’s all part of the ongoing brutalization. The first step to stopping it is understanding it.
Though I tried to join the Air Force and have relatives who are both current and former fighter jocks, I’m becoming more and more convinced that air war is simply immoral.
There are only so many times you can “accidentally” take out civilians at a wedding, or a funeral, or some other event before “accident” becomes “willful disregard for life.” I’m not certain a bomb dropped from miles up is any less a weapon of terror than any other device one could name.