WAR

WAR

Question.  What's the most peaceful decade in US history since WWII?  We had five years of no-war after 1945, till the start of the Korean War in the summer of 1950. Harry Truman the Korean War a "Police Action"--carried out by the world's self-designated policemen. Though the freeing of South Korea was a good and justifiable action, what it led to has been murderous disaster.

After Korea the US thought of itself as the world’s policeman   Though we still had what was called the “Cold War” with the USSR, after Korea we had--very briefly-- a bit of something like peace. We almost managed to have a shooting war in Czechoslovakia in 1956, and we tried again in Lebanon (that's when I was part of the invasion--with 20,000 other soldiers and marines) in 1958.  The invasion of Cuba in 1962 was followed by acts of state terrorism, murder attempts—in the 1990s the CIA admitted to 28 attempts to murder President Castro--embargoes, and since 2001 illegal US occupation of the northwestern end of the island.

Then Vietnam and Cambodia from 1965 nonstop until 1974.  Then-- still in the 1970s--Gerry Ford's brief gun-boat excursion into North Korea, and Carter's attempt to start World War III by invading Iran to rescue those 50-odd CIA men held in the US embassy in Teheran.  They were all spies, of course; because they all had multiple passports, we couldn’t even “identify” them—and we didn’t know exactly how many of them there were. American technology saved the world from that attempt at invasion of a sovereign state: all the US helicopters ate too much sand flying low over the desert, and crashed.

In the 1980s, Reagan's bombed Lybia—violating French airspace to do so—and invaded Greneda. And he had his brutal war against Nicaragua.  Then George the First gave the world the Gulf Oil War. 

First thing in office, in 1993, Clinton bombed Basra—because an Iraqi in Kuwait had been accused of trying to assassinate George Bush. Justice! And then Somalia, and our courageous bombings of things like passenger trains crossing bridges in Bosnia to get us through to 2000. 

Since then, continuous war and terrorism and torture. Don’t forget the torture. Don’t forget Guantanamo—which presidential candidate Obama promised to close, seven years ago. But didn’t. Hasn’t. Won’t.

There is no end in sight.  Nobody even expects it.  Few of us even ask for it. 

So the only peace we have had in the nearly seventy years since we firebombed civilians in Dresden and dropped atomic bombs on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was from 1945-1950--when we had the "Cold War."

Everybody was pretty much exhausted by war in 1945--and we had "won."  And the US military was "occupying" Japan, and Germany.  But the US wasn't actually out fighting and bombing anywhere. 

Still, Harry Truman’s two horrible bombs on cities--on everyday people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki--continued kill and maim Japanese people for generations, into the 1970s.  But only Japan had been irradiated.  And Harry Truman had given the rest of us five years of  breathing space that we could sort of call peace.

Maybe we should celebrate those years, the "Cold War" years, when we were rebuilding the world.  And when Americans were feeding the world.  We were putting our ships and planes in "mothballs"--and hoping for a long, long summer of peace.

It didn't last, of course.  And now we have had sixty-four years of war, and wars.  Since the end of World War II we have had wars or attempted wars or military "incursions" in Korea, Lebanon, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, Nicaragua, Iran, Lybia, Greneda, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and now (by proxy and with our weapons) Syria. 

There aren't many of us alive who remember 1945 to 1950.  We had peace then, or something close to peace, in most of the world.  At least--in most of the world--we weren't killing each other, and torturing each other.

Could we have a Peace Monument?  And--all over the world--get rid of our monuments to war? 

Maybe we could keep just a small piece of one of them, as a memorial:  to remind us of what, in our stupidity, we have celebrated for thousands of years of what we call human "civilisation." 

I will submit a nomination for that reminder, that memorial. It’s not a US monument, though.  It's a piece of a monument at London's Hyde Park Corner, dedicated to the British machine-gunners of World War I.  But in its stupidity, it can stand for all monuments to all wars. The inscription reads, "For Goliath has killed his thousands, but David has killed his tens of thousands."

That sums it all up.