From: sahle@csgrad.cs.vt.edu (Eskinder Sahle)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.arabic
Subject: Re: American attitudes toward the Gulf War
Date: 15 Apr 92 06:00:12 GMT
Organization: VPI&SU Computer Science Department, Blacksburg, VA

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The writer of this post is Ahmed Bouzid, and NOT Eskinder Sahle
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In article <1992Apr12.161852.77@mtechca.uucp> foster@mtechca.uucp (self.attribute:=major_arcana[0].name) writes:
>In article <2467@creatures.cs.vt.edu>, Ahmed Bouzid writes:
>
>> The Gulf War afforded the US a golden opportunity ... to prove that 
>> it is the present untouchable master of the world. And such are the 
>> ways of the mighty: didn't the United States do the exact same thing 
>> when it dropped the Atomic Bombs over a Japan that, as it has turned 
>> out after all, was on its way to capitulating anyway? The Atomic Bombs, 
>> history has now shown, were not necessary to stop the war. But they 
>> were necessary for another thing: to show the other nuclear power in 
>> the world that the US not only had the bombs, but that it was ready to 
>> use them.   
>
>The ~other~ nuclear power? Which one was that? The only other powers of
>any kind were Britain, Germany, France, USSR, Japan, China. These seven
>comprise the first five members of what would become the UN Security 
>Council (only big powers invited) and the two main Axis powers. On 8 


The other power was the USSR.  Britain and France were, as you pointed
out, allies of the United States,  China was too far behind technologically,
Germany and Japan were crushed (again, as you pointed out), and so the USSR
is the only one that remains.  Your assertion that the USSR was
"nowhere near developing anything useful along these lines"
oversimplifies the situation.  The USSR emerged from the War on
the side of the victors, and like the other victors, it laid claim
to a share of the spoils of war.  And its share was the East Bloc
countries.  The USSR was a power to tame and to impress, and the
end of the war (an end that was forseen way before the bombs were
dropped) was an occasion to make the point that the USSR can spread
its communist ideology only so far, and no farther.


>> The callousness of the US in the Gulf War is a fact. Little concern was
>> shown for civilian life: the US was gripped in a fit of madness, it 
>> became blind--and your people behaved even more despicably than your 
>> military: you sat and watched, without feeling, absorbing what you were 
>> fed, incapable of imagining (since no pictures were given you--and without 
>> pictures, how on earth can anything be real!) for yourself the horror 
>> your own money was inflicting on innocents--read that carefully, INNOCENTS. 
>> Like fools, all of you Americans repeated--"well, we don't like Wars, but
>> we will stand behind our troops, lest we again err and call those who 
>> kill assassins and those who rob thieves." What a fine display of the 
>> principles that you hold sacred to you heart was your conduct during the 
>> War. The American people deserve nothing--absolutely nothing-- but contempt 
>> for how they behaved during the War. While people were being massacred, 
>> what did your fine nation do? You waved your yellow ribbons.
>
>No one waved yellow ribbons. They waved flags. Yellow ribbons were tied
>around trees, radio antennae, telephone poles and other upright objects. 
[....]
>I never heard anyone, not even the 
>most rabid hawk, say what Mr Bouzid claims "all of you Americans repeated". 
>I am not even sure what the sentence means, and I know for certain that very
>few Americans, especially of the uneducated war-supporting classes, use the 
>words "err" "lest" and "assassins" in their normal discourse. Could Mr 
>Bouzid please give a source for this quote?

It means: "we don't like wars, but we will not come out and say that we
don't like THIS war, because, if we did, we would risk making that
mistake that we made before--Viet Nam--where we held the individuals who bore
arms and shot at innocents responsible for their deeds."  This was
the prevalent feeling, and cases of dissention were rare--extremely
rare.  And I remember that throughout the war I was in a state of
continuous disgust with the way people perceived, talked about,
thought about, and argued about the War.  They focused on the
trivial--they sent their cookies and postcards, and waved their flags, and
tied those ribbons (sorry for the slip, pal), and watched with 
dumb glee how "smart bombs" went right stright through a door, and
how an Israeli family (who, lo and behold, looked just like a regular
American Family) had to go through the humiliation of wearing 
tear-gas masks in their own homes, and took all of this as matter of
fact.  They did not ask: wait, a bomb, smart or dumb, is still a
bomb, and how about bombarding a city as big as Baghdad, how 
surgically can that be done, and how much of a military power is
Iraq, anyway, when their army surrenders in droves as soon as
they get a chance to, and do we have to massacre them like this,
in the tens of thousands, is it really necessary to take the life
of healthy young men--men who, grubby-looking as they might have been,
were still men, men who want to live and who should have lived?
Why is it suddenly so important to defend another nation?  Why
didn't we fight to the death like thisfor the principle our leaders are
trumpeting in our ears that we are fighting for, when we did nothing
when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, or when Iraq invaded Iran?
Or are we fighting for a principle?  These are all questions
very few people asked, and those who asked them were threatened
with the label "antipatriotic", or outright called "antipatriotic."

>There were many Americans, not a majority but at least enough to make Mr 
>Bouzid's statement "all you Americans" an error, who did not support the
>shooting war. 

I will say this in my defense: true, there were voices of dissent,
but they were in the miniscule minority.  And the overwhelming
majority of this miniscule minority said that they were against the
War--but, FOR the troops, which, in my own estimation, renders their
statement an absurdity.

>Right-wing columnist Patrick Buchanan, of all people, opposed it. 

Pat Buchanan belongs to that miniscule minority within the miniscule
minority, and for once I totally agreed with him.

>The real reason most flag-wavers and yellow-ribbon tyers did so was so that
>the troops would not feel unloved and suffer the unpleasant problems that 
>still plague Viet Nam veterans. We sent the soldiers gift boxes, letters, 
>special foods and other goodies mostly to expiate our national guilt at 
>having ill-used our troops in Viet Nam. We were not going to lose one more 
>soldier to anomie, apathy or despair, regardless of the justice of the war
>the soldiers were fighting.

To begin with, I hope you will agree with me that almost everyone was for the 
troops.  In any case, I believe that it was almost unanimous that everyone
was with the troops.  Now, I hold that the American People
are guilty of a numbing, and that these fine discriminations about
being for the troops but not necessarily for the War, are nothing more
than tactics of war (and in war all is game), by which the American People 
were duped into a state of inaction.  And I will own that the trick,
whether it was by design, or whether it came about naturally and was noticed
and made use of by and by, was a stroke of genius: the trick of getting 
the whole nation to support the war by having them expiate what 
you people consider the "shameful" treatment you gave your of Viet Nam 
veterans.  In other words, I believe that The people in command played on 
America's Guilt--and Guilt with a big "G"--and, America, thirsty and eager as it
is to get rid of this guilt, pounced on the occasion.  And do you
remember what was one of the first things Bush said after the cease-fire
was declared?  As though awarding the people what they had bargained
for, he said: "By God, we've kicked the Viet Name syndrome once and
for all" (I'm paraphrasing, but I think it's close enough).

>One may argue that the Viet Nam War was injust and the Gulf War as well. 
>One would probably be right. But anyone who thinks that most Americans 
>~ever~ take into consideration the poor and suffering of other nations
>is remarkably ill-informed about the US. The majority attitude is even 
>worse if the other nation in question has committed crimes, such as being 
>Communist (Viet Nam) or Muslim (Iran) or invading our turf (Iraq). :-)
[....]
>Jeff Foster

I will tell you this about the "shameful" conduct of the American People
during and after Viet Nam.  Not ever a nation in the whole damned
history of Humanity acted more honorably and showed itself to be ahead, 
way ahead, of the rest of humanity in seeing things for what they 
were--killing as killing, and not as "the inccurring of collateral human 
damage," as Bernard Shaw (who was pissing in his pants under a bed when he 
was caught in the cross-fire in Baghdad) put it while talking about civilian 
deaths that a bombing of some facility or other was bound to cause--as the
people of America acted when they held each and every soldier who came
back from Viet Nam accountable. The American people of then were thinking:
they did not get confused, they were thinking in terms of
responsibility, and the artifices and contrivances of "the honor of the army" 
and "the pledge of allegiance," and "dying for your country," did not fool them.
They saw that murder was murder, and that a soldier was before anything
else a human being who needed to think for himself and act according
to his conscience.  How far ahead of everybody else you were.  How
wonderful a step humanity was making then--people who were starting
to realize that War was evil, hell, and not the glory it was sung 
throughout the ages.  And a world peopled by men who think like this 
is bound to be a world of peace, a world safe of all wars.
And so, what a sad step backward the Gulf War was, where that very
spark of hope that might have put you at the helm of a truly glorious
new world order was so carelessly put out by a guilt that should have
been pride in the first place.

Ahmed Bouzid.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.arabic