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2 DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA Bonfire of puppy-tossers, and the beer
test By Julian
Delasantellis
casualties it is causing in
Iraq. Pantano, a veteran of the first Gulf War in
1991 and an investment banker and energy trader
with Goldman Sachs, rejoined the marines after the
attacks of September 11, 2001.
While on
patrol, also in Mahmudiya, on April 15, 2004, two
soldiers in Pantano's command allege that he fired
two entire M-16 magazines, usually with around 30
rounds each, into the bodies of two unarmed Iraqi
men, who, even acknowledging that the men had
their hands in the air, Pantano says represented a
threat to him.
Describing the incident,
Pantano said, "I then changed magazines
and continued to fire until the
second magazine was empty ... I had made a
decision that when I was firing I was going to
send a message to these Iraqis and others that
when we say, 'No better friend, No worse enemy,'
we mean it. I had fired both magazines into the
men, hitting them with about 80% of my rounds."
Pantano left a placard with that phrase - "No
better friend - no worse enemy" - the slogan of
his Marine Corps battalion, on the corpses of the
men he shot, and it also became the title of his
autobiography.
As part of his defense,
Pantano, much like President George W Bush,
reached for the security blanket of September 11,
2001. In a March 2005 BBC interview he stated that
"I'm a New Yorker and 9/11 was a pretty
significant event for me, our duty as marines is,
quite frankly, to export violence to the four
corners of the globe, to make sure that this
doesn't happen again."
Pantano quickly
achieved near idol status in the right-wing
blogosphere. Ultra-conservative talk show host
Michael Savage took up his cause daily, even the
New York Times invited him to pen an op-ed. Under
intense pressure and threats, Pantano's two
accusers altered their stories so thoroughly that
the charges against Pantano were dropped. Pantano
is currently a North Carolina Sheriff's deputy,
and, although he denies it, rumors abound that the
local Republican Party eyes him hungrily for
nomination to an elective office.
It is
interesting that, just about 20 kilometers west of
poor, shamed Monroe, which now apparently must
forever bear the cross of producing the puppy
killer, another small Washington state community,
Mukilteo, takes pride in being able to call itself
the home of an Iraqi human killer.
In an
investigation of a April 2006 incident in the
Iraqi town of Hamadania, the US Navy's Criminal
Investigative Service inquiry led to charges of
murder, kidnapping and coverup against seven
marines and a navy corpsman in relation to the
killing of an Iraqi man. One of the accused, Lance
Corporal Robert Pennington, of Mukilteo, pled
guilty and received a 14-year sentence; he was
granted clemency and released a few months later.
On his return home, he received a hero's welcome,
as reported in the Everett Herald, "Out of jail,
marine is cheered in Mukilteo: 150 greet man
convicted in Iraqi's death."
So the
question still is this: if Americans sent their
soldiers to Iraq to save the Iraqi people, why do
they care so little when their soldiers go out and
kill the Iraqi people? How can they care so
passionately about the dogs of Iraq, and so little
about its people? I've written before on this
site about America's confused and ever-morphing
rationalizations for remaining in Iraq. Last June
6, in Yes Rambo, you get to win this
time, I wrote that many Americans
wanted to persevere in Iraq in order to erase the
stain of Vietnam's shame. On August 7 of last
year, in Dying in vain or for George W's
daddy? I speculated that a core reason
that America went to, and was still staying in
Iraq, was that George W Bush was using the war as
a psychological truncheon against his distant and
cold father, the former president George H W Bush,
in that winning the war where his father could not
would at last prove himself superior to him, and
his perceived better-loved brothers. In my October
30 piece from last year, Ideology wins - the people
lose I observed that US officers in
Iraq were apparently quietly acquiescing to their
troops refusing to go out on patrols, for by then
the real rationale in staying in Iraq had
degenerated to just denying the Democratic party
the political victory of being able to claim that
they had stopped it.
All these various
justifications are united by a common factor. None
of them has much or anything to do with anything
actually occurring in Iraq. Americans killing
Iraqi civilians in cold, or at least chilled
blood; they're OK with that. But Americans killing
Iraqi dogs - "what kind of people do you think we
are?"
But there's more. A recent article
in the online journal Salon, by retired US Air
Force Lieutenant Colonel William J Astore,
explains why, even with a virtual guarantee that
military enlistment, at least in the army or
marines, means service in Iraq, substantial
numbers of young men still continue to show up at
military recruitment offices. Part of it is
patriotism and a desire for 9/11 payback, but
according to Astore, an equally important factor
is the cultural phenomenon called the "war against
boys".
"To many of these potential
recruits, American culture today appears feminized
- or, at least demasculinized - a mommy-state, a
risk-averse society with designer drugs and
syndrome-of-the-day counselors to ease our pain,"
Astor writes. "In response, what we're seeing is a
romantic yearning among young men for the very
hardness, the brutality even, epitomized by
military service and warfare."
Some
conservative polemicists, most notably Christina
Hoff Summers, now contend that the American public
educational system, in finally seeking to address
the unique educational requirements of young
girls, has swung the pendulum so far as to
suppress the natural, rambunctious instincts of
boys. Competitive, possibly injurious pursuits
such as gym class dodge ball are discouraged, and
therapists are quickly dispatched to deal with the
obvious psycho-cultural "issues" involved if any
two boys resort to fisticuffs at recess. In
contrast to these traditional training
methodologies of the patriarchy, the emphasis in
today's schools is said to be on cooperation,
safety and contests where no one wins, but no one
loses or gets hurt.
That's certainly not a
way to describe the dusty, dangerous streets of
the Iraq war. So, since a core reason to maintain
the US presence in Iraq is to continue to "support
the troops" and since the troops are getting to do
the breaking and destroying of things that,
although innate to their character, they couldn't
do growing up in the late 1990s and beyond, thus
is created another unspoken rationale for Iraq -
boys will be boys.
Even with it now
obvious that the entire Iraq misadventure, which
claimed its 4,000th American life over the
weekend, has now become nothing but an unending
quagmire where the American people care more about
the country's dogs than its people, I worry that
the US presidential candidate that has best
expressed clear and concise opposition to the war,
Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, now looks likely
to be the Democratic nominee for president this
autumn, to face unabashed war supporter Senator
John McCain of Arizona.
In describing the
reasons for an expedited American withdrawal from
Iraq, Obama reflects the views of the vast
majority of the nation's informed foreign policy
elite, as well as a great many retired military
voices as well, who contend that the Iraq
catastrophe has done nothing to make America a
nation more safe from terrorism or any other
national threat.
For Obama's last
remaining rival for the Democratic nomination,
Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, her
opposition to the war is more nuanced, more
couched in generalities and limiters. In 2002 she
supported the Congressional authorization for use
of force in Iraq that Bush used as a causus
belli for war. Most political observers
believe that, in doing so, and in her continuing
equivocations about ending the war or preventing
Bush from spreading it to Iran, Clinton was, and
is, just once again following the political
strategy called triangulation. This, the effort to
consciously stake out policy positions between the
ideological poles of extreme right and left, her
husband Bill used to maximum benefit and advantage
during his presidency. Clinton apparently figures
that if it worked in the 20th century, it will
work in the 21st. So Clinton stakes out a
position on the war more favorable to it than
Obama, but for reasons that essentially have
nothing to do with Iraq or the war. That Americans
can understand, can identify with, for it matches
the country as a whole allowing the war to
continue for reasons having nothing to do with
Iraq, either.
The beer test has become an
important modern qualification for the American
presidency, as in that during the last election,
political pollsters discovered that Americans
would rather have a beer with Bush than his rival,
Senator John Kerry. Clinton's success in getting
votes from blue-collar, working-class Democrats
means she would probably poll higher than Obama in
this regard. More Americans might want to have a
beer with her if only to see if a little
inebriation would loosen the coldly calculating
mind of Hillary Clinton, America's modern
Machiavelli, and to see just where the border in
her psyche is between ambition and scruples, so
would I.
Julian Delasantellis is
a management consultant, private investor and
educator in international business in the US state
of Washington. He can be reached at
juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.
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