(Note to literalists: the Watched column presently contains only a smattering of 'warblogs' because the facilitator of the template-change--Dr. Menlo--is not very familiar with them, and will be adding more as they are sent to him. Also, this blog may contain areas of allusion, satire, subtext, context and possibly even a dash of the surreal: wannabe lit-crits beware.)
Control
[Watch this space for: Pentagon and Petroleum, The Media is only as Liberal as the Corporations Who Own Them, Wash Down With, and Recalcify]
WARBLOGGER WATCH
Thursday, June 27, 2002
Harold Owens tells us he "Wrote to [sic] quickly," and reader Dan Safford tells Owens's customers that Charley Reese "worte [sic] for years for the Miami Herald [sic, again]." One wonders how close Safford's reading could have been, as Reese "worte" in the Orlando Sentinel.
Reese leaves me ill at ease, though he often serves up heresies very worth hearing. Giving the wreck-in-progress of The War Against Terror (TWAT), I hope Reese revisits and updates the following, excerpted from his February 11, 2001 Sentinel column:
Let us look at ourselves realistically.
Our military power is mainly nuclear, and nuclear weapons are suicidal. We have not won a real war since 1945. We had a stalemate in Korea and defeat in Vietnam. The Gulf War amounted to a mugging of the expeditionary force of a Third World country. It is no great military feat for 1,200 advanced warplanes, 600,000 troops and a fleet of modern ships to drive 200,000 draftees out of Kuwait, where inhabitants had neither air support nor cover.
We've become a nation that deludes itself with hype. We called that a great victory, and we conveniently forget that a truck bomber drove us out of Lebanon. The barefoot soldiers of a Somali warlord drove us out of Somalia. We have since taken to using $1 million missiles to blow up an aspirin factory in Sudan and some tents and outhouses in Afghanistan.
The war against Yugoslavia was a failure. We bombed a little country of 10 million souls. Their army, however, emerged unscathed. And we drove out the people we intended to protect. In the end, Russian diplomacy saved our face. Now our own inept diplomacy has American troops sitting in armed compounds for an indefinite period of time and with no hope of solving the political problems.
If we continue to pursue American hegemony, we will create our own opposition. What we have to do is recognize that the rest of world is not going to accept American hegemony.
