What can you expect from someone who waves to a blind man?
Man Who Waves At Stevie Wonder Draws Up Plans To Nuke 7 Countries
I had the rare privilege once of spending an hour talking with Mrs. Lana Peters, formerly known as Svetlana Stalin, the daughter of Joseph Stalin who had defected to the West in the late 1960's. It was shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union; she had just given a talk at the college where I worked where she had predicted to a fairly incredulous American audience much of what was to follow under Gorbachev. Though her posture was typically stooped as if underneath the burden of the great weight of the history she had witnessed, when seated her back was straight and erect in harmony with her entire bearing as a woman of grace and deep culture. She was very generous with her reflections as well as her time; I ventured the anecdote that for a year during the darkest days of the Cold War with her father as Premier of the Soviet Union, my father was flying nuclear deterrent missions just off the Soviet Union's borders. We've since learned that my father's old boss at the Strategic Air Command, Curtis LeMay, was saying the same things here, and more. LeMay engaged in out-of-the-chain-of-command initiatives of his own to provoke the Soviets to war, the factual model for Gen. Jack Ripper. Somehow cooler heads prevailed on both sides thankfully, until Gorbachev was finally to tell Colin Powell, "You don't understand, we're through. You're going to have to find a new enemy."
There was a least one voice in America's military that heard the greater import of Gorbachev's words - LeMay's final successor at SAC, and the first commander of the new U.S. Strategic Command, Gen. Lee Butler. Upon his retirement, Gen. Butler became a fervent activist in the cause of nuclear disarmament, not that many people heard his message in a media more concerned with Bill Clinton's sex life.
"What, then, does the future hold? How do we proceed? Can a consensus be forged that nuclear weapons have no defensible role, that the political and human consequences of their employment transcends any asserted military utility, that as weapons of mass destruction, the case for their elimination is a thousand fold stronger and more urgent that for deadly chemicals and viruses already widely declared illegitimate, subject to destruction and prohibited from any future production? I believe that such a consensus is not only possible, it is imperative and is in fact growing daily."
He really couldn't be clearer, could he? And he seems entitled to his opinion. Which brings us to the Bush administration's request to the Pentagon to draw up various contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons, large and small, many and few, against at least seven countries. It's probably the first time in history that 'promiscuous use' and 'nuclear weapons' have ever been rightly joined in the same thought. With the Bush administration, you never really know who's responsible for what, exactly; when Bush tried waving at Stevie Wonder the other evening, we were given a truly sublime example of a man so out-to-lunch he probably shouldn't drive. Cheney is certainly 'a' power behind the throne, but maybe not 'the' power. Cheney was previously Sec. of Defense, of course, though he explains his lack of military service during Vietnam as having "other priorities" at the time; he demonstrated these priorities, after dropping out of Yale, by working as a phone company lineman and then scrambling to enroll in a community college to maintain his draft deferment.
Rumsfeld is a former fighter pilot, and though that's a job I'd never turn down, few military types are more vainglorious and unreflective. The nexus of the Bush war party seems to be Rumsfeld's Deputy Sec. of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Pat Buchanan in his book 'A Republic, Not an Empire' finds Wolfowitz, and a 46 page memorandum he wrote while in the Pentagon under the first Bush, at the center of Republican foreign policy. As his book's title suggests, Buchanan's apprehensions are based on the agenda explicitly laid out by Wolfowitz - that America should dominate the world, in every sense, that the planet shall serve as our empire; that we should militarily prevent any country or consortium of countries from controlling the resources that would allow them to escape their dependence and subservience: which is how we now find ourselves building a string of military bases in Central Asia, to control Caspian Sea oil reserves not for America's use, but to control China and India who will.
And so we also find ourselves with 'contingency plans' for nuclear weapons, with apparent abandonment of our historic 'no first strike' policy - in case somebody didn't get the message and needs to be slapped down. When Pat Buchanan says a conservative is too extreme for him, it should tell you something.
The advent of nuclear weapons was insufficient initially to change the military mind, both Curtis LeMay and his Russian counterpart continued to press for war for reasons both supposedly pragmatic and ideological; it took some decades to produce a Lee Butler. Paul Wolfowitz is a conservative academic and ideologue, unimpressed by the world beyond his own opinion. Where in the darkest days of the Cold War cooler heads contained the irrational zealotry of a LeMay, today Wolfowitz apparently has the undivided attention of George W. Bush, a man who waves at Stevie Wonder.
--Kent Southard, for Bush Watch (www.bushwatch.com) |
