October 10, 2017--Madman Theory

Desperately looking for some evidence that the Trump administration's foreign policy is not totally out of control, I have been speculating (hoping) that somehow in regard to his apparent unhappiness with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Trump's seemingly irrational, out-of-cotrol behavior includes some larger logic. 

I have written here that though Trump appears to know nothing whatsoever about history or the ways of the world, he apparently does meet occasionally with Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, and from Kissinger may be accepting some tutoring about how to act tough and be effective when it comes to international policy.

With the glaring exception of the Vietnam War, Kissinger and Nixon were able to do that. There was detente with the Soviet Union and the opening to China.

To that end perhaps Trump is learning about Nixon's Madman Theory. I was reminded of this earlier in the week when reading Robert Dallek's excellent, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners In Power, where he makes reference to that.

From Wikipedia, here is a succinct overview--

The theory was a feature of Richard Nixon's foreign policy. He and his administration tried to make the leaders of hostile Communist Block nations think Nixon was irrational and volatile. According to the theory, these leaders would then avoid provoking the United States, fearing an unpredictable response. 

Nixon's Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman wrote that Nixon confided to him: 

"I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, 'For God's sake, you know that Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry--and he has his hand on the nuclear button.' Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace."

In October 1969, the Nixon administration [via Kissinger] indicated to the Soviet Union that the "madman was loose" when the United States military was ordered to full global war readiness alert (unbeknownst to the majority of the American population) and bombers armed with thermonuclear weapons flew patterns near the Soviet border for three consecutive days. 

The [Nixon] administration employed the madman strategy to force the North Vietnamese government to end the Vietnam War. Along the same lines, American diplomats, especially Henry Kissinger, portrayed the 1970 [illegal] incursion into Cambodia as a symptom of Nixon's supposed instability. 

In 1517, Niccolò Machiavelli argued that sometimes it is "a very wise thing to simulate madness."

For the record, Nixon, though through traditional forms of diplomacy was able to make deals with the Soviets and China, the madman strategy itself did not work. 

Attempting to convince our adversaries in Southeast Asia he was crazy did not "force" the North Vietnamese to negotiate the end of the Vietnam War. We in effect lost the war. Over time we unilaterally withdrew our troops; failed to support the ongoing efforts of the South Vietnam government and military; and the North in less than a year triumphed and unified Vietnam into one country, which they then as now control.

So much for my hope that Trump's "madness" might be intentional and prove to be effective. 

February 3, 2105--Sniping

We finally got around to seeing Clint Eastwood's Western, American Sniper.

This is not a typo, since Sniper is more a conventional Western of the sort Clint used to make than a traditional war movie.

In full Manichean mode, Eastwood is in familiar territory with forces of good confronting and overcoming, if somewhat ambiguously, evil. Good guy against bad guys.

It is also a biopic about Chris Kyle, the American sniper who during four tours of duty in Iraq is credited with at least 160 "kills." He is a Rambo figure. As Sly Stallone's Rambo single-handedly took on and defeated our stealthy enemies in Vietnam (a war we otherwise in real life were losing) Kyle takes on al-Qaeda fighters and through sniping and pitched firefights wipes out dozens of them though in real life they were and are winning.

Superheroes Rambo and Kyle help reconcile us to defeat by providing an alternate reality--that what we see on TV and read about in the papers is less real than what is on the big screen. Thus perpetuating the illusion that America has never lost a war.

One has to wonder why Sniper is doing so incredibly well at the box office, having already taken in more than $200 million. The highest grossing "war" movie of all time. What about it is appealing to Americans' consciousness?

The film puts on vivid and overwhelming display American exceptionalism, showing a self-made, unencumbered man taking on the world's evil forces. And, in a cool 2015-version of winning, prevails.

Eastwood and Stallone in their eras of American self-doubt have made careers out of such films.

But ironically, since I am certain this was not Eastwood's intent--he is a well-known conservative hawk--Sniper is more than anything a powerful antiwar movie.

Kyle is represented as heroic and undoubtedly deserves to be (sorry Michael Moore), but his heroism is not worthy of the situation--the Iraq War--in which it plays out. The war on the ground, in which Kyle and his comrades are unremittingly exemplary, is not worth the human cost. On either side. Even the heroic are drawn into the blood and gore, the purposeless and waste, and, yes, the evil that wars of this kind are.

In Sniper, in Western terms,  good outcomes prevail--more bad than good guys are killed, the principal evil-doer, Mustafa, an al-Qaeda sniper who was a Syrian Olympic marksman, is shot by Kyle after he kills three or four American soldiers; but in the end, as represented in Sniper, it means nothing, amounts to nothing.

Though our boys kill more of the elusive enemy than in turn get killed and maimed, as we are shown at the end of the film's climatic battle, which ends without a clear sense of outcome, as Kyle and his comrades withdraw from the field of battle more and more al-Qaeda fighters are shown to be streaming in.

With that, with his kills tallied, though the war will continue--it continues to this day (al-Qaeda has become ISIS)--Kyle decides it's time to go home.

And then when he does, he appears to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder but, as could only happen in a Rambo or Eastwood movie, is "cured" in less than 15 minutes of film time. At first shown sitting alone at a bar nursing a beer and brooding, after spending a few minutes with a VA psychologist, who takes him on a walk down the hospital corridor where he meets cheerful veteran amputees, Kyle is back to himself and is ready to return to his wife and children, where he is soon shot by another returning veteran, who presumably has a more enduring case of PTSD.

This, of course, is not shown on screen and thus is another way Eastwood attempts to sanitize and camouflage the reality of war's horrors. In Westerns, for the same reason, the good guys are never killed on screen. They head for the sunset.

With all this absurdity and horror to obscure and cover up, how could anyone claim that what we have been up to in Vietnam and more recently Iraq makes any sense or has any clear purpose? Including Clint.

January 21, 2015--Heroes

I half agree with Michael Moore.

He stepped in it over the weekend when he tweeted, in reference to the Clint Eastwood movie, American Sniper, that snipers are "cowards" and not "heroes."

He wrote--

My uncle killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shot you in the back. Snipers aren't heroes.

I haven't as yet seen the film so I am not sure if Chris Kyle, a real-life Navy SEAL who was credited with more than 160 "kills," shot anyone in the back or if the movie even made that distinction.

Shooting someone in the back to me wouldn't make someone a coward any more than a solider killing someone during a war with an explosive grenade or with a rocket launched from a drone guided to its target remotely from the security of an operations bunkers thousands of miles from the field of battle is a coward.

War in all its forms is evil--though it may at rare times be a necessary evil (WWII comes to mind), and so applying "rules" to war to me has always had the tincture of an oxymoron about it.

But I suppose rules of war may keep people from using chemical, biological, or atomic weapons and require that POWs be held and treated humanely. I have always believed, though, that any restraints combatants apply while otherwise blowing each other to pieces (often including innocents) is because they do not want the same tortuous things done to them if the tables were turned, which often happens in all forms of warfare.

So almost all that occurs is not cowardice but more because soldiers are doing their awful job or get carried along in the flow of things. As a result, moral judgements need to be applied extra-judiciously.

On the other hand, again not having seen the movie, I doubt if director Eastwood or actor Bradley Cooper present Kyle as much of a hero.

If they do, this could be a good corrective by Moore as to what it means to be a hero and to all the overpraising we have become prone to in so many aspects of our lives--from calling all our troops heroes (politicians do this uncontrollably) to representing every poop or scribble one of our kids produces as if no one ever did anything that amazing and miraculous.

True heroism is a very special and rare quality. It should be reserved for acts of courage and sacrifice, not for anything and everything one of our soldiers does in the daily course of serving in the military.

I know this is not just a product of otherwise rampant cultural hyperbole. It is also a reaction to the ways in which soldiers who were drafted to fight in Vietnam were treated--shabbily at best--when they returned from fighting. Even genuine heroes were shamelessly spat upon.

We are being careful this time to show respect for our troop volunteers while they are fighting and when they return. But not all of them are heroes and almost none of them are cowards. Before Michael Moore uses that label maybe he should sign up and see how he does.

October 8, 2014--E=MC2

The speed of light is very fast, in fact there is nothing faster in the universe. It is a very big number--light travels at 186,000 miles per second, or 299,792,458 miles an hour, which means that the light emanating from the sun, which is about 93 million miles from Earth, takes only 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach us.

But on a cosmic scale, this is small potatoes.

The galaxy in which our solar system is located is so huge that that hugeness is expressed not in miles but in light years--how many miles light travels in a year. At 186,000 per second, that's very, very far. To give you a sense of that, our galaxy, the disk of the Milky Way, is about 100,000 light years in diameter.

Then, the ultimate measurement, our universe, everything that there is, is 93 billion light years in size, an almost infinitely large number to comprehend.

I have been thinking about the speed of light because a friend, Leslie Woodhead, is writing a book about the Atomic Era, not so much about the science as about the cultural and political consequence of a world full of atomic weapons. He wants to interview me because I am obsessed with The Bomb and how it has affected life on our planet. To satisfy my obsession, I have read and thought much about these issues. In addition, since he's British he wants to gather reflections from Americans who lived as youngsters through the early days of the Atomic Era and Cold War. I qualify in that regard as well.

In thinking what to say to him, I have dipped a bit into the science of the A-Bomb, especially the theory Einstein developed that defined and quantified the convertibility of mass to energy. As evidence and to demonstrate what that would mean in practical terms, converting a relatively smallish mass of Uranium-235 or Plutonium into a massive amount of energy (an atomic explosion), he propounded perhaps the most famous of all mathematical equations--E=MC2, with E representing Energy, M Mass, and C-squared the speed of light times itself.

With the speed of light by far the latest number in the equation, and then squaring it (multiplying it by itself), and then multiplying it additionally by the mass in question, reveals how such a powerful explosion could result in converting such a relatively small mass of radioactive material into energy--the cataclysmic force of an atomic explosion.

For example, a bomb weighing less than 10 tons with a Uranium-235 core weighing only141 pounds of which just one kilogram (2.2 pounds) underwent nuclear fission, an atomic bomb called Little Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, exploded with the force of 63,000 tons of TNT. Tons. And killed 135,000 Japanese.

I will want to talk with Leslie about take-cover drills in school where we were taught to dive under our desks if we saw a "blinding flash of light" from an A-Bomb exploding over Times Square, ground zero; and how, after the end of World War II, under Cold War pressure all presidents from Truman to Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson to Nixon were under pressure from their military advisers to use nuclear weapons preemptively, in turn, against the Soviets, the North Koreans, Cubans, and Vietnamese; and how this led to the establishment of a "national security state" with inordinate power accruing to the President with Congress assigned a subsidiary role, effectively resulting in  the end of  the Founders' concept of the "separation of powers."

But it will be hard to not be thinking about E=MC2, the speed of light, that kilogram of U-235, and those 135,000 killed that August.