May 2015

What Is It Like to Live in a Nation at War?

2016-12-28T21:37:54+00:00May 25th, 2015|Defense|

Finally having the opportunity to ascend the Washington Monument yesterday, although all the views were beautiful, my eye was drawn to a photograph of the National Mall as it stood in 1942. Many of the parks and memorials were absent — in their place sat rows and rows of squat, ugly office buildings, clearly constructed in a hurry. This was the capital of a nation at war.

Because so much knowledge of World War II has seeped from the realm of fact to founding myth, we tend to forget that the war was total. From 1941 to 1945, civil society abruptly transformed. All of industry reorganized. Professional careers were put on hold — new professions were invented overnight. Consider that the ranks of the U.S. Army swelled from 200,000 in 1939 to 6 million by 1944. The war became a constant companion and steady topic of conversation. There was no avoiding it. As Lee Sandlin writes in “Losing the War:”

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September 2014

Thirteen Years Later, We’re Still Fighting the 9/11 War

2016-12-28T21:37:55+00:00September 11th, 2014|Defense|

I was twelve years old when those two planes flew into the Twin Towers and turned the country upside down. 2,996 people were dead. More attacks seemed imminent. Jon Stewart cried on television. The United States was ready to fight back – but how? And against whom? It was a strange, confusing, and frightening time to be an American.

This  was the world in which my generation began its political education. It was like a switch had flipped, with all the rules suddenly reset and reshuffled. I didn’t realize it at the time, but in retrospect, the adults had little more idea what was going on than we did.

We invaded Afghanistan; we toppled the Taliban. We established a Department of Homeland Security and developed a vast, new intelligence apparatus to fuel it. We overturned some laws and rewrote many more.  In a national paranoia, we glued our eyes to a color-coded terror warning system and – when enough people said it was the right thing to do – we invaded Iraq.

We declared war on a vast, transnational network of extreme jihadi organizations. We launched thousands of drones into the sky and hovered them over isolated hamlets, seeking to kill terror at its source. We passed death sentences on Pakistani villagers from 7,500 miles away.

We did it all – continue to do it – so we can feel safe again.

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January 2014

Dark & Doubtful: Movies of the Iraq II & Afghanistan Generation

2016-12-28T21:37:56+00:00January 17th, 2014|Culture, Defense|

I challenge you to find a chest-pounding, upbeat, pro-American movie about conflict released in the last five years. Cross out “pro-American” and I’ll bet you still can’t do it.

This thought occurred to me as I finally got around to watching Iron Man 3. Brash? Sure. Action-packed? Duh. But classic good-guys, bad-guys name-of-justice beat ’em up? Not exactly.

The “bad guy” is a shadowy, ubiquitous terrorist who turns out to be made-up. Our main character suffers from PTSD. The American government, completely in thrall of the military-industrial complex, is inept, indecisive, and vaguely sinister. The one “good guy” who fights under the Stars and Stripes spends the whole movie barging in on innocent Pakistanis. The real bad guys (a defense contractor) are staffed by amputee veterans of “some war in the Middle East.” Could the message be any Starker – or more cynical?

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