Giant in Repose

It was, by all accounts, a clear sunny morning. The sky was as vibrant and alive as the people revelling below. While storm clouds of war were gathering on distant horizons, the US was in a period of relative peace, albeit a shallow peace. On this crisp morning, with no real warning, the skies changed from a medium of life-giving sunshine to a channel for the flying machinations of death. Within a few hours' time, thousands were dead, injured, and missing. Smoke and intense flame rose from the suddenly hobbled symbols of Americna invincibility. The unimaginable had just become the new reality. A panicked US began to question all of the securities it had taken for granted just the day before.

On this particular day, it was not the world that had changed; rather, it was the United States that was forced to change dragged, kicking and screaming, into a world long ignored and denied by Americans. This paticular morning was not that September morning in New York City that we all watched play out on our televisions a few years ago, although it clearly could be. Instead, I am describing that fateful December morning over Pearl Harbor that seems to constantly be replayed in black and white footage on the History Channel, or in Time Life books. The similarities between the two events has been noted many times, god knows I don't have the intelligence to come up with something so original. This just seems to be a good time to revisit the events, and the tenacious desire of our country to forget the lessons that should have been learned, and relearned, many times over.

Unfair comparison you say, World War II and the 9/11 attacks are apples and oranges? Believe that WWII was a noble endeavor from a black and white fairy tale, and the military endeavors following 9/11 are nothing more than a sinister, and cynical, play on oil, greed and revenge? If so, it is no wonder that we as a country continually have to be reminded about the nature of the world around us.

In the years and months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan had embarked on a campaign of expansion that included an invasion of China and many islands in the Pacific. Japan was a late comer to the Industrial Age economy, and lacked a number of valuable resources, which included oil and steel. The US presence in the Pacific represented a huge threat to the Japanese plans to take what it needed from its neighbors. Up until Pearl Harbor, most Americans were content to allow Hitler to swarm across Europe and kick the shit out of even the British. Once the first US sailor went down to a Japanese torpedo, we collectively stacked up our chips and went all in.

After Pearl Harbor, the surviving sailors were given post-cards and told to write home and let mom, or Mary Sue, know that they had survived the attack. One sailor's card, sent a few days after the attack, didn't reach home until February of 1942. In an era of satellite phones, email, and web cams, one can only imagine the uproar that would ensue if word of a loved one did not reach the states after nearly three months.

Immediately after Pearl Harbor, the US suffered horrific defeats in Manilla and the Phillipines. By the time the US was actively engaged in the European theater, Hitler was the landlord for the greatest part of the continent. During the height of US bombing runs over Germany, before P-51's were introduced as fighter escorts, B-17's, and their crews were being lost faster than my dollars fly to my ex-wife. In the years before Pearl Harbor, the US stuck its head in the sand, and the corner bullies took over while we wallowed in our own affairs.

In a far more subtle way, the Vietnam war was a similar learning experience. Although the homeland was not physically attacked, those who would take up arms against us learned, long before we did, that our national fickleness and weak-kneed approach to international politics could be used more effectively as a weapon than any physical attack. The rift that developed amongst US citizens, that is used to politicize and undermine public support for US military undertakings, that rift was the first real smart bomb, and it continues to be used against us today.

In the skirmishes leading up to 9/11, the US got another wake up call, this time in Somalia. In the process of trying to save a country from the itself, one particular sunny day, two Black Hawk helicopters get shot down (by techniques taught by Al-Queda). Those American soldiers that spent the remaining day and night trying to rescue pilots and comrades, were also unknowingly the first responders in the renewed attack against America's reputation for invulnerability.

Last night at Blockbuster, I saw that someone has made a "Black Hawk Down" video game for my beloved PS2. Now, you and your 10 year old son can re-live the video horror that our troops were subjected to. We forget so quickly.

A few weeks ago, National Geographic ran documentaries I had not seen before: Inside 9/11. In one of the series, in an interview with the FBI Scene Commander, he talked about when he returned to ground zero on the morning of Sept 12, and how the sounds of the firefighters' locators were beeping and screaming from within the rubble haunted him. NG played just a second or two of footage from that morning. The sound of the locators is simply heart-breaking.

That President Bush probably sold us on the Iraqi excursion by using some "soft" or questionable intelligence, is neither surprising nor damnable. For decades, critics have questioned whether or not Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew that Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked, and allowed it to happen so that the US would be drawn into the war... It ain't rocket science. FDR probably didn't know the day, the time, or even necessarily the exact target. But he clearly recognized that the US wasn't going to get off of its ass until someone took a pound of flesh. WMD's in Iraq? Yeah, at some point. Thanks to our previous administration, the Iraqis had a free hand to sell or loan everything it had to Syria, Iran, Egypt, maybe even to the North Koreans.

Iraq as the center of terrorism? Maybe, and maybe not. But Saddam had been hanging his ass out at the US while pretending to bow to Allah for a decade. He undoubtedly inspired hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, to hate you, your children, your SUV, your homes, your churches, your way of life. The single most devastating WMD today, short of nukes, is cash. Keep in mind that Saddam, for years, has been sitting on top of countless fortunes worth of oil and gas. (Let's see, didn't he also have some "aggressive growth" plans of his own a few years ago?) Not all of his oil money went to bribe the UN...

It does not matter whether you are Republican or Democrat. It also does not matter whether your president lied to you about uranium cakes, or plutonium pastries, or piss cakes from a urinal; his job is to protect this country. If he had to tell us that alien invaders with 6 foot anal probes had just landed in Bahgdad, if that is what it took to get us on the offensive, then he had a moral obligation to do just that. The night that Bush made the speech "laying out the case for war", I was sitting in a bar having dinner with one of my more devoted liberal colleagues. He quietly rolled his eyes during portions of the speech, I drank my beer, and could not have cared less. I had not forgotten that September morning, unable to contact loved ones, away from my children. I had not forgotten the warnings that were subsequently issued about possible attacks against grade schools.

Late in the day on 9/11, someone, maybe Senator McCain, said there would undoubtedly be a declaration of war. Well, yeah, but against who? I have grown tired of those who claim Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, that Iraq is just baby Bush's way to get back for planned assasination attempts of Daddy Bush.

Those who wish to see the demise of our way of life, of our nation, they have continued to evolve and to find ways to defeat us. We collectively get the vapors about "proof" that this country or that tin-pot despot was behind an attack on us. Saddam didn't fly the planes into the building himself. The tenor of today's criticisms of the president make me think that, in-flight recordings of Saddam at the controls of the planes, with video footage of him spiraling into the Trade Center, even that would not be enough to placate the Cindy Sheehens of the world.

Truck bombs failed to topple the towers in the early 1990's. There was no such failure in 2001. The people flying those planes didn't give a damn if their victims were Republican, Democrat, white, black, Christian, Muslim, straight, gay or even moderately ambivalent. They had no allegiance to any one country, they did not wage their surprise attack against us under the banner of any single flag.

Pearl Harbor awakened the slumbering giant. Vietnam made the giant question itself, and wrip itself apart. The War against Terrorism has the giant schizophrenic, tripping all over itself in its oversized sensitivies and outmoded view of the world. In its on-going confusion, the Giant keeps forgetting that those sharp pin-pricks, those blows from behind and below the belt, they are all intended to leave the giant... Fomerly Living.