The painting is called Regaling the Commander, and was created by Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville in 1875.
On a grass leaf, awaiting the morning sun,
The dew is melting.
Do not stir the field so soon, wind of winter!
---Dogen
Tozan asked Sozan: "Where are you going?"
"To an unchanging place," Sozan said.
"If it's unchanging, how could there be any going?" asked Tozan.
Sozan said: "Going, too, is unchanging."
---Zen mondo
When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace with words and ideas and abstractions---such as merit, such as past, present and future---our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.
---Peter Matthiessen
I understand an element of basic military training stays with you forever. I work with a guy who saw action as a Marine Corps sergeant in Viet Nam some 35 years go. He likes to snap me a salute in the school hallway, partly out of respect I guess but also to show off his machismo. The whole military thing is such a definition of manhood that a guy actually can feel discomfort for having gone through adolescence in relative Peacetime, as my generation did. I made it all the way through with a 1-A classification, but never was drafted---although the Cuban Missile Crisis came close.
No such problems of Peacetime nowdays though...or in the forseeable future, with eternal war declared on any opposition to Yankee globalization. Even our army supposedly has a private army of contracted protectors...although they don't seem as efficient at doing that job as they do guarding scouts for various corporations. Reagan was not a real soldier but he played one in the movies. Nixon got off on splendid uniforms. Bush and Cheney ducked duty but work ceaselessly to convince the world they're true commanders of democracy. They so love their armed contractors in Iraq and New Orleans (was NO or Katrina mentioned in the State of the Union?) that we now are hearing proposals for a new private army in the US to do all those pesky menial chores that so plague the luxury class.
As Bush looks for more people to command, which of course is the mark of a Real Man, I'm relieved to get a history lesson from Garry Wills today in the NY Times. He reviews for us what Commander in Chief really means in historical and Constitutional context. This White House seems to care little for either history or the Constitution, but the rest of us can benefit from a little review. Garry Wills, a professor emeritus of history at Northwestern, is the author, most recently, of “What Paul Meant.”
The New York Times
January 27, 2007
Op-Ed ContributorAt Ease, Mr. President
By GARRY WILLS
We hear constantly now about “our commander in chief.” The word has become a synonym for “president.” It is said that we “elect a commander in chief.” It is asked whether this or that candidate is “worthy to be our commander in chief.”
But the president is not our commander in chief.
He certainly is not mine. I am not in the Army.
I first cringed at the misuse in 1973, during the “Saturday Night Massacre” (as it was called). President Richard Nixon, angered at the Watergate inquiry being conducted by the special prosecutor Archibald Cox, dispatched his chief of staff, Al Haig, to arrange for Mr. Cox’s firing. Mr. Haig told the attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to dismiss Mr. Cox. Mr. Richardson refused, and resigned. Then Mr. Haig told the second in line at the Justice Department, William Ruckelshaus, to fire Cox. Mr. Ruckelshaus refused, and accepted his dismissal. The third in line, Robert Bork, finally did the deed.
What struck me was what Mr. Haig told Mr. Ruckelshaus, “You know what it means when an order comes down from the commander in chief and a member of his team cannot execute it.” This was as great a constitutional faux pas as Mr. Haig’s later claim, when President Reagan was wounded, that “Constitutionally ... I’m in control.”
President Nixon was not Mr. Ruckelshaus’s commander in chief. The president is not the commander in chief of civilians. He is not even commander in chief of National Guard troops unless and until they are federalized. The Constitution is clear on this: “The president shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States.”
When Abraham Lincoln took actions based on military considerations, he gave himself the proper title, “commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” That title is rarely — more like never — heard today. It is just “commander in chief,” or even “commander in chief of the United States.” This reflects the increasing militarization of our politics. The citizenry at large is now thought of as under military discipline. In wartime, it is true, people submit to the national leadership more than in peacetime. The executive branch takes actions in secret, unaccountable to the electorate, to hide its moves from the enemy and protect national secrets. Constitutional shortcuts are taken “for the duration.” But those impositions are removed when normal life returns.
But we have not seen normal life in 66 years. The wartime discipline imposed in 1941 has never been lifted, and “the duration” has become the norm. World War II melded into the cold war, with greater secrecy than ever — more classified information, tougher security clearances. And now the cold war has modulated into the war on terrorism.
There has never been an executive branch more fetishistic about secrecy than the Bush-Cheney one. The secrecy has been used to throw a veil over detentions, “renditions,” suspension of the Geneva Conventions and of habeas corpus, torture and warrantless wiretaps. We hear again the refrain so common in the other wars — If you knew what we know, you would see how justified all our actions are.
But we can never know what they know. We do not have sufficient clearance.
When Adm. William Crowe, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, criticized the gulf war under the first President Bush, Secretary of State James Baker said that the admiral was not qualified to speak on the matter since he no longer had the clearance to read classified reports. If he is not qualified, then no ordinary citizen is. We must simply trust our lords and obey the commander in chief.
The glorification of the president as a war leader is registered in numerous and substantial executive aggrandizements; but it is symbolized in other ways that, while small in themselves, dispose the citizenry to accept those aggrandizements. We are reminded, for instance, of the expanded commander in chief status every time a modern president gets off the White House helicopter and returns the salute of marines.
That is an innovation that was begun by Ronald Reagan. Dwight Eisenhower, a real general, knew that the salute is for the uniform, and as president he was not wearing one. An exchange of salutes was out of order. (George Bush came as close as he could to wearing a uniform while president when he landed on the telegenic aircraft carrier in an Air Force flight jacket).
We used to take pride in civilian leadership of the military under the Constitution, a principle that George Washington embraced when he avoided military symbols at Mount Vernon. We are not led — or were not in the past — by caudillos.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s prescient last book, “Secrecy,” traced the ever-faster-growing secrecy of our government and said that it strikes at the very essence of democracy — accountability of representatives to the people. How can the people hold their representatives to account if they are denied knowledge of what they are doing? Wartime and war analogies are embraced because these justify the secrecy. The representative is accountable to citizens. Soldiers are accountable to their officer. The dynamics are different, and to blend them is to undermine the basic principles of our Constitution.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/27/opinion/27wills.html?th&emc=th
1 comment:
Cyberspace was buzzing yesterday between friends Paul Quintanilla and George Buddy as they compared and shared notes about the private army the White House has employed in Iraq, New Orleans, and now wants to institutionalize permanently. We may hit another Depression yet, but this ain't FDR's New Deal...although they'll probably try to spin it like that if Rove(r) thinks of it. What Quinty and Buddy were up to was documenting the numbers of "contractors" carrying guns Bush has hired with our taxes. Buddy, who lives in Harrisburg, first found the figure of roughly half the 100,000 paid contractors in Iraq alone are part of this militia, and paid an average of $1000 a day. He linked us here
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.html?URI=http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/26/outsourcing-the-war/
to New York Times blogs, but they're available only to that paper's "select" group of readers...which means you have to pay a fee to participate. (I put up the link in case you are one of those people.) They then found the original article those numbers came from at a Thursday posting in the Los Angeles Times. The author is Jeremy Scahill, a fellow at the Nation Institute and author of the forthcoming "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army." That article is here http://www.latimes.com:80/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-scahill25jan25,0,4485578.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
Scahill also references and quotes "the decider" from the State of the Union about setting up his "Civilian Reserve Corps."
And oh yes, let me refer you to George Buddy's blog, where he posted all this as an entry yesterday~~~
http://gbuddy.blogspot.com/
Here's the LA Times article~~~
Our mercenaries in Iraq
The president relies on thousands of private soldiers with little oversight, a disturbing example of the military-industrial complex.
By Jeremy Scahill
January 25, 2007
As President Bush took the podium to deliver his State of the Union address Tuesday, there were five American families receiving news that has become all too common: Their loved ones had been killed in Iraq. But in this case, the slain were neither "civilians," as the news reports proclaimed, nor were they U.S. soldiers. They were highly trained mercenaries deployed to Iraq by a secretive private military company based in North Carolina — Blackwater USA.
The company made headlines in early 2004 when four of its troops were ambushed and burned in the Sunni hotbed of Fallouja — two charred, lifeless bodies left to dangle for hours from a bridge. That incident marked a turning point in the war, sparked multiple U.S. sieges of Fallouja and helped fuel the Iraqi resistance that haunts the occupation to this day.
Now, Blackwater is back in the news, providing a reminder of just how privatized the war has become. On Tuesday, one of the company's helicopters was brought down in one of Baghdad's most violent areas. The men who were killed were providing diplomatic security under Blackwater's $300-million State Department contract, which dates to 2003 and the company's initial no-bid contract to guard administrator L. Paul Bremer III in Iraq. Current U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who is also protected by Blackwater, said he had gone to the morgue to view the men's bodies, asserting the circumstances of their deaths were unclear because of "the fog of war."
Bush made no mention of the downing of the helicopter during his State of the Union speech. But he did address the very issue that has made the war's privatization a linchpin of his Iraq policy — the need for more troops. The president called on Congress to authorize an increase of about 92,000 active-duty troops over the next five years. He then slipped in a mention of a major initiative that would represent a significant development in the U.S. disaster response/reconstruction/war machine: a Civilian Reserve Corps.
"Such a corps would function much like our military Reserve. It would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them," Bush declared. This is precisely what the administration has already done, largely behind the backs of the American people and with little congressional input, with its revolution in military affairs. Bush and his political allies are using taxpayer dollars to run an outsourcing laboratory. Iraq is its Frankenstein monster.
Already, private contractors constitute the second-largest "force" in Iraq. At last count, there were about 100,000 contractors in Iraq, of which 48,000 work as private soldiers, according to a Government Accountability Office report. These soldiers have operated with almost no oversight or effective legal constraints and are an undeclared expansion of the scope of the occupation. Many of these contractors make up to $1,000 a day, far more than active-duty soldiers. What's more, these forces are politically expedient, as contractor deaths go uncounted in the official toll.
The president's proposed Civilian Reserve Corps was not his idea alone. A privatized version of it was floated two years ago by Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, conservative owner of Blackwater USA and a man who for years has served as the Pied Piper of a campaign to repackage mercenaries as legitimate forces. In early 2005, Prince — a major bankroller of the president and his allies — pitched the idea at a military conference of a "contractor brigade" to supplement the official military. "There's consternation in the [Pentagon] about increasing the permanent size of the Army," Prince declared. Officials "want to add 30,000 people, and they talked about costs of anywhere from $3.6 billion to $4 billion to do that. Well, by my math, that comes out to about $135,000 per soldier." He added: "We could do it certainly cheaper."
And Prince is not just a man with an idea; he is a man with his own army. Blackwater began in 1996 with a private military training camp "to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing." Today, its contacts run from deep inside the military and intelligence agencies to the upper echelons of the White House. It has secured a status as the elite Praetorian Guard for the global war on terror, with the largest private military base in the world, a fleet of 20 aircraft and 20,000 soldiers at the ready.
From Iraq and Afghanistan to the hurricane-ravaged streets of New Orleans to meetings with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger about responding to disasters in California, Blackwater now envisions itself as the FedEx of defense and homeland security operations. Such power in the hands of one company, run by a neo-crusader bankroller of the president, embodies the "military-industrial complex" President Eisenhower warned against in 1961.
Further privatizing the country's war machine — or inventing new back doors for military expansion with fancy names like the Civilian Reserve Corps — will represent a devastating blow to the future of American democracy.
Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times
Whew, now if you have any energy left I want to share the other reply which got posted at jazzoLOG by somebody named Ken Larson. A major excitement about blogging is getting a response from someone you don't know and have no idea how they ever found you. Ken's comment is so interesting I just had to Google him down...and that link follows his message~~~
ITS NOT THE CHIEF IT 'S THE TRIBE
Your post has some excellent points. Here's some additional data:
The Department of Defense, headquartered in the Pentagon, is one of the most massive organizations on the planet, with net annual operating costs of $635 billion, assets worth $1.3 trillion, liabilities of $1.9 trillion and more that 2.9 million military and civilian personnel as of fiscal year 2005.
I am a 2 tour Vietnam Veteran who recently retired after 36 years of working in the Defense Industrial Complex on many of the weapons systems being used by our forces as we speak.
It is difficult to convey the complexity of the way DOD works to someone who has not experienced it. This is a massive machine with so many departments and so much beaurocracy that no president, including Bush totally understands it.
Presidents, Congressmen, Cabinet Members and Appointees project a knowledgeable demeanor but they are spouting what they are told by career people who never go away and who train their replacements carefully. These are military and civil servants with enormous collective power, armed with the Federal Acquisition Regulation, Defense Industrial Security Manuals, compartmentalized classification structures and "Rice Bowls" which are never mixed.
Our society has slowly given this power structure its momentum which is constant and extraordinarily tough to bend. The cost to the average American is exhorbitant in terms of real dollars and bad decisions. Every major power structure member in the Pentagon's many Washington Offices and Field locations in the US and Overseas has a counterpart in Defense Industry Corporate America. That collective body has undergone major consolidation in the last 10 years.
What used to be a broad base of competitive firms is now a few huge monoliths, such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Boeing.
Government oversight committees are carefully stroked. Sam Nunn and others who were around for years in military and policy oversight roles have been cajoled, given into on occasion but kept in the dark about the real status of things until it is too late to do anything but what the establishment wants. This still continues - with increasing high technology and potential for abuse.
Please examine the following link to testimony given by Franklin C. Spinney before Congress in 2002. It provides very specific information from a whistle blower who is still blowing his whistle (Look him up in your browser and you get lots of feedback) Frank spent the same amount of time as I did in the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) but in government quarters. His job in government was a similar role to mine in defense companies. Frank's emphasis in this testimony is on the money the machine costs us. It is compelling and it is noteworthy that he was still a staff analyst at the Pentagon when he gave this speech. I still can't figure out how he got his superior's permission to say such blunt things. He was extremely highly respected and is now retired.
http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/spinney_testimony_060402.htm
The brick wall I often refer to is the Pentagon's own arrogance. It will implode by it's own volition, go broke, or so drastically let down the American people that it will fall in shambles. Rest assured the day of the implosion is coming. The machine is out of control.
If you are interested in a view of the inside of the Pentagon procurement process from Vietnam to Iraq please check the posting on this blog entitled, "Odyssey of Armaments"
http://rosecoveredglasses.blogspot.com/2006/11/odyssey-of-armaments.html
On the same subject, you may also be interested in the following sites from the "Project On Government Oversight", observing it's 25th Anniversary and "Defense In the National Interest", insired by Franklin Spinney and contributed to by active/reserve, former, or retired military personnel.
http://pogo.org/
http://www.d-n-i.net/top_level/about_us.htm
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Ken Larson is author of a book entitled "Odyssey of Armaments, My Journey Through the Defense Industrial Complex." An excerpt is online as the November 5, 2006 post at his blog which he linked above~~~
http://www.rosecoveredglasses.blogspot.com/
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