Oświęcim i Śnieg

Auschwitz in the Snow

We have finally returned from Toronto where my good sister, my wife's sister, is dying in what the Canadians euphemistically call Palliative Care. We took her daughter to see her every day, then turned to a mountain of tasks awaiting us.

We are involved greatly in this Toronto family of mother and daughter.

Even the snow cannot bring beauty...

... it remains severely cold, not gentle; it is grey, not white; it is a threat of glacial grinding and the digging of aretes and the tossing up of moraines upon the battle ground of Earth...

It took me 2 days to be able to write this.

--

Lest We Forget

We should not forget the good we can do, nor should we forget the evil:

For a full year or more before the March 2003 invasion, the neo-cons and their major media outlets - notably, the Weekly Standard, the National Review Online, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the New York Post and Fox News - kept up a virtually daily drumbeat of op-ed articles, television appearances, selective leaks to the mainstream media by their confreres within the administration with only one aim in mind - to persuade the public that Saddam Hussein represented such a threat that he could only be dealt with by military means.  

As the invasion drew near, the AEI, the movement's de facto headquarters, drew scores of reporters to its weekly "black coffee briefings", where such neo-con worthies as Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, then-Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, former CIA director James Woolsey and Iraq National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi, held forth on the evils of the Ba'athist regime and the regional implications of the forthcoming "liberation" of the Iraq people.  

The carefully orchestrated and coordinated drumbeat for war four years ago has been nowhere in evidence with respect to Iran over the past month when, judging by their writings and television experiences, they have appeared far more concerned with the growing public and Congressional pressure to begin withdrawing US troops from Iraq and prevent Bush from adding more forces there.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IB17Ak02.html

The Iraq War was the Triumph des Willens, the triumph of the Neoconservative American WILL, whereby the Neocon USA shall dream itself into its schizoid persona of Starship Trooper , and destroy the terror spawn of Saddam. We also were able to get the Vietnam monkey off our back. (I'm afraid we shall find the Vietnam monkey was rather light compared to the Iraq gorilla which will haunt us hence.)

Will the Neoconservatives ever be brought to justice?

--
reprint

The Fiscal Tonkin Gulf

 Gulf of Tonkin

The Congress has abdicated its power and responsibilities many times in my life. I remember the Tonkin Gulf resolution:

Tonkin Gulf resolution, in U.S. history, Congressional resolution passed in 1964 that authorized military action in Southeast Asia.

On Aug. 4, 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin were alleged to have attacked without provocation U.S. destroyers that were reporting intelligence information to South Vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his advisers decided upon immediate air attacks on North Vietnam in retaliation; he also asked Congress for a mandate for future military action.

On Aug. 7, Congress passed a resolution drafted by the administration authorizing all necessary measures to repel attacks against U.S. forces and all steps necessary for the defense of U.S. allies in Southeast Asia.
Although there was disagreement in Congress over the precise meaning of the Tonkin Gulf resolution, Presidents Johnson and Richard M. Nixon used it to justify later military action in Southeast Asia. 

The measure was repealed by Congress in 1970. Retired Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap, in a 1995 meeting with former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, categorically denied that the North Vietnamese had attacked the U.S. destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, and in 2001 it was revealed that President Johnson, in a taped conversation with McNamara several weeks after passage of the resolution, had expressed doubt that the attack ever occurred.

Now the House of Representatives has fallen prey to its own internal Tea Party-Republican discords - a problem anyone with an ounce of sense saw coming when the Republicans embraced the Tea "Baggers" - and can no longer execute its responsibility to oversee national finances......

This is the fiscal counter-part of the surrender after the Gulf of Tonkin charade.
__