Page 18 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • September 7, 2011 the gratuitous late-war fire bombings in Germany and the napalm and nuclear attacks on Japan. We did, however, do away with the draft that was jumped-started for the Korean War. Some years ago, I was investigating Pearl Harbor with Special Agent Tom Kimmel of the FBI. Kimmel was the grandson of Admiral Husband Kimmel, who had the blame for the attack’s success foisted on him. Both Husband and Tom Kimmel were experts on possible conspiracies. Tom, a senior FBI agent, left me with the quote of quotes: “Most crimes are due to stupidity or cupidity, and when you can’t be sure, it’s safer to go with stupidity.” Stupidity means getting into a war when you’re angry or eager to displace some aggression. Oil is what is at stake in the Middle East. If we can work out agreements with the new regimes to supply that oil at reasonable prices, we can write off the Middle East as a trouble spot. We would be well advised to do so. Even American Legion Magazine, as patriotic an advocate of a strong America as can be found anywhere, stated it its most recent issue: “Hussein’s Iraq was not connected to the 9/11 attacks….” Hussein admitted some known terrorists afterward, but known terrorists have been admitted to most of the countries in the Middle East. The creep who masterminded the 9/11 attacks finally met justice in Pakistan, supposedly a friend of the United States to the tune of $3 billion a year in bribes. The same issue of American Legion Magazine provides these terrible statistics: Some 300,000 of the troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, about 20 percent of those deployed, come back with diagnosed post-traumatic stress syndrome. The Pentagon also estimated that there were 19,000 sexual assaults in the ranks in 2010, up from 3,158 in 2009. This means that American service personnel were not just harassed but also sexually assaulted by fellow American service personnel. About 40 percent of the victims were men assaulted by other men, and 25 percent of the assaults of men and women alike took place during combat deployments. These are official figures, not something made up by whatever pacifist groups still exist. Anecdotally, some combat units lose more soldiers to postdeployment suicides than they do to combat. Most of the people who have post-traumatic stress inflicted on them will need counseling for the rest of their lives, and many will have extreme difficulty building relationship and holding jobs. The tragic cost to the veterans and their families is compounded by the catastrophic cost to the American economy. We cannot turn our backs on these courageous men and women who responded to the call of duty as they saw it. They should continue to have all the help they need, even if it involves life-long disability pensions, but we cannot allow politicians – most of whom never served in the military even stateside -- to continue the fantasy that we are going to build democracy against the will of the people whose countries we occupy. We got rid of Saddam Hussein who was a murderous thug even if he didn’t support the 9/11 attacks. We got rid of Osama bin Laden, who planned the attack. The other day, the Libyans got rid of Muammar al-Gaddafi, and they were happy to have done it without U.S. troops whose presence would only have united Muslims against “the crusaders.” Let us support the Muslim revolt against Muslim dictators in Muslim countries at a distance. Let us air-drop food and medicine if they need it due to temporary emergencies without turning them into permanent client states. Let us buy their oil, even as we phase down our dependence on that oil through Western Hemisphere sources, through the increased use of solar and geothermal energy, and through a drastic reduction in the waste of gasoline and electricity for recreational activities. Let us not send more troops to be killed by people defending their own turf or brutalized by the sexual predators in their own units. We cannot condone the abuse of Americans by foreign lunatics and fanatics. We cannot condone the abuse of Americans by home-grown degenerates. The murderers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon lost when the end result of their attack was not Islamic jihad but Islamic revolt against Islamic tyrants. We had the courageous combat troops and the military technology to pulp their armed forces in a walkover, but we don’t have the ideology – and shouldn’t want the ideology – to turn the world into a sequel to the Roman, British, or Soviet empires. If we don’t accept that we’ve already won, and bring the troops home, we could lose in the very act of winning. We could also turn 9/11 from the morally squalid defeat that it was into a victory though the default of our own integrity. Many people have a hard time believing it was 10 years ago that so many of our friends and neighbors were murdered at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The United States adopted a new motto, “God Bless America,” and a new understanding that we are far more vulnerable than we had ever thought we were. Ten years after the 9/11 murders, the response is still confusing. Dictatorships around the Muslim world are crumbling one by one, and some very bad people are being kicked out of power, which we all hope will lead to freedom and, if it doesn’t threaten our own shaky economy, greater prosperity for people who rightfully resent the home-grown tyrants who have kept them in poverty and ignorance while soaking up U.S. oil money and U.S. bribes. There is a lot of hope out there on the horizon if we chose to look at it. America’s contributions through the deaths of U.S. service personnel in Korea, Vietnam, and Cold War accidents like the implosion of submarines and crashes of aircraft paid the price for liberty. Our collective contribution in the form of the exorbitant taxes that have eroded the American middle class also helped thwart what was a Soviet communist bid for world hegemony, much as they undermined the well-being of the American middle class. But the real collapse of the Soviet empire happened from the inside. The East Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians did not receive the benefit of American or NATO air strikes or columns of U.S. tanks when they refused to knuckle under to Soviet dictatorship. They might have loved to have American troops show up and destroy the Russian presence that made a mockery of their human rights and a shambles of their economies, but they didn’t get them. The United States and Britain flew food and coal into Berlin to prevent a collapse of divided Germany because a collapse in Germany would have handed the Russians Europe’s greatest industrial plant and neutralized the largest and most dependable European army. The United States intervened in a civil war in Korea that we essentially started by urging the Russians to seize Korea from the failing and visibly doomed Japanese Empire and then give back only half of it. The actual goal of the Korean War was clearly to protect post-war Japan’s nearby and threatened industrial plant, the largest and most modern in Asia. The North Koreans attacked South Korea only after Dean Acheson, the U.S. State Department bungler who helped provoke the Japanese before Pearl Harbor, later circumscribed South Korea as outside America’s defense perimeter. The North Koreans took this statement to Stalin, who approved their invasion. The United States lost 32,000 soldiers, the South Koreans lost two million citizens, and the peacetime draft was brought back to shore up the collapsing post-war volunteers. In Vietnam, we buttressed a corrupt regime to the tune of 58,000 more American lives, killed another two million Asians, and got caught committing massacres at My Lai and elsewhere that permanently undermined our good-guy role around the world, even with people who shrugged of Turning catastrophe into freedom’s triumph Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: Whatever happened to courage and truthfulness in American politics? It appears that these qualities are progressively being skipped with each of their consecutive terms of office. We have seen how our elected representatives, from the president down to both houses of Congress, attempt to organize people and structure their messages to gain respect, protect their jobs, and strengthen their authority over people’s lives. In this process, we see them act out of self-interest thus becoming opportunistic, predatory actors who are a detriment to society and our way of life. Most dramatically, we are now experiencing a national debt where these actors continue to practice intergenerational theft. In addition, they continue to create laws (such as compulsory healthcare) that are ruthless, unbending, and hurt people. It is realized that all people are imperfectly informed. So, if we have a multitude of decision makers making different sorts of decisions, we can facilitate a process of trialand-error learning that minimizes the consequence of a particular error. If this decision making is centralized, like in government control, it is difficult for the people to escape from the depredations of potentially predatory actors. Politicians continue to fail to learn from the past. In spite of all the knowledge that has been amassed through the ages, these representatives still would rather learn from their own limited experiences. This is why the messages they deliver are too often ambiguous and their oratory is not supported by their actions. They have become masters at wheeling out their own prejudices and shallow answers. History has shown that our political leaders’ supreme objective is to remain in office for eternity. To that end, they appeal to a constituency of mixed interests. On one hand, they have the wealthy, special interest supporters and their insatiable thirst for favorable legislation. On the other hand, they appeal to a culture of laziness, irresponsibility, and selfishness with some flourishing on entitlement programs. In the middle, there are those who welcome the opportunity to do honest work, improve their skills, earn a Supports term limits respectable living for their families, and participate in the enrichment of their fellow citizens. They strive to avoid those interests and actions that would lead to a slow-motion moral collapse. New national elections will soon give us the opportunity to get rid of our long-term congressmen who have developed too many cozy relationships and are entrenched in their respective districts where they are willing to sacrifice their consciences to ambition. Consequently, it would seem prudent to establish limits of three terms for member of the House of Representatives and two terms for members of the Senate. Lacking term limits, heavy voter turnout would minimize the effectiveness of any candidate’s core supporters, thus breaking the grip of these traditional multiple-term “leaders.” George W. Shabet Ridgewood