TT: Raffique Shah's cup runneth over with bile

Point is the French seemed to have learnt their bitter lessons on repressing seemingly weak nation-states by the 1960s. The arrogant Americans never did. Which is how they became entangled in this Iraq mess that has them mired in the desert with no easy way out. In fact, there may be no way out for them at all. But there is also a parallel between the atrocities they committed in Vietnam and those that are being exposed now, especially the photos that emerged from the prison at Abu Ghraib. After the mess hit the fan (and who else but the media to expose it, Roy?), Bush went on television last week to apologise to increasingly angry Arabs, telling them "this was not the American way". Oh yeah?

It seems that Bush forgot (he dodged the draft anyway) the multiple atrocities US forces committed in Vietnam. Like kicking "Viet Congs" (a derisive term, along with "gooks" (they had labelled anyone fighting with North Vietnam) out of helicopters-in-flight. Like going"turkey shooting" as farmers tilled the soil, just to satisfy the "body count" their commanders demanded of them. Like unleashing "agent orange" a deadly, carcinogenic defoliant that led to the early deaths-by-cancer of thousands of Vietnamese, and even their own troops. Has Bush forgotten the "carpet bombing" of Vietnam that levelled entire cities and killed tens of thousands? Or the use of napalm against ordinary Vietnamese? One news photograph of a girl running away from a napalm attack, her skin aflame, captured the Pulitzer Prize. Another that showed a South Vietnamese general shooting a "Viet Cong" to the head, taken by the photographer upon bullet-impact, also won a Pulitzer. So what exactly is "the American way" of fighting war, of holding prisoners?

I'll tell you what it is. It's Bush being allowed to be a law unto himself (which is why Kerry is speaking of "returning the US to the world community of nations"), to degenerate into the most lawless president ever. From the moment he was allowed to set up a secret prison at Guantanamo, and the world refused to speak out against this violation of all the rules of war, he became a renegade. Ordinary Afghans, and even foreigners caught in the Kabul crossfire, were held, blindfolded, and taken to that enclave in Cuba to face unspeakable terror.

By the time the war against Iraq was launched in March last year, his troops had already fine-tuned the art of torture. So having female soldiers join their male counterparts in the total dehumanisation of Iraqi males, was nothing new. In fact, Bush should not have apologised. He should have told the world that "this the American way". For indeed it is, and always has been. America as a nation was forged from the blood of millions of indigenous "Indians".

So, pettily and pettishly, Shah slanders the president, the entire U.S. military, and the U.S. itself. No one reading this piece would imagine that Raffique Shah is aware that the U.S. was attacked by Islamic terrorists in 1983, 1993, and 2001. Shah, a revolutionary in his own mind from his days in the TT Regiment when he would have -- if he and his cohorts had been able -- overthrown the legitimately elected PNM government during the 1970s, wilfully ignores any facts that might grant his diatribe any semblance of balance.

To achieve this, he must ignore context and history; Shah does this, and so conveys the impression that events occur in a vacuum. Thus, if the U.S. detains men in Afghanistan, it is because the U.S. is unjust; if the U.S. defeated and decimated the indigienous population of this country, it is because the U.S. is genocidal; if U.S. soldiers killed Viet Cong it is because the U.S. is racist and genocidal. The great weakness of 20th and 21st century writers and thinkers (Shah is not included in this latter group) is their inability to regard history through anything but the lens of their own time and its socio-cultural values. By so doing, they make flawed judgments of past events without regard for the sensibility of the times in which the events occurred.

Shah's blinders preclude him from perceiving how the nature of warfare has altered with the advance of history; that America's war against the indigenous people of this continent was entirely consistent with other wars of up to and including that time (see Thomas Sowell's writings for more on this); that the U.S.'s mode of waging war has altered over time becoming more humanitarian with regard to civilians; and, that a country which has been attacked has a right to defend itself and to strike pre-emptively to forestall future attacks. Shah, a Marxist, would also have some trouble comprehending why the huge South Vietnamese community in California totally rejects communism to the extent that they will not fly the flag of communist Vietnam.

While none of this excuses the near extermination of the indigenous peoples of America, nor the dropping of napalm, the point of the matter is that events have context. If the event is to be properly understood, it would be folly to disregard the context for therein does the event find its meaning. Moreover, the socio-historical context of an event requires that the values of another time not be brought to bear on that of an earlier.

The amazing thing about this piece is that Shah, a former soldier, seems to have no sense of what "dodged the draft" really means; the alternative is that Shah is believing Democrat spin that several years service in the National Guard flying a dangerous jet is the equivalent of avoiding military service by unscrupulous means, a la Bill Clinton. That TT does not and never had a "draft" does not excuse Shah's abysmal ignorance of the expression's meaning. As a journalist, he owed it to himself and his readers to discover the meaning of words and expressions that he might write sensibly and informatively.