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theAutumn45
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Joined: Oct 28, 2005
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 Posted:
Feb 06, 2007 - 11:18 PM |
 
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| Post subject: Cluster Bombs - The Vishnu Strategy |
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IB07Ak02.html
The Vishnu strategy meets its match
By Conn Hallinan
The Supreme Lord said: "I am death, the mighty destroyer of the world, out to destroy." According to the great Hindu text Bhagavad-Gita, Vishnu delivered that speech to Prince Arjuna before a great battle almost eight millennia ago.
Physicist Robert Oppenheimer paraphrased it in 1945 to describe the explosion of the first atomic bomb. The latest channeling of the Hindu god can be found in an Israeli commander's evaluation of last summer's war with Lebanon: "What we did was insane and monstrous: we covered entire towns in cluster bombs."
The commander was decrying the way Israel, the United States and Britain wage war these days, which has increasingly become an exercise in mass destruction. In the past five years, Vishnu has visited Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon. The result has been death and ruin on a biblical - or more aptly, a Bhagavad-Gita - scale.
During last summer's 34-day war, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) dropped some 4 million cluster munitions on southern Lebanon. According to United Nations relief coordinator David Shearer, "Nearly all of these munitions were fired in the last three or four days of the war." At least a million of these unexploded bombs are still waiting in ambush for unwary farmers and children.
The IDF destroyed airports, harbors, water and sewage plants, electrical generators, 80 bridges, 94 roads, more than 900 businesses and 30,000 homes. Retreating Israeli soldiers systematically destroyed the infrastructure of villages and deliberately polluted water tanks and wells. According to the Lebanese government, some 1,189 Lebanese were killed, 4,399 wounded, and one-quarter of Lebanon's population - about a million in all - were turned into refugees.
Lebanon is hardly unique.
Since the Gulf War in 1991, according to Handicap International, the United States and Britain have dropped more than 13 million cluster bombs on Iraq and strewn the countryside with more than 500 tons of toxic depleted-uranium ammunition. A Johns Hopkins University study found that anywhere from 426,369 to 793,663 Iraqis have died since the March 2003 invasion. The war has also driven 1.8 million Iraqis out of their country and created 1.6 million internal refugees.
Since January 2006, almost 4,000 people have died in Afghanistan, more than 1,000 of them civilians. The United States has dropped more than three times the number of bombs on that country over the past six months as it did in its first three-year campaign against the Taliban. B-1 bombers routinely unload more than 8,500 kilograms of explosives during bombing runs, while AC-130 gunships, spitting 155-millimeter howitzer shells and tens of thousands of 40mm cannon shells, prowl the skies. In September, an AC-130 killed 31 shepherds.
Three of the most powerful armies in the world attacked countries that are only marginally in the same century as Israel, the US and Britain. Yet in spite of overwhelming firepower, Israel was fought to a standstill in Lebanon, the Americans in Iraq are in increasingly desperate straits, and British forces in Afghanistan, according to their former chief of staff, General Peter Inge, face the possibility of outright defeat.
Has the Vishnu strategy met its match?
There was a time when a handful of British regulars ruled the South Asian subcontinent, when a few brigades of US marines could keep Central America safe for the United Fruit Co, and when the IDF smashed far larger armies in a week of fighting. But the British faced mostly tribal warriors, and the marines were up against unarmed peasants. The Arab armies were big, but poorly led and technologically inferior.
All empires - whether they are based on colonies or economic domination - depend on uneven development. There was a time when industrial capitalism was all-powerful, and when the people it conquered often did not even think of themselves as "nations". When the people in one of those conquered countries did think of themselves as a nation, the maintenance of empire became a rockier affair. Tiny Ireland tied down more British regulars in the 19th century than did India.
Eventually the emergence of nationalism made it impossible for the colonial powers to retain direct sovereignty over Asia, Africa and the Middle East, though many of those former colonies are still economic and political vassals. The British withdrew because they suddenly faced hundreds of millions of people who were united in wanting them out and, if push came to shove, would fight to make it so.
The great powers retreated, but they always believed that their superior military power and their willingness to use the Vishnu strategy gave them a final vote in matters concerning their interests. For many, that illusion of superiority held even when reality demonstrated the opposite. Hence revisionists like US
Vice President Dick Cheney currently argue that the United States lost the Vietnam War not because of the impossibility of defeating an entire nation but because the US political and military leadership lacked sufficient resolve.
The bipartisan Vishnu
Unfortunately, the hallucination that war is still a relevant strategy is not confined to the neo-conservatives and a few right-wing
Republicans. Many US Democrats share it as well, even if they happen to disagree with the current White House about the tactics of employing military power.
The Democrats have voted overwhelmingly to support the almost US$600 billion yearly military budget, including the unneeded $65 billion F-22 program and the $256.6 billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter plane that no one seems to want. Lockheed Martin, which makes both the F-22 and the F-35, has contributed generously to the campaign of Missouri Democrat Ike Skelton, the new chairman of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee and a chief supporter of expanding the US Army and Marine Corps.
Rhode Island Democrat Jack Reed, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, recently endorsed President George W Bush's proposal to enlarge the ground forces. "I have been calling for such an expansion for several years," he told the press.
In a recent editorial, the New York Times called such an expansion essential for the kind of "extended clashes" the US will face in the future from "ground-based insurgents". But "extended clashes" are exactly the kinds of wars that make military superiority irrelevant. The Bush administration's "surge" of troops into Iraq will make not an iota of difference, any more than the Vietnam escalations did a generation ago.
The cost, however, is extraordinary. The Department of Defense will spend $2.3 trillion over the next five years - actually more if you count nuclear weapons, veterans' benefits, and the cost of the wars themselves. The price tag for Iraq alone is $450 billion and climbing.
All this massive (and expensive) firepower does achieve something: unprecedented death and destruction. The Israeli bombers created vast destruction in Lebanon, and three-decade-old cluster bombs are still blowing up Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians. Iraq may find it harder to recover from its "liberation" than it did from the Mongol invasions. We cannot "win", but like the Romans of old, we can sow the earth with salt. What we reap will not be acquiescence or compliance, however.
Commenting on the recent Lebanon war, Augustus Richard Norton, a former army officer who served in southern Lebanon and currently teaches at Boston University, pointed out that previous Israeli invasions and occupations created the conditions for the recent war. "Hezbollah had 20 years to hone their skills and hatred against Israel," he said. "That hatred was created by Israel; it wasn't there in the beginning."
Substitute the United States or Britain for Israel. Shift the locale to Iraq or Afghanistan. And that's where the Vishnu strategy gets you in the end.
Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist |
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frenchlover1999
Shanghai Royalty
Joined: Sep 18, 2004
Posts: 8730
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Feb 07, 2007 - 12:16 AM |
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Good article. The scum of humanity: the zionists and their anglosaxon servants. |
_________________
That was no shark. That was my personal submarine. But enough of this polite conversation. What is the purpose of your visit? |
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wolfy
Fire-eater
Joined: Sep 13, 2004
Posts: 2510
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| Posted:
Feb 07, 2007 - 09:15 AM |
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Henry_Chinaski
Board Lord
Joined: Aug 16, 2003
Posts: 5025
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| Posted:
Feb 07, 2007 - 02:35 PM |
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Great article.
Apparently those that dont understood are those that dont want to understand. |
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theAutumn45
Rocker
Joined: Oct 28, 2005
Posts: 796
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| Posted:
Feb 09, 2007 - 09:29 PM |
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Letters on the above article:
Conn Hallinan responds to readers
I was frankly distressed to learn that Asia Times Online has removed my commentary, The Vishnu strategy meets its match (Feb 7) from its website because you received a number of letters suggesting that I was insulting the Hindu religion. I assure you that was not my intention. The title of the commentary came from a remark made by Robert Oppenheimer following the detonation of the first atomic bomb at the Trinity test site in New Mexico. His exact quote (from Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb, page 676) was: "I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him he takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become death, the destroyer of the worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or the other." In researching the quote I found that Oppenheimer had edited it slightly. The most accepted translation is "The Supreme Lord said: I am death, the mighty destroyer of the world, out to destroy" (chapter 11, verse 32). I also found that the speaker is actually Shiva who takes on the form of Vishnu (the reference to Shiva was dropped in the editing process). The concept of "destroyer" is a powerful one, and one that many religions use. One letter writer said that I should have used the Christian Armageddon (I assumed the writer thought I was a Christian; I am not), but Armageddon is not about destruction per se, it is about the great battle that is supposed to be fought in present-day Israel between the forces of Zog and the followers of Jesus. It would supposedly bring on the Second Coming. The suggestion by the letter writer is, I suppose, as casual as my use of the phrase from Oppenheimer. The letter writer is wrong in his use of Armageddon, but I certainly take no offense, and I doubt most Christians would. What I was doing in the commentary was using the words in the context that Oppenheimer used them: What have we done? What have we unleashed upon the world? That is the context that he used it in (he also compared what his team had done to Prometheus). The US, Israel, Britain and some other nations have increasingly resorted to being "mighty destroyers". I also referred to the ability of those nations to unleash mayhem of "biblical proportions." I hope that phrase does not offend Christians, but it is a phrase based on the kinds of destruction the Christian Lord rains down on any number of occasions. I am disturbed that Asia Times Online withdrew my commentary based on the fact that people didn't like it. Isn't the idea of commentaries to provoke discussion? Shouldn't Asia Times Online have printed the letters and let people debate the question? Granted, the focus of my commentary had nothing to do with religion, but still and all, debate is debate. Maybe there are others out there who happen to have a somewhat different view than most the letter writers. How will we know this? If we censor ideas because we fear they may offend someone, why have different ideas? There are certainly Christians who would take offense at one letter writer's casual suggestion of substituting Armageddon, and maybe me using the Bible to describe what the US does in Iraq and Israel in Lebanon. Do we not run such a letter or a commentary because those people might be offended? What article will be withdrawn next? Last, the tone of the letters directed at the commentary and myself is revealing. There is whiff of fundamentalism in them that chills me. Debate, disagreement, even correction are what we should be seeking, not attack and denunciation. The last thing this world needs is more sectarianism. It leads to the very kind of policies I was attempting to challenge.
Conn M Hallinan
Foreign Policy In Focus (Feb 9, '07)
A reader responds to readers
Conn Hallinan has written an essay [The Vishnu strategy meets its match, Feb 7] that, as the editor observed [under Karigar's letter of Feb 7], "made salient points". It deserves to be widely read and pondered. On the other hand, the "Vishnu" analogy was indeed unwarranted, because, for one, as the God who acts (vish), he is guardian of the dharma (the cosmic law) and as such is as much life-bearer as death-bringer; actually, Vishnu is more a force of conservation than anything else, and though that makes him a natural ally of the forces of life, this also implies due destruction, in the same way that any kind of complex life necessitates impermanence and death (without apoptosis and cellular death, pluricellular life would only be a lump of cancerous cells). [Second], Hallinan was pointing to the unfortunate tendency of the English, UStatians and Israelis, for massively destroying any people who stand in their way, often with some sort of religious varnish - accordingly, an "Armageddon" or a "Sodom and Gomorrah" religious analogy would be more fitting, culturally. Considering that these Anglo-Christo-Zionist forces of war and death are still rampaging for even more destruction, articles like Hallinan's are a service to human society. Accordingly, may I suggest to ATol to bring back to their website, properly modified so as to avoid an unnecessary distraction from its main point, an otherwise fine article?
Dr Bittar Gabriel Jivasattha
Switzerland and Australia (Feb 9, '07)
Our original comment was a bit misleading; the article was not deleted but was removed from the Front Page, and is still available on the Middle East Page; the links to it provided above also still work. We agree that the gist of the article made valuable points, but we have learned from hard experience that almost any religious analogy, accurate or otherwise, gets some people in such a froth that there's little point arguing about it. - ATol |
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