Today is the day we dedicate to remembering and honoring our military veterans, men and women who march into the hell of war to protect our way of life.  Many of us have come to increasingly believe that the best way to support our troops is by not sending them into wars based on lies, against a shifting cast of amorphous enemies, like the long war in Iraq, the endless, senseless destruction in Afghanistan.  John Kerry’s questions resonate as loudly today as they did when he got back from his tour in Vietnam, another futile, costly faraway war against a people who posed no threat to us, premised on the shakiest of foundations.  “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?  How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

For starters, you make him volunteer.   Forced redeployments, extended tours, traumatic brain injuries (the Pentagon’s count is 320,000 from 2001 to June 2015*), amputations, quadriplegia, PTSD, poor services from the VA, countless veteran suicides — the cost of honoring our brave troops.  The ones who scream loudest about America’s need to send troops and kill them over there so they can’t kill us here are generally the most silent on these terrible costs to the troops whose service they claim to honor.

Relying on my memory yesterday, and intent on relaying the story of an innocent individual, a sixty-seven year old midwife, Mamana Bibi, killed by a U.S. drone strike in a remote village mistakenly identified as harboring terrorists, I neglected to adequately report on Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis’ chilling interview on Face the Nation.   Fortunately, CBS published a transcript, which I’ve just read and which I will comb through a bit for you.

Secretary Mattis, regarded as the “adult in the room” and a “voice of reason” in the Trump administration, described our new military posture to interviewer John Dickerson.   Mattis said “…the bottom line is we are going to move in an accelerated and reinforced manner, throw them on their back foot.” He described how we have shifted from a policy of attrition in Iraq and Syria, in our current war against ISIS, to one of annihilation.   He explained.  We are no longer going to push them back, we are going to surround and destroy them. Under this new policy we are going to kill them all over there so none survive to come and kill us here.  

Mattis described how American and Iraqi forces are surrounding ISIS in places like Racca, an ISIS stronghold.  “And once surrounded, then we’ll go in and clean them out,” Mattis said, in a phrase that brings “ethnic cleansing” to mind. I realize this is a cheap rhetorical play on my part.  “Ethnic cleansing”, of course, is the mass murder of defenseless civilians whose only crime is belonging to a certain ethnic group, Mattis is talking about killing really bad people who choose to do exceedingly evil things.   Still, ‘clean them out’ is too similar to ‘surgical strike’, the kind of positive-sounding, antiseptic language that should never be allowed in any discussion of mass killing.  

Mattis then talks about the necessity of “getting the big ideas right” as he endorses his Commander in Chief’s delegation of command decisions to the commanders on the ground.   Mattis then utters a curious and highly debatable sentence to back up the wisdom of this big idea:  “there is no corporation in the world that would, in a competitive environment, try and concentrate all decisions at the corporate level.”

He then assures America that we have not changed the rules of engagement. “There is no relaxation of our attention to protect the innocent. We do everything we can to protect the civilians, and actually lowering– delegating the authority to the lower level allows us to do this better.”  Mattis also recognizes that a certain number of civilian deaths are, unfortunately, unavoidable when fighting an evil enemy.  “Civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation. We do everything humanly possible consistent with military necessity, taking many chances to avoid civilian casualties at all costs.”

In other words, pay no attention to a video of civilian rescuers machine gunned by an American gun crew while carrying other wounded civilians to a van to rush them to the hospital.  Americans are never supposed to see these kinds of videos, which are illegally released to the public by traitors like the transsexual Private Manning.   Civilians we are unable to protect are called ‘collateral damage’, and though the death of civilians has, unfortunately, increased under America’s muscular new policy, Mattis disputes whether increased American bombing, and a declared policy of surround and annihilate, actually have killed so many more civilians.  

Asked about the hundred civilians recently turned into “collateral damage” after American bombing in Mosul, Mattis was not so sure we did it.  “We believe we found residue that was not consistent with our bomb. So we believe that what happened there was that ISIS had stored munitions in a residential location. Showing, once again, the callous disregard that has characterized every operation they have run.”   Our belief that ISIS probably did it confirms that the hundred civilian deaths probably had little to do with our bombing.   He comforts with this reassurance, which includes a candid admission:   “We are the good guys. We’re not the perfect guys, but we are the good guys. And so we’re doing what we can.”

Not surprisingly, the threat to humiliate our enemy comes from the very top. Dickerson asks Mattis “President Trump has said, to defeat ISIS ‘There has to be a humiliation of ISIS.’ What does that mean?”  Mattis elaborates.  “It’s also a fight about ideas. And we have got to dry up their recruiting. We have got to dry up their fundraising.  The way we intend to do it is to humiliate them, to divorce them from any nation giving them protection, and humiliating their message of hatred, of violence.”

Mattis concludes his explanation of our  new smash-mouth policy of annihilation and humiliation with these pious and indisputable words:  “Anyone who kills women and children is not devout.  They have– they cannot dress themselves up in false religious garb and say that somehow this message has dignity.”

I’ve probably dignified these comments more than they deserve, speaking of messages that claim to have dignity.  In the fight about ideas, the side that turns a beloved sixty-seven year-old village midwife into chopped meat, and is, by its own humble admission, not perfect, probably does not hold the moral high ground.  John Kerry described routinized atrocities that he participated in while deployed in the supremely violent mistake in Vietnam.

“There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50-caliber machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare, all of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this is ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant [William] Calley, are war criminals.”    source  **   

Here in the land of the free and the home of the brave we learn absolutely nothing from our own recent history.  So, that said, by all means, as we celebrate Memorial Day and honor the many sacrifices of our all volunteer armed forces, and prefer the lesser evil (to us) of remote controlled killing to boots on the ground, let’s humiliate and annihilate them over there, so they don’t humiliate and annihilate us over here.   That’s surely the best, and only, way to win this existential war of ideas.  God bless.

*   Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America at p. 57

**   Kerry said this on Meet The Press on April 18, 1971, he testified before the Fulbright Committee a few days later.   The link takes you to the minutes of the Senate hearing.  He made similar comments in his testimony before the Committee, which is timely and well worth reading, but without the direct, personal mea culpa.