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Official US Army photograph
As the new Obama Administration takes the reins of the government – and with them, the heavy responsibilities at home and abroad – the President, Congress and the American public have to deal with two wars – one of necessity, one of choice – inherited from the now-departed President Bush.
The war of necessity – Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) – began on October 7, 2001 after the disastrous terrorist strikes against the United States on September 11 of that same year. It was in the Taliban-controlled nation where Osama Bin-Laden and his Al Qaeda mujahedin trained, equipped and indoctrinated thousands of extremist Islamic “holy warriors” for the struggle against the “Christian crusaders” and Israel. The Taliban said Bin Laden and his cronies were, by their interpretation of Islamic law, guests that were under their protection.
60 Years Before 9/11
Just as President Franklin D. Roosevelt was justified when he asked Congress to declare war on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor nearly 60 years earlier, President Bush acted properly when he authorized the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom, the government code name for a sweeping war against terrorists and the nations that sponsor them. Presently, Operation Enduring Freedom, or OEF, is under way in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, as well as in the Philippines and the Horn of Africa (including Somalia).
The former President had no choice except to conduct OEF in Afghanistan. When the international community asked the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden and his cronies, shut down the various terrorist camps and to allow U.S. inspections of all Al Qaeda facilities, Mullah Omar and his band of ultra-extremist Islamic “students” refused. In an echo of their earlier rejection of worldwide pleas for them to spare the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan from demolition – apparently because the centuries-old statues were a violation of the prohibition against idol worship – the Taliban declared that unless the U.S. handed them proof that Bin Laden had ordered the September 11 attacks or agreed to have him tried in an Islamic court, they would not comply.
Taliban destroyed ancient Buddhas
So even though Al Qaeda had assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, as a prelude to the September 11 attacks, the U.S.-led coalition (which is still comprised by 50 nations) attacked Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 from the air, land and sea. Within two months, the allies had crippled the Taliban military, Mullah Omar was driven out of his “capital” in Kandahar, and Osama Bin Laden and his cronies were cornered in the mountains near Tora Bora, on the border with Pakistan.
The War of Choice
Unfortunately, there were those within the Bush Administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Feith, who believed they had been handed a golden opportunity to “settle scores” with Saddam Hussein.
Since his inglorious defeat in 1991 after being ejected from Kuwait by the first President Bush and a 40-plus nation coalition, Saddam remained a defiant thug who still dreamed of being a pan-Arab ruler. He stubbornly clung to the concept of rule by terror in Iraq, and he vocally supported violent Palestinian groups that carried out suicide attacks against Israel, especially during the second intifada of 2000-2002.
Saddam was also suspected of authorizing a thwarted assassination attempt against George H.W. Bush when the former President was in Kuwait. Even though President Bill Clinton had retaliated by ordering a cruise missile attack on the headquarters of Iraqi Intelligence, the second Bush Administration made it clear that it bore a grudge against the Iraqi dictator.
Knowing that the post-September 11 mood was one of fearful anxiety, Bush and his cronies tried to rally the American public and the rest of the world in an anti-Saddam crusade by various means. First, they attempted to link Iraqi intelligence with Al Qaeda. This would have been plausible if Osama Bin Laden was not a religious zealot who thought Saddam was an apostate who used Islam as a cover for his actions. Thing is, Bin Laden had once offered the Saudi government that he’d lead the forces against Iraq in Kuwait if the Royal Family kicked out the hated Americans then entering Saudi Arabia in Operation Desert Storm. There was no way on Earth that Saddam would have risked his hide for a man who had offered to dethrone him, no matter if they had a common enemy.
Second, they trotted out the infamous “evidence” that Iraq still had chemical and biological weapons and was working on acquiring or building nuclear weapons. The country had had weapons of mass destruction before the first Gulf War and had used them both against Kurdish rebels and during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88). Indeed, as Saddam’s FBI interrogator later declared, the notion that Saddam’s regime still had even a fraction of its WMD stockpile was partially the late dictator’s own doing. Knowing that his once-powerful conventional forces were a shadow of their pre-Desert Storm selves, Saddam wanted Iran to be in the dark about the possible existence of WMDs in Iraq to deter an invasion by Tehran’s Islamic forces.
This bluff, plus the failure of the CIA and other intelligence agencies to investigate claims by “Curveball” – a shifty anti-Saddam defector – and Ahmed Chalabi, a well-known Iraqi ex-pat leader, that Iraq did have WMDs, was seized upon by the Bush Administration and used as a casus belli to justify its “war of choice” in Mesopotamia.
Perhaps believing that the U.S. had beaten Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan with a relative handful of NATO forces and Northern Alliance fighters, President Bush took his “eyes off the ball” from the war of necessity and reallocated crucial American intelligence and military resources to Iraq. It was as though he were trying to replicate President Roosevelt’s strategy of a two-front war during World War II, with Iraq substituting for Germany as the prime target, and Al Qaeda sitting in for Japan as the secondary objective.
The fallacy of this strategy is that America does not have the same size Army (18 million soldiers) as it did at the height of its power in 1945. The U.S. military may be more theoretically powerful than many because of its sophisticated weapons systems and its nuclear arsenal, but its resources are not limitless. The Army and Marines are hard pressed to fight the insurgents in Iraq and the resurgent Taliban/Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, and the two wars – one of necessity, the other of choice – are also straining the public’s support.
"The first casualty of war is the truth..." - Winston S. Churchill
"We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." –Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (referring to weapons of mass destruction, 2003)
It's almost impossible to believe this, but any young man or woman born on Jan. 17, 1991 - the date on which President George H. W. Bush's press secretary intoned the phrase "The liberation of Kuwait has begun..." - is now old enough to bear arms and risk his or her life in a tragic and unnecessary sequel to Desert Storm.
US, Iraqi and Polish troops in Iraq. Photo courtesy of US Army
If a Hollywood scriptwriter cut from the same satirical cloth as Terry Southern or a young Mel Brooks had written a Dr. Strangelove-like scenario in which a competent President's likeable but not-too-bright son is elected to the White House and revisits the dad's "unfinished business" in the Middle East and bungles it badly, he or she would have been laughed at by most producers. (Unless, of course, the producer was either a commie, a gambler who lost big in the Vegas casinos, or had the foresight of Nostradamus.)
UH 60 over Afghanistan - October 2006 - Courtesy of US Army
On the surface, Operation Iraqi Freedom has all the hallmarks of a typical - and bad - Hollywood sequel to a successful blockbuster. You have the evil Power Behind the Throne (Vice President Dick Cheney) who wants to finish a task he considers unfinished; Cheney was, remember, Bush Sr.'s Secretary of Defense. Like Darth Sidious in the much maligned Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Bush II's Veep is often thought as the true mover of events in Dubya's less-than-illustrious tenure as President.
You also have a big cast of henchmen and hapless straw figures, ranging from the often snippy Donald Rumsfeld to the upstanding yet outmaneuvered Colin Powell, whose one-term career as Secretary of State will be remembered for his assertion at the UN Security Council that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, in which he said, "Ladies and gentlemen, these are not assertions. These are facts, corroborated by many sources, some of them sources of the intelligence services of other countries."
If people still believe that flawed and false intelligence data from a deceitful Iraqi defector named Curveball and a well-known Iraqi exile leader named Chalabi are "corroborated facts," then it's possible that they'll buy a deed for a bridge in New York City from a vendor in Brooklyn, too.
Unfortunately, for that 18-year-old man or woman who for whatever reason - patriotism, family tradition, financial necessity, or the War on Terror - wants to wear the uniform and bear arms, Iraqi Freedom is not Desert Storm II, nor is it the "necessary war" in Afghanistan that began after Al Qaeda attacked the US on Sept. 11, 2001. It was a war of choice, waged for a variety of reasons - a son's desire to redeem a perceived flaw in his dad's foreign policy, a desire of a former SecDef to finish a fight against a defiant Saddam Hussein, or maybe a combination of all these, plus ignorance and arrogance.
And for the thousands of families on all sides - Iraqi and the American-led coalition - who have lost loved ones or have to tend to their wounded kin, what seems like a badly-written satire is, unfortunately, not very funny
Well, with 15 episodes – and one theatrical release “pilot episode” to boot – aired and with seven remaining to be seen on Time-Warner’s Cartoon Network, George Lucas’s animated Star Wars – The Clone Wars isn’t the “kid-video” disaster that many disgruntled “fan boys” claim it to be.
Given the importance of the Clone Wars to the Star Wars mythos – fans had wondered about this series of conflicts ever since it was mentioned in 1977’s Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope – because both Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker had distinguished themselves as Jedi Knights before “the dark times” of the Empire, it’s only natural that Lucas would want to explore the three-year period between the Battle of Geonosis and the defeat of General Grievous in greater detail. As Lucas himself explained it when the first 2-D Clone Wars “microseries” debuted in 2003, “we only get to see how the Clone Wars begin (in Episode II) and how they end (in Episode III.)
The official movie poster for Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Though many fans ignored the August 2008 feature-length movie Lucas and Catherine Winder produced to launch the series, it wasn’t (in my view, anyway) as watered-down-for-kids or as unwatchable as its detractors say it is. True, the Truman Capote-like Ziro the Hutt is not my favorite character – I find him less tolerable than, say, Jar Binks, and the “Thunderbirds”- like animation does take some getting used to, but the 98-minute-long movie is true to the pacing and sensibilities of the live action Episodes.
Not Like Hasbro’s GI Joe or Transformers
Even though the series does clash with the continuity already established in Cartoon Network’s 2-D Clone Wars series of 2003-2005 (supposedly the 100 episodes are “retconned” in between Episodes 21 and 25 of Genndy Tartakovsky’s “pilot series”), Star Wars: The Clone Wars is a gritty, sometimes violent, but entertaining look at the galactic conflict between the Galactic Republic, led by Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, and former Jedi Master Count Dooku’s Confederation of Independent Systems.
Like its Nelvana Productions animated forebears Droids and Ewoks animated series of the mid-1980s, Star Wars: The Clone Wars consists of 22-minute-long self-contained episodes, each one introduced with a moral ("Great leaders inspire greatness in others.").
However, though some episodes are stand-alone tales, quite a few form parts of story arcs that take place over a span of three or more episodes, such as the Jedi search-and-destroy mission against General Grievous’ Death Star-like battleship Malevolence. This allows writers such as Henry Gilroy to tell complex and even grown-up friendly tales without having to worry about “Oops, we only have 22 minutes to tell a tale in!”
Ahsoka and Anakin
And unlike Hasbro-sponsored kid-video animated series along the lines of GI Joe or Transformers – which to me were glorified toy commercials – the violence in Star Wars: The Clone Wars has consequences. In the aforementioned Malevolence story arc, Anakin Skywalker and his Padawan Ahsoka Tano agonize when they lose some of the Y-wing pilots they lead into battle. Other Jedi Masters – like Kit Fisto – lose Padawans to General Grievous and Count Dooku. Clone troopers – who now have distinct personalities viewers get to know and like as the series progresses – feel hunger, show emotion, joke, get hurt, and even die.
The Heroic Side of Anakin Skywalker
Although the troika of Anakin, Obi-Wan and Ahsoka is not featured in every episode, Star Wars: The Clone Wars gives fans of the future Darth Vader a good look at Luke and Leia’s father-to-be at a time when he’s still a Jedi hero. Sure, we see instances where his moodiness and impatience do surface, and his Jedi outfit does have a certain visual similarity to Vader’s, but the series mostly shows Anakin when his relationship with Obi-Wan isn’t so strained as it is in Episodes II and III. This, in my view, adds depth to the much maligned “whiny Anakin” character as played by Hayden Christensen in the live-action movies, plus makes his transition from Jedi hero to Sith Lord all the more tragic.
The Apparent Insanity of Online Reviewing
One of the questions that many people ask me is “If some online reviewing sites don’t pay writers a really worthwhile salary upfront, and yet you pour your heart and soul into your reviews as if you were writing them for, say, Entertainment Weekly, and you only earn what might be considered pennies for each, why do you bother
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]In my forty-plus years on this big, blue marble, I've lived through what the old Chinese curse calls "interesting times."
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Comment by Alex Diaz-Granados
on Facebook Is Evil (or i don't need to know what my ex boyfriend's new girlfriend looks like)
Random thoughts from a cluttered mind
I can sincerely say that I have been in similar situations and can really empathize with you.
Take care!