war : mackenzian

Blasting away tomorrow

April 13, 2017 By mackenzian

On a deep black field, a brilliant blue Earth with swirly clouds criss-crossing the continent of Africa. — Photo credits: International Space Station and NASA

I remember reading about Agent Orange in accounts of Vietnam. Zyklon B appeared in reports on Nazi Germany’s concentation camps, and Scud missiles dominated Cold War headlines. When I later studied the lead-up to the 2002 invasion of Iraq, it was WMDs all day: biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons governed by treaties, held illicitly, and responsible for trauma to thousands and thousands of people across the Middle East and North Africa.

Today, while I ate a high-hipster fried chicken sandwich (premium sub roll, fresh dill mayo, provolone cheese, and spicy pickled cucumber slices), the United States Army dropped a Massive Ordnance Air Blast missile on Achin, a small province in eastern Afghanistan. Reports are that this miserable missile cost just under $16 million, and the US bought twenty of them six years ago. Yes, that’s right: someone else was president at the time.

The United States has now been conducting military campaigns in Afghanistan for sixteen consecutive years. I’m old enough to remember when the war was framed as recompense for the September 11 attacks in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. But these days, with no more frontpage counts of US deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or any other warzone, the war isn’t a common topic.

Three years before 9/11, a little further southeast of the area that the United States decimated today, India and Pakistan were playing nuclear chicken.

India tested its nuclear capability in May 1998 by exploding devices underground. Western nations quickly closed ranks and sanctioned India, but that only deepened its government’s resolve to use its weapons as symbols of nationalistic power and global significance.

They went so far as to call it Operation Shakti!

Arundhati Roy wrote about the futility of those tests that same year, and I thought of her comments in the aftermath of today’s non-nuclear blast:

If there is a nuclear war, our foes will not be China or America or even each other. Our foe will be the earth herself. The very elements — the sky, the air, the land, the wind and water — will all turn against us. Their wrath will be terrible…

Though we are separate countries, we share skies, we share winds, we share water. Where radioactive fallout will land on any given day depends on the direction of the wind and rain. Lahore and Amritsar are thirty miles apart. If we bomb Lahore, Punjab will burn. If we bom Karachi, then Gujarat and Rajasthan, perhaps even Bombay, will burn. Any nuclear war with Pakistan will be a war against ourselves.” — Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination

Today’s bombing is the latest gambit of one nation against a decentralized non-state actor and the two have been trading death and crossing borders for a decade and a half now.

If both Roy and I are right that our destinies are tied, then no matter who claims post-skirmish victory, there will be no winners.

“The first rewrite of the draft of history”

December 13, 2016 By mackenzian

Cartoon of open newspaper with "Correction" advertisement: "The Downing St memo seems to be at odds with pretty much anything you remember seeing and hearing in the media in the runup to the Iraq war. Your memory is in error. We regret your mistake. — Tom Toles’ “The first draft of the rewrite of history” (July 2005)

Tom Toles has drawn editorial cartoons for the Washington Post since 2002. The Post published “The first rewrite of the draft of history” in 2005 after British papers broke news about “highly sensitive” meetings of British intelligence officers, Cabinet members, political strategists, and communications specialists, and representatives of the United States.

At these meetings, later minuted in the aforementioned “memo,” US officials reportedly outlined their commitment to pursuing war in Iraq. July 2002 was long before the US government had secured Congressional approval for a military intervention.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.” —Matthew Rycroft, July 23, 2002

Within three years of this memo, the British parliament convened two inquiries into how the government talked about weapons of mass destruction and managed intelligence data-collection. The country had to wait 14 more years to get reports from a third inquiry that focused on the war itself and required key members of the Blair administration to answer for their decisions about it.

In those 14 years, I moved to the US, completed one degree, started another, studied and published on the government’s mash-up of rhetoric and the “science” of secret intelligence, and moved across country again.

Over that same period, people involved in designing the Iraq invasion kept busy rewriting conventional wisdom about it.

So I wasn’t altogether surprised this week to see US Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi make claims about the US intelligence community that didn’t match the history or government inquiry findings or my own memory. It reminded me of Toles’ cartoon, which so pointedly pokes at the stories administrations weave for themselves—and then expect us all to believe.

More on the Japanese internment

November 19, 2016 By mackenzian

This week, George Takei shared more about his experience with socially marginalized people and marginalizing social laws.

I referred to his 2014 TED talk in last night’s post; this morning, he published a new reflection on his life in a United States internment camp.

The United States apologized for locking up Japanese Americans. Have we learned nothing?” —George Takei

Read it: “They interned my family. Don’t let them do it to Muslims.” (Washington Post, November 18, 2016)

Reflections on the US-Japanese Internment

November 17, 2016 By mackenzian

Lately I’ve been honoring the Santayana quotation about being doomed to repetition by referring my readers to history:

Habit and memory are a sort of heredity within the individual… Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained[,] infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” —George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1906

As the next administration’s proxies invoke the prison camps where the United States held 120,000 Japanese-American people for four years during World War II, those who lived through that experience are recounting their memories for our benefit.

Actor George Takei shared his experience with an audience in Kyoto, Japan, two years ago. He recalled the day soldiers walked up his drive to force his family out of their house. “I will never be able to forget that scene,” he said. “It is burned into my memory.” At the time, he was five years old.

These things don’t just happen, however. They creep, and we adjust, and they creep some more.

Prior to the Bosnian genocide starting, the same Islamophobic rhetoric seen in the U.S, was spread throughout the former Yugoslavia. ‘Muslims are terrorists,’ ‘They want to spread Sharia Law.’ ‘They want your women to wear hijabs.’ All of that stuff we’ve ignored… Genocide is a slow process, you know… and it starts with words and instilling fear into the people. We’re past that in the U.S.” —Arnesa Buljusmic-Kustura (November 17, 2016)

“You’re worried about a future that’s already here,” Ayesha Siddiqi also wrote last night. “[It] just didn’t touch you yet.” I joke sometimes about the U.S. government being overfamiliar with my iris patterns—because I was required to submit them with other biometric data more than a decade ago. But it’s really not a joke. It’s more than just bureaucracy.

And that’s why I keep writing about history and why others, like Takei and Buljusmic-Kustura keep recounting the targeting they’ve lived through. We do it with the hope that the more we tell these stories, the more that more of us will be able to perceive the social and legal patterns behind and around us; that we’ll use that perception to help us better notice and intervene in the experiences of others; and that, given opportunity, when the old, old story cracks open at this chapter again, we will choose differently than we have before.

Nothing will change until we do.

A Writing November

October 31, 2013 By mackenzian

I’ve decided to participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo 2013), and will be using the 50,000 word-challenge to reboot my research on the British executive branch’s structure, values, personnel, and communications during the 18 months before the UK- and US invaded Iraq.*

This year marked the 10th anniversary of the March 2003 invasion and the 8th year since I began to study how the Blair administration rendered Saddam Hussein’s Iraq “non-compliant” with international protocols on weapons of mass destruction and an “imminent” threat to the UK national interest.

I’ve already written and presented about this case for other communication academics (Popular Culture Association, 2008; Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 2009), and I’ve also written a 150-page doctoral study about it with a bibliography nearly 25 pages long. I may write for these readers again in the future, but not next month.

November is about writing about the British executive branch, weapons of mass destruction, secrecy, freedom of information, and civil servants, not for other academics and not as part of a degree program, but for members of the public: people like you who are savvy and curious, who don’t necessarily know a lot about the details of this case, and who care about good governance and want to read high-quality, engaging content about it.

I’m not going to write and revise next month, though; I’m just going to write. By the end of the month, I’ll know whether I have it in me to turn this year-old baby into a book in 2014.

My goals for November are simple enough, and I’m declaring them here to increase the risk:

Write ~2,000 words six days each week for 30 days, or a minimum of 1,670 words daily.
Focus on generating these 50,000-50,100 words, rather than fretting about whether they are good words.
Remember how much I love this project and wonder why it’s taken me so long post-graduation to return to it.

If you’d like to track my progress through November, there’ll be a word count widget in the right column of my homepage. And if you have a fiction or non-fiction book in you too, then you still have a day to sign up! As of tonight, nearly 190,000 other writers are waiting for you.

Expect an update on this from me in a few weeks.

* This intention marks me as a NaNo Rebel. Good luck to all the novelists too!

Blasting away tomorrow

“The first rewrite of the draft of history”

More on the Japanese internment

Reflections on the US-Japanese Internment

A Writing November

Join the Inner Circle

Work With Keisha

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