Bush's Epaulettes New Ruskin College
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Lecture Notes: 12-19-04 Epaulettes
When I drive my car I remind myself that the other drivers, unlike me, are going home to their families, where they are loved. This is how I explain it. The world, life, would not make sense to me otherwise. There must be something that I am missing, that explains what I see: love.
How else to explain it?
This must be how you can go on. What appears to me as horrible cruelty, to you appears as only one small part of life. My devastation is for you, who love and are loved, a minor detail hardly worth notice.
And not just in the small things.
For example, it is now clear that our country went to war in Iraq without any plan for governance. For me this is shocking, scarcely believable. A tragedy is unfolding before me. But for you who go home to wives and children, to loving homes, this is . . . what?
You see I do not know. It is only a hypothesis of mine. I conjecture that you deal with these facts differently, but just how it is for you I can not even guess.
It was reported that the terrorists fled Fallujah and moved to Mosal. Yet there is no way to track them. When they left Fallujah there was no record made, nor was there when they arrived in Mosal. Then there was a report that perhaps three million Iranians have moved into southern Iraq. No one knows. And again, there was no census taken when we arrived, nor now, two years later.
People have been receiving aid, applying for work, exchanging old bank notes for new ones, registering births, marriages, deaths, yet in two years no system has been set up to record who lives in this place that has already claimed so many lives.
And as these reports come in there is a growing sense of alarm. Our men are there in a sea of people, nameless, faceless, strangers. They are traveling around in and among them, surrounded. There is no organization, no system has been put in place; month by month, year by year, lives are lost but there is no direction.
Recently it was announced that in Fallujah iris scans and fingerprints would be taken of the residents when they return. Return! Two years later we are now just starting to find out and make a record of who lives there? My god!
And then I think . . . well it is different for them. If you have a wife and family, a good paying job, a warm loving home to go home to, then, . . . things must be different for you.
There was a mutiny in a supply column. The newspapers reported that a “convoy” of 17 trucks was refused by our soldiers. You see . . . 17 trucks is not a convoy. 170 trucks, with several helicopters overhead, with armored cars, on a “military highway,” shut down to civilian traffic, at night, without lights, that is a convoy.
17 supply trucks is barely a supply column.
So what is going on? The colonels are rated by their unit’s “readiness.” And so they pump up the number of patrols their units have made. So many hundreds of patrols a week, so many thousand a month. It looks good on their service record, for their “service review.”
There is this line on their “service review” : Readiness. There is space there for a number. The bigger the number the better the review. (But you see Mr. MacNamara, this is the problem. What if the numbers you are capturing on your matrix are not reflective of a successful operation. What if your abstraction fails to capture those qualities that are needed? Then instead of directing the organization to victory, you simply misdirect it, confound it, turn it around in circles, Vi-et-nam.)
So 17 trucks were going to bump there way from one place to another. A patrol. A service mission. Keep them numbers coming.
Now as for strategy. Well we leave that for the nattily dressed gentleman in the oval office. (Did you notice that he has recently taken to sewing epaulettes on his golf jackets?) He took a three week old victory and turned it into two years of desultory negotiations. He has abandoned those who originally joined the governing council so he could negotiate a new government with some diplomat from the UN. The same corrupt UN that took the blood money from Hussein. The same corrupt UN that hired Hussein’s own security men who promptly helped blow up the UN’s headquarters in Baghdad and then cut an ran and to this day has refused to come back. Some negotiations. But the nattily dressed gentleman likes negotiations, it makes him feel apart of things.
You see there isn’t an Army badge with a wireless server in the center and with lightening bolts on either side and with an eagle on top. There is no Army unit that develops data bases of the civilian populations. You can not enter a name or a face and get a three dimensional map of where the person lives in Mosal, or a chart showing the family and clan relationships. Nor is there an Army badge for operating prisons to rehabilitate illiterate young men raised on hate. Nor is there an Army badge for mass communication and public relations.
And in any case none of these things are on the colonel’s service review.
So nothing gets done. There is no plan. No strategy. We load them on to the trucks and humvees. And off they go out into a see of Iraqis, whose names and faces and homes and clans and tribes are unknown. And the newspaper reporters call it a “convoy.”
There is no network of military highways that are closed to civilian traffic from 1800 to 0600. There are no military reservations. There are no double fenced borders with vehicle stop trenches and robotic sensors. No one thought to conduct a census. No photos have been taken of the young men of Iraq and scanned into the database. The troops do not have hard drives with those young men’s photos so that they will know everyone in their area. (Arrest anyone not on the hard drive.) There is no system of prison camps. No programs of indoctrination and education. No films about the mass murders under Saddam Hussein. No training work programs, for example, digging those double trenches along the borders.
So the terrorist are free to wander around in the “sea” of the people.
And our young people are bumping around down some dusty road.
And the colonels are piling up huge numbers.
And the nattily dressed gentleman is sitting in his oval room checking his shirt sleeves.
And I am looking at all of you. And I suppose that it must be love. That is the only way I can make sense out of it.
You look like heartless zombies, but maybe it is love . . . that I am missing.
www.NewRuskinCollege.com
Lecture Notes: 12-19-04 Epaulettes
When I drive my car I remind myself that the other drivers, unlike me, are going home to their families, where they are loved. This is how I explain it. The world, life, would not make sense to me otherwise. There must be something that I am missing, that explains what I see: love.
How else to explain it?
This must be how you can go on. What appears to me as horrible cruelty, to you appears as only one small part of life. My devastation is for you, who love and are loved, a minor detail hardly worth notice.
And not just in the small things.
For example, it is now clear that our country went to war in Iraq without any plan for governance. For me this is shocking, scarcely believable. A tragedy is unfolding before me. But for you who go home to wives and children, to loving homes, this is . . . what?
You see I do not know. It is only a hypothesis of mine. I conjecture that you deal with these facts differently, but just how it is for you I can not even guess.
It was reported that the terrorists fled Fallujah and moved to Mosal. Yet there is no way to track them. When they left Fallujah there was no record made, nor was there when they arrived in Mosal. Then there was a report that perhaps three million Iranians have moved into southern Iraq. No one knows. And again, there was no census taken when we arrived, nor now, two years later.
People have been receiving aid, applying for work, exchanging old bank notes for new ones, registering births, marriages, deaths, yet in two years no system has been set up to record who lives in this place that has already claimed so many lives.
And as these reports come in there is a growing sense of alarm. Our men are there in a sea of people, nameless, faceless, strangers. They are traveling around in and among them, surrounded. There is no organization, no system has been put in place; month by month, year by year, lives are lost but there is no direction.
Recently it was announced that in Fallujah iris scans and fingerprints would be taken of the residents when they return. Return! Two years later we are now just starting to find out and make a record of who lives there? My god!
And then I think . . . well it is different for them. If you have a wife and family, a good paying job, a warm loving home to go home to, then, . . . things must be different for you.
There was a mutiny in a supply column. The newspapers reported that a “convoy” of 17 trucks was refused by our soldiers. You see . . . 17 trucks is not a convoy. 170 trucks, with several helicopters overhead, with armored cars, on a “military highway,” shut down to civilian traffic, at night, without lights, that is a convoy.
17 supply trucks is barely a supply column.
So what is going on? The colonels are rated by their unit’s “readiness.” And so they pump up the number of patrols their units have made. So many hundreds of patrols a week, so many thousand a month. It looks good on their service record, for their “service review.”
There is this line on their “service review” : Readiness. There is space there for a number. The bigger the number the better the review. (But you see Mr. MacNamara, this is the problem. What if the numbers you are capturing on your matrix are not reflective of a successful operation. What if your abstraction fails to capture those qualities that are needed? Then instead of directing the organization to victory, you simply misdirect it, confound it, turn it around in circles, Vi-et-nam.)
So 17 trucks were going to bump there way from one place to another. A patrol. A service mission. Keep them numbers coming.
Now as for strategy. Well we leave that for the nattily dressed gentleman in the oval office. (Did you notice that he has recently taken to sewing epaulettes on his golf jackets?) He took a three week old victory and turned it into two years of desultory negotiations. He has abandoned those who originally joined the governing council so he could negotiate a new government with some diplomat from the UN. The same corrupt UN that took the blood money from Hussein. The same corrupt UN that hired Hussein’s own security men who promptly helped blow up the UN’s headquarters in Baghdad and then cut an ran and to this day has refused to come back. Some negotiations. But the nattily dressed gentleman likes negotiations, it makes him feel apart of things.
You see there isn’t an Army badge with a wireless server in the center and with lightening bolts on either side and with an eagle on top. There is no Army unit that develops data bases of the civilian populations. You can not enter a name or a face and get a three dimensional map of where the person lives in Mosal, or a chart showing the family and clan relationships. Nor is there an Army badge for operating prisons to rehabilitate illiterate young men raised on hate. Nor is there an Army badge for mass communication and public relations.
And in any case none of these things are on the colonel’s service review.
So nothing gets done. There is no plan. No strategy. We load them on to the trucks and humvees. And off they go out into a see of Iraqis, whose names and faces and homes and clans and tribes are unknown. And the newspaper reporters call it a “convoy.”
There is no network of military highways that are closed to civilian traffic from 1800 to 0600. There are no military reservations. There are no double fenced borders with vehicle stop trenches and robotic sensors. No one thought to conduct a census. No photos have been taken of the young men of Iraq and scanned into the database. The troops do not have hard drives with those young men’s photos so that they will know everyone in their area. (Arrest anyone not on the hard drive.) There is no system of prison camps. No programs of indoctrination and education. No films about the mass murders under Saddam Hussein. No training work programs, for example, digging those double trenches along the borders.
So the terrorist are free to wander around in the “sea” of the people.
And our young people are bumping around down some dusty road.
And the colonels are piling up huge numbers.
And the nattily dressed gentleman is sitting in his oval room checking his shirt sleeves.
And I am looking at all of you. And I suppose that it must be love. That is the only way I can make sense out of it.
You look like heartless zombies, but maybe it is love . . . that I am missing.
www.NewRuskinCollege.com
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