The amendments are another step in a campaign waged by congressional Republicans, religious right activists and their allies in a new organization, the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty, to protect military chaplains who discriminate against gay and lesbian service members. This campaign — infused with overheated rhetoric about repression and persecution of Christians — has emerged as a key piece of the religious right’s strategy of portraying the Obama administration and its allies as hostile to religion.

House Republicans have sought to portray anti-gay military chaplains as in need of protection to freely express their belief that homosexuality is a sin. Akin’s effort to protect the “conscience” rights of chaplains and religious service members “is trying to solve a problem that does not exist,” Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which fought for DADT repeal, said in a statement. Sarvis added that there are already adequate protections for chaplains’ and other service members’ consciences, and no one is being punished for their personal religious beliefs. Palazzo’s amendment conflicts with Defense Department policy requiring neutral use of facilities, according to SDLN.

Last year, similar amendments in the House version of the NDAA were stripped out in conference committee. But House Republicans have persisted in their push for “religious freedom” against the rights of gay and lesbian service members to be free of discrimination, harassment and stigmatization. It’s a fight, in Akin’s words, against “[t]his liberal agenda” that “has infiltrated our military, where service members and chaplains are facing recrimination for their sincerely held moral and religious beliefs.” Akin claimed that raising “moral or religious concerns” about same sex marriage or the DADT repeal “have become potentially career-ending” for some chaplains and charged that Obama’s support for same-sex marriage “will only add fuel to this fire.”

President Obama’s new position on marriage equality, the anti-gay activists claim, is yet more evidence that the government seeks to repress their religious speech and practices and eventually drive them out of the military.

“In part this was triggered by repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” said Ron Crews, a retired military chaplain and executive director of the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty. But he, too, tied his group’s activism to the broader claim that Obama is hostile to religious freedom.

“There’s just concern right now about this administration’s seeming lack of understanding of religious liberty issues, and this is just one symptom of that,” Crews told me. He cited the administration’s contraception coverage policy as another example. Since senior Defense Department officials are political appointees, he added, the legislative efforts are an attempt to “counterbalance” administration policy.

The Chaplain Alliance is made up of retired chaplains who are now “endorsing agents” for active military chaplains serving as representatives of their religious group or denomination. The Alliance is entirely Christian and represents 2,500 active chaplains, said Crews.

The military, said Crews, “has become another laboratory for social engineering” as the DADT repeal “validated behavior in the military that a good number of faith groups acknowledge as sinful behavior and so the government has put its stamp of approval on behavior that faith groups find sinful and harmful, actually, to the individual and to the broader society.”

To advocates for the rights of non-theists and non-Christians to be free from evangelism in the military, though, the military chaplains’ complaints ring hollow. “Chaplains are senior officers with their commanders’ ear, unfettered access to service members, and the right to preach their beliefs from the pulpit,” said Jason Torpy, president of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, which opposes the amendments and has worked to end discrimination against non-theists in the military. The MAAF has documented and advocated against aggressive evangelizing in the military, including command promotion of prayer, disparagement of non-believers, religious counseling and “spiritual fitness” programs (which promote Christianity as an essential part of military service), evangelical concerts and baptism of troops.

“These amendments are intended to give chaplains the additional power to force their beliefs on others by belittling and ridiculing fellow service members,” Torpy added. “When did the honorable concept of free exercise of religion give way to the free infliction of religion?”

“We think the language they have put forth would allow people the license to bully, and then blame it on their religion requires them to do this,” said Edwina Rogers, executive director of the Secular Coalition for America, which also opposes the amendments.

The Chaplain Alliance claims, however, that chaplains are the ones at risk of being bullied. In a letter to the House Armed Services Committee supporting a similar, stand-alone bill, the Military Religious Freedom Protection Act, the Chaplain Alliance ominously warned of a “hostility” to the chaplaincy that could cause them to lose their endorsements “because of their inability to preach, teach, or share with their fellow servants the full counsel of God,” leading to a “constitutional crisis” because “the military cannot function without the chaplaincy, much less a partial chaplaincy.”

But when I asked Crews about retaliation, he said, “we have not had any chaplains reprimanded as yet for anything they’ve said in the pulpit,” and admitted there are protections for chaplains speaking at a worship service. But, he added, “we’re not just concerned with what happens inside the walls of the chapel,” but with “the overall ministry of a chaplain.”

Crews pointed to the Strong Bonds program, which sponsors military retreats to help service members “strengthen” their marriages under the stress of multiple deployments. “The question becomes will chaplains be required to take same-sex soldiers on those retreats if the chaplain upholds the view of the definition of marriage from a biblical perspective that marriage is between one man and one woman. We’re just waiting right now for an incident to occur. This is one of the unknowns.”

Crews’ worry that chaplains will be forced, against their religious beliefs, to provide marriage counseling to same-sex couples underscores how the religious right has disregarded the Establishment Clause as it complains of religious persecution. Strong Bonds, which uses Christian materials, has long been a target of criticism from the Secular Coalition, the MAAF, and other advocates of church-state separation, for using federal money to lecture service members with sectarian religious advice.

Several years ago, Laurel Williams, an Army major who attended a Strong Bonds retreat in Orlando, Fla., in 2008, showed me an array of evangelistic materials she received there. One item was a book by Gary Chapman, described as the “leading biblical marriage counselor in the U.S.,” whose phrase “love your partner like Jesus loved the church was repeated over and over throughout the weekend seminar,” Williams told me. One book used in the program promised its readers that “you can be equipped to develop an affair with the one and only lover who can satisfy all your innermost desires: Jesus Christ.”

Torpy, of the military atheist group, obtained a copy of a strategy memorandum sent by an Akins aide to House staff and several religious right leaders, which shows Republicans decided to offer two separate amendments because it “gives us the strongest hand going into conference with the Senate.”

But Rogers said she had “high hopes” that the Senate would not adopt the amendments, even if they are passed by the House, and that they would once again be removed in conference. “To roll the clock back and say, now you can discriminate based on what you believe,” said Rogers, “sounds like a serious problem.” But discriminating based on their religion is exactly what the “religious freedom” crusaders want to achieve, and it doesn’t look like they’re going to give up any time soon.

We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones.  Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment.

Sacrificing the Young in the Arenas of Capital

“The Hunger Games,” Suzanne Collins’s bestselling young-adult novel and top-grossing blockbuster movie, is all about this very moment in so many ways. For those of you hiding out deep in the woods, it’s set in a dystopian future North America, a continent divided into downtrodden, fearful districts ruled by a decadent, luxurious oligarchy in the Capitol. Supposedly to punish the districts for an uprising 74 years ago, but really to provide Roman-style blood and circuses to intimidate and distract, the Capitol requires each district to provide two adolescent Tributes, drawn by lottery each year, to compete in the gladiatorial Hunger Games broadcast across the nation.

That these 24 youths battle each other to the death with one lone victor allowed to survive makes it like — and yet not exactly like — high school, that concentration camp for angst and competition into which we force our young. After all, even such real-life situations can be fatal: witness the gay Iowa teen who took his life only a few weeks ago after being outed and taunted by his peers, not to speak of the epidemic of other suicides by queer teens that Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” website, film and books aspire to reduce.

But really, in this moment, the cruelty of teens to teens is far from the most atrocious thing in the land. “The Hunger Games” reminds us of that.  Its Capitol is, of course, the land of the 1 percent, a sort of amalgamation of Fashion Week, Versailles and the KGB/CIA. Collins’s timely trilogy makes it clear that the 1 percent, having created a system of deeply embedded cruelty, should go, something highlighted by the surly defiance of heroine Katniss Everdeen — Annie Oakley, Tank Girl and Robin Hood all rolled into one – who refuses to be disposed of.

Now, in our world, gladiatorial entertainment and the disposability of the young are mostly separate things (except in football, boxing, hockey and other contact sports that regularly result in brain damage and sometimes even in death). But while the Capitol is portrayed as brutal for annually sacrificing 23 teenagers from the Districts, what about our own Capitol in the District of Columbia? It has a war or two on, if you hadn’t noticed.

In Iraq, 4,486 mostly young Americans died.  If you want to count Iraqis (which you should indeed want to do), the deaths of babies, children, grandmothers, young men and others total more than 106,000 by the most conservative count, hundreds of thousands by others. Even the lowest numbers represent enough kill to fill nearly 5,000 years of Hunger Games.

Then, of course, there are thousands more Americans who were so grievously wounded they might have died in previous conflicts, but are now surviving with severe brain damage, multiple missing limbs, or other profound mutilations. And don’t forget the trauma and mental illness that mostly goes unacknowledged and untreated or the far more devastating Iraqi version of the same. And never mind Afghanistan, with its own grim numbers and horrific consequences.

Our wartime carnage has been on a grand scale, but it hasn’t been on television in any meaningful way; it’s generally been semi-hidden by most of the American media and the government, which censored images of returning coffins, corpses, civilian casualties and anything else uncomfortable (though in our science-fiction era when every phone is potentially a video camera, the leakage has still been colossal). Most of us did a good job of being distracted by other things — including reality TV, of course.  The U.S. Ambassador and military commander in Afghanistan were furious not that our soldiers struck jokey poses with severed limbs, but that the Los Angeles Times dared to publish them last month. And those whistleblowers who took the effort to reveal the little men behind the throne are facing severe punishment.  Witness one Hunger-Games-style hero, Bradley Manning, the slight young soldier turned alleged leaker, long held in inhumane conditions and now facing a potential life sentence.

The Return of Debt Peonage

In “The Hunger Games,” kids in poor families take out extra chances in their District lottery — that is, extra chances to die — in return for extra food rations; in ours, poor kids enlist in the military to feed their families and maybe escape economic doom. Many are seduced by military recruiters who stalk them in high school with promises as slippery as those the slave trade uses to recruit poor young women for sex work abroad.

And then there’s another form of debt peonage that is far more widespread in our strange and ever-changing land: student loans. The young are constantly told that only a college education can give them a decent future. Then they’re told that, to pay for it, they need to go into debt — usually into five figures, sometimes well into six. And these debts are, in turn, governed by special laws that don’t allow you to declare bankruptcy — no matter what.  In other words, they are guaranteed to follow you all your life.

One of my close friends wept when her husband began to earn enough money to pay off her $45,000 loan, structured so that it looked like she would continue to pay interest on it for the rest of her life; not so dissimilar, that is, from the debts sharecroppers and workers in company towns used to incur.

In other words, we’re creating a new generation of debt peonage. And she’s not the worst case by far. Early in the Occupy Wall Street moment, she told me, someone arrived at Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan with markers and cardboard on which participants were to write their debt.  What shocked her was how many of the occupiers in their early twenties were already carrying huge debt burdens.

According to the website for Occupy Student Debt, 36,000,000 Americans have student debts.  These have increased more than fivefold since 1999, creating a debt load that’s approaching a trillion dollars, with students borrowing $96 billion more every year to pay for their educations. Two-thirds of college students find themselves in this trap nowadays. As commentator Malcolm Harris put it in N + 1 magazine:

Since 1978, the price of tuition at U.S. colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the U.S. economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But… wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.

About a third are already in default. You can only hope that this bubble will burst in a wildcat strike against student debt, and if we’re lucky, a move to force tuition lower and have a debt jubilee.

The rest of us, the 99 percent, need to remember that, when it comes to public education, the crisis has everything to do with slashed tax rates — to the wealthy and corporations in particular — over the last 30 years. We went into bondage so that they might be free. Getting an education to make your way out of poverty and maybe expand your mind is becoming another way of being trapped forever in poverty. For too many, there’s no way out of the hunger labyrinth.

The Labyrinths of Poverty

Which brings us to the hungriest in our 2012 real-life version of the Hunger Games: the poor. The wealthiest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen is full of hungry people. You know it, and you know why. In this vast, bountiful, food-producing, food-wasting nation, it’s a crisis of distribution, also known as economic inequality, described at last with clarity and force by the Occupy movement.

One of the sad and moving spectacles of camps like Occupy Oakland last year was the way they became de facto soup kitchens as the homeless and hungry came out of the shadows for the chance at a decent meal. Some of the camps had really dedicated chefs who cooked superbly.  They also had rudimentary medical clinics where the poor received the healthcare they couldn’t get anywhere else.

We are in a new era of desperation, when lots of people who were getting by these last several decades aren’t anymore. There are no jobs, or the jobs available pay so abysmally that workers can barely survive on them.

Of course, we do have one arena in which meals are guaranteed, and the population there keeps growing. Six million Americans live there, and it often does get gladiatorial inside. It’s called prison, and we have the highest percentage of prisoners per population in the world, higher than in the U.S.SR gulags under Stalin. Half of them are there for drug offenses, 80 percent of those for simple possession.

Which, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, hasn’t stopped the flow of drugs meant to numb the pain we’re so good at creating here.  We should create a measure for Gross National Suffering (GNS) before we even think about the Gross National Happiness they measure in Bhutan.

And once our prisoners get out, they’re a stigmatized caste, uniquely ill-suited to survival in this economy — speaking of hunger, debt, poverty, being branded for life and hopelessness. Like universities, prisons are profitable industries, though not for the human beings who are the raw material they process.  In this age, both systems seem increasingly like so many factories.

In the Shadow of 900 Tornados

But if you want to think about all the ways we’re dooming the young, there’s one that puts the others in the shade, a form of destruction that includes not just American youth, or human youth, but all species everywhere, from coral reefs to caribou. That’s climate change, of course.

Our failure to do anything adequate about it has rocketed us into the science-fiction world Bill McKibben so eloquently warned us about in his 2010 book “Eaarth.” His argument is that we’ve so altered the planet we live on that we might as well have landed on a new one (with an extra “a” in its name), more turbulent and far less hospitable than the beautiful Holocene one we trashed.

There were 160 tornados reported on March 2nd of this year. Remember that, in April of 2011, 900 tornadoes were ripping up interior United States, and this April was similarly volatile.  Remember the unprecedented wildfires, the catastrophic floods, the heat waves, the bizarrely hot North American January and other oddities? That’s science fiction of the scariest sort, and we’re in it. Or on it, on the crazy new planet we’ve made ourselves. Here in the U.S.A sector of Eaarth in the year 2012, 15,000 high-temperature records were broken in March alone, and summer is yet to come. A town in north-central Texas hit 111 degrees — in April! What turbulent planet is this?

One grain of good news: a lot of us, even in this country, finally seem to be of aware of the strangeness of the planet we’re now on. As the New York Times reported, a new survey “shows that a large majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter, last year’s blistering summer, and some other weather disasters were probably made worse by global warming. And by a 2-to-1 margin, the public says the weather has been getting worse, rather than better, in recent years.”

If you want to talk about hunger, talk about the unprecedented flooding that’s turned Pakistan from one of the world’s breadbaskets into a net food-importing nation, with dire consequences for the agricultural poor. Talk about China’s many impending ecological disasters, its degraded soil, contaminated air and water, its many systems ready to collapse. There’s more disruption of food production to come, a lot more, and lots more hunger, too.

Around this point in science fiction books and even history books, a revolution seems necessary. The good news I have for you this May Day is that it’s underway.

Revolution 2012

2011 was the year of strange weather, but it was also the year of global uprisings, and they’re far from over. They erupted in Russia, Israel, Spain, Greece, Britain, much of the Arab-speaking world, parts of Africa and Chile, among other spots in Latin America (some of which got their revolutions underway earlier in the millennium). Uprisings have blossomed even in what the rest of the hungry world sees as the elite Capitol, the United States and much of the English-speaking world, from London to New Zealand.

Remember that revolution doesn’t look much like revolution used to. That might be the most retrograde aspect of the very violent “Hunger Games” trilogy, the way in which the author’s imagination travels along conventional or old-fashioned lines. There, violence is truly the arbitrator of power, along with cunning, whether in the ways the teenagers survive in the gladiatorial arena or the Capitol, or how both sides operate in conflicts between the Districts and the Capitol. In our own world, the state is very good at violence, whether in its wars overseas or in pepper-spraying and clubbing young demonstrators. You’ll notice, however, that neither the Iraqis, nor the Afghanis, nor the Occupiers were subjugated by these means.

Violence is not power, as Jonathan Schell makes strikingly clear in “The Unconquerable World,” it’s what the state uses when we are not otherwise under control. In addition, when we speak of “nonviolence” as an alternative to violence, we can’t help but underestimate our own power.  That word, unfortunately, sounds like it’s describing an absence, a polite refraining from action, when what’s at stake — as demonstrators around the world proved last year — is a force to be reckoned with; so call it “people power” instead.

When we come together as civil society to exercise this power, regimes tremble and history is made. Not instantly and not exactly according to plan, but who ever expected that?

Still, many regimes have been toppled by this power, and the capacity to do so is ours in the present.  As Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan point out in their recent “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict“, since 1900 people-power campaigns have been successful in achieving regime change more than twice as often as violent campaigns.

It’s May Day, a worldwide General Strike has been called, and last week tiny Occupy Norman (Oklahoma) announced that it “had won a major battle”: their city is moving all its money out of Bank of America into a local bank. Last fall’s Move Your Money campaign included city money from the outset and quiet victories like this could begin to reshape our economic landscape. Activism in the streets is so intimidating that next month’s G8 Summit scheduled for Chicago will hole up at Camp David instead.

Meanwhile last week, both the Wells Fargo and General Electric shareholders’ meetings were under siege from Occupy activists.  The Wells Fargo meeting and protests took place in San Francisco, and afterward an arrested friend of mine posted this on Facebook: “I forgot to mention that Max gave me the Hunger Games salute in jail today. It was awesome.”

In this way do fiction and reality meld in misery and triumph as, this very day, janitors in California go out on strike and even Golden Gate Bridge workers will be protesting. May Day actions are planned across the globe.

Still alive and kicking, Occupy is chipping away in a thousand places at the status quo. 350.org, the little organization that defeated the Keystone XL Pipeline (so far), is holding a global Climate Impacts Day on May 5th and plans to take on the petroleum industry in its next round of actions.

Of course, this is only a beginning, and the banking and oil companies, the 1 percent, and the prison and education rackets are more than capable of pushing back.  So we need one more tool in our arsenal, and that’s a picture of what we want, of what a better world looks like. McKibben’s “Eaarth” and “Deep Economy” offer such a picture, as does William Morris’s “News from Nowhere,” even 120-odd years later, but we won’t get that from “The Hunger Games,” which, for all its thrilling, subversive and surly delights, is all dystopia all the way home. We may still get it, however, on our stranger-than-fiction planet.

May Day is a day of liberation — a day to be seized and celebrated, a day to remember who was shot down on it and who fought for it.  It’s a day to join those who fought and fight for liberation, to imagine what its most delicious and profound possibilities might look like.

So skip work, flip a bird at the Capitol, commit your deepest love and solidarity to the young whose lives are being gambled away, feed the hungry, take a long look at how beautiful our planet still is, find your way into solidarity and people power, and dream big about other futures. Resistance is one of your obligations, but it’s also a pleasure and a way of stealing back hope.

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The L.A. Times informed the Pentagon of its story and waited 72 hours before publishing. The Army, notably, had not launched a criminal investigation into the troops responsible for the photos until the Times contacted them. The Obama administration and the Pentagon have both condemned the soldiers responsible for the pictures, but also expressed disappointment in the Times for publishing them. Wired’s Spencer Ackerman refers to the photos as “yet another unforced error” for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. It’s a depressing and disturbing story, from a long and miserable war.

It’s also an opportunity, obviously, for various nuts to write asinine and offensive things.

Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel currently employed by the right-wing media as a cartoonish satire of bloodthirsty jingoist militarism, declared on Fox that he was furious not with the soldiers who created the disturbing photos, but with a military leadership that refused to “stand up” for our troops by not investigating them for crimes they commit. He also, naturally, blamed the liberal media:

“The real scandal is that the L.A. Times, desperate to survive, creates a scandal, publishes those pictures over the Pentagon’s objections. The real scandal is that the establishment media leaps on another chance to trash our troops. The worst of the scandal is that our leaders, in and out of uniform, rush to condemn our troops – no explanation, no context.”

“I suggest the White House spokesman Jay Carney join the military and see what it’s like himself before he condemns our troops,” Peters continued. “I’m especially appalled that those in uniform, General [John R.] Allen, our commander in Afghanistan, just jumped to trash our troops.”

(Peters, by the way, never actually saw combat during his years in the Army. That obviously doesn’t disqualify him from commenting on matters of war, but it ought to disqualify him from commenting that only people with armed forces experience can comment on matters of war.)

The “real scandal,” as ever, is not the actual scandalous thing. It’s some other thing, related to Obama’s secret radicalism or fetish for apologizing for America’s greatness, or the liberal media’s apparent hatred of our fighting boys in uniform.

At the National Review’s the Corner today, David French reports that the real scandal is not that these soldiers desecrated bodies, nor even necessarily that the L.A. Times published the photos, but that the L.A. Times didn’t publish some other thing, four years ago, that would’ve proved that Barack Obama is a Muslim, or just a guy who likes Muslims a little too much.

Let’s just reprint the whole thing because it’s a classic of the genre:

If there’s one thing that’s utterly predictable during the course of our war, it’s that major journalistic outlets will publish stories that shame our troops or place them at greater risk — but only after very public (and comically insincere) hand-wringing. I wonder … if any Afghan soldiers turn their weapons on their American allies as a reprisal, will the Times editors at least send flowers to the families of the fallen? Perhaps a card? “We’re sincerely sorry that our journalistic ‘ethics’ led to the death of your husband/wife/son/daughter, but there was a vital need to cast our war effort in a negative light. After all, the New York Times leads us in Pulitzers at the moment, and nothing says ‘Pulitzer’ like exposing two-years-old wrongdoing by privates.”

Did the soldier who sent the photos to the L.A. Times do so in order to help that struggling newspaper win a Pulitzer, do you think? Or did he do so because he is some sort of self-hating troop who wants troops like himself to be killed?

But if you’re one of those courageous and fearless “let’s tell the raw truth, and let the chips fall where they may” types, and you’re tempted to respect the L.A. Times for its journalistic integrity, let me remind you of a time when the newspaper showed restraint: When it decided — in the midst of a hotly contested presidential campaign — not to publish a videotape of Barack Obama praising former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi at a 2003 dinner. After all, that’s just a future president discussing one of the world’s most hot-button geopolitical issues (with a bonus appearance by applauding domestic terrorists). Move along. Nothing to see there.

The reason French knows about this shocking tape of Barack Obama praising a well-respected Columbia professor is because the L.A. Times reported on it, in great detail, repeatedly, in 2008. It didn’t release the video because its source gave them the video on the condition that they not release it. I assume the soldier who sent these Afghanistan photos did so on something like the opposite condition.

Finally, the sad lost children of Breitbart belatedly weighed in with this Big Peace post making an argument that I can’t quite follow. It is something like “the media and John McCain were mean to Donald Rumsfeld after Abu Ghraib which totally wasn’t even a big deal and it wasn’t Rumsfeld’s fault so it it will be hypocrisy if they don’t blame Obama for this thing.”

In a statement, the Pentagon said, “The secretary is also disappointed that despite our request not to publish these photographs, the Los Angeles Times went ahead. The danger is that this material could be used by the enemy to incite violence against U.S. and Afghan service members in Afghanistan.” The Pentagon promised to take all measures necessary to protect troops from a public backlash.

“These images by no means represent the values or professionalism of the vast majority of U.S. troops serving in Afghanistan today,” Pentagon spokesman George Little said.

The LA Times quoted its editor, Davan Maharaj, as saying, “After careful consideration, we decided that publishing a small but representative selection of the photos would fulfill our obligation to readers to report vigorously and impartially on all aspects of the American mission in Afghanistan, including the allegation that the images reflect a breakdown in unit discipline that was endangering U.S. troops.”

The U.S. military is still reeling from the January release of a video showing Marines urinating on Afghan corpses, and riots in February following the news that troops burned copies of the Quran, Islam’s holy book. Those riots killed 30 Afghans and six Americans. In March, Army sergeant Robert Bales went on a shooting rampage and killed 17 Afghan civilians, including 9 children. Bales has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder, according to the Associated Press.

CNN reported that the paper told the Pentagon about the pictures in March, which resulted in a criminal investigation.

George Wright, an Army spokesman, said, “such actions fall short of what we expect of our uniformed service members in deployed areas,” according to the LA Times.

A decade later, after the U.S. military smashed Saddam Hussein’s army in Kuwait in the First Gulf War, George H.W. Bush exulted that the country had finally “kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” As it turned out, despite the organization of massive “victory parades” at home to prove that this hadn’t been Vietnam redux, that war kicked back.  Another decade passed and there were H.W.’s son W. and his advisors planning the invasion of Iraq through a haze of Vietnam-constrained obsessions.

W.’s top officials and the Pentagon would actually organize the public relations aspect of that invasion and the occupation that followed as a Vietnam opposite’s game — no “body counts” to turn off the public, plenty of embedded reporters so that journalists couldn’t roam free and (as in Vietnam) harm the war effort, and so on. The one thing they weren’t going to do was lose another war the way Vietnam had been lost. Yet they managed once again to bog the U.S. military down in disaster on the Eurasian mainland, could barely manage to win a heart or a mind, and even began issuing body counts of the enemy dead.

“We don’t do body counts,” General Tommy Franks, Afghan War commander, had insisted in 2001, and as late as November 2006, the president was still expressing his irritation about Iraq to a group of conservative news columnists this way: “We don’t get to say that — a thousand of the enemy killed or whatever the number was. It’s happening. You just don’t know it.”  The problem, he explained, was: “We have made a conscious effort not to be a body count team” (à la Vietnam). And then, of course, those body counts began appearing.

Somehow, over the endless years, no matter what any American president tried, The War — that war — and its doppelganger of a syndrome, a symbol of defeat so deep and puzzling Americans could never bear to fully take it in, refused to depart town. They were the ghosts on the battlements of American life, representing — despite the application of firepower of a historic nature — a defeat by a small Asian peasant land so unexpected that it simply couldn’t be shaken, nor its “lessons” learned.

National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was typical at the time in dismissing North Vietnam in disgust as “a little fourth rate power,” just as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Thomas Moorer would term it “a third-rate country with a population of less than two counties in one of the 50 states of the United States.” All of which made its victory, in some sense, beyond comprehension.

A Titleholder for Pure, Long-Term Futility

That was then. This is now and, though the frustration must seem familiar, Washington has gotten itself into a situation on the Eurasian mainland so vexing and perplexing that Vietnam has finally been left in the dust. In fact, if you hadn’t noticed — and weirdly enough no one has — that former war finally seems to have all but vanished.

If you care to pick a moment when it first headed for the exits, when we all should have registered something new in American consciousness, it would undoubtedly have been mid-2010 when the media decided that the Afghan War, then 8½ years old, had superseded Vietnam as “the longest war” in U.S. history. Today, that claim has become commonplace, even though it remains historically dubious (which may be why it’s significant).

Afghanistan is, in fact, only longer than Vietnam if you decide to date the start of the American war there to 1964, when Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (in place of an actual declaration of war), or 1965, when American “combat troops” first arrived in South Vietnam. By then, however, there were already 16,000 armed American “advisors” there, Green Berets fighting there, American helicopters flying there. It would be far more reasonable to date America’s war in Vietnam to 1961, the year of its first official battlefield casualty and the moment when the Kennedy administration sent in 3,000 military advisors to join the 900 already there from the Eisenhower years. (The date of the first American death on the Vietnam Wall, however, is 1956, and the first American military man to die in Vietnam — an American lieutenant colonel mistaken by Vietnamese guerrillas for a French officer — was killed in Saigon in 1945.)

Of course, massive U.S. support for the French version of the Vietnam War in the early 1950s could drive that date back further.  Similarly, if you wanted to add in America’s first Afghan War, the CIA-financed anti-Soviet war of the mujahideen from 1980 to 1989, you might once again have a “longest war” competition.

The essential problem in dating wars these days is that we no longer declare them, so they just tend to creep up on us.  In addition, because undeclared war has melded into something like permanent war on the American scene, we might well be setting records every day on the Eurasian mainland — if, for instance, you care to include the First Gulf War and the continued military actions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq which, after 2001, blended into the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror, its invasion of Afghanistan, and then, of course, Iraq (again).

For those who want a definitive “longest,” however, the latest news is promising.  Obama administration negotiations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government are reportedly close to complete. The two sides are expected to arrive at a “strategic partnership” agreement leaving U.S. forces (trainers, advisors, special operations troops and undoubtedly scads of private contractors) ensconced on bases in Afghanistan well beyond 2014.  If such official desire becomes reality, then the Vietnam record might indeed be at an end.

What’s important, however, isn’t which war holds the record, but that media urge in 2010 to anoint Afghanistan the titleholder for pure long-term futility.  In retrospect, that represented a changing-of-the-guard moment.

Now, skip ahead almost two years and consider what’s missing in action today.  After all, dealing with the Afghan War in Vietnam-analogy terms right now would be like lining up ducks at a shooting gallery.  Just take a run through the essential Vietnam War checklist: there’s “quagmire” (check!); dropping the idea of winning “hearts and minds” (check!); the fact that we’ve entered the “Afghanization” phase of the war, with endless rosy prognostications about, followed by grim reports on, the training of the Afghan army to replace U.S. combat troops (check!).

There are those sagging public opinion polls about the war, dropping steadily into late-Vietnam territory (check!); the continued insistence of American military officials that “progress” is being made in the face of disaster and disintegration (not quite “light at the end of the tunnel” territory, but nonetheless a check! for sure).

There are those bomb-able, or in our era drone-able, “sanctuaries” across the border (check!); American massacre stories, most recently a one-man version of My Lai (check!); a prickly leader who irritates his American counterparts and is seen as an obstacle to success (check!), and so on — and on and on.

While the Afghan War has always had its many non-Vietnam aspects — geographical, historical, geopolitical and in terms of casualties — anyone could have had a Vietnam field day with the present situation.  At almost any previous moment in the last decades, many undoubtedly would have, and yet what’s striking is that this time around no one has.  Unlike any administration since the Nixon years, nobody in Obama’s crowd now seems to have Vietnam obsessively on the brain.

What was taken as the last significant reference to the war from a major official came from Bush holdover Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.  In February 2011, four months before he left the Pentagon, Gates gave a “farewell” address at West Point in which he told the cadets, “[I]n my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”  This, press reports incorrectly claimed, was that general’s Vietnam advice for President Kennedy in 1961.  (The statement Gates quoted, however, was made in 1950 after the North Koreans invaded South Korea.)

A Vietnam Analogy Memorial

Since then, Washington generally seems to have dropped Vietnam through the memory hole.  Well-connected pundits seldom mention its example any more.  Critics have generally stopped using it to anathematize the ongoing war in Afghanistan.  In a wasteland of growing disasters, that war now seems to have gained full recognition as a quagmire in its own right. No help needed.

And yet I did find one recent exception to the general rule.  Let me offer it here as my own memorial to the Vietnam analogy. Recently in a news briefing, U.S. war commander in Afghanistan General John Allen tried to offer context for a phenomenon that seems close to unique in modern history. (You might have to go back to the Sepoy Rebellion in British India of the nineteenth century to find its like.)  Afghan “allies” in police or army uniforms have been continually blasting away American and NATO soldiers they live and work with — something now common enough to have its own military term: “green on blue” violence.  In doing so, Allen made a passing comment that might be thought of as the last Vietnam War analogy of our era.  “I think it is a characteristic of counterinsurgencies that we’ve experienced before,” he said.  “We experienced these in Iraq.  We experienced them in Vietnam… It is a characteristic of this kind of warfare.”

How appropriate that, almost 40 years later, the general, who was still attending the U.S. Naval Academy when Vietnam ended, evidently remembers that war about as accurately as he might recall the War of 1812.  In fact, Vietnamese allies did not regularly, or even rarely, turn their guns on their American allies.  In the far more “fratricidal” acts of that era, what might then have been termed “khaki on khaki” violence, the “Afghans” of the moment were American troops who reasonably regularly committed acts of violence — called “fragging” for the fragmentation grenades of the period — against their own officers.  (“Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units,” wrote Marine historian Col. Robert Heinl, Jr., in 1971.  “In one such division… fraggings during 1971 have been authoritatively estimated to be running about one a week.”)

Still, credit must be given.  Increasingly poorly remembered, Vietnam is now one for the ages.  After so many years, Afghanistan has finally emerged as a quagmire beholden to no other war.  What an achievement!  Our moment, Afghanistan included, has proven so extreme, so disastrous, that it’s finally put the unquiet ghost of Vietnam in its grave.  And here’s the miracle: it has all happened without anyone in Washington grasping the essence of that now-ancient defeat, or understanding a thing.

The “lessons of Vietnam,” fruitlessly discussed for five decades, taught Washington so little that it remains trapped in a hopeless war on the Eurasian mainland, continues to pursue a military-first policy globally that might even surprise American leaders of the Vietnam era, has turned the planet into a “free fire zone,” and considers military power its major asset, a first not a last resort, and the Pentagon the appropriate place to burn its national treasure.

After Vietnam, the U.S. at least took a few years to lick its wounds.  Now, it just ramps up the latest military flavor of the month — at the moment, special operations forces and drones — elsewhere.

Call it not the fog, but the smog of war.

And in case you haven’t noticed, the vans are already on the block.  The Afghan Syndrome is moving into the neighborhood and the welcome wagons are out.

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