Chapter 11 then is no option. The conclusion is clear: a GM Chapter 11 Bk means the end of GM. Additionally, the shock heard round the world would be a piercing din few economists reckon would not be devastating . . . round the world, and around and down every block in the United States. As you’ve heard about the weather, if you don’t like it now, wait a few moments, it’ll change. Except, I sincerely doubt any of us will like what it changes to should GM go under, and take the entire industry and millions of Americans with it.
Thus, insofar as GM and federal assistance is concerned, I have but a single request: Don’t be flippant or doctrinaire, think about it long and hard.
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And that gets me to Afghanistan. Candidate Obama and General Petraeus and other top military commanders have all said more troops are needed right now, exactly as they have been needed from the start. I have this in-the-pit-of-my-gut anxious trembling — you know, the kind you have that precedes paroxysms of retching and oh-God-just-let-me-die-here-and-now heaving my insides.
Through the campaign, Obama insisted he intended to add those troops, at least three brigades, or anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 members each. My mind marches in circles with questions.
Where will he get that many men? (Women are as yet legally precluded from ground combat duty.) From Iraq? When? Currently the Army is tapped out. Most of those who are in Iraq are on their second, third, and fourth tours, each tour lasting from six months to a year and a half. They’re in no physical or psychological condition to take on another spell of whack-a-soldier, especially in an area that, day by day, is increasingly seeing soldiers getting whacked. And in the more open Obama administration, the American public will likely see more and more whacked soldiers returning home in flag-draped, full metal jackets.
Where will the money come from? If at all, it will be several years before the federal government begins seeing any returns on the interest owed for the hundreds and hundreds of billions we’re “lending” the banks and the insurance companies and the American auto industry and all the Joe-the-Plumbers who will clamor for their cut. All of this surging purging of the US treasury at a time when roads and levees and sewer systems are crumbling, the entire educational system is falling behind tribal Botswana, and our medical delivery system isn’t delivering healthcare quite so effectively as South Africa.
Even if the preceding concerns weren’t all that much to be concerned with (Which they sure as hell are!), there’s the very grave matter of “Why?” Thinking on Vietnam and Iraq, specifically what do we intend to accomplish there? Routing the bad guys from Afghanistan is a crack-pipe dream. Everyone has tried it. And everyone who has tried has failed. (For those who may not be as familiar as they perhaps would like to be, to expound in the discussion, I urgently and heartily recommend James Michener’s Caravans, a short novel set in Afghanistan.)
You say, “That’s where al Qaida is, where bin Laden is, and it’s where they trained and plotted to fly airplanes into American buildings.” To that I ask, “Really? Behind which rock? Hunkered in which cave? And are you certain, would you bet YOUR life and limbs, they are not in rocks and caves in Pakistan, where not even the Pakistani military dares to explore?” Remember Vietnam, and read Kipling. Ask the Brits. Ask the Russians. We’re somewhere north of 4,500 dead and at least $2 TRILLION in the hole in Iraq. And Iraq could seem a walk in a somewhat dangerous park compared to what we’ll likely find we’ve gotten ourselves into in Afghanistan. No foreign military has ever gotten out of there with their heads held high; heads severed from bodies and held high, impaled on a post, yeah. But not otherwise.
Am I proposing we do nothing? That’s neither fair nor intelligent. Nor is it even an honest question, because it’s constructed on a false premise: that doing nothing is the only alternative to sinking thousands of lives and trillions of dollars in the quicksand. What I will want to know from President Obama, what I demand — with little hope of getting a reply — are specific answers to the questions I’ve raised. The dead and severely mutilated who are sure to be the ones paying that highest price of all, and my sons, who will certainly be expected to bear the financial brunt of the venture, have an inalienable right to the answers. Before . . . Not later. I just don’t want either me or any of them to find the light at the end of that tunnel is a candlelight vigil.
One set of final thoughts. What distinguishes us — by which I intend, humans — from the other so called lower forms is our ability, used or not, to understand and feel the pain of others. It’s called empathy. Their pain is our pain, just one person removed. Read Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and the Jew Shylock: “ . . . if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
Since the times of President Jackson this country has been wronging others. We’ve split foreign countries in two. We’ve overthrown legitimately elected democratic leaders in pursuit of our own, commercial corporate interests; sometimes just to sell newspapers. We’ve installed the most brutal of dictators. And millions of innocents have been lopped into that most sanitary term, collateral damage, while we chased the illusion of power.
We’re doing as much in Afghanistan right now. Ask yourself, if your son or daughter were killed in an American bombing attack, would you not care, would your anger not seethe, would you not look for any way possible to exact revenge, simply because someone in a United States military uniform somewhere erroneously concluded your wedding party was a meeting of our enemies? Would you just let it go? Or, if you could, if you had the wherewithal, would you not plot to send a planeload of Americans into a building? Is it so beyond your scope of imagination to suppose you might also like to train to be the pilot of that plane?
Sometimes, sadly, ya gotta do what ya gotta do. But I would like President Obama to be damned sure it’s something the United States just absolutely has to do, and that he knows exactly what he is doing, and how he’s going to get us out.
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