Historical Signposts:

As I grow older, I realize more and more how much what happens today is influenced by the past. It seems that things have a cycle of their own. As of now, it seems that what happened in twenty year increments seem to provide kind of a yardstick—and in many ways—a perspective for today. It goes without saying that we as Americans, unlike the Asians who tend to think in perhaps 100 year increments, are inclined to think more in terms of day to day when they should be looking at things longer term.

Such thoughts impel me now to think of those early days of the Cold War when General Curtis LeMay headed up SAC, which was the Strategic Air Command. At the time, there were always a number of bombers in the air ready to take out the Soviet Union. Blunt, but true.

You may have seen Dr. Strangelove which was the tongue in cheek version of a movie that depicted what could happen if both our countries got our signals crossed and moved forwards towards confrontation..

Fortunately, wiser men prevailed in those days.

And when SAC transformed itself into what was to become NORAD to which I volunteered, I had often wondered what would happen if a foolish, shallow person addicted to limited thought and macho to a fault would have assumed office.

That was more than fifty years ago.

Now, we know. And make of it what you will, it does give us reason to pause.

In those early days, we have something called the “football,” the red phone that an aide carried everywhere.

In only a matter of minutes, waiting Russian ICBMS could be targeted at a diversity of US Cities.

I thought about this as I tracked Khrushchev’s plane from our engagement point, mid Atlantic, until the time it arrived in New York where he was attend a session of the UN.

Khrushchev was no fool; neither were any of the presidents from Eisenhower thru Bush I.

Nobody wanted to start a nuclear war and have that on their conscience.

But there were incidences.

On one chill morning in the mid-1980’s, a radar observer noticed aberrations on the radar.

It seemed to indicate that American missiles had been launched.

The generals wanted to go to duty stations and launch their own missiles in order to survive. And they had only fifteen minutes to make the decision.

Fortunately, a cool colonel of the Russian Air Force was in charge and he urged caution and argued effectively against making a pre-emptive strike.

As it turned out, it was a false alarm, geese flying through the radar net.

Such a miscalculation could have surely brought around Armageddon if the Russians didn’t have such a cool and rational man at the helm.

Today, he lives an obscure life in an obscure hamlet.

And so it went.

Again, I wondered what would happen if cooler heads did not prevail.

And that we voted into office a hip-shooter; someone who liked to play the fast-draw.

Well, we’ve gotten to find out.

One of the first thing Bush did in taking office was to end SALT, an agreement that had lasted 37 years and kept us at peace.

Next, our cowboy president talked about preemption, going to War on the suspicion that our adversary was planning to strike.

No proof; no nothing.

Fortunately, the Russians were not headed by an adventurer; nor, at the time, were they so predisposed to challenge the US.

But times change, today Russia has resumed its role as counter-balance to adventurism and the world is much more complicated than it ever was back in the fifties.

In the early days of the Bush chutzpah, he had no hesitation in calling North Korea, Iran and Iraq “Evil Empires” which nearly destroyed the democracy that South Korea had built over so many years.

Nor did it help America smooth over relations with Iran with its large moderate population. Again, we seem to forget was that it was we who armed the Iraqis to fight Iranians and it was we who in the fifties disposed their premier because he wanted to nationalize his own oil industry.

The Persians, a culture that goes back some five thousand years and proved to be culturally advanced then, did not forget our interference into affairs of State and our pushing the Shah and his dreaded secret police, Savak, on them.

Yet, we blunder forward without so much as a thought to historical imperatives or the actions of the past.

If we had, we never would have made so many mistakes in Iraq. And we might have come out without our tail between our legs.

In all of this, the blame should never be cast on the troops. Their efforts have always been exemplary; however, as in Vietnam and other unnecessary adventures, it is the government that calls the shots.

In this case, it was pure egomania combined with cultural ineptitude combined with arrogance that has cooked our goose and we are still too preoccupied with all the wrong things to see it.

As we approach an election, but before we can take a deep breath, it has become increasingly clear, that we need to clean house; that we have to remove the brain-dead, the egoists, the blind, the self-aggrandizing and the meek before we can turn things around.

If there were no other purpose to education than just knowing how to conduct our affairs and to protect the people, that would be sufficient to justify PhD’s for all.

And though some might laugh at such a magnanimous gesture, perhaps if we had done so, we would not have spent nearly one trillion dollars to promulgate a War that seems to have no end and no definition of “victory.”

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon