Syria and the Spanish Civil War

There were enough Americans outraged by the events in Spain during its civil war (1936-1939)to see the creation of what was called the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.  Along with thousands of volunteers in brigades formed in other nations, they voyaged to Spain to protect its elected government from attacks by fascist forces devoted to its overthrow.  Many of those fighters never returned home, killed in the ferocious battles that took place.  They were eventually cited as the first casualties in the war against fascism that would ultimately result in the deaths of tens of millions around the globe. The democracies of the world stood by and watched as the Nazi air force came to the aid of Francisco Franco's fascists, notably commemorated in Picasso's Guernica mural.  

 

I have often thought back to that historical episode when, in the face of injustices taking place, I try to deal with my own barely contained rage at policies our own government has pursued and is currently pursuing. I find it extremely difficult to stand by and be a witness to events that all of my reason and instincts tell me are wrong yet nevertheless go unopposed.  It is sometimes not enough to console oneself with Martin Luther King's observation that "the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice." (Ironically, fascism in Spain far outlived the regimes in Germany and Italy, lingering until Franco's death. Some injustices clearly die hard. It would not be until Francisco Franco's death in 1975 that veterans of the Lincoln Brigade could return to a Spain finally free of fascism.) Perhaps, for children of the 1960s, the slow tread toward justice is a particularly bitter pill to swallow. We had tasted at least one victory when, in the same year that Franco had died, the puppet regime in Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army. Though the war in Vietnam had gone on for decades, tens of thousands who had marched against American involvement felt that that they had had a role in bringing it to an end, that peaceful protest could have an impact.

It was a lesson not lost on American policy makers.  Never again would large segments of the American people mobilize peacefully against the grand design of U.S. foreign policy.  And there would be many such occasions when those policies could be called into question, particularly with the inception of the Reagan government in the 1980s.  (Although it should be pointed out that, even before Reagan, the supposedly pious "restoration" president, Jimmy Carter, was a thick-skinned cold warrior, initiating a secret war in Afghanistan that would have far-reaching consequences, not the least of which was the birth of Al Qaeda.)  By 1983, Reagan, (in a war that gave us the newly issued U.S. Army helmet, for some, rather alarmingly similar to that worn by German troops in World War II), was prepared to give us an unquestionable "victory" even if over a small island in the Caribbean most notable for being a diploma mill for for foreign medical students.  In the aftermath of Vietnam, our nation's military exploits would proceed unhampered by mass protests.  In Grenada, in Panama, in "secret" (secret only to the American public) wars in Central American nations like El Salvador and Nicaragua), and, outstandingly, in the so-called Operation Desert Storm, the Gulf War in 1990, the U.S. demonstrated that it would not be repeating the mistakes it had made in Southeast Asia.  No longer would free-wheeling war correspondents be sending raw footage home in time for the six o'clock news.  The end of the draft also ended anti-draft protests and substituted for the draft a "professional" army joined in battle by mercenaries handsomely compensated for their efforts with taxpayer dollars.   The safeguards against wars unilaterally declared by the executive branch that were put in place after Vietnam and were really no more than an underscoring of our constitution were ignored wholesale.  Journalists were "embedded" with troops and their reportage seriously constrained by the military.   Anti-war protests engendered by both wars in Iraq as well as the war in Afghanistan were feeble compared to those that accompanied the war in Vietnam.  Not only were we fighting an evil dictator or "terrorism" rather than a people's liberation movement, the motivation to take to the streets against wars being fought in our name was greatly diminished after U.S. Army troops had opened fire on protesting students at Kent State, killing four students and wounding nine more in a barrage of gunfire.  At the conclusion of the Gulf War, U.S. forces could, without fear of domestic criticism, leave a "Highway of Death" littered with the corpses of massacred thousands retreating from Kuwait on their way back to Baghdad.  We had entered a brave new world.

 

.And then, of course, we had 9/11.  It took ten years for the U.S. to find an enemy worthy of the trillion-dollar-a-year killing machine that the nation maintained even after the fall of the Evil Empire in 1991.  Of course, the war against the remnants of that empire had gone on unabated in the intervening years.  We would seize the moment, bury communism so deeply that it could never rise again.  With the help of Germany and Croatian fascists, with Tito gone, ornery Yugoslavia descended into butchery and became atomized.  Since, it appears, every American president must have his war, even Bill Clinton was persuaded to initiate a bombing campaign in the area, at one point "accidentally" bombing the Chinese embassy.  (The official explanation was that it did not appear on military maps of the area.  U.S. intelligence should have sought out a tourist map at a local hotel desk.)

 

       By the time Bush, Jr. entered the Oval Office, the Evil Empire had morphed into an Axis of Evil which included such threats as North Korea, (Goodbye, Sunshine Policy.), and dangerous Cuba.  Those roaring mice, of course, would never have invited the response to external threats that we would soon be treated to, a response that would transform the nation into an Orwellian nightmare with a tattered constitution that was twisted to allow for torture, rendition to foreign torture chambers, robot drone attacks out of The Terminator, and a new language, a glossary that seemed to come out of Goebbel's playbook.  Suddenly, we no longer had a nation, we had a "homeland," (heimat? vaterland?), and restrictions on human rights were euphemistically summed up in the "Patriot Act."

      Even before 9/11, however, it was clear as soon as the Supreme Court gave Bush the presidency and he announced his cabinet choices in December of 2000, that his was a war cabinet.  I can recall upon hearing that such as Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice would be joining Dick Cheney on his team that I ran down the hall from my office to a friend's office and cried out, "My God, he's chosen a war cabinet.  We're going to war!"  Rumor had it that Bush, the son, was obligated to deal with the unfinished business his father had left in Iraq.  All that was needed was a convenient casus belli and the games could begin.  It was not long in coming.

      It is not necessary here to sum up the events following September 11, 2001.  Ultimately, the neo-con cabal and the cowboys had to be reined in following disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan.  A caretaker government was in place well before the permanent government had installed another restoration president.  Rumsfeld would go replaced by Gates, a member of the Iraqi War Commission, who stayed on to be Barack Obama's defense secretary.   Bush had been declawed.  Though many of the trappings changed after he left the White House, and there was talk of withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, it soon became clear that, Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding, the new young president would continue the grander design.

 

Next:  Drones, the Arab Spring, Gaza, and the attack on the Hassad regime.