In December of 2003, I visited one of the ancient killing grounds of the Cradle of Civilization because there was a war going on there, or rather, there were two wars going on – our war on Iraq and Assad’s war on Aleppo and the rest of Northern Syria.
2nd Worst FO/GO in US Mil history. Second only to Wrong Way Dougie Douglas MacArthur.
Both GOs loved to run. Dougie not only ran the wrong way twice his time running backward is the US Army record as seen on his DD214. Time was lowered on his DD215.
(Yellow Hair, G.A. Custer remains my all-time fav USMA/US Mil officer.)
he was a poet of staggering gifts. it wasn't "fashionable" to think so when I was "coming up" because he's not quite Victorian (in style) and yet not nearly High Modernist (although de died in 1928), so most of my contemporaries have had to discover Hardy on their own.
btw, I just saw Polanski's "Tess" last week for the first time since it came out and it's a fucking masterpiece.
Who, 22 years later remembers Mr. Paul Bremmer? He was the American civilian in charge of Iraq who, apparently consulting nobody with a fragment of a brain, one morning disbanded the entire Iraq Army. He didn't disarm them and put them in camps. He just let them loose, no money, no job. These guys became what SecDef Rumsfeld called the "Dead-enders", or a minor nuisance. Yeah, Rummy go tell that to us again.
I didn't know this idiot got the PMofF. Well, at least it was before Rush Limbaugh got his from Trump. Now that medal in my mind equates with children's "Participation" trophies.
Rush Limbaugh should have been mortified to receive it, and Cheeto Man should have been prevented from awarding it. He is the ultimate craptastic proof that it is now ludicrous to rely on social and political norms to protect our democracy and its institutions.
the trouble with that Santayana quote is that it's certainly, verifiably true, but it ALSO might be true about those who DO remember the past, if you catch my drift.
in the case of the US, however, we can comfortably keep ourselves in the first category...
Here I am, conscientiously learning about the noble feminine past during Woman's History Month, and now I must deal with (as you noted) 6,000 years of mostly male-inspired violent nonsense. Sigh. Great, passionate writing though.
Re the first segment: McArthur handled thing a little differently in Japan.
" Aloof and vain, viceroy MacArthur was almost as reclusive as the Wizard of Oz. He kept much of the local Japanese government intact and did not attempt to micromanage it, preferring to rule much the way the British had run India for decades before the war. And as few Americans were competent in Japanese, MacArthur kept the bureaucrats and technocrats who had always run Japan doing so. He never visited either his occupation army or his domain. If troops paraded past the Dai Ichi Building, he would make a show of accepting their salutes, but rather than personally inspecting garrisons and camps, he would send substitutes—occasionally his wife, Jean, and a staff general. Yet this pattern of distant command and remote governance seemed to work, as MacArthur retained the country’s institutions and culture.
Once he’d established SCAP headquarters in the Dai Ichi—and settled Jean and young son Arthur in the American Embassy only a few minutes away—MacArthur’s routine seldom varied. He left for work at 10 a.m. in his black 1941 Cadillac limousine flying his five-star flag and flanked by military police motorcycles. On his arrival at the Dai Ichi the crowds of curious Japanese parted, and MacArthur ascended to his unpretentious office, in which he permitted no telephone and kept only a legal pad on what was usually a clean desktop. He would return to the embassy for lunch—and often a nap—and then return to his office until late evening. The supreme commander conducted business by notes and conversations with trusted assistants. He rarely permitted visitors, and then only of the VIP variety. Few were Japanese. In his showily imperial way MacArthur became a substitute emperor figure, ensconced mystically atop the Dai Ichi Building.
Every six months MacArthur met with Hirohito, whom he had effectively succeeded. MacArthur had their first meeting, in September 1945, preserved in an iconic image of his tenure in Japan. Hirohito arrived at the embassy one morning, dressed in severe black formal attire, and the general met him in a slightly rumpled khaki uniform, tieless. A SCAP cameraman captured the pair standing side by side, the diminutive emperor almost literally in the shadow of the tall, sturdy American. Japanese officialdom saw the image as deeply humiliating, and the contrast unmistakably symbolized MacArthur’s Japan.
Yet MacArthur also understood the symbolic importance of the emperor, and in early 1946 he prevailed upon Washington to spare Hirohito—whatever his role in condoning and then encouraging the war—from facing charges as a war criminal. Hirohito escaped the scaffold; Japanese pride was massaged, and order was maintained. (Some high officials were held accountable in postwar war crimes trials: An international military tribunal in Tokyo tried, convicted and executed Prime Ministers Hideki Tojo and Koki Hirota and five top generals).
The orders under which MacArthur initially became de facto ruler of postwar Japan—known as the “U.S. Initial Post-Surrender Policy for Japan”—directed him to exercise his authority indirectly through the state where possible, while conferring upon him discretionary power to enforce the 1945 surrender terms. The document tasked MacArthur with extensive responsibilities beyond the Japanese Home Islands, the most significant of which was the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops from areas they held at the end of the war. That process took many months, as MacArthur insisted only Japanese ships be used, yet the Allies had sunk most of the nation’s merchant fleet. Also directed to deal with the widespread malnutrition that plagued postwar Japan, the supreme commander dispensed from military stocks thousands of tons of emergency food supplies in the spring and summer of 1946 and also distributed foodstuffs shipped from abroad.
MacArthur’s responsibilities—and his authority—expanded further in November 1945 when the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued its “Basic Directive for Post-Surrender Military Government in Japan Proper.” The general soon put such a personal imprimatur on so much of the document that it seemed entirely his own. He had already ordered the recall of all Japanese diplomatic personnel abroad. Next, he severed all diplomatic ties between Japan and other nations. Thereafter, SCAP’s own Diplomatic Section managed Japan’s foreign relations.
MacArthur’s occupation staff in Tokyo at first numbered about 1,500 and grew to more than 3,000 by 1948. Most of his minions ranged politically from conservative to ultraconservative, and they established policies that continued, rather than dismantled, the zaibatsu (business conglomerates) that had long dominated the Japanese economy. Entrenched Japanese bureaucracies from the national level to the villages and towns continued largely undisturbed.
Reform nonetheless crept into Japan, for MacArthur’s regime also enforced policies set by the Truman administration. The “Basic Directive” triggered war crimes trials in 1945–46, as well as replacement of the Meiji Charter Oath of 1868, under which Japan had been ruled by oligarchs on behalf of a semidivine emperor. A four-power Allied agreement (between the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and China) called for a commission to formulate a new Japanese constitution by late February 1946. To evade meddlesome Stalinist input, MacArthur’s headquarters pre-empted the commission with its own document, “Three Basic Points,” presented as a Japanese initiative. The first of the points allowed the emperor to remain head of state, though his powers would henceforth derive from the new constitution, which itself would reflect the will of the people. The second point called for Japan’s renunciation of the right to wage war or to maintain armed forces. The third point abolished the feudal system and reformed the peerage. Each point embodied mandates from Washington based on the Allies’ August 1945 Potsdam Agreement.
The new constitution had to be ready in a week, in order to forestall any Soviet input. MacArthur’s Government Section chief, Brig. Gen. Courtney Whitney, summoned his public administration specialists—some of them lawyers—and announced that they now comprised a constitutional assembly; they would secretly draft the new Japanese constitution, and his three deputies would ensure the document appeared to be of Japanese origin. The resulting 92 articles reflected America’s New Deal policies, establishing social welfare and civil rights, even enfranchising women. When deliberations ended on February 10, Lt. Col. Charles Kades, head of the 25-member committee, said to one member, feisty 22-year-old Vienna-born linguist Beate Sirota, the only woman in the room, “My God, you have given Japanese women more rights than in the American Constitution!” She retorted, “That’s not very difficult to do, because women are not in the American Constitution.” Once Hirohito gave his “full approval” of the draft, MacArthur announced his concurrence, and on March 6 the Japanese government made public its new constitution.
Can we consider for a moment three things. 1) Factions of all stripes have been fighting over turf in Mesopotamia for thousands of years. Occasionally the fighting has been suppressed by the presence of an occupying force whether it be Persian, Roman, Greek, British, French, Ottoman or American. 2) The only thing these factions hate more than each other is an occupying force. 3) All of the borders in the region were drawn at the Treaty of Versailles not to match sectarian or ethnic boundaries, but to meet the colonial aspirations of the British and French. And this is a big part of the ongoing problem.
Goodness, you make us humans sound like a bunch of crazy monkeys, but with swords and guns. I spent a year in RVN, I Corp, 101 Division, !LT , 2/11 arty. Now that war was terrific, as a result we now get lots of cheap goods in our Walmarts. Gosh, let's start another "liberation" somewhere.
You note what is NEVER mentioned: Vietnam gave a huge boost to the industries of Japan and Korea. With the Congressional law that military goods made overseas NEVER go back to the States, we bought thousands of jeeps made by Fuji Heavy Industries (Subaru) for the ARVN/RF/PF, boots/cloth shoes for the same from South Korea's then new shoe factories, and who knows what else. The Navy tried to get all its ships' modifications and repairs done in Japan rather than in the expensive shipyards of the USA. The goal was to save money, but we really kickstarted our Asian competitors. I liked my Fuji (Subaru) jeep so much (I was on an Army Advisory Team) I tried to buy one ($1400 new), but was told it wouldn't be allowed. The Army paid about $5000 for the racier Ford jeeps. I later in life bought 4 Subarus. Great car. That war hurt America in every way.
I was out of New York and back in Hawaìi by the time Georgie Porgie put his pecker in the knot hole; l foresaw all that you have recounted.
I expressed that to my elected official but it fell on deaf ears, because at that time, Clinton had balanced out budget to a surplus and the feeding frenzy was getting into full gear.
Twenty years on and I’m amazed at how close I was to the way it’s played out.
‘And the Rich have gotten richer and millions of innocent noncombatants have met a violent end. So…
“Nobody ever lost a buck betting on the ignorant stupidity of the American Public.
If I had the power I'd give you the pulitzer prize for this one, Lucian :)
I think you misspelled the general's name. It's Betrayus.... Oh, and I just saw an email from Donald Trump in which he says he is Retribution. Lovely,
lol. Also spelled P4.
2nd Worst FO/GO in US Mil history. Second only to Wrong Way Dougie Douglas MacArthur.
Both GOs loved to run. Dougie not only ran the wrong way twice his time running backward is the US Army record as seen on his DD214. Time was lowered on his DD215.
(Yellow Hair, G.A. Custer remains my all-time fav USMA/US Mil officer.)
Peace on earth was said, we sing it
and hire a million priests to bring it.
After 2000 years of Mass,
we've come as far as poison gas.
--Thomas Hardy, 1921.
Wow. The same novelist who wrote Far From the Madding Crowd? I need to look into his writings other than novels.
he was a poet of staggering gifts. it wasn't "fashionable" to think so when I was "coming up" because he's not quite Victorian (in style) and yet not nearly High Modernist (although de died in 1928), so most of my contemporaries have had to discover Hardy on their own.
btw, I just saw Polanski's "Tess" last week for the first time since it came out and it's a fucking masterpiece.
Great essay. I think you just rewrote Catch-22 except as non-fiction.
and without the laughs.
Who, 22 years later remembers Mr. Paul Bremmer? He was the American civilian in charge of Iraq who, apparently consulting nobody with a fragment of a brain, one morning disbanded the entire Iraq Army. He didn't disarm them and put them in camps. He just let them loose, no money, no job. These guys became what SecDef Rumsfeld called the "Dead-enders", or a minor nuisance. Yeah, Rummy go tell that to us again.
"There are the things we know we know, the things we know we don't know, and the things we don't know we don't know." - Donald Rumsfeld
...and as I recall, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his incompetence.
I didn't know this idiot got the PMofF. Well, at least it was before Rush Limbaugh got his from Trump. Now that medal in my mind equates with children's "Participation" trophies.
Rush Limbaugh should have been mortified to receive it, and Cheeto Man should have been prevented from awarding it. He is the ultimate craptastic proof that it is now ludicrous to rely on social and political norms to protect our democracy and its institutions.
Aughhhhh! That guy! Yikes!
Man, I sure enjoyed this one -
as George Santayana so eloquently put it:
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,
Same concept, set to music: https://youtu.be/V4WGsMplGxU
Brilliant choice of song, Bill. By both you and Richard – love what he does with it.
the trouble with that Santayana quote is that it's certainly, verifiably true, but it ALSO might be true about those who DO remember the past, if you catch my drift.
in the case of the US, however, we can comfortably keep ourselves in the first category...
And even worse for those too benighted to even consider giving it a look!
Here I am, conscientiously learning about the noble feminine past during Woman's History Month, and now I must deal with (as you noted) 6,000 years of mostly male-inspired violent nonsense. Sigh. Great, passionate writing though.
LOL...I was thinking the same thing...those boys 'll never learn!
After all that I need a stiff drink.
The tragedy is the ignorance and indifference of Americans to the facts of human history. Big egos, lots of war and eternal grief.
Re the first segment: McArthur handled thing a little differently in Japan.
" Aloof and vain, viceroy MacArthur was almost as reclusive as the Wizard of Oz. He kept much of the local Japanese government intact and did not attempt to micromanage it, preferring to rule much the way the British had run India for decades before the war. And as few Americans were competent in Japanese, MacArthur kept the bureaucrats and technocrats who had always run Japan doing so. He never visited either his occupation army or his domain. If troops paraded past the Dai Ichi Building, he would make a show of accepting their salutes, but rather than personally inspecting garrisons and camps, he would send substitutes—occasionally his wife, Jean, and a staff general. Yet this pattern of distant command and remote governance seemed to work, as MacArthur retained the country’s institutions and culture.
Once he’d established SCAP headquarters in the Dai Ichi—and settled Jean and young son Arthur in the American Embassy only a few minutes away—MacArthur’s routine seldom varied. He left for work at 10 a.m. in his black 1941 Cadillac limousine flying his five-star flag and flanked by military police motorcycles. On his arrival at the Dai Ichi the crowds of curious Japanese parted, and MacArthur ascended to his unpretentious office, in which he permitted no telephone and kept only a legal pad on what was usually a clean desktop. He would return to the embassy for lunch—and often a nap—and then return to his office until late evening. The supreme commander conducted business by notes and conversations with trusted assistants. He rarely permitted visitors, and then only of the VIP variety. Few were Japanese. In his showily imperial way MacArthur became a substitute emperor figure, ensconced mystically atop the Dai Ichi Building.
Every six months MacArthur met with Hirohito, whom he had effectively succeeded. MacArthur had their first meeting, in September 1945, preserved in an iconic image of his tenure in Japan. Hirohito arrived at the embassy one morning, dressed in severe black formal attire, and the general met him in a slightly rumpled khaki uniform, tieless. A SCAP cameraman captured the pair standing side by side, the diminutive emperor almost literally in the shadow of the tall, sturdy American. Japanese officialdom saw the image as deeply humiliating, and the contrast unmistakably symbolized MacArthur’s Japan.
Yet MacArthur also understood the symbolic importance of the emperor, and in early 1946 he prevailed upon Washington to spare Hirohito—whatever his role in condoning and then encouraging the war—from facing charges as a war criminal. Hirohito escaped the scaffold; Japanese pride was massaged, and order was maintained. (Some high officials were held accountable in postwar war crimes trials: An international military tribunal in Tokyo tried, convicted and executed Prime Ministers Hideki Tojo and Koki Hirota and five top generals).
The orders under which MacArthur initially became de facto ruler of postwar Japan—known as the “U.S. Initial Post-Surrender Policy for Japan”—directed him to exercise his authority indirectly through the state where possible, while conferring upon him discretionary power to enforce the 1945 surrender terms. The document tasked MacArthur with extensive responsibilities beyond the Japanese Home Islands, the most significant of which was the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops from areas they held at the end of the war. That process took many months, as MacArthur insisted only Japanese ships be used, yet the Allies had sunk most of the nation’s merchant fleet. Also directed to deal with the widespread malnutrition that plagued postwar Japan, the supreme commander dispensed from military stocks thousands of tons of emergency food supplies in the spring and summer of 1946 and also distributed foodstuffs shipped from abroad.
MacArthur’s responsibilities—and his authority—expanded further in November 1945 when the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued its “Basic Directive for Post-Surrender Military Government in Japan Proper.” The general soon put such a personal imprimatur on so much of the document that it seemed entirely his own. He had already ordered the recall of all Japanese diplomatic personnel abroad. Next, he severed all diplomatic ties between Japan and other nations. Thereafter, SCAP’s own Diplomatic Section managed Japan’s foreign relations.
MacArthur’s occupation staff in Tokyo at first numbered about 1,500 and grew to more than 3,000 by 1948. Most of his minions ranged politically from conservative to ultraconservative, and they established policies that continued, rather than dismantled, the zaibatsu (business conglomerates) that had long dominated the Japanese economy. Entrenched Japanese bureaucracies from the national level to the villages and towns continued largely undisturbed.
Reform nonetheless crept into Japan, for MacArthur’s regime also enforced policies set by the Truman administration. The “Basic Directive” triggered war crimes trials in 1945–46, as well as replacement of the Meiji Charter Oath of 1868, under which Japan had been ruled by oligarchs on behalf of a semidivine emperor. A four-power Allied agreement (between the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and China) called for a commission to formulate a new Japanese constitution by late February 1946. To evade meddlesome Stalinist input, MacArthur’s headquarters pre-empted the commission with its own document, “Three Basic Points,” presented as a Japanese initiative. The first of the points allowed the emperor to remain head of state, though his powers would henceforth derive from the new constitution, which itself would reflect the will of the people. The second point called for Japan’s renunciation of the right to wage war or to maintain armed forces. The third point abolished the feudal system and reformed the peerage. Each point embodied mandates from Washington based on the Allies’ August 1945 Potsdam Agreement.
The new constitution had to be ready in a week, in order to forestall any Soviet input. MacArthur’s Government Section chief, Brig. Gen. Courtney Whitney, summoned his public administration specialists—some of them lawyers—and announced that they now comprised a constitutional assembly; they would secretly draft the new Japanese constitution, and his three deputies would ensure the document appeared to be of Japanese origin. The resulting 92 articles reflected America’s New Deal policies, establishing social welfare and civil rights, even enfranchising women. When deliberations ended on February 10, Lt. Col. Charles Kades, head of the 25-member committee, said to one member, feisty 22-year-old Vienna-born linguist Beate Sirota, the only woman in the room, “My God, you have given Japanese women more rights than in the American Constitution!” She retorted, “That’s not very difficult to do, because women are not in the American Constitution.” Once Hirohito gave his “full approval” of the draft, MacArthur announced his concurrence, and on March 6 the Japanese government made public its new constitution.
https://www.historynet.com/american-proconsul-how-douglas-macarthur-shaped-postwar-japan/
GET HISTORY’S GREATEST TALES—RIGHT
Can we consider for a moment three things. 1) Factions of all stripes have been fighting over turf in Mesopotamia for thousands of years. Occasionally the fighting has been suppressed by the presence of an occupying force whether it be Persian, Roman, Greek, British, French, Ottoman or American. 2) The only thing these factions hate more than each other is an occupying force. 3) All of the borders in the region were drawn at the Treaty of Versailles not to match sectarian or ethnic boundaries, but to meet the colonial aspirations of the British and French. And this is a big part of the ongoing problem.
Welp. I'm sadder now than I've been in a while and that's a sad comparison all by itself. But wiser.
Thanks for the bloody revolving door history lesson.
Make art, not war.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_art#:~:text=The%20history%20of%20art%20focuses,on%20its%20aesthetic%20visual%20form.
Luc, as always, Great writing & information! If only you had been our history teacher, we might have been given the undisguised, unvarnished truth!
Goodness, you make us humans sound like a bunch of crazy monkeys, but with swords and guns. I spent a year in RVN, I Corp, 101 Division, !LT , 2/11 arty. Now that war was terrific, as a result we now get lots of cheap goods in our Walmarts. Gosh, let's start another "liberation" somewhere.
You note what is NEVER mentioned: Vietnam gave a huge boost to the industries of Japan and Korea. With the Congressional law that military goods made overseas NEVER go back to the States, we bought thousands of jeeps made by Fuji Heavy Industries (Subaru) for the ARVN/RF/PF, boots/cloth shoes for the same from South Korea's then new shoe factories, and who knows what else. The Navy tried to get all its ships' modifications and repairs done in Japan rather than in the expensive shipyards of the USA. The goal was to save money, but we really kickstarted our Asian competitors. I liked my Fuji (Subaru) jeep so much (I was on an Army Advisory Team) I tried to buy one ($1400 new), but was told it wouldn't be allowed. The Army paid about $5000 for the racier Ford jeeps. I later in life bought 4 Subarus. Great car. That war hurt America in every way.
Thanks—quite a tour de force. It's time for some group to start awarding Substack prizes. This sure deserves one.
Brilliant assessment and recounting.
I was out of New York and back in Hawaìi by the time Georgie Porgie put his pecker in the knot hole; l foresaw all that you have recounted.
I expressed that to my elected official but it fell on deaf ears, because at that time, Clinton had balanced out budget to a surplus and the feeding frenzy was getting into full gear.
Twenty years on and I’m amazed at how close I was to the way it’s played out.
‘And the Rich have gotten richer and millions of innocent noncombatants have met a violent end. So…
“Nobody ever lost a buck betting on the ignorant stupidity of the American Public.
‘Waddaya gonna do?’