Duck and Cover

I've see many troubles in my time,
only half of which ever came true
--Mark Twain

How much pain they have cost us,
the evils which have never happened.
--Thomas Jefferson

There are more things, Lucilius,
that frighten us than injure us,
and we suffer more in imagination than in reality
--Seneca

When I'm drivin' in my car
And that man comes on the radio
He's tellin' me more and more
About some useless information
--Satisfaction, The Rolling Stones
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Fear is big business in America. If you were o.k., you wouldn't buy half the stuff you dump into your cart every buying trip. The Chicken Little Bush administration did not discover the phenomenon of harnessing our fear to promote their dirty little agenda.

We feared the Native Americans, the blacks, the yellow peril, the Communists, terrorists, meteoroids. The baby boomers fear their very biology -- wrinkles, gray hair and yellow teeth. The front page plash is Muslim extremism. Ranger fears an economic meltdown.

There is no shortage of fearful scenarios, but we should choose to act only upon those which are relevant and present a clear danger. We cannot tilt at windmills as we lack the military and financial wherewithal to address all dangers. A fear is not a threat until it can actually do harm.

Most of our leaders are chicken shit bastards that never wore a uniform so they don't understand the first lesson that all veterans got on Day 1 of Basic Training: Don't sweat the small stuff. Ignore everything imagined and focus on what is real and important.

What is important is everything that will kill, eat or severely rearrange the assemblage of your body parts. This awareness is the basis of all military actions. One does not worry about overdue mortgage payments while marching out of the encirclement at the Chosin Reservoir.

Everything in its time and place. Prioritize, economize, identify the main threat and deal with it while containing secondary attacks. Accomplish the mission, but the implied mission is always personal physical survival.

This orientation is the distinctive element that defines a veteran's life view. It goes deeper than a flag lapel pin sported on a politician's lapel.

So why are Americans so fearful? Have we become old dogs afraid of a kick in the head? We buy off on phony wars to keep us safe from the shadows. Now we are expanding the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) to Pakistan as a metric intended to produce success in Afghanistan.

We are forcing the Pakistan Army to fight the Taliban because we see this as a precondition to defeating an insurgency in Afghanistan. This is desperation posing as policy, based upon another fearful lie.

Of course a Talib victory over Pakistan would be a disaster, but is it even rational to consider that a real-life probability? As a rational nation, how would we evolve this outlandish, unquantifiable and unjustified fear, and then build a policy around it?

We fear the Pakistan nukes getting into the hands of Muslim extremists, yet gladly and readily accept that Pakistan Muslims actually presently own and control these weapons. What is the difference between a radical Muslim and a Muslim? Why is one trusted and the other vilified?

Why do we accept in stride the nukes in China, India, Russia, etc., but the Pakistan weapons have us flying in ever-tighter circles? Rationality has nothing to do with ownership of nuclear weapons. Logic and nuclear weapons cannot occupy the same grid square.

If one bothers to remember, the official U.S. policy regarding nukes was No First Strike and MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). MAD was the only believable part after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Ranger was amused and mystified during Nuclear Officers Employment School by U.S. policy, which was poised to destroy Europe to save it. They also taught us that 35% civilian casualties was an acceptable figure for collateral damage. During the Vietnam war we zippoed villages to democratize the inhabitant's lives.

Same concept, different AO.