is the title of James Carroll's terrific op ed in todays' (Tuesday 5/3) Boston Globe. I strongly urge all kossacks to go
here to read the entire piece. Let me offer just a couple of snippets to whet your reading appetites.
THE HOLIEST acreage in America was consecrated in an act of revenge. Beating a retreat back to Washington from their defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run, Union soldiers crossed into the property of ''Arlington House," Robert E. Lee's home on the Potomac River. They buried the remains of their dead comrades in Mrs. Lee's rose garden. From then on, the Confederate leader's estate was used as a Union graveyard -- a vindictive payback. The place is now known as Arlington National Cemetery.
The blind impulse to respond to hurt by striking back is part of human make-up, yet the urge, opening into the forbidden irrational, is a deep source of shame, too. Humans clothe the act of vengeance in all sorts of other justifications.
more below the fold
Sept. 11, 2001, left the United States in the grip of an unarticulated need for payback. No one takes a blow like that without wanting to strike out. Stated justifications aside, that need fueled the subsequent American attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, which is why it meant so little when those justifications (bin Laden dead-or-alive, WMD, etc.) evaporated. And why it meant so little when the brutalities of American methods were made plain, from torture to hair-trigger checkpoints to ruined cities.
There is a connection between Iraq and the US firebombing of cities at the end of World War II. There is a connection with the Vietnam War, which ended 30 years ago last week. Despite all the talk about Sept. 11, 2001, as a moment of transcendent change, the events of that day, and what followed from them, were not transforming. Rather, they were revealing an epiphany laying bare currents of an American transformation set moving years before in massive acts of reprisal, beginning with the bombing of cities in Germany and Japan and continuing through the extremities of the US air war in Southeast Asia.
The bombing of cities in those wars, carried on even after studies had shown such bombing to be strategically futile, amounted to terrorism campaigns.
The snippets above willgive you but a taste. Truly, go to the original link and read the entire piece. It is well worth the time.