Any clue as to the status of Blackwater? Is there a chain of
command there? If so, is it only within the State Dept.?
What the legal status of private US armies in a place like
Iraq?
Hal
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Halvard Johnson
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On Oct 1, 2007, at 8:59 PM, Joseph Duemer wrote:
> Thanks, Douglas. In the US these days we tend to give the military a
> complete pass. Can do no wrong. Has the public's trust. This is mostly
> unexamined guilt left over from the American War in Vietnam. A
> dangerous
> precursor to fascism. I think we're very close to that, now.
>
> Peter, the poet always marries the horse.
>
> jd
>
> On 10/1/07, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> Joe
>>
>> I read the piece with interest this morning, after finding my first
>> reference to it in a reply to a note I haven't found yet. It was an
>> interesting piece, but I think you've caught the aspect that bothered
>> me too. Her concern for those she teaches is fine, but,yes, her
>> seeming
>> lack of concern that her charges are going off to fight an immoral &
>> illegal war in a country where the country they serve has destroyed
>> both hundreds of thousands of its people and much f=of its
>> infrastructure as well as created millions of refugees, for a set of
>> lies ddid bother me.
>>
>> Thanks for pointing that out so clearly....
>>
>> Doug
>> On 30-Sep-07, at 5:42 PM, Joseph Duemer wrote:
>>
>>> Here is my comment on the article, from my
>>> weblog<http://www.sharpsand.net/>
>>> :
>>>
>>> That is what Elizabeth D. Samet appears to have written in her
>>> forthcoming
>>> book, excerpted
>>> here<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/magazine/30WestPoint-t.html?
>>> ex=1348804800&en=1295af93deef8a15&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rs
>>> s>i
>>> n
>>> the
>>> *NY Times Magazine*. I find her her eerie coolness about the Iraq
>>> War
>>> deeply
>>> unsettling. I suppose it is a good thing that the young officers she
>>> describes carry Wallace Stevens or Andrew Marvell into the gibbering
>>> moral
>>> idiocy of Baghdad with them. A tolerance for ambiguity of the
>>> sort one
>>> learns from poetry might also serve as a kind of restraint
>>> against the
>>> military culture of certitude, I suppose. Samet's accounts are
>>> full of
>>> budding *noblesse oblige*, but all the Stevens & Marvell in the
>>> world
>>> doesn't change the truth, as Tim O'Brien (an infantryman) put it in
>>> "How to
>>> Tell a True War Story" — "Send young men to war and they come home
>>> talking
>>> dirty."
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Joseph Duemer
>>> Professor of Humanities
>>> Clarkson University
>>> [sharpsand.net]
>>>
>>>
>> Douglas Barbour
>> 11655 - 72 Avenue NW
>> Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
>> (780) 436 3320
>> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>>
>> Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
>> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>>
>> When you combine two unique voices
>> it creates a third, phantom voice.
>>
>> Emmy Lou Harris
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Joseph Duemer
> Professor of Humanities
> Clarkson University
> [sharpsand.net]
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