Judith M. Harmon: The True Definition Of 'Cowboy Diplomacy'

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION 

by Judith M. Harmon

Yesterday, my sixteen-year-old son was approached in an Olympia shopping center parking lot (Shades of "Fahrenheit 9/11") by two Marine Corp Recruiters.  My son discussed my deceased Marine Corp brother's feats during and medals from Vietnam as he waited for his sister who was having her nails done in a shop owned by a Vietnamese family.

The recruiters hustled my son for about 20 minutes before asking his age.

I had  previously jumped through hoops to find a statement that could maneuver around the No Child Left Behind Act, to present to his school district, leaving him unmolested by recruiters on campus.  Obviously, I resented the predatory behavior, forced on a minor, without my consent.

As soon as I found out about the attempted lure I headed over to the recruiting office.  I introduced myself as a mother who had been a state side Army medic during the Vietnam war. As I scanned the  room I asked the Marine what a huge motorcycle, small video arcade and other props had to do with the military?  He did not respond. I implied it resembled the game room of a child predator.

I explained that my son was only sixteen and had been approached by recruiters in the parking lot.  I clarified that the Bush Administration has failed to demonstrate a moral compass or an ability to make substantive corrections and my son would not be taking the ill-fated journey with them.

I told him my father, a Marine Corp Artillery Officer during WWII, spent a couple of years in the Solomon Islands.  He brought all of his men out alive and never asked them to do anything that he would not do himself.  He became a rocket scientist and designed the fuel system that took Apollo 11 to the moon.  Unfortunately,  he died six months after the moon walk at the premature age of 56.

I filled him in that our moon shot had more to do with guidance systems for weapons of mass destruction than for space exploration.  I  explained that my brother John, who died at 46, spent two tours in Vietnam as a sniper and demolition expert.  The Marines loaned him to the CIA.  The CIA turned my nineteen-year-old brother into an assassin; two separate trips to Bangkok (civilian hits) securing a bar/restaurant hours before TET and eliminationg rogue troops whom he later figured out were not rogue but just like him.

My father never advised my brother not to follow an immoral order because he did not believe anyone would use his son in such a way.

I asked the recruiter why he thought a cabal of neocons, coming from a country that was being formed four hundred years ago could presume to march into a civilization with five thousand years of history and magically change it?  No response.  It didn't occur to me until I arrived home twenty minutes later what methods would be employed.

Extermination and reservations just as the Native American "problem" was handled.

This administration has worked with the goal of inciting chaos, in Iraq, as a way to break down the culture.  The looting of the museums and historical records was allowed in order to disintegrate the sense of common heritage, failure to provide basic services such as water and electricity plus jobs will foment civil war.  Negroponte, the father of Death Squads, need merely direct a few acts where it appears to be Sunni v Shia or vice versa, with private contractors or CIA as bad actors, to encourage a full blown civil war. Intellectuals are slaughtered and others leave by the thousands. The hope is the extermination of both sides by each other and a replica of the Pol Pot brain drain back into the stone age.

Not possible, you protest.  Ah, but on July 23 The Seattle Times reported that a group of  U.S. soldiers, charged with premeditated murder, claim that they were ordered to kill all military age males they encountered when routing out, or looking for "insurgents."  The U.S. Calvary routinely wiped out all male Indians it deemed a threat.  This is definitive Cowboy Diplomacy.

Sincerely,

Judith M. Harmon
Lacey, WA

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION