October 29, 2007 archive

When Mercenary Armies Go Crazy

One of the things that always troubled me about the application of the term “Machiavellian” to the zany antics of the Bush misadministration is the extent to which Rovian Math – and even Cheneyian Cloak & Daggerism – ignores the master manipulator’s precepts.  Indeed, like a conservative Christian who cherry-picks Leviticus, the architects of the failed philosophy of neoconservatism ignored some of the Prince’s very clear warnings about things like rulers relying on hired soldiers to look out for their interests – and look at the quagmire of black water it’s gotten us into.

Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we’ll look into another occasion in which the use of mercenaries has bitten an empire in the ass.  As usual, we Americans are by no means the first to experience the sort of happening-since-at-least-the-time-of-Rome setback that so shocks (shocks!) the neocons every time one of them so predictably comes to pass.

LiveBlog with Aidan Delgado

OK – so here we go. 

I don’t have a lot prepared to say up top here.  I just want to welcome Aidan Delgado and give a brief intro. He will be posting here as TheObjector. 

Aidan Delgado joined the Army Reserve in 2001 and was sent to Iraq in March 2003. He was assigned to the 320th Military Police Company where he worked as a mechanic and also as a radio operator.  He spent 1 year in Iraq – 6 months at Tallil Airbase outside Nasiriyah and 6 months at Abu Ghraib.  As a Buddhist he soon found that being in the Army and witnessing the inhumanity of war and its effects on his fellow soldiers, and of course the Iraqis, violated all his beliefs and principles.  He decided he could not be a willing participant any longer so he turned in his weapon and filed for Conscientious Objector status.  His book tells about everything he saw and felt and how difficult it was to go on living and working with most of the soldiers in his unit once he made the decision to become an Objector.  It is a really amazing story of courage and compassion.  Highly recommended.

You can read more about the book here: Review

Click the book cover to purchase from the publisher, Beacon Press.

Here is Aidan’s website with a lot more information and links. 

Without further ado, I’ll open the floor, I mean blog, to questions.  Post your comments at any time and Aidan can work his way down the page to reply. 

Pony Party: Sunday music retrospective

Some of the Men


Harry Chapin:  W.O.L.D.

Is It Now?

Docudharma is subtitled, “Blogging the Future”.  I’ve written before that, to me, that phrase means that this blog is dedicated to the construction or at least discovery of the Next Big Thing, the next world-view, the post-post modernism that will become the world we live in, the culture we inhabit, after the worn-out hand-me-down culture that we call “late twentieth century America” is finally tossed in the hamper.  Of course, Docudharma is not unique in this venture; much of the blogosphere is committed to it, if not so explicitly.

However, I want to suggest that we cannot blog the future until we understand the present, and I don’t think we understand the present yet.  I don’t think we know what the first decade of the twentieth-first century “meant” yet.  We know it was a disaster.  We know it was a cheat; a cheap trick.  We know that because of George Bush and 9/11, in that order, the decade that was supposed to bring us flying cars instead brought us faith-based everything.  We know that something went wrong.

But I don’t think the narrative that a country tells itself about where it is, is, yet.  We don’t have a story for when we are.

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