By Myles Ludwig
My Uncle Izzy was gassed during the First World War.
I remember a brief visit with him when he was on his deathbed. I was maybe 4. I was shocked to see that he had shrunk to near-infant size from the man I knew as a sturdy Russian immigrant.
I had known him as strong man, a man who had been an acrobat with his brothers performing on the beach at Coney Island, scraping and sanding parquet Brooklyn floors with them for a living, fathering four large and powerful sons and one equally strong and powerful woman. All of whom I remember as gentle. I remember them cleaning fish they’d caught in the kitchen sink of his Brooklyn home.
I remember when I stood beside his bed — it seemed more crib than bed — with other family members, and hearing whispers he’d been gassed in the war and was never the same.
I had no idea what that meant, being gassed. Much later I learned that poison gas was a gruesome weapon used by both sides during that war. It was a frightening thought, to be killed by some invisible, insidious agent, a cloud of death that lingered in one’s life forever.
My own father’s life was saved by atomic poison. Slated to be part of the forward force in the invasion of Tokyo in the Second World War, his life was saved when Harry Truman dropped a cloud of fire and gas on Hiroshima, killing so many and poisoning the lives of those who survived.
I remember arguing with him at the dinner table about the morality of that choice. I was naïve and probably offensive. In the meantime we were dropping napalm and Agent Orange in Vietnam which poisoned the lives of both Americans and Vietnamese. My opposition to that war was a minuscule part of the larger effort to end that war. Sadly, it did little to improve the lives of those who suffered.
Poison has been part of war at least the 17th century when poison bullets were used in the war between France and the Holy Roman Empire. They were used by us in our invasion of Iraq, though that has largely been swept under the media rug.
Poison arrows?
And now: It reminds me of those abstract childhood debates about whether it was better to die by the gun or the knife. We didn’t consider gas.
Or drones.
To strike or not to strike is a very troubling question. It’s a question with a substantial number of substantive moving parts: What is this country called Syria and the civil war within it; what is the place of moral issues and fairness in war; what is the value of punishment; what is the appropriate role of our country in the world’s internecine wars; why this media hype, multiplatform regurgitation and so many media mistakes; what about the return of “the credibility gap” – a term so familiar to us from the LBJ and Nixon days of the ’60s and ’70s – and how to assess the character of our president?
To say that we have been presented with a Hobson’s choice, balancing on Occam’s razor and riding Buridan’s ass on the very narrow and dangerous road of analogies to Damascus, to say that, is a glib view of the predicament.
Syria is a made-up country. It came into existence as a result of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire allied to our enemies in the First World War. It was a spoils-of-war prize given to the French, who carved it up into a geographic jigsaw puzzle seemingly based on ethnic or religious, or ideological borders. The divide-and-conquer theory.
Its parts never comfortably fit together, not then nor now. The Alawite sect, of which Syria’s current ruling mafia is a member, is historically a secret, mystical form of Islam which traces its roots back to the Canaanites and Hittites of ancient times. One of its tenants is reincarnation. They were persecuted, and then elevated into bureaucratic heaven by the French just as were the Sinhalese and Tamils by the British, the Hutu and the Tutsi by Belgians. These changes turned their societies upside down as the underdogs become the rulers.
Nobody was happy.
What is fair in war? What’s the difference between a law and a “norm”? When does the violation of a “norm” become a war crime? Is beheading American prisoners of war by the Japanese in the 1940s somehow worse or better than Islamofacists beheading Daniel Pearl?
Worse than drone attacks?
Our government leaders are talking about “punishing,” but does punishment work? Think of your own children.
Did we punish the Chinese for selling machetes to the Hutu to massacre Tutsis?
Secretary of State John Kerry — a Vietnam vet who was became a peace activist — has called this a “Munich moment” for America, comparing Britain’s appeasement of Hitler’s aggression to America’s stuttering in Syria.
But I think it might more accurately be called Obama’s Rwanda moment.
Just as the failure to act in Rwanda seemed to haunt President Clinton and impel him to action in Kosovo, I think the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Obama is more frightened of being accused of being weak than of sliding down the slippery slope of any unintended consequences – which there will surely be.
So, he’s tossed the ball to a stultified Congress as cover (“not my credibility”), still coyly reserving the authority to do what he thinks is right no matter how they vote, speaks with a silver tongue to a confused, Iraq-dazed country and paradoxically uses Samantha Power, so bitterly critical of Clinton’s failure in Rwanda, as an engine to move the needle on the proverbial meter of hearts and minds.
It seems as though every member of his government is pivoting so fast they are whirling. Why believe this CW evidence in Syria when WMD evidence in Iraq turned out to be false? Is Obama truly more worthy of trust than Bush? Is his “high confidence” so different than the previous “slam dunk?” Surprisingly, the previously hawkish neocon Paul Wolfowitz has been chastened by history and now talks diplomacy.
I think it’s time to take the gloves off in critically viewing Obama. We’ve given him a lot of latitude, but he’s done little. He’s failed to live up to the promise we imposed on him and which he accepted. Our disillusionment is palpable, but we’re afraid to express it for fear of being called, what – racist?
Is he a re-tread, elected on promise of being pragmatic, but turning out to be unprincipled? Substituting one ideology for no ideology?
Perhaps it is true, as Albert Einstein said, “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”
I don’t know what the “right thing to do” is.
But I do know, that as the songs go, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a gas, gas, gas” and “I used to love (you), but it’s all over now.”
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.