As I watched the video of the last trucks crossing the Kuwait border, all I could see were the black hulls of the Greek ships sailing away, gray smoke still hanging in the ruined walls of Troy.

Not that Iraq is currently in ruins, but the Trojan war has been on my mind for the last decade, since George W. Bush, like Agamemnon before him, began gathering reluctant allies for a headstrong military adventure that brought grief to nearly everyone associated with it.

To appease the gods for sending a military force to make war on a society in a war in which non-combatants on only one side would be at risk, Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia.  (His wife would later kill him for having done that.)  Mr. Bush made no such sacrifice, nor did he ask the majority of his countrymen to make any sacrifice on behalf of the soldiers he commanded.

Popular political psychology has it that one of Mr. Bush, fils authentic motivations for the Iraq invasion was revenge on an enemy of his father’s (or perhaps to show himself stronger than his father).  Both roles are reflected in the character of Neoptolemus, Achilles’s son, whom avenges his father’s death before the walls of Troy, by killing King Priam as the city is sacked.  This “revenge” is the punitive act of a bully, putting the sword into an old man who can no longer defend himself.

As Achilles dishonored Hector’s body, dragging it through the dust of the Dardanian Plain, so the residents of Falluja desecrated the bodies of four Blackwater contractors in 2004, so American troops desecrated the bodies of living and dead Iraqis for “trophy photos,” so – bizarrely – did our military of our nation desecrate the bodies of our own troops by disposing of them in landfills.

“Troy falls at last after ten years of futile, indecisive, noble, mean, tricky, bitter, jealous and only occasionally heroic battle,” writes Barbara Tuchman.  As for the Greeks’ Trojan Horse ploy, she said it exemplifies, “policy pursued contrary to self-interest – in the face or urgent warning and a feasible alternative.  Occurring in this earliest chronicle of Western man, it suggests that such pursuit is an old and inherent human habit.”

(So, wait, am I comparing the US to the Greeks or the Trojans?  Both, actually.  It would seek a foolish consistency to only learn from one side and somehow we have maniacally managed to repeat the worst mistakes of each.)

A more recent and equally depressing analog in the history of arms is the nine-plus years the Soviets spent trying to bring a friendly government to Afghanistan.  That invasion/war/occupation began on a Christmas Eve in 1979 and ended with the trucks and tanks rolling over the border for the cameras on a winter day in 1989.  Like us, the Soviets didn’t try to portray their withdrawal as a victory march, but like us; there was a feeling of relief that comes from setting down a heavy load.  For Islamic militants, the Soviet withdrawal was seen as a tiny force, blessed by Allah driving our a superpower.  How will they see the US withdrawal from Iraq?

I don’t know how things went for the Soviet soldiers, but Western literature says those who fought at Troy brought their war home with them in ways eerily familiar.  Odysseus famously wandered for a decade, as did Aeneas of Troy and his followers.  Neoptolemus was killed by Agamemnon’s son Orestes (who also killed his mother Clytemnestra, who killed Agamemnon).  Our troops return to a devastated economy years of post-traumatic stress disorder.

I suppose it’s appropriate the end of this long, foolish war comes at the end of a year, the end of the 9/11 decade.  Here’s to hoping we can all feel as though we are putting a burden down and prepare to take up new and better burdens in the year ahead.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

I know, rationally, the world doesn’t work like this, but in an odd sense, I’m looking forward to the tenth anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attacks. The irrational part of my brain thinks, “Maybe we’ll wake on September 12th and things will stop being so strange, that this decade of global chaos will end.”

This train of thought started last week, when I realized I was startled about not being startled. I was reading about the workers who were hospitalized after standing in highly irradiated water. They received radiation burns on their legs.

Interesting, but no big deal, right? “Burned by water,” however, just lodged in my head and I found myself muttering it over and over. It slowly surfaced in my brain that what was once absurd is now commonplace.

Consider: we have three wars running simultaneously. (Two and a half, minimum, depending on how picky you wanna get.) There’s no draft; most of us plod along never thinking about it. And plod we do, three years into an economic crisis and no relief in sight. Yesterday, Portugal became the third Eurozone nation to seek a bailout. Yawn. Shrug. Whatever.

Nine years ago in this space, I wondered if perchance I hadn’t developed schizophrenia and could no longer distinguish reality from fantasy. How else, I wondered, could Mark Floegel of 2002 explain his life to Mark Floegel of 1982?

That was when we only had one war. That was before a major American city was washed away and we decided to rebuild it – even though it’s below sea level and even though we haven’t done a thing to stop ocean-raising climate change.

That was before American banks trashed the global economy and everyone understood how the bankers did it and we did nothing about it, except bail out the bankers and let tens of thousands of Americans lose their homes. That was before we dumped two hundred million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and decided to just say it was all OK rather than doing anything about the hazards of offshore drilling. Did you hear the Cubans are opening their portion of the gulf to drilling? They say it’s OK, they won’t make the mistakes we did. Just like our nuclear plants can’t fail the same way Japanese ones do. Except the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (unofficially) says they can. (Officially, they tell us not to worry.)

Economist Joseph Stiglitz, writing in the UK Guardian, sees a common thread in all this: detachment. The people who benefit from – and decide on – the senseless ways in which we run the world, energy executives, bankers, politicians, are detached from the consequences of their decisions.

These oligarchs send out the bureaucrats to explain to us (with that “you’re too stupid to understand” tone) that the risk of anything going wrong is vanishingly small. (They haven’t seen the inventory in the paragraphs above.)

Here’s something to remember: risk is not impact. If there’s a mosquito in your bedroom, it’s annoying, but you’ll stay in bed and try to sleep, knowing you might get bitten. If you know that mosquito will give you a fatal disease, you’ll pull the sheet over your head and run out of the room. The risk of being bitten is the same, but your appreciation of the impact is what determines your behavior.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

The recession. In that May 2008 post, I noted that Goldman Sachs was predicting an oil price of $200/barrel in 2010. But that was May 2008 and by Election Day of that year, the economy had solidly tanked, destroying demand for oil along the way. The price of oil today is around $77/barrel. Even Goldman Sachs gets a money question wrong once in a while.

What happens when (if?) the global recession ends and demand rebounds? Lloyd’s of London, the insurance market that has been the world’s leading authority on business risk for the past 300 years this month predicted “catastrophic consequences” for businesses that fail to adequately prepare for the effects of peak oil.

Lloyd’s and the UK’s Royal Institute of International Affairs jointly released the report, “Sustainable energy security: strategic risks and opportunities for business.”
The authors’ main points are:
* Businesses which prepare for and take advantage of the new energy reality will prosper – failure to do so could be catastrophic
* Market dynamics and environmental factors mean business can no longer rely on low cost traditional energy sources
* China and growing Asian economies will play an increasingly important role in global energy security
* We are heading towards a global oil supply crunch and price spike
* Energy infrastructure will become increasingly vulnerable as a result of climate change and operations in harsher environments
* Lack of global regulation on climate change is creating an environment of uncertainty for business, which is damaging investment plans
* To manage increasing energy costs and carbon exposure businesses must reduce fossil fuel consumption
* Business must address energy-related risks to supply chains and the increasing vulnerability of ‘just-in-time’ models
* Investment in renewable energy and ‘intelligent’ infrastructure is booming. This revolution presents huge opportunities for new business partnerships

Of course, there are a number of well-educated and well-paid people who fill the columns of business web sites with ridicule for the notion of peak oil. In the same post that mocks peak oil theory as “religion,” the author takes pains to write of “conventional oil.” “Conventional oil”? You know, the black stuff that’s pumped from the ground (or spews of its own pressure into the Gulf of Mexico).

The very fact that peak oil’s critics refer to “conventional oil” means we’re running out of it. The Bradford oil field, the world’s first, for decades provided all the lubricating oil for cars. Only that field – under northwestern Pennsylvania and southwest New York – had the high viscosity oil engines demand and so when it began to play out 20 years ago, synthetic motor oils had to be developed. The same is now true for “conventional oil.” We can no longer rely on the stuff that comes up as oil, we’re going to have to boil it out of tar sands and drill miles below the ocean floor and beneath arctic ice (while it lasts) for “unconventional oil.”

So, in a sense, everyone’s right. Yes, there’s oil out there to be had, at tremendous hassle and expense and damage to the environment. So yes, we can keep on with our oil-based economy and cheap plastic everything and NASCAR as entertainment – at a price. A price that will get higher and higher. A price of money and ecological havoc and blood spilled across the globe.

Yesterday, the body of the 11th Vermonter killed in the oil wars was returned home for burial. How many more?

© Mark Floegel, 2010

So, let’s get back to that. What a stupid idea. Just because Gen. William Westmoreland Stanley McChrystal asks for 30,000 troops, doesn’t mean that Mr. Obama, as commander-in-chief, has to give them to him.

I’m not a general or politician, but even after the president’s speeches, I have unanswered questions:

- What are these troops supposed to do? If we’re going to run a classic counter-insurgency campaign, along the lines laid down by Gen. David Petraeus (Gen. McChrystal’s boss), we’ll need between 500,000-600,000 troops in Afghanistan, instead of the 100,000 we’ll have there at the height of the surge and we can’t plan on starting to pull them out in mid-2011.

- What’s with the whole “in and out” strategy anyhow? In the old neighborhood, we used to say, “Go big or stay home.” Mr. Obama does neither. If we start ramping up in January 2010 and ramping down in July 2011, what’s the point, other than to put on a political show to defend Mr. Obama from charges of being “soft on foreign policy”? Memo to the White House: you’re gonna get accused of that anyhow and waste lives, time and money in the process.

- What will all this cost? The first and foremost cost is to our fellow citizens who bear the burden of fighting needless wars. As Bob Herbert pointed out in Tuesday’s Times, it’s the same few soldiers and their families who have been asked to sacrifice more again and again and again for eight years.

- What will this cost in dollars? The cost of the war commonly bandied is one million dollars per year, per pair of boots on the ground. The Washington Post reported Monday that as we pull out of Iraq, the military is authorized to leave as much as $30 million worth of gear behind for the Iraqis at each post. We are leaving 280 posts in Iraq, so the total value of gear we leave behind may approach $8.4 billion. No worries that corrupt Iraqi officials will let any of that stuff fall into the wrong hands and American troops at the six large remaining bases will be killed with weapons purchased by US taxpayers. (“You there! Pay to kill your own kid!”) Of course, we’ll need the exact same gear in Afghanistan. Oh well, I guess we’ll have to buy all new stuff. Bet the defense contractors love this one.

- Are we really leaving Iraq? As I noted above, we’ll still have six large bases and Tuesday morning we woke to learn that over a hundred people died in a series of bombings in Baghdad. Could the terrorists be so uncooperative as to ratchet up the violence in Iraq, just as we’ve made a larger commitment in Afghanistan, thereby straining our overstressed forces even more? Could they be trying to pull us in two directions at once? Damn them! But how could anyone have foreseen this diabolical plot?

- What about the contractors? As of last March, there were 68,000 contractors in Afghanistan – outnumbering the troops at that time. There are 75,000 contractors in Iraq. Shifting the burden from soldiers to mercenaries might look good politically, but to whom are these people responsible? How many are taking drugs in opium-rich Afghanistan? (I’m sure it’s against the rules, but with the contracting companies making a big markup on every warm body they can locate, I’ll bet they’re pretty willing to overlook misbehavior.) Congress has been told we’ll hire local contractors in Afghanistan, but won’t that undermine our ostensible efforts to build up Afghan military and police forces?

- Where’s my war tax? If we accept, for the sake of argument, that Mr. Obama’s war plans need to be enacted, why is he following the George Bush strategy of lulling America into thinking that it all comes for free? Hamid “Where’s My Bribe?” Karzai told the BBC Afghanistan won’t be able to pay for any of its own security for 15 years. Why not ask the rest of us to share the sacrifice of the one in a hundred Americans who have to fight these wars? Why not at least tax the crap out of the bankers and Wall Streeters who party on with their ginormous bonuses?

And oh yeah…. What about Pakistan?

© Mark Floegel, 2009

The adult covers her or his face and suddenly uncovers. “Peek-a-boo!” The baby laughs, the adult covers up and the process repeats. Both players seem to enjoy the game immensely.

What’s going on below the surface is that the baby is learning the notion of permanence. At first, the game seems to involve an adult appearing from nowhere, over and over. Eventually, the child learns that the adult has been there the whole time, covering up and uncovering. Peek-a-Boo!

Being able to grasp the concept of permanence; that the adult – or anything else for that matter – continues to exist when out of sight, is a function of the higher brain. The notion that the only things that exist are those we can see is a function of the limbic brain, sometimes called the reptile brain or the animal brain. The shift in consciousness from the limbic to the higher brain is what separates us from animals – or not.

There are times for all of us when the limbic brain takes over. Usually it’s a time of great stress. The limbic brain is where the “fight or flight” response lives. When we panic, it’s the limbic brain that’s doing the thinking. One reason the decisions we make in panic are so reliably poor.

If a child progresses normally, he or she will graduate from Peek-a-Boo to hiding behind a parent’s leg when a stranger arrives on the scene. (“If he can’t see me, I’m invisible.”) A few years on and the child plays “Hide and Seek” with friends. I suppose that’s a competition among seven-year-olds to see who has best mastered the concept of permanence.

I start noticing myself slipping into limbic brain. It happened last month as I drove up a twisting dirt road up Pike’ Peak (no guardrails, oncoming traffic, 500-foot drops). It happens in social situations when I have to introduce someone whose name I have forgotten.

What does it all mean? A few things, I think. On a concrete level, it means neglected babies, ones that do not have the benefit of endless rounds of Peek-a-Boo, develop more slowly than their more cared-for peers. They come later to the concept of permanence and have difficulty with other abstract concepts, like fairness and justice. More of their lives are dominated by their limbic, reptile, animal brains and therefore, they act more like animals. Fear and instinct rule their lives and their fighting and/or fleeing are inappropriate responses to the complex situations modern life throws at us.

It is often these neglected children who commit gruesome crimes because they do not have the tools to rise above the pitiful state neglect – and all too often, abuse – has left them in. So when you read that a court-ordered psychological profile of a person accused of a bloody-minded crime says that he or she was doomed to such acts by poor parenting, it’s not just the mollycoddles of bleeding-heart society. It’s a scientifically described fact, same as the prediction that salt will rust your car.

For the rest of us, who successfully negotiated the journey from Peek-a-Boo to Hide and Seek and beyond, where does the lesson end? We, individually, have learned about equality and justice and fairness, but at the same time we see society’s highest rewards heaped on those who operate from the reptile brain (think Wall Street, think Washington and Moscow). Like the neglected child that grew into heartless criminal, we are – to some extent – the victims of the society that created us. More importantly, we ARE that society, a society that too often operates from a reptile brain.

We are less than the sum of our parts, but as long as the guilt can be parceled out somewhere else, we shrug and go along. If 47 million uninsured Americans are safely out of sight, we can pretend they don’t exist. If one third of one percent of our population has to spend year after year on the far side of the globe, fighting our wars for oil, we can keep buying plastic trash. If we think we will be securely dead by the time the worst effects of global warming are visited on our neighborhood, we can keep believing they will never happen.

© Mark Floegel, 2009

I like to keep up with the news, but I’m suffering from sensory overload: a huge economic crisis, what is on the verge of being labeled a global swine flu pandemic (or as the American Pork Producers Council implores, “the H1N1 virus”), a global war on terror (or as the Obama administration corrects, “overseas contingency operations”), an outbreak of euphemisms, the end of the American auto industry as we’ve known it, musical chairs in the US Senate, nuclear Pakistan becoming unstable, nuclear North Korea becoming more unstable, none-too-stable Iran lusting for nuclear capacity.

Hurricane season is just one month away. WooHoo!

In the summer of 2002, I posted a commentary in which I speculated that if I could have accurately predicted 2002’s news (airplanes flying into skyscrapers, shoe bombs) twenty years earlier, I would have been treated for mental illness. By 1989, my mental illness would have been worse that it was in 1982.

It turned out that the bad president, the one who started the unnecessary war, was tapping the phones of American citizens and was ordering people to be tortured. If fact, we used the same torture that we executed Japanese war criminals for using in the 1940s. The new president – who by the way is the first black president – doesn’t seem inclined to do anything about that, but at least he says we won’t torture anymore. And the bad president destroyed the economy and the rednecks are building a wall all along the Mexican border….

Click. The little window on my padded cell snaps shut and the orderly walks away, shaking her head.

In that 2002 post, I noted the publication of a new book, “Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market,” by James Glassman and Kevin Hackett. Where are you today, guys? Living in an improvised hut built of remaindered copies, I’d guess.

In a September 2006 post, I predicted the demise of the American auto industry. I’d just attended a three-day meeting on global warming, during which the auto industry had been assessed with cold-blooded objectivity.

As I drove away from that meeting (in an American car, no less), I couldn’t ignore the lump in my stomach. The automakers were dying of a thousand self-inflicted cuts, but I was witness to the death of one of the central myths of the American century. Every one of the negative predictions made during that meeting has come to pass. (To be fair, a few of the wishes have come true, too. “If only we could oust John Dingell as chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee…”)

Another one of those spurious memes relating to the Chinese is that the Chinese character for “crisis” combines the words “danger” and “opportunity” and while it’s poor linguistics, there might be a good idea there.

The opportunity in this convergence of crises is that it offers us a chance to wipe the slate cleaner than we have for half a century. It gives us the opportunity for new beginnings. Maybe the message we’re getting is that incremental solutions won’t work. (I’m looking at you, Tim Geithner.)

For the next several years, times will be hard and things will be weird. So be it. It would be really stupid, I mean like “American auto executive stupid,” for us to try to “solve” our problems by getting back to where we were just before the walls fell in. That’s not a solution; that’s the “rewind” button.

Let’s not wait for more crises to accrue before we listen. Let’s start wiping the slate, start new and do a better job this time.

© Mark Floegel, 2009

In those books, the bad guys – the wizards and witches that had been drawn to the Dark Side – make their case thusly: This isn’t about good and evil, it’s about power and the difference between those who are strong enough to claim it and those who are not.

OK, maybe that’s wrong. Maybe thinking about Harry Potter isn’t the weird thing. The weird thing is how many educated politicians and journalists are criticizing – not the fact that the United States of America made routine torture a policy – but that we have revealed that the policy existed and have promised not to do it again.

“Now we’ve given the terrorists a handbook of what we do and they’ll train their people to resist it,” is one of the common complaints heard on tee vee. Um, no we haven’t given them a handbook, because we just said we weren’t going to do it anymore. Were you not listening?

Besides, it’s not like we invented waterboarding. It’s been around since the Inquisition at least, that’s what? Half a millenium? As the declassified memos make clear, the whole torture handbook was cribbed from techniques used by the Chinese and North Korean communists during the Korean War 50 years before we started using them. Osama has an Internet connection too.

If the Bush people had used the Internet to greater effect, they’d have learned that waterboarding, stress positions, long bouts of sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and all the other stuff doesn’t produce actionable intelligence from prisoners. That was the lesson of Korea. What it does produce are mentally broken individuals who will say whatever they’re told to say, which is why so many American servicemen were made to denounce their homeland. Just ask John McCain.

As the timeline in the memos makes clear, untrue statements from prisoners may have been part of the Bush/Cheney plan. One of the early uses to which this torture was applied was to get prisoners to confess to a link between the 9-11 attacks and Iraq, thus justifying a pre-emptive war George W. Bush wanted to launch since before he took office. So, congratulations George and Dick, you dragged a once-great nation down to the level of 1950s communist propaganda for your own political purposes.

Dick Cheney, the Valdemort in this US/Potter analogy, is the chief spokesperson for the “power and those not afraid to use it” school. In recent interviews, he sneers at those who disagree as weak, unpatriotic and wanting to coddle terrorists. He misses the point and wants us miss it, too. People with a sense of morality are not weak coddlers; they refuse to debase themselves and their nation. People who stand for due process and inalienable human rights are patriots. The difference is not between strong and weak, it’s between good and evil. The difference is clear in the Harry Potter books and it’s equally clear in real life, unless as Upton Sinclair said, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Weird, you want weird? Last week the teabaggers were calling Barack Obama a tyrant and a dictator. This week, Fox News and the other sponsors of that protest are calling Mr. Obama weak because he repudiates torture. Inconsistency is the hallmark of political desperation.

The full extent of our history of torture is still unknown. It needs to be known. We cannot put this behind us until all is revealed. We know Khalid Sheik Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times. The first waterboarding must have given Mr. Mohammed a “handbook” of what was to come, but it didn’t stop his torturers from doing it another 182 times. The only explanation for such behavior I can imagine is emotional disturbance that ran all the way to the West Wing of the White House.

Yes, we need to know everything that was done in out name and then we need a national week of mourning and repentance.

© Mark Floegel, 2009

Still, the world is not two-dimensional and those who pretend it is do an injustice to reality. I’m willing to give Barack Obama some limited benefit of the doubt on America’s two wars because he inherited them from George W. Bush.

Now that he is president, Mr. Obama has the duty to direct US war policy in ways that are sane and in keeping with America’s constitutional values. As Richard Nixon said about Vietnam when he assumed the presidency, “This is Johnson’s war, but in six months, it will be mine.” It was, and he didn’t do a good job with it.

War is rarely noble. If any war approaches nobility, it was World War II and because of that, I think Americans have been confused about war since. Because we were clearly the “good guys” in that war, we tend to reflexively think of ourselves as “good guys” in all subsequent wars.

We have not been the good guys in Iraq. That war is a brutal, stupid mistake. Mr. Obama gets partial credit for promising to draw down our troops in Iraq and for promising to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. He’ll get full credit when he makes good on those promises.

Afghanistan is another story. I don’t think our cause there is noble, I do think it’s necessary.

We face a handful of unpalatable choices in Afghanistan. We don’t want the Taliban to take over and make the country a haven for terrorists nor do we want the country to descend into the warlordism and opium production that preceded the Taliban’s first takeover. The Karzai government we’ve supported is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent (very much like the disastrous Diem regime in South Vietnam).

What’s the solution? I don’t know. I do know Donald Rumsfeld’s massive bombing campaign that opened the Afghan war was stupid and brutal, like the Iraq mistake. Somehow, we have to find a way to make Afghanistan stable, governed by people who are a threat to neither Afghan citizens nor other countries. I know getting there from here will be a long process and will entail the goodwill of many nations, both in the region and around the world.

The Afghans have had poor to terrible governments as long as history can record. It is understandable, given their plight, that the Afghan people have little or no hope for a decent society (or would even know what one looks like), so we have to have that hope for them. If we are to have a policy – a war policy, a foreign policy – that is worthy of the United States of America, then we need to have as our goal the stability of Afghan nation and the well being of the Afghan people. We need to help them stand until they can stand on their own.

General David Petraeus was in Washington yesterday, asking for more troops. We will soon have 68,000 troops in Afghanistan and Gen. Petraeus would like another 10,000 on top of that. Many of these troops have been rotating on and off combat duty for seven and a half years. Stateside lives are in tatters; many suffer from post-traumatic stress. All of us owe these men and women a huge debt and we should not scant on paying it. They have sacrificed greatly and deserve our support.

President Obama seems intent on extracting us from a foolish and unnecessary war. The other war, the unwelcome but necessary war, he seems determined to fight as wars should be fought, with sadness and determination.

© Mark Floegel, 2009

Navigating I heavy weather, Dan and I piled into his dad’s silver ’75 Honda cvcc, picked up subs at the SubYard and headed for my house, where my dad had a challenge.

“You’ve been drinking.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“What day is it?”

“The nineteenth.” (Ha!)

“… of January.” (D’oh!) “Uh, I mean March.”

Busted.

I’m not sure that’s worth remembering, much less commemorating, except to remind me that 30 years ago, I was a young and unserious (perhaps reckless) high school senior. My dad, I’m sure, was wishing I’d wise up and get serious. I got a big dose of seriousness – and so did everyone else – nine days later when the Unit 2 nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island experienced a partial core melted down.

It was a sobering kick in the pants for an about-to-be-18-year-old only somewhat mediated in the following years by the realization that Three Mile Island went a long way toward ending the construction of nuclear electric generating plants in the U.S.

Sad to report, the nuclear industry is hoping that 30 years later, their shabby history has been forgotten as they try to peddle a new generation of nukes under the falsehood of combating global warming.

Ten years later, I was a still-young environmentalist working in Washington, DC when, on March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska and dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil.

Twenty years after that sorry day, Exxon has yet to compensate any of the thousands of people – entire communities – whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed that day. By 1991, Exxon declared that the spill had been “cleaned up,” but experts tell us that in the best of circumstances, a maximum of 15 percent of ocean-spilled oil is ever “cleaned up.”

Meanwhile 20 percent of the plaintiffs who sued Exxon for the damage the sill did them, have now died. That’s a solemn meditation for a 20th anniversary – 20 percent of the injured died with no compensation, only 15 percent of the oil treated.

What got me thinking about my high school misadventures, however, are the seniors in the class of 2003, because today is the sixth anniversary of the foolish and deadly invasion of Iraq.

Yes, Three Mile Island was a jarring wake-up for me, but it was still somewhat far away. Not geographically, but in terms of how much control I could have over it. I was still able to pretend it was an “adult thing.”

Wars are different. They’re fought by the young. If you go to one of the many web sites that list Americans killed in Iraq and read the ages, you’ll see most of them don’t remember Three Mile Island. The Exxon Valdez spill is a hazy memory at best. The number of dead today stands at 4,259.

Barack Obama – who’s three months younger than I – has promised to get us out of Iraq, even as he sinks us deeper into Afghanistan. The all-volunteer Army, which had struggled to fulfill its quotas not so long ago, is now aided by the sagging economy.

There is value in anniversaries. They remind of us lessons we’ve learned or offer the chance to learn a lesson we’ve missed. Next year, we say, things will be better.

© 2009, Mark Floegel

The US, via the CIA helped with money, weapons and training. If you watched “Charlie Wilson’s War,” it all seems like fun with a few caveats thrown in. That movie leaves one with the impression that it was the movement of millions of US tax dollars, plus some nights in Middle Eastern cafes with shady arms dealers that made the difference.

That’s not how Osama bin Laden and his friends see it. Their version of history says God – Allah – strengthened their hand and all that CIA money was just a manifestation of God’s will. The displeasure of Allah with the godless Commies was such that not only were the infidels driven from Afghanistan, but the Soviet Union collapsed soon after.

From where I sit, the collapse of the Soviets wasn’t so simple. It had to do with economics, Soviet political sclerosis, the price of oil and a dozen other factors. To Islamic fundamentalists, however, that was of a class with the CIA money in Afghanistan. Just part of the plan. To them, the Iron Curtain was torn because Insha’Allah: God wills it.

Then, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait. Osama thought Saddam should be pushed back, but he wanted only Muslims to do the pushing. The Saudi royal family disagreed and threw in with a coalition of western nations. Part of the deal allowed US military personnel to operate from bases in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi is home to the holiest of Muslim shrine at Mecca and Medina and the presence of non-believers on Saudi soil was infuriating to Mr. bin Laden and his followers, even though – in an uncharacteristic burst of cultural sensitivity – the Pentagon bent over backwards to keep from offending Muslims. Non-Muslim religious services were kept to a minimum, women were kept on base, so devout Muslims would not have to look at them, no beer, etc. etc. True, we stepped on the civil rights of our people trying not to offend their people, but we never seem to be able to get that stuff just right.

The point is, Osama thinks he and God got together and destroyed the Soviet Union and since Mr. bin Laden thinks God is an angry god, he probably felt he was speaking for Angry God when he declared that the unfaithful US must be destroyed and so the attacks on the US began and reached a high point (so far) on Sept. 11, 2001.

Since then, Osama has been quoted as saying he and Allah will destroy the US, just as they did the Soviets. From where he sits, it may look like the plan is working. The US is tied up in two wars, neither of which is going very well. In fact, what’s happened to the US military in the past six years looks an awful lot like what happened to the Soviet military in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Of course, what really brought down the Soviets was their economy, because you can’t be a military power and an economic weakling. And now our economy is tanking – and taking much of the global economy with it, but that’s OK with Osama and his pals because… well, they live in caves and the standard of living they’d prescribe for the rest of us wouldn’t look much different.

From our side of the world, we see that America’s current weakness (military and economic) is due to the incompetence of George Bush and the people around him. It’s odd that both Mr. Bush and Mr. bin Laden think Mr. Bush’s actions as president were ordained by God.

Mr. Bush’s time is nearly through and let’s hope Mr. bin Laden’s is too. Maybe, going forward, we can take responsibility for our own actions and dig ourselves out of this mess.

© 2009, Mark Floegel