Maravi

(NEWZIMBABWE) Ambassador Ray: Dulce et Decorum Est!

Ambassador Ray: Dulce et Decorum Est!
by Nathaniel Manheru
14/08/2010 00:00:00

I MUST confess that I find the US ambassador quite a fascinating character.

I will ignore the fact that he now enjoys a weekly byline in Ncube’s Standard, to focus on his ideas. His piece in this week’s Standard was a moving plea for the forgotten, troubled soldier, whoever and wherever he might be, whichever war of cause might have disgorged him.

This tragic persona, as the ambassador would want us to characterise him/her, is a victim of conflicts he seldom provokes, conflicts usually caused and triggered by politicians "who rarely have to face the physical consequences of battle up close".

In his view, these war-mongers (politicians) are quick to mothball him/her, he/she the human war toy, much the same way a childhood toy is discarded, cast into "a dark corner of the closet."

At which point our anti-war hero-ambassador cuts in with personal experiences culled from his participation in America’s infamous war against Vietnam.

Following his second deployment by the same America to the same country in 1998, the first one having stretched between 1968 and 1973 when he fought the war, Ambassador Ray fortuitously befriends a commander of a Vietcong unit which he had tried "in vain" to destroy in 1968.

He writes: "We found that 30 years after the fact, we could exult in having survived and enjoy each other’s companionship," notes Obama’s envoy to here.
Wilfred Owen reincarnate

Let me very clear, the ambassador is not breaking new ground by way of his irreverent attitude towards — or more accurately after — a war.

There is a huge corpus of combat literature dedicated towards showing the ugly side of this grisly industry, well away from the traditional view of war as an opportunity for martial honour, away from a panegyrised view of war which conveniently glosses over its hideous side.

Leading in this tradition of literature is the poet Wilfred Owen who tested aesthetic myth with graphic descriptions of the decidedly unsightly, serum-gurgling mouths of dead soldiers strewn on the battlefield.

Against such a gory backdrop irony took a vengeful toll on the ageless patriotic line: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (how beautiful it is to do die for one’s country). I am sure the Ambassador is familiar with this First World War poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est". So, nothing extraordinary in your account, Mr Ambassador.

Reviving the supply side of war

What is really extraordinary is the sheer sequence of his piece, that is, the fact that it comes hard on the heels of the America’s commander-in-chief’s recent address to US veterans, indeed that it came just ahead of commemoration of our heroes here.

Last week, I had occasion to comment on Obama’s address to America’s veterans, noting that through this address, Obama had embraced America’s unjust wars overseas, indeed sought to glamourise its by-now malfunctioning or mothballed human war machines, but without pausing for a moment to ask what wars, what cause.

Today I go slightly beyond that analysis. Frankly Obama’s speech amounted to a testament of more commitment to deadly wars of aggression by the US and its presidency. I resent the fact that martial America need wear my colour, my skin, my identity as an African for its macabre rituals.

We the victims of America’s cruel history, we targets of prospective American aggression overseas have no business glorifying the human agency of those wars. What is worse, as Obama speaks, America under his command is conducting more hostilities abroad.

In other words, Obama is stoking, revving up the supply-side of war, thereby setting the stage for more such addresses by America’s future presidents, thereby further deepening the institution of unjust wars whose ambiguous legacy is a happy, confident face of superpower America, set against broken anguished faces, stirred and tortured consciences of veterans like Charles Ray, now better knowing, now recanting wars from bitter but salving self-pity.
Hacking America’s Rambo

Is it not extraordinary that the US Commander-in-chief’s message to veterans gets the most poignant rejection from his ambassador here, himself a black veteran of Vietnam?
Maybe Manheru must turn off the lights, close the door and take a stroll into oblivion.

For, so it seems, the column now has a new hand. Secondly, Ambassador Ray pays a rare tribute to those patriotic Vietnamese combatants who fought to eject the invading and occupying imperialist army of America. And he does it through a quiet lamentation, shorn of any rhetorical flourish: from 1968 to 1973, the invading US Army tried "in vain" to subdue Vietnam. What an admission from one so intimately involved in that war!

It is a defeat the US endured until its not-so-dignified exit in 1973, a hurried exit that left behind a triumphant and re-united Vietnam, sworn never to be a colony again.

In this seemingly innocuous instalment, the US ambassador pitilessly hacks down the myth of American invincibility, a myth so carefully and painfully cultivated through America’s foremost dream factory — Hollywood — both to enable America to come to terms with its own defeat at the hands of a small people, a small gun enlarged by a just cause, and partly to keep an otherwise increasingly truculent "other" world awed and terrified through such fictional images of false American firepower.

Rambo is history of warfare as America would rather have had it, never as America endured it. Thank you ambassador for shooting down America’s Rambo myth, the myth of a warring America grinning at its inevitable victory for all wars however unjust, whatever grave injury caused to the "other".
Stalking ghost of Mai Lai

But before America’s chaotic retreat from Vietnam, she made sure she killed a little more Veitnamese civilians, most spectacularly at Mai Lai. And this is where my fight with the ambassador, as agency of an unjust regime, begins. His piece pities a soldier who kills enough to survive the war, but a soldier too callous to reserve a dime’s worth of pity for those civilians he killed in cold blood, all in the name and line of duty.

Call this soldier the "forgotten plumage" of America’s wars, one well decorated, indeed periodically recognised on national days such as the day in question, indeed one repaid by diplomatic postings or ministerial appointments as happened to the ambassador and former secretary Powell.

But the real "the dying bird" behind this lovely but neglected plumage is the civilian who caught in between, indeed the easy victim of a beaten army on crazy vengeful rampage.
Such as Mai Lai. It is this level of tragedy in war which history ignores, yet one which brings out war’s real, horrendous cost.

It is this missing dimension which makes the ambassador’s piece at once pretentiously anti-war being fundamentally anti-humanity. As a write, I am watching images of Afghans demonstrating against the killing of three civilians — student brothers — by American soldiers fighting yet another unjust war in that country. Who do I pity, Mr Ambassador? Whose humanity to I agonise over, yours or that of those innocent Afghans? Why is your army killing those Afghans, that Afghanistan?
Common denominator

Much worse, the ambassador deracinates combatants from causes, reducing them to a sentimental common denominator of tragic figures of neglectful war-mongers, namely politicians.

"Having faced death, or taken the lives of fellow humans, a veteran needs some assurance that it was a cause worth the cost ... The honourable thing to do is to honour those who sacrificed, regardless of the side for which they fought. Soldiers should not be blamed for the war," argues the ambassador.

Yet a soldier is as good as the cause he fights for, at least in this part of the world where the doctrine of just war still guides guns and combatants.

What was the idea behind this flawed postulate from the ambassador? To equate himself with our war veterans? To smuggle himself onto the pantheon of Zimbabwe’s war of liberation, strictly on the mechanical criterion of he-who-wielded-a-gun-and-got-neglected-thereafter?

Or worse, to smuggle in Rhodesia’s soldiers into our narrative of liberation? This to me is the mischief behind the ambassador’s seeming lamentations for far-away wars. But it goes further. A few weeks back, America has been funding media seminars on the concept of retributive healing — what it disguises as healing with justice in order to push for another Truth and Reconciliation Commission here, a Commission whose beneficence is celebrated abroad, never by societies which hosted or sought healing through them.

The ambassador goes further: drawing from Cambodia, he thinks such a Commission in our context must indict leaders who should bear blame for any accesses committed before 1980.

The piece was thus meant to be a vicarious exoneration of Zimbabwe’s combatants, in order to make the proposed commission more appealing. Well, lets watch out for these preachers who themselves need the very sermons and salvation they promise us.
Flag-draped caskets

Before I close this one, I have a little one for the ambassador. In case he has not seen Newsweek of August 9, it has an angry letter from one John M. Massey, an American from Texas.

In respect of America’s adventures in Afghanistan, he has this piece of stinging advice which the ambassador, with his new found anti-war sensibility could very well transmit to his president: "How many more flag-draped caskets do we have to see before we come to our senses? The day will come, just as in Vietnam, when our leaders accept that this is a war we’re not going to win." No wonder why Afghanistan is called "the graveyard of empire".
Diamonds are forever American

I am happy the diamonds have been sold for the value we got. It has been a long-drawn affair, but one in which we ended up with the trophy.

It is not so much the value for now, as it is the fact that a maiden sale has been made, against the will of well-known bullies. And, hey, who else was our customer?

America of course. So much about human rights and conflict diamonds. So much about ban on American companies doing business with the "Mugabe regime", as prohibited by the Executive Order. Diamonds are forever America’s best friend, are they not? The ban on corporate bodies under ZDERA has to go, is it not?
Not for your sake and my sake, dear reader, but to enhance America’s capacity to forestall encroaching China.

It is this kind of hard-headedness which Blair’s celestial Labour never quite grasped, a hard-headedness which Cameron might just begin to understand. Unfortunately it may be too late, too, too late.
Two little men and a tall job

Those cretins from MDC who continue to raise dust over selection of heroes, which heroes do they have? Why should a party still to renounce puppetry and treachery carp over heroes.
O.B.E perhaps? But then, it’s not for Robert Mugabe or Zanu (PF) to grant them that. They know where to go.

What I find staggering about the Prime Minister’s party is the short-sightedness of his communication team, reportedly led by Timba the little bird.

Why would you inspire a tall story which claims the Prime Minister has won a major victory for heroes ceremony, a story sure to be contradicted by events soon after? You do not build long-term positive publicity for your man around a lie to easy to diffuse, surely?

Zanu (PF) did not have to do anything except to wait for the Heroes Day to puncture this flatulent claim from these airy geniuses.
And one sees a definite pattern of holding the Prime Minister up for maximum ridicule.

You get a story which says the Prime Minister forced the President in Cabinet to climb down on the so-called jingles, which "will" to be removed impedimenta. A day passes.
A week passes. Now a month, and the "jingles" are still blaring with the venom of road rage.

How do you sustain publicity victory on such fiction? Or worsening it by claiming MDC-T has good, non-hateful compositions enough to make it to world charts. We shall test this claim by transcribing lyrics of a handful of "jingles" we got from a source deep in harvest House. Those in glass houses do not throw stones, Sir Nelson.
Another one for SADC

Another one is coming, this time related to SADC where the same machinery, again fronting young Chamisa, peddling the myth that Zimbabwe will come up for discussion in Windhoek, over outstanding issues which these cretins love to grow at the rate of heads of amoebas.

We shall see, come Tuesday. Quite the contrary, Zimbabwe will be on the offensive, in respect of the so-called SADC Tribunal, itself a decided illegality which the Executive Secretary should have simply stopped a long time ago. The petitions by white-led Bar associations shall come to a humorous stop, too abrupt for any comfort.
In the meantime, let Chamisa yawn his folly shorter-lived though it shall be.

Icho!

Nathaniel Manheri is a columnist for the Saturday Herald. E-mail him: nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw

Labels: AMBASSADOR, HYPOCRISY, WAR CRIMES

posted by MrK @ 4:32 AM