Gemini Fool Moon, and The Fog of War

So, Barack Obama seems poised to turn into Lyndon Johnson tonight, as he commits more than 30,000 more lives to the “war” in Afghanistan.

Did I read somewhere recently that we would be out by 2017? Did I hear that this wasn’t the next Vietnam? It’s perfectly ominous that Obama is going on television tonight with the Moon hours away from full phase in Gemini: the picture of a polarized society, fixated on trivia, driven by its emotions and not by reason. The Full Moon in Gemini thinks it’s thinking — but it’s not really doing anything of the kind.

I am probably not the first to ask this, but I haven’t heard the question: why do we debate if we can afford health care for months, but we spend no time at all debating whether we can afford still more war? Why are we going billions further into debt to pay for this? Why exactly? Perhaps it is the fog of war. Did anyone see this documentary? I highly recommend it (relevant clip is provided below).

The film is an interview with Robert McNamara, one of the ‘best and the brightest’ recruited by Kennedy to lead the Department of Defense. JFK was about to pull the US out of Vietnam when he was killed; McNamara stayed on when LBJ took over — and he became the steward of what we know to be Vietnam. McNamara was synonymous with Vietnam and its endless litany of war crimes.

In the summer of 1964, with the nation still shocked from the loss of Kennedy and the Beatles just having arrived in the United States, there was a scam perpetrated that opened the floodgates to the war — something called the Tonkin Gulf incident; that is, a torpedo attack on a Navy ship called the Maddox. The attack never actually happened, but it became the means by which countless lives would be lost due to the rapid US escalation of the conflict; which became a war; which spread to Laos and Cambodia; which turned into the killing fields. Today, hundreds of thousands of people — most of them children — are still suffering from the multigenerational effects of the 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T that was sprayed on them in the form of Agent Orange.

The big astrology was strikingly similar to what we facing today: the approach of a major aspect between Uranus and Pluto, the thing we think of as the Sixties, in a very hefty cosmic nutshell. That, too, is ominous, as is the current Saturn-Pluto square: this is not going to go well. And a big part of the problem is that We, the People, are not speaking up about it. It’s supposedly all too much to think about.

As an old man, McNamara looks back and admits that everyone was deluded. He admits the attack on the Maddox didn’t happen. Here is a video clip from the film. It’s all of three minutes (and the whole film is just as interesting). McNamara says the words: “It didn’t happen.” But the Tonkin Gulf resolution by Congress gave Johnson full authority to do whatever he wanted in Vietnam — and then over the next nine years, 54,000 Americans died, hundreds of thousands more were contaminated by dioxin and injured by bullets, everyone who served was psychologically damaged, and we were responsible for the deaths of millions of Vietnamese and Laotians and Cambodians.

And people still defend our being in Vietnam. I just got into an argument with someone a week ago about whether Vietnam was justified! I really thought that was impossible. Heck, even McNamara himself said it wasn’t justified, and Nixon finally pulled the plug.

So now we’re in Afghanistan why? Well it started with catching Osama bin Laden, who wrote out his will and then got away — and eight years later we are still committing troops and money and murder. We are fighting an insurgency, just like in Vietnam. We are at war with the people we are supposedly trying to save from the scourge of the “terrorists.” I always wondered as a kid how this kind of shit happened. I wondered as a student and I still wonder today, even though we are watching history go down. And I do mean go down.

I flip through the channels, I keep seeing news haircuts talking about winning the war.

Borrowing from John Kerry, when he was speaking for Vietnam Veterans Against the War: how do you ask someone to be the last person to die for a lie?