Eric Francis

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Gemini Fool Moon, and The Fog of War

Targets in North Vietnam were bombed and the Vietnam War was commenced based on false reports of torpedoes fired at the Maddox. Photo from The Fog of War.
Targets in North Vietnam were bombed and the Vietnam War was commenced based on false reports of torpedoes fired at the Maddox. Photo from 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.

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