Unreality American Style

What I find incredible is that big rich corporations, big rich countries, big rich individuals all persist in seeing the world as if it were a projection of themselves. But these corporations and country leaderships are full of very bright people. And the rich tend to be very bright people. But they keep falling victim to their inability to see the world through anybody else's eyes.

The US lost Vietnam because it fought the war in a big expensive say. It ignored the lives of the "little people" that it professed it had come to fight and save.

The US made the same mistake in Iraq.

It is making the same mistake in Afghanistan.

Here's an article by Ann Jones in the Huggington Post that makes this same point. Here's the key bit:

In the heat of this summer, I went out to the training fields near Kabul where Afghan army recruits are put through their paces, and it was quickly evident just what's getting lost in translation. Our trainers, soldiers from the Illinois National Guard, were masterful. Professional and highly skilled, they were dedicated to carrying out their mission -- and doing the job well. They were also big, strong, camouflaged, combat-booted, supersized American men, their bodies swollen by flack jackets and lashed with knives, handguns, and god only knows what else. Any American could be proud of their commitment to tough duty.

The Afghans were puny by comparison: Hundreds of little Davids to the overstuffed American Goliaths training them. Keep in mind: Afghan recruits come from a world of desperate poverty. They are almost uniformly malnourished and underweight. Many are no bigger than I am (5'4" and thin) -- and some probably not much stronger. Like me, many sag under the weight of a standard-issue flack jacket.

Their American trainers spoke of "upper body strength deficiency" and prescribed pushups because their trainees buckle under the backpacks filled with 50 pounds of equipment and ammo they are expected to carry. All this material must seem absurd to men whose fathers and brothers, wearing only the old cotton shirts and baggy pants of everyday life and carrying battered Russian Kalashnikov rifles, defeated the Red Army two decades ago. American trainers marvel that, freed from heavy equipment and uniforms, Afghan soldiers can run through the mountains all day -- as the Taliban guerrillas in fact do with great effect -- but the U.S. military is determined to train them for another style of war.

One thing I agree with the political right about is the ineffectiveness of big bureaucratic governments. But the right doesn't go far enough. It should see the same problem with the darlings of its eyes: the big corporation and the big rich people. These all suffer from the same inability to see the world the way it is.

I chuckle as I remember how Bush in the leadup to the 2006 elections kept telling people about how many tens of thousands of Iraqi security forces had been "successfully trained". But in reality, Iraq still has pitifully few really professional military or police personnel. And Afghanistan has practically none. This despite Bush claiming for 5 years that this kind of "training" was a high priority. It just wasn't done. And it certainly will never be done if they continue to do it in the unrealistic way that Ann Jones points out that they still stupidly are attempting to do!