The Ethical Warrior

What was does not necessarily have to be what is to come

But we do evolve. And that includes socially.

Ever hear of the McCoys and Hatfields? While myth suggests that America's most infamous blood feud originally started with the murder of a McCoy for the "crime" of fighting for the Union in the Civil War, the actual catalyst occurred fifteen years later; Floyd Hatfield and Randolph McCoy argued over who owned a hog.

Really.

Originally, the matter was taken to court. The Hatfields claimed that the hog was theirs since it had been retrieved from their land. The McCoys claimed it was theirs since the pig had been notched with McCoy markings well before it was discovered on Hatfield land. The Justice of the Peace sided with the Hatfields. His name was Anderson Hatfield. Relations further disintegrated, and within two years, the families were killing one another.

Oh, and there's also a woman involved. Apparently Johnse Hatfield knocked up Roseanna McCoy, then ditched her and married her cousin Nancy.

At one point, the governor of West Virginia even threatened to call out the militia to invade Kentucky.

The feud essentially stopped in 1891, but related criminal trials continued for ten years. And over a century after the feud began, the Hatfields and McCoys lined up for one last fight. In 1979, members of the two clans gathered to participate in episodes of the popular game show Family Feud. The prizes included cash and a pig.

The families have gathered for reunions at least since 2000, and in June, 2003, representatives of both families gathered in Pikeville, Kentucky in order to sign an actual peace treaty.

The Hatfields and McCoys participated in a slow-burning feud. Compared to a war, it seems like nothing; only about a dozen people died in the feud over the course of as many years.

We might say that the feud began over an unsolved murder, an itinerant hog, or a sordid love affair. None of these constitute justification for what happened, except perhaps in a cultural context. Although, even if we recall Atticus Finch, whose greatest legal defeat came in the form of a murder defendant whose explanation was that the son-of-a-bitch had it coming to him, that still doesn't justify killing children, such as the New Year's Day Massacre of 1888 in which the target, Randal McCoy, escaped but his wife was beaten nearly to death and two of their children murdered. The New Year's Day Massacre of 1888, incidentally, was a preemptive strike.

This sort of thing does not reflect the proposition that people "create situations to avert war".

They stopped essentially because they had to. It was getting harder and harder to carry out vendetta raids, and after either eleven, thirteen, or twenty-eight years—depending on where you place the official start of the feud, it was also more difficult to rally to the cause. The McCoys, for their part, and retreated twenty or so miles to Pikeville after the 1888 massacre. If you keep score by a body count, it would appear the Hatfields won decisively, although their side of the feud lost seven to prison and one to the gallows for the 1888 massacre. If you score it by what the feud actually achieved, nobody won.

And yet, there is peace.

Now perhaps this seems a long way to make the point, but it seemed more worthwhile than to point out that, having just endured eight years of the Bush administration, I find the notion that people create situations to avoid wars somewhat dubious. Certainly, there are plenty of people who do so, but for a few years there, they were called terrorists. And, all else considered, the people did re-elect President Bush. Hmm ... deliberately empowering a warmonger who has lied to the nation in order to achieve his ends ... how, exactly, does that create a situation to avert wars?

Furthermore, I think back to that bizarre incident when an incident in the Straits of Hormuz was deliberately blown out of proportion in an attempt to describe what doesn't even equal a mosquito fleet as a dire Iranian threat. Nor do I think that ignoring intelligence reports in order to lie to the American people about what Iran is doing, why it's dangerous, and why military force might be required reflects a situation created to avert warfare.

Or we might consider the Cold War. Some would say it was inevitable, especially since Stalin was something of a lunatic, but I'm pretty sure that invading Russia—six years before Lenin made his exit and eighteen years before Stalin consolidated his power with the great purge—didn't help. Our fear of Communism was no different from the propagandist fear that sent the Haymarket Martyrs to their deaths. Many regard Emma Goldman as evil in part because she participated in an assassination plot. Yet the industrialists who murdered labor leaders in order to secure their exploitation of the workers are considered respectable. All these years later, nobody cares that the Haymarket Martyrs weren't guilty, that the governor posthumously pardoned them and blistered the court with criticism. What people know of the Haymarket incident is that some nasty, mean Anarchists were put to death because they murdered a bunch of people with a bomb in a marketplace. The judge actually explained at one of the sentencing hearings that it was not because of the murders that they were being executed, but because they were Anarchists.

This fear that one might not be able to get rich by exploiting and hurting other people drove the American side of the Cold War. Brinkmanship? Daring an enemy to initiate mutually-assured destruction? How, exactly, does that create a situation to avert war? And how does sponsoring proxy wars create a situation to avert war?

A long debate among German Lutherans is whether or not they did enough during World War II. There's a great soliloquy in the movie Closet Land in which Madeline Stowe's character explains life under martial law, how you know people are disappearing, but you still do nothing. It's a dynamic take on the old bit about "when they came for me, there was no one left to object". I think the strongest indictment against them would be that they were frightened beyond rational comprehension, and in the end that's between them and God. But the central question over which they have agonized is whether they did enough to try to avert what happened. And their consciences suggest that, for whatever reasons, the answer is no. It's over sixty years later and they're still trying to figure it out.

In your opinion, do you think humans understand more about the world and human nature than our tribal ancestors?

My own take is that we do.

Let's mix together some Freud and Carlin: One of George Carlin's famous routines was to ridicule what he considered nonsense words. I, too, adore this particular bit of his. But occasionally, his pursuit of comedy caused him to miss the mark. Like one time, he criticized the term post-traumatic stress disorder, and wondered in his trademark acerbic manner why shellshock wasn't good enough. Freud, on the other hand, found himself in the perverse situation of being gratified by massive tragedy. It was World War I that finally validated his basic theories of psychotherapy, to the point that he once explained that his heart was light because his life's work was secured for history. Egomaniacal, yes, but before doctors started applying Freud's theories, the general treatment for shellshock was tantamount to torture, including stubbing out cigarettes on a patient's tongue. (The soldier, it is said, became rather depressed after that.)

The problem with Carlin's complaint is that warfare is not the only trauma to induce shellshock. Freud treated a patient once who refused to drink water. Through his psychotherapeutic methods he found the root of the problem. Bertha, his patient, was psychologically traumatized by having witnessed a friend allowing a dog to drink water from a glass. Freud also treated multiple cases of what was referred to as glove anesthesia—said to be as common in his day as anorexia is today—which was a disorder in which a person suffered a paralysis of the hand. Psychotherapy successfully revealed the root cause: patients suffered psychological trauma resulting from masturbation.

In 1980, the APA added PTSD to the DSM-III. At the heart of a PTSD diagnosis is the idea of trauma. Etiologically, shellshock and PTSD are extremely similar; shellshock is a form of PTSD, but not all PTSD is shellshock.

This evolution represents a significant increase in our understanding of how humans operate.

And as much as I adore the late Mr. Carlin, I must simply disagree with his joke, because shellshock—also known as battle fatigue—is not the appropriate diagnosis for a rape survivor, or one who has survived a catastrophic flood. One of my cousins, when he was ten, started wetting the bed again. This happened because he had his first glimpse of death, watching a body twitch into oblivion after a motorcyclist slammed into a parked car or something and broke his neck in the street outside my cousin's house. Shellshock or battle fatigue would be inappropriate diagnoses.

The reason I pick on Carlin in this case is because his joke depends on a certain lack of understanding. It took sixty years before psychology officially made the connection. And herein lies one of the functional problems of that separation: etiologically, the problem of PTSD starts outside the patient. Holding shellshock as somehow unique—as Carlin did in the joke—complicated the treatment of other neuroses because the cause of a neurosis was being diagnosed from the wrong perspective. If a rape survivor suffers PTSD, is it an internal weakness that caused the dysfunction, or an external stimulus? Shellshock clearly placed the stressor outside the patient—e.g. the war itself. But without a broader definition, many other people were poorly diagnosed. It's a simple difference: "The war is the source of the problem" versus "The problem is a weakness within you".

Additionally, PTSD is still a controversial diagnosis insofar as it may not be subtle enough. Resolving this question would represent another advance in our understanding of how humans operate. Less than a century after Freud developed the notion of psychoanalysis, we have made tremendous gains in our understanding of human nature. Freud's mentor was Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist who often worked with syphilitic psychotic illness, and had an interest in similar behavior from patients for whom no physical diagnosis applied. Before that, the cause of psychotic behavior in women was that the patient had a "wandering uterus", a myth descended from Plato's Timaeus. Indeed, this is where the word hysteria gets its meaning. So from the fifth century BCE, or so, this was the idea of what caused such behavior in women. Galen of Pergamum proposed in the second century CE that hysteria in women was caused by sexual deprivation. It was more prevalent in women who one would presume were sexually deprived, such as virgins, nuns, and widows. The prescription was sexual intercourse, marriage, or if nothing else was available, lesbian vaginal massage. And this notion held up pretty well until Freud. It might well have been another of his mentors, Joseph Breuer, who explained that the cure for a nervous woman was to take a standard male penis, insert, and repeat.

In other words, it took over two thousand years to get from, "She just needs a man to fuck her" to actually trying to figure out what the problem was. Yet in the period of about 110 years since Freud began publishing and practicing psychoanalysis, we've made comparatively exponential gains.

The point is that we are always learning, always changing, always evolving as a society. This does not change the fact of what was, but it deeply challenges the proposition that what was must always be.

Yes, history has been a long series of struggles between human tribes, but it doesn't have to be that way. Our continued learning as a people have brought to light such simple notions that it probably isn't the best way to settle a rape survivors nerves to simply get on her and try to bang her back to sensibility. But that's the way it was for centuries at the very least. And since Freud is so controversial, maybe he's wrong. Perhaps we should acknowledge the human animal, ditch psychotherapy, and go back to fucking women until they decide to be happy?

Then again, as much as our ancient tribal ancestors hadn't the vocabulary, research tools, or philosophical basis to understand PTSD, hysteria, or psychosis, neither could they understand a credit default swap or collateralized debt obligation. Perhaps we should go back to hunting and gathering? After all, our complicated economic schemes are proving a bit troublesome at present.

There is no reason that the ideas of war and peace should be any different. Yes, there will always, as long as there is a human species, be crime and criminals, even in some strange utopia. Natural diversity suggests there will always be problematic outcomes; after all, as we approach 6.8 billion people, not all of the variations will prove useful or rewarding. Still, though, this is different from the idea of a war.

The Tonkin incident? Saddam's weapons of mass destruction? Not only do these defy the notion of people creating a situation to avert wars, the anemia of such fraudulent justifications also reflects the desperation of politicians who wish to go to war. And the citizens who supported the war ... well, they were reaching, too. And the paucity of honest, logical, proportionate arguments they put forth also indicate a growing desperation.

Things are changing. Humanity is making some progress. There is no reason to simply shrug and give over to the inevitability of warfare.

Despite the school lessons and PBS children's programs, the myth of the Revolution is simply that, a myth. Undoubtedly, many good things have come from it, but the British weren't the only greedy ones in that fight. Remember that the Revolution grew in taverns. One could say—colloquially, at least—that the Revolution was the result of a bunch of drunks complaining about taxes.

Furthermore, the Revolution did not take place in a time when one could easily be a peacenik.

Additionally, consider Thomas Paine. The Rights of Man was a phenomenon unto itself, the best-selling literature in history until that point save for the Bible itself. Yet Paine made no money from its publication; his concern was that as many people as possible should read it. Plenty of other people made money from it, but not Paine.

Yet how did Paine wind up in the Bastille, preserving his head from the Great Terror as a matter of chance? Well, after the Revolution, the Founding Fathers decided they didn't have much use for The Rights of Man, so Paine went elsewhere to help other people.

From the outset, we have undermined our "democracy". The Bill of Rights, while deservedly admired, came about as a direct response to the British. The first eight amendments prohibit the government from undertaking actions that the British had followed. While The Rights of Man was good enough to read to soldiers before battle, it wasn't good enough for the after-party. The three-fifths rule in and of itself should make that point. Abigail Adams' famous line, "Remember the ladies"? Theoretically, women weren't people until around 1920. (The Fourteenth Amendment establishes the equal protection of all persons before the law, yet this didn't apply to women. It took until 1920 before they won the right to vote, including actions taken by the federal government to quash state laws granting women's suffrage.) And since slave-owning didn't seem a violation of freedom or democracy to the Founding Fathers, there does exist something of an argument about whether the Declaration of Independence really mattered after the Revolution. As much as I despise slavery, and while I find the Confederacy a morbid joke, it's hard to argue with the right of the South to secede. And, to be certain, the Confederacy did, in fact, declare the causes that impelled them to separation.

And, of course, there is Manifest Destiny. Biological warfare, for instance, is a very interesting way to go about creating democracy. A few more peaceniks here and there might have been helpful.

I bought into the myth a long time ago. It is how we choose to represent ourselves to the world, and decent respect to the opinions of mankind suggests that we ought to live up to that standard. It's why I'm disappointed by things like the three-fifths rule, the Missouri Compromise, even the Civil War itself—Lincoln should have let them go. And that myth is why I reject torture, fraudulent pretenses for war, and the rising corporate plutocracy. I despise Alien and Sedition Acts, reject the USA PATRIOT Act, and am considerably unsettled by the recent attempt to destroy habeas corpus. These are all betrayals of our Revolutionary justification.

I wouldn't go so far as to say the Revolutionaries were wrong. But I do think we've done poorly by that heritage.

There is no evidence that anything is perfect, ma'am. There well could come a day when people have no choice to fight back against an existential threat to the species, but in the meantime, I don't think dropping white phosphorus on children or bombing hospitals makes for good practice.

Bring me the head of Joseph Kony. That would help. A genuine demonstration of the noble value of war would certainly help. But—and looking back to S.A.M.'s note that the last century was "filled with wars by civilised peoples striving for a better world"—the Iraqi Bush Adventure, for instance, was more about oil and regional politics than freedom or striving for a better world. And as I mentioned in my response to S.A.M.'s question, there is only so much that a civilized people can accomplish through warfare. For instance, we can't rebuild Uganda through warfare. But if someone would bring me the head of Joseph Kony, I would certainly reconsider the limits of what warfare can genuinely and legitimately accomplish.

Pacifism, in order to be successful, requires that people make genuine efforts against injustice. It's not just chanting and dancing around with flowers.

But right now, justice is too expensive for the tastes of the majority. Still, ideologically and psychologically, we've come a long way in the last century. And we've got a long way to go. But I admit, when the war is thousands of miles away, it's easy enough to surrender to its inevitability.

Did I .... Did I just read that?

Or perhaps I am taking you wrongly. Because it is true that certain demands for peace are unacceptable. While I'm sure there are circumstances I have not yet imagined, I'm of the general opinion that a "peace" relying on injustice is no peace at all.

Well, since war is inevitable, why bother trying?

To take two influential paradigms, capitalism and communism, as examples, they both have historically suffered philosophical disconnections from human nature. One argument against communism is that it "disincentivizes" society. This theory suggests that communism overlooks a simple fact of human nature. The argument goes that if one sees a co-worker getting paid the same for doing less work, why should the one work any harder? Soviet automobiles, for instance; there was a classic press photo that went around the world in the 1980s of a Soviet car that people had lifted up and dumped into a rubbish bin. And who here remembers the Yugo?

Capitalism, though, seems to overlook its own vital aspect of human nature. One justification for the system suggests that private enterprise improves the civic endeavor. After all, how many companies have mission statements that talk about providing vital products and services to communities? To the other, how is success measured? Consider trickle-down. The idea is that if you coddle the rich, that extra wealth will "trickle down" to the working classes. Yet the result has been a widening of the wealth gap. It's a noble idea, but it also pretends that rich people will do their part for the good of the community.

Communism, capitalism, even anarchism can work, but everyone needs to have a certain minimal understanding of how things are supposed to operate. We see it all the time in microcosm. The question is how to translate that notion to the larger scheme.

All government is coercion. That's Anarchism 101: the power of the state lies in its coercive capability.

Never choose war. If war comes, you fight. But the idea of choosing war? What was it, fifteen from Saudi Arabia, three from the UAE, and one from Lebanon? I know, let's choose to invade Iraq.

Now, I recognize you made the point to choose war wisely, but how often does that really happen?

The sign that we are still dumb animals is that we pick up the swords again.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Tiassa: But we do evolve. And that includes socially

We haven't evolved past war and aggression and there is no sign we are heading in that direction.

T:This sort of thing does not reflect the proposition that people "create situations to avert war".

I listed that as an option.

T: They stopped essentially because they had to.

A good reason for ending a conflict. Lack of time, money, energy, spirit, etc.

T: And yet, there is peace.

As I said there is always peace, peace being an interval between war. Look around the world we have a UN which has been good at keeping wars out of the west. Here is what it cannot do: avert wars by the west, avert wars between non-western nations. In short there are conflicts going on all the time. One conflict ends and another arises elsewhere. C'est la vie.


T: In your opinion, do you think humans understand more about the world and human nature than our tribal ancestors?

Understanding more hasn't lead to a solution yet has it? You have no proof that man has evolved to a point where inter-faith, inter-state, inter-tribal warfare is a thing of the past.
You speak of a dream for the future, not a present state of affairs. You speak of a dream for mankind, mankind continues to show deadly aggression towards its own kind not to mention other species. Where is proof of your ideal in real time?

T: Things are changing. Humanity is making some progress

Show me proof of progress. Show me proof that armed conflict is a thing of the past, that we are anywhere close to that. Show me proof that we are producing less arms than in the past? If there is all this progress there would be no reason to create all these arms. When Russia and Georgia had a conflict they worked it out...the old fashioned way and while they were working it out with bullets and tanks, the two world leaders of each country sat next to each other during the olympic games in Beijing. While genocide in Rwanda was in full swing the Hutu's sat on the Security council, as millions in Cambodia died at the hands of the KR the KR had a seat at the U.N and were acknowldeged by all civilized nations. We have no intention of ending violence on a global level. World leaders pay lip service to peace as the massess in countries without war seem to like the sound of it (those in war-wrecked nations are too exhausted to march for peace) and then they can get on with whatever they were doing without feeling too much guilt, and world leaders can get on with their wars without being bothered with the massess. Just look at how Obama pulls troops out of Iraq only to increase them in Afghanistan. He talks of the error of war in one place (because it was unpopular) and then speaks of its necessity (using the same exact bush argument) in another. Afghanistan was a little off the radar during Iraq and now we hear about it every once in a while when mainstream news takes a break from the economy. Please show me proof of this progress you speak of.

T: The problem with Carlin's complaint is that warfare is not the only trauma to induce shellshock

We know this. Being raped can cause PTSD, as well as living through a house fire or car accident.

T: The point is that we are always learning, always changing, always evolving as a society. This does not change the fact of what was, but it deeply challenges the proposition that what was must always be.

Please show how aggression is not a natural and necessary part of human nature? Remember Clockwork Orange?

T: Despite the school lessons and PBS children's programs, the myth of the Revolution is simply that, a myth

What kind of new revisionism denies the American revolution? I imagine in new American ahistoricism the French revolution is also a 'myth'.

T: I reject torture, fraudulent pretenses for war, and the rising corporate plutocracy. I despise Alien and Sedition Acts, reject the USA PATRIOT Act, and am considerably unsettled by the recent attempt to destroy habeas corpus. These are all betrayals of our Revolutionary justification

I think we have just found our point of agreement.

T: There is no evidence that anything is perfect, ma'am. There well could come a day when people have no choice to fight back against an existential threat to the species, but in the meantime, I don't think dropping white phosphorus on children or bombing hospitals makes for good practice.

Who said anything about dropping white phosphorous? You are moving towards extremities here. Russia didn't need to drop white phosphorous on Georgia to reach their aims. Israel drops white phosphorous because they harbour a gross hatred towards the palestinians, they wish to destroy every remnant of their enemy...kind of like Turkey's attitude towards Armenia. They think they can do what they want because they are not condemned by nations like the U.S indeed they ignore U.N resolutions and no one threatens them with economic sanctions. It is Israeli arrogance that puts them at risk for eventual defeat. The idea that conflict is inevitable doesn't mean that there isn't a line drawn on what means are used, this is where the civility of a nation shows itself.

T: But right now, justice is too expensive for the tastes of the majority. Still, ideologically and psychologically, we've come a long way in the last century. And we've got a long way to go. But I admit, when the war is thousands of miles away, it's easy enough to surrender to its inevitability

Pacifism is a TACTIC, it cannot be a way of life. The dodo bird didn't survive because it was easy prey to the portuguese invaders who would club the bird to death as it approached them seeking friendship. They couldn't take flight and they didn't know how to protect themselves from predators. Explain your notion that justice is too expensive for the tastes of the majority? I agree with you that SAM is off when she speaks of
the last century as "filled with wars by civilised peoples striving for a better world", its a naive notion that any nation approached war out of anything but self-interest; in short a better world for ourself. But still we need to pay attention to our own self-interest in conjunction with that of others in order to survive.

T:I'm of the general opinion that a "peace" relying on injustice is no peace at all.

Well how do you imagine we are going to take aggression out of the basic nature of man? Something as in built as the urge to fuck and reproduce? Can you think of a way we can extracate these from human nature without completely invading sovereignty, personal psychology and homogenizing ideological space? Like I asked before have you ever read Clockwork Orange?

T: The argument goes that if one sees a co-worker getting paid the same for doing less work, why should the one work any harder?

Follow Scandinavia and simply tax those who make more.

T: We see it all the time in microcosm. The question is how to translate that notion to the larger scheme.

The peace we see in the microcosm is enforced by the State (police officers). Don't get me wrong i have nothing against police officers. The peace we see in a microcosm seems to have adverse reactions like school shootings, random rapes, well the display of aggression of all kinds. Its as if people lose it and then, and then this:

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/?id=396561&type=World

Check out the related news at the bottom of the story.

T:Never choose war. If war comes, you fight. But the idea of choosing war? What was it, fifteen from Saudi Arabia, three from the UAE, and one from Lebanon? I know, let's choose to invade Iraq. Now, I recognize you made the point to choose war wisely, but how often does that really happen?

WW2 was won because the Americans chose to engage before war reached its shores (yes before pearl harbour). It was a wise decision. Americans would have shown some wisdom if they had simply asked more questions than having a knee-jerk response to 9/11 which was 'bomb anyone'. I knew it was a mistake at the time, Indymedia asked a lot of questions but they were in the minority when it came to questioning the accuracy of weapons of mass destruction. I'm no genius and if I could see through it I don't see why the rest of the nation could not. Confederacy of Dunces!

T: The sign that we are still dumb animals is that we pick up the swords again.

Behaving like the Dodo bird in the face of a growing aggression is also dumb. What do you suggest the Palestinians do? Fight or lay down like the already dead?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I would say its pretty obvious certain people enjoy killing.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

The money you drop would be used to buy bombs to bomb YOU with.

War is almost an instinct for mankind now. Retribution. Simple retribution. Whoever throws the first punch decided that words and negotiations were not enough and that the enemy had to be taught and/or forced to do what was seen as appropriate. The other country defends.

 

Ethical war is the worst thing that ever happened to the USA.

 

How do you mean Roman? The rant of late is that the U.S doesnt engage in ANY ethical wars.

 

Seriously? We're spending billions of dollars on precision weaponry. We view killing some babies as an unfortunate mistake, not the glorious triumph of us over them. We have enough conventional weapons to make most of the world extinct- at least the parts with resources and enough hardware to be annoying, but not enough guns to actually do anything.

Have you ever heard of the doctrine of total war? It's the most effective way to get rid of enemies and take their stuff. What's left of it, anyway. The great thing about oil- you can shell the crap out of the people, and it doesn't go anyway.

 

Roman: not the glorious triumph of us over them.

Well I am not so sure how precise those precision weapons are but don't you think there should be a 'valid' reason to engage in war? I mean it really isn't 'us against them' is it, I mean who are they? And what are we fighting for? Their liberation? Doesn't make sense.

Bha! I don't believe you actually believe you would want 'total war'! (And for Scott the list man I am not inadvertenly calling him dishonest!) Sounds like bravado, but anyway, I was just curious.

 

Well, you've got to sell a war, because for whatever reason, we don't like seeing pictures of dead kids and being told we're to blame. The best way to get a human to do what you want is construct a social group he identifies with, and set up an opposing social group in conflict with him. Sell war like they sell football.

What are we fighting for? The same stuff we've always fought for- a handful of rich and powerful men decide they want some other rich and powerful man's stuff, and convince the rest of us to go along with it, at great cost to the rest of us.

I was against the wars from the beginning- it's a stupid waste of resources. I'd rather have got the money to pay for my schooling. But now that we're there, and have been there, doing not much more than holding our dicks in our hands, while the country is bled dry, we may as well win, and win really fucking hard. Which we could do, but we don't.

 

Ok. I see what you're getting at now.

 

What am I getting at?

 

Yea, I understand your point of view. I was just looking for clarification, for you to elaborate on what you meant. I agree with you save the notion that the U.S has been there so long that they should just 'do the job right' I don't think there is a way to do the job right save exit.