Overview

Until recently, Afghanistan was called “The Forgotten War.” The dramatic domestic, regional, and international politics of the Iraq war largely eclipsed the fact that our people were fighting just as hard in Afghanistan. Although we’re paying attention to AfPak now, off the radar screen an important and related fight has been unfolding in the Philippines.

At the invitation of the Philippine government, the U.S. maintains about 600 troops, including Army Green Berets, Civil Affairs, and Military Information Support teams, Navy SEALS and Seabees, along with Air Force personnel and Marines.  Our military forces are deployed in six locations: Zamboanga, Mindanao, Jolo, Basilan, Tawi Tawi, and a small number of liaison staff on Luzon. Their mission is to help the Armed Forces of the Philippines eliminate terrorist groups like Jemaah Islamiyah and the Abu Sayyaf Group and to prevent them from establishing safe havens from which to train other terrorists, both internal and external.

The small airport at Jolo is being expanded to accommodate civilian traffic. The U.S. contingent uses contracted aircraft to island hop.

The importance of the Philippines to American Pacific interests in defense and trade becomes clear when you spin a globe and note its location: The Philippine Archipelago is a geographic bottleneck that allows the holder a significant political and military advantage throughout the area and far beyond.

In the last century, the dominant insurgencies that jousted with the Philippine governments—and us—were linked to communism. The Chinese and the Soviets were happy to instigate rebellion in impoverished places such as Luzon and Mindanao, and to back the indigenous New People’s Army against the U.S.-backed Philippine government.  Russian and Chinese interest in limiting American hegemony in the Philippines (a former U.S. colony), and surrounding areas, has been a constant.

Mindanao: Fighters from this village surrendered on 20 April 2009. Instead of incarceration, the villagers are being welcomed back by aid projects from the Philippine and U.S. governments. This is causing defections among the enemy. The guerrilla leader told me he had been fighting since 1976.

After the Soviet Union fizzled and the Chinese communists became interested in wealth, the armed insurgencies of the Philippines gained new vitality from association with rising Islamic fundamentalist ideology and organizations.  There are direct links between Philippine domestic insurgents and Indonesian and Malaysian terrorists.  Foreign Islamic terrorists also have been captured in the Philippines.  The U.S. Government regards this as a key front in the global war on terror.

With the large, poor Muslim population (called Moros) on Mindanao and other islands, it is no surprise that Islamic nationalist movements have found a home among the Moros.  The Moros have been fighting nearly all comers for centuries.  That said, this does appear to be a war that “we” are winning.  “We” means that probably 98% of the hard work is being done by the Philippines, but the 2% the United States brings to the table is crucial.

The term Moros was coined by the Spanish who described any of the Muslim peoples as “Moros” (Moors), but in the context of the Philippines, the term itself is as ethnologically vague as calling modern Europeans “Christians.”  While Islamic nationalism is a force in Mindanao, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, no matter what jersey it wears, much of the Philippine fighting is not religiously grounded.  For example, the relatively isolated people have a long memory for past political feuds and are mired in a revenge culture.  The population is fragmented into clans and other affinity groups.  The very idea of a Moro is politically subjective, as the “Moros” themselves are an amalgam of peoples forming anthropological sediment that predates Christianity itself, while Islam reached Mindanao approximately 600 years ago.  Jihadists and Crusaders collided here centuries ago.

Mindanao: We drove two hours, often through ambush country rivaling any I’ve seen in Afghanistan, to get to this remote village. The jungle and terrain favor the enemy. This Moro fighter had a permanent scowl until our troops (Philippine, and U.S. Navy and Army) greeted him, and then he brightened up.

Politically, the southern Philippines is an “over-determined” mess.  Many potent indicators of instability are present. It’s poor. The national government is weak and has a history of atrocities. Political corruption is rampant at all levels of government. The education system is weak. There are overlapping claims of national, tribal, and Sharia law. The culture is deeply fractured.  The borders—in this case beaches—are vast and porous.

The two “M’s” of Mindanao: Malaria and Moros.

These cultural, historical and political dynamics have proven to be a breeding ground for insurgency, lawlessness and terrorism. In terms of the insurgent and terrorist groups operating in Mindanao, it can be instructive to think of the MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front) as analogous to the Philippine Taliban, and JI/ASG (Jemaah Islamiyah/Abu Sayyaf Group) as the Southeast Asian al Qaeda.  Though the MILF is more culturally advanced than the Taliban, JI/ASG are typical AQ-type scavengers.  Many of the Taliban are more like cavemen with RPGs, while the MILF are more like Filipino Muslims with gripes, grudges and claims.  AQ is always AQ. All of these groups want some form of independent Islamic state. The U.S. military is in the southern Philippines to help the AFP (Armed Forces Philippines) defeat JI and ASG, but they are also concerned about lawless or “rogue” elements of the MILF who collaborate and provide safe haven to JI and ASG.

Central Mindanao and the MILF

I had the opportunity to spend a few days in Central Mindanao where the U.S. military is concerned about the presence of JI and whether or not the rogue elements of the MILF are providing them safe haven. Unlike al Qaeda, which is a non-state organization committed to terror in the name of ideology whose guerillas usually function in small, unidentified groups, MILF fighters—even the grunts—, actually wear uniforms in an attempt to gain international recognition and to gain protections under international law. Their primary struggle is local, and nationalistic.  The MILF is not per se an enemy of the United States, or even the Philippines, other than that it wants sovereignty, and this conflicts with Filipino desires.

Numerous Filipino officers have described the combat prowess of the MILF, noting that they are not good fighters, but that they are smart, very tough, show great heart and their courage is unquestionable.  And they have home field advantage.

Faces of the enemy: Moro children turned out to be just like other kids. The kids were well-mannered, never asked for candy, and loved the camera. (Mindanao)

The Moro fight in the Philippines is largely about ancestral domain which, in that light, could be claimed by someone before them.  The people who happen to be Muslims want land and independence.  Sharia law is the law of the land in some places.  Pitched battles are unfolding on a daily basis.  Up to 300,000 people have been displaced by fighting between the MILF and the AFP.  Journalists, aid workers, missionaries and locals often have been kidnapped, causing the AFP to expend great energy in search and rescue operations. Some officers—U.S. and Filipino—believe at times the KFRs (Kidnappings for Ransom) are about money, but at other times the KFRs are simply strategic diversions; the enemy knows the AFP and the PNP (Philippine National Police) will divert great resources to the hostage crisis.  U.S. officers agree.

While in central Mindanao, I spoke with Philippine Army Colonel Rey Ardo, who explained some dynamics of his area of operations (AO)—which includes a large MILF camp near his AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) camp, across Lake Lanao.  The colonel, who is Commander of the 103rd Brigade, said his fight is less with MILF as an organization and more with lawless elements, a sentiment that various commanders expressed.  We saw this in Iraq and lawless bandits are a great problem in Afghanistan.

We spoke while walking around his gigantic sand-table (a sort of handmade relief map showing terrain features in 3D), where it occurred to me that, using his 105mm guns, he could easily shoot over the lake and destroy the Moro camp.  I asked why he doesn’t unleash on those guys.  Colonel Ardo noted that the MILF lives there with women and children and the AFP doesn’t want to clobber the children. The Philippine Army has not always exercised that kind of restraint in the past, but there is recognition now within the AFP that roads, wells and schools and good governance are going to ultimately end the conflict, not bullets and bombs.

Mindanao: Evil Moros. Muslims one and all. Everything looks different up close. I felt at home in this 'enemy' village. This photo, and many others, was taken by Navy Lt. Lara Bollinger using my camera. The Moro woman, using stuttering English, asked Lt. Bollinger if she has a wife.

As a result of fighting smarter and combining their combat operations with aggressive civil military operations, the AFP is making slow but tangible progress in its struggle to bring the MILF into the fold.  Philippine Army Colonel Rey Ardo echoed the emerging view that some in the MILF are tired of fighting and can be wooed away with sincere promises of prosperity.  In fact, in the month prior to my arrival, more than 100 MILF fighters had surrendered to the AFP, tired of being on the run and hoping for a better life for their families. They are now being provided security and livelihood assistance by the AFP and the government. Identifying fissures and fault-lines in Iraq, and exploiting them, was paramount to the incredible turn of events in 2006-2007.  Each enemy group that agrees to end the fighting brings crucial information, and fighters who will join us, while allowing the good guys to concentrate on the remaining violent actors.

Laundry day; every village we passed through had the laundry on the line.

Our troops call laundry day 'no pants day' because the little kids all run around wearing shirts but no pants. The bigger kid saw us and ran over to lift the baby’s arm to wave. In Iraq he would have ran to us for candy because too many troops make brats out of the kids by playing Santa Claus. It’s dangerous to throw candy to kids, too. They run out and sometimes get run over.

A Potent Mix of Conflicts

If the MILF insurgency were the only thing standing in the way of peace, security and development in Mindanao, then prospects for Mindanao might be rosier. But there is a subtlety here that Filipino commanders are quick to point out:  there are two major layers of violence.  The first layer, which the Philippine military must address in the short term, is the organized violence against the government that has killed thousands over the years and displaced hundreds of thousands.

If the Filipino commanders that I spoke with get their choice—there are other camps within AFP who, I am told, are more prone to use force—the violence will mostly be resolved with civic action, not guns.  They say that 80% of their actual fight is on the civil affairs side, and only 20% is gun-related.  That’s great news and in itself demonstrates much promise.

Filipino officers were open about their combat operations, but in each case tried to put the fighting into an 80-20 context, lest the public lose track that this war is better resolved with patience and thinking rather than bullets.  But make no mistake; fighting happens every day, and if you check the news, there are more war stories coming from here than any person can follow.  This is a no-kidding war.

Sulu Island: Local legend has it that Alexander the Great made it this far, and that some islanders are his descendents. One hears similar stories in Afghanistan. It seems quite odd that Afghanistan and the Philippines would have so many real or imagined connections. Whatever the case, there were many old signs of yesteryear’s initiatives, and an Italian hostage from the International Red Cross is known to be near this area.

Underneath this first layer of anti-government violence, however, is a whole other layer of inter-clan, tribal violence, known in the Philippines as “rido.”  Standing over the sand-table, Col. Ardo talked about the hundreds of these “rido,” or clan feuds, in his area.  As with other Filipino officers, Islam is not his big concern.  Islam is an overlay.  The local culture is the plumbing.  The clans and their infighting cause persistent bloodletting.  The similarities in Afghanistan are remarkable, where the equivalent Dari term for rido is “gangi qabilaui” (for tribal fights within one ethnicity), and “gangi meliaty” (for fights between ethnicities).

Rido sometimes persist for generations, perpetuating a cycle of violence that is not easily broken. Combine that dynamic with one million loose firearms in the Philippines, and you can see how this might create a volatile climate.

Another peculiarity in the southern Philippines fighting is something called pintakasi, which I first heard about from an American Navy SEAL just before a mission was to launch that evening.  He was concerned that a small group of AFP forces, who were going on the mission, might get killed in a pintakasi.  A pintakasi (cockfight) occurs when fighting erupts, and all the fighting-aged males flood out of villages with any weapons they can find (M-16s are plentiful), and try to overwhelm the invader.  One day, ten AFP Marines were beheaded, for example.  Sounds similar to the events that occurred in Mogadishu as depicted in “Blackhawk Down” where our own people were nearly overwhelmed.

Mindanao: Philippine troops see much combat down here.

I asked Colonel Ardo about rido dynamics and he said there were too many feuds even to count.  “Dozens?” I asked.  He shook his head.  “Hundreds?” I asked.  I was aiming too low.  “What causes them?”  It had been a long day out in enemy country (I saw no fighting; we were talking with MILF members and their families who had surrendered) and I didn’t take notes.  But his answer was, effectively, “There are countless rido caused by anything you can imagine.”

Interestingly, Colonel Ardo explained that he sees rido violence between Muslim clans, and between Muslim and Christian clans, but not between Christian and Christian clans.

Both U.S. and Filipino commanders will say that rido and tribal rivalries—over the long haul—are more problematic than religious grievances and cause more violence than anything else. Many of the inhabitants of Mindanao and other islands hail from cultures which have been persistently violent—with or without outside influence—for centuries.  And so the Filipino commanders know that even when they end the major warfare, the basic culture of violence will persist, which, again, sounds like Afghanistan.

Indeed, Colonel Ardo said, almost in passing, that he is not fighting “people”; he’s fighting a culture.  Afghanistan.

Americans think of Filipinos as pleasant, likable and good workers—as indeed they often are. But at home, Filipino culture is, of course, messier.  The nation’s approximately 7,100 islands are home to over 100 tribal groups, which speak at least 70 languages.  One of the most unhelpful internal cultural dynamics is an expression of the tribal rivalries, which takes the form of something widely known in the U.S. and the Philippines as “crab mentality.”

When a fisherman has one crab in a bucket, the crab can escape and so the bucket needs a lid.  But if there are two or more crabs, every time a crab starts to escape, the others—so they say—will pull it back down.

Mindanao. Most of these Moro women were happy to have their photos taken, and only a few were shy, but even when they were shy they laughed. The men of this village had fought for decades and only surrendered with dignity on 20 April 2009.

Mindanao: The villagers served us lunch. I felt no danger in the village and would have been happy to spend the night, but that might be a hard sell to the U.S. and Philippine forces. Philippine forces are guarding this village because other MILF who have not surrendered are threatening them with death. Other fighters, I am told by villagers, wish to surrender too, but they are waiting to see what happens.

A vigorous, economically powerful drug culture is part of the political problem.  In the United States, despite the serious drug problem, cartels do not run our government.  But in places like Afghanistan, or Mexico—and over in Mindanao—drugs are a T-Rex.  If Afghanistan is a poppy farm, Mindanao is a meth-lab, according to the U.S. and Filipino officials.  Methamphetamines serve as an oxidizer for civil chaos and a revenue source for terrorists.  And, predictably, drugs corrupt and de-legitimatize the government.  We see this in Afghanistan where top leaders are implicated in the drug business.  Stories are similarly rife in the Philippines.

Weak, corrupt governance is a sort of civil AIDS.  AIDS is not the direct killer, but it unlocks the doors for all the killers, such as drug dealers, and ideological or religious insurgents, to crawl in and grow.

Besides government law, Sharia “law,” and tribal/clan “laws,” there is Jungle Law.  Jungle Law lurks in the global shadows even in the spotless marbled halls of Europe and the United States, but in most parts of the world Jungle Law is on the surface for all to see.  An American officer said that in the Philippines, if you want to stay poor, go into business.  If you want to get rich, go into government. In Mindanao the people complain that the “government” is just an extortion racket and not part of any solution.  Sounds like Afghanistan, and to a lesser but cripplingly real extent, Iraq.

AFP and U.S. civil affairs brought wood and other building supplies to this village.

Powerless National Government

Philippine commanders explain that government authority ends with the paved roads.  Vice Admiral Alexander Pama showed me maps of his safe areas versus enemy-controlled areas.  Sure enough, the arteries were paved roads.  Where arteries ended, necrosis began.  We see a similar dynamic in Afghanistan.  Paved road ends: Enemy country begins.  But this is not always so.  In some areas there are no paved roads yet I have driven for mile upon mile with no issues, though central government is completely absent in most of Afghanistan and much of the Philippines.  Politics abhors a vacuum. Terror thrives in ungoverned regions, as Donald Rumsfeld used to say, though more accurately he might have said “can” thrive; I frequently travel in ungoverned areas where there is no terror.

Saudi Troublemaking

Whatever its natural shelf-life, the Islamic aspects of rebellion are being supported by inveterate meddlers and fomenters of Islamic fanaticism and terror.  Saudi money is pouring into the southern Philippines just as it did in Afghanistan and Pakistan two decades ago; mosques and madrassas are being built. Some money has been used for projects such as road-building.  The nature of Saudi money inflows is unclear to the various U.S. and AFP officers I’ve spoken with, but concerns about a Pacific Wahhabist haven would seem justified, given what’s happened elsewhere in the last quarter century.  Unfortunately, even if the money were coming straight from hardcore Wahhabist troublemakers in Saudi Arabia, the Republic of the Philippines would be in a weak position to shut it down.  The Philippines is relatively poor, and dependent on the economic largesse of Arab states.  Lack of economic opportunity at home has forced Filipinos abroad as guest workers. The country needs the remittances from the Arab world, including Saudi Arabia.

The Sulu Sea.

Chinese Ambitions

Some officers believe that Chinese proximity, maritime, and territorial ambitions bring the Chinese into the dispute.  The Chinese have vested interests in keeping the U.S. out of the Philippines, while keeping the Philippine government preoccupied. Meanwhile, China continues to hit the economic and military gym in preparation for political and possible military struggles ahead.  Chinese global ambitions are clear.  They have been launching people into space and all over the world.  China is evolving into a considerable force, and to fuel its economy it needs resources.  On the strategic level, the resource-rich area of the Philippines is glinting off China’s hungry eye.  Some Americans believe that at least a portion of anti-American rhetoric in Filipino press is instigated by the Chinese.

Long term approach: As with Afghanistan, solutions will require generations of work.

Some Differences

In Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Philippines, motivations and fighting styles swing widely.  Disgruntlement flows from many wells.  The fight in the Philippines is constructed with all the care and organization as a plate of spaghetti.  The wise use of money can be a great antidote for some of the Philippine ills, but not all.  Between money and justice, the perception of justice is always King.

Thinking about what is possible to actually accomplish in the Philippines requires a long time frame, as in Afghanistan. It will take decades, perhaps a century, to guide and nudge these insurgencies and tendencies to civility, by means of subtle cultural persuasion, and ensuring that groups with grievances share in the benefits of economic prosperity.  Just as the violent cultures of headhunting Iban on nearby Borneo are no longer headhunting, the primitive (yet cell phone-toting) feudal clans of the southern Philippines are clashing between themselves and others.

Insofar as our folks go, morale of American troops appears to be high.  I’ve talked with dozens of them on three islands—Luzon, Mindanao and Sulu.   The soldiers are well cared for, and in some areas they have freedom of movement even on Mindanao.  Attacks on our people are very uncommon compared to Afghanistan.

The U.S. team in the Philippines is in the experienced hands of Colonel Bill Coultrup, who served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, including being in the middle of the “Blackhawk Down” fight in Mogadishu.  He was involved in the hunt for bin Laden, and it was actually Coultrup’s folks who captured Saddam Hussein in Iraq.  Admiral Timothy Keating recently told me in Singapore that Colonel Coultrup is a national treasure.

Lt. Lara Bollinger waved at hundreds of people that day. These women waved back, but the camera missed the moment.

Moros on Mindanao.

Mindanao: No pants day: These kids were in a town near the sea, and apparently were from Christian families. Inland were many mosques, but along the coast were churches.

A hundred years for an American is like an eternity.  Our society dramatically changes in just a few decades. But a century to more stagnant peoples is a mere blink of an eye.  Colonel Bill Coultrup, commander of JSOTF-P (Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines), told me that “The Bud Dajo Massacre,” in which U.S. forces killed hundreds in a volcano crater back in 1906, is still often portrayed daily in local media as “The recent American slaughter.”  Take these interesting words from Sulu Island, where I visited with U.S. and Philippine forces before landing back in Afghanistan:

“My great-grand-father on my mother’s side was massacred. So it is in the blood of the Tausug people to take revenge. And I know even in the hinterlands, they are preparing for the arrival of the Americans,” Samny Adjuh said. “We see it all the time with troops arriving every day and the construction of airfields and harbors for military craft.”

Samny Adjuh said the island’s native Tausug were getting ready to certainly take revenge if Americans come again. Insi Tubjil, from a village known for its rebel activity, had this unwelcoming message.

“Anybody who will come here, any foreigner that will come to invade us… my advice to them is that if there are three Tausug killed, 300 of them will be killed,” he said. “Even if it is to work on these so-called internation[al] development projects that in the end only serve to make the oligarchic families in Manila richer.”

To most people, “The Recent American Massacre” might seem like flagrant propaganda, keeping in mind that since the Moro-American war the United States and much of the world have been radically transformed several times.  We fought World War I; watched the Soviet Union rise; suffered a Great Depression; fought World War II, Korea, Vietnam; put a dozen men on the Moon; then watched the Soviet Union dissolve.  Meanwhile, some Tausugs are singing those same old songs, often apparently in the same old huts without running water.  Like the Afghans, they are waiting for people to build roads for them, and they are their own worst enemies.

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I’ll get to that somewhat nervy assertion in a bit, but first a little background.

Among the cinematic slew released during those years of cold, are two of my favorite films, Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe. Both dealt with strikingly similar themes, unintentional nuclear holocaust, yet in entirely different tones.  But cold war themes weren’t that varied by their very nature, since inevitably the worst case scenario was the best case plot device and nothing brings down the house like bringing down the house.

With that said, still, there’s so much similarity between the two stories that law suits were indeed filed and production schedules slowed. This worked out to Stanley Kubrick’s advantage as his Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was released almost a year ahead of Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe. In my opinion Kubrick’s is a better film than Lumet’s and not due to slowed schedules, either. But both are magnificent, and because of their approaches to the topic, very different  and essential part of the genre.

Based on Peter George’s novel Red Alert, Dr. Strangelove is, if there’s anyone alive out there who still hasn’t seen it yet, a comedy. The novel, however, is not satire and does not even contain a Strangelove at all, since Terry Southern who worked on the script with Kubrick and George, added that character during pre-production.

Fail-Safe, based on a novel by the same name, was written by two gents who do not have the same name, namely Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. When George Clooney re-enacted this story in LIVE television format, which I personally think was a marvelous idea, he enlisted the help of veteran broadcaster and news legend Walter Kronkite to introduce the landmark teleplay. Kronkite brought weight and nostalgia to the production, he also brought a big flub. As he concluded his up to then flawless introduction of ‘what you are about to see’, he awkwardly stumbled and stammered with the authors’ names. Well, that’s LIVE television, warts and all. Nobody’s perfect, least of all television icons. And it didn’t harm the presentation at all. It probably even made it more enjoyable, if one can use that term with a story about nuclear holocaust. Judging by Dr. Strangelove, that’s exactly what Kubrick wanted us to do.

By a strange coincidence both of these films were foolishly screened one after the other at Harvard Square’s famous Brattle Theater. I had seen them both before several times each, so I knew them backwards and forwards. I also knew one was a comedy and one was decidedly not, though the endings were not all that different, in fact, the comedy turned out a whole lot worse in the end.

The folks that work at the Brattle, probably still to this day, are a smug lot. Using the current vernacular, snarky might even be a way to describe them. Naturally, most are students at Harvard and quite confident in making profound statements they’ve overheard (that one I borrowed from Gene Kelly in An American in Paris, if anyone’s checking). When I saw the lineup with Dr. Strangelove scheduled first, I knew then what many of you who know these films are thinking now, that the staff at Brattle either hadn’t yet seen the films, or they had and were just smug and snarky enough to think it would be cool in this order. For either error, they deserved to be gingerly removed from their employment with the finesse of a General Ripper or a ‘Bat’ Guano, warts and all.

Now, there are very few times when I’ve felt the need to walk out of a movie before the credits finished. Much fewer times due to reasons other than the quality of the film. Well, one such occasion happened here in Japan. At approximately the same time that the quite serious staff of the Tokyo International Film Festival scheduled a screening of Lawrence of Arabia an earthquake was scheduled by the even more serious staff of mother nature. Colonel Lawrence, having just seen the horrors left by the Turks at Tafas was about to echo his famous “No prisoners!” yawp, when the screen went black, then white, then the chandeliers in the theater started swaying like we were on an ocean liner in the wrong part of town. All I could think of was The Poseidon Adventure.  I knew, prisoners or no, it was time to get out of that cavalcade of stars. The last person I would want to be was that guy hanging from an upside down dining room table who ended up in the stained glass. That was one time I left a screening early. The other was at the Brattle. It was during Fail-Safe after Dr. Stranglove had already played.  Their clever lineup. No, there was no earthquake and only one prisoner. Me.  I opted to stay and slog it out. Maybe the overly snarky crowd, I thought, which had laughed way too loudly in classic ‘look at me, I get it’ fashion with the subtle humor of Kubrick’s  would settle down a bit with Lumet. Well, so much for that idea. What followed was constant, again, much-too-loud snickering and feigned muffled laughter by the Ivy proud crowd. I couldn’t take it, so I left. The fools, the mad fools let the comic tone of Dr. Strangelove poison the same serious message that Fail-Safe emitted with fatal solemnity. The horror was negated by the association. I was pissed. And I’m pretty darn sure Henry Fonda – as the President – would’ve been, too.

Dr. Strangelove, enjoyable masterpiece that is it, was of course not intended to frighten. Well, not really. You could say it was intended to frighten about as much as 2001: A Space Odyssey, the most expensive movie about religion ever made, was intended to evoke prayer. The story goes that Kubrick was making Dr. Strangelove as a serious narrative when he felt that it was just so absurd and yet so very possible, that he had to make it a comedy, the irony of it was just too funny.

Fail-Safe was another matter, though. Not filled to the brim with over the top characters with clever names, it very clearly laid out the ease with which a nuclear war could be started, not by purposeful insanity, nor tampering with bodily fluids, but by accident, and even with the best intentions and correct safe guards in place. To human eyes, working flawlessly, by the numbers.

The U.S. Air Force had a disclaimer on the film stating that what you have seen could not happen.  Dr. Strangelove had a similar disclaimer that Kubrick was all too happy to include feeling it lent even more gallows humor to his already hilarious film. He was right. It did.

Well, let me stop for a second. I have a confession to make. I lied. There’s another cold war film that I was fully planning on mentioning and is of particular interest here. In fact, it’s the reason for the whole darn thing. So, I apologize with the sincerity of a Merkin Muffley. This film is not a comedy, nor a drama but rather a TV documentary. It’s called The War Game.  It was made by Peter Watkins and originally scheduled to be released in 1966 on the BBC. It’s what could be described as a docudrama or dramatization. But, we’ll call it a documentary because if [Ray Bradbury's Stolen Title] 9/11 is called a documentary, then this certainly is. And like all documentaries, it’s meant to sway.

For those who haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil it. But I will say, what happens to us, to England specifically, isn’t pretty.

In documentary fashion, and using an omnipresent “voice-of-God” narration the film shows what precautions and procedures are in place in the event of a nuclear emergency, in this case, an exchange of hostilities with tactical nuclear weapons between NATO and those forces of communist Soviet Union and China. It interweaves man-in-the-street bits, creating a very realistic portrayal of then contemporary English urban and suburban life as only a Richard Lester could appreciate. These go on to show what the average person was thinking in terms of perceived threat.  Experts are interviewed – civil defense and emergency services workers, politicians and theologians. Many of the ‘expert’ interviews, particularly the ones that keenly show the message of disparity between wishful thinking and reality, do not provide us with real names, but rather titles to match their out-of-place statements such as ‘the war of the just’  by ‘an Anglican Bishop’ or the American nuclear strategist’s belief that both sides in a war would refrain from destroying cities. These staid interviews are contrasted effectively with the fire, flying debris and screams as well as with the narration that shares information with us such as, ‘in this car a family is burning alive’ or ‘these men are dying’, as if we didn’t know already.

There’s a wide range of citizenry shown, rich and poor, educated and not. A lot of opinions are expressed, some sound, others not, and none of them are from experience. The film then goes on to graphically provide that.

The ensuing chaos and horror is remarkably realistic in its incoherence. When Kubrick made Dr. Strangelove, he wanted the defensive missile strike on Major Kong’s B-52 to be incomprehensible, chaotic, out of focus and over modulated. Going against conventional filmmaking, Kubrick didn’t want us to know what was happening. He wanted real.

With exception to the narration, much of The War Game mirrors Kubrick’s approach and philosophy as if he had been lobbing grenades at the cameraman himself.

The film was met with tremendous resistance from within BBC, a thoroughly more responsible outfit in those days, and from the British government itself, keen not to highlight the fact that nuclear war is not something that can be mopped up quickly and that no nation can adequately prepare for war, conventional or nuclear.

The director Watkins resigned over this resistance and the film was not shown on that network until 1985. It is noteworthy that it is during the Reagan and Thatcher years, not the liberal and labour party administrations of the 1960s and 1970s of Britain and the U.S., that the ban was lifted on this harshly critical-of -government, distinctly anti-nuclear film and finally allowed to be shown to the public. However, it did get limited private exposure during the banned years of Liberal party administrations by making the college circuit rounds and being shown to film critics by prints provided by Watkins himself. His work would go on to receive not only accolades but awards by these same critics, most likely enjoying the privilege of seeing something banned by the government and the BBC.

From the outset, the film, like all film, is designed to influence thinking. That it was scheduled for the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima makes this fact no secret at all.

The film’s fictional deadline of when the festivities were to occur if we didn’t disarm in 1966 came and went. So did ‘76, ‘86, ‘96 and 2006. A lot of years has passed since this warning of imminent extinction if we didn’t act immediately to disarm. 43 years in fact, have passed. So have a few other things like the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan had a lot to do with those. A very big heaping ‘a lot’, if you ask me.  But whether you want to debate that or not, like the end of the world, it’ll have to be postponed for another doomsday. What’s important, to paraphrase Reagan himself, is not who takes the credit for preventing nuclear holocaust, but that it was prevented. The super power nuclear exchange did not happen. The film’s message was a misfire. We all know, however, that the new threats we face today are just as possible and just as destructive as the previous ones that The War Game effectively addressed. I’m afraid, as horrible as The War Game suggests, in reality, it will be a whole lot worse.

There is a lot of emotion connected with any discussion of a war more nuclear than conventional. And that’s as it should be, I suppose. Because unlike any other weapon system, nuclear weapons have lingering effects that are unparalleled in our history.

As long as such arsenals exist, the horrors of Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe and The War Game could become reality. Will they? Who knows? No one certainly wants it to happen. No sane person anyway. But the sane aren’t always calling the shots, both government and freelance.

We’ve all seen what much smaller atom bombs were capable of. The fission bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are in essence the detonators for the awesome fission/fusion thermonuclear devices in most stockpiles now. We’ve all watched the grainy footage from New Mexico, Bikini atoll, and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We’ve watched with passing car wreck fascination the horrors of the children maimed, the shadows burned on the walls and the few remaining structures that withstood hell. It’s all unforgettable and very emotional.

But there are some points that get misplaced in all this emotion. Many people are aware of them, but many more are not, it seems. Anyway, let’s see if we can touch on a few right now.

1. The U.S. using atomic weapons targeted two Japanese civilian cities: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Not entirely correct. Certainly the U.S. dropped atom bombs on those two cities, practically destroying them entirely and killing tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people. But, a point often overlooked is that neither city was strictly ‘civilian’ as we know it. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were industrial, armament, military producing centers that contained both residential and industrial components, often side by side.

Japan was a cottage industry culture at that time. Businesses that you or I might think of as ‘war industry’ firms, such as Ford, GM, Boeing, etc, were unheard of in Japan. Small shops built everything. Well, almost everything. Some large conglomerates, powerful family samurai shogunate holdovers, called Zaibatsu, did exist, welding tremendous influence in shipping, construction, manufacture and practically all of the large scale design and development of war industry business. Mitsubishi, yes, the same one as the car maker, produced the A6M Zero-Sen , Zero or Zeke as it was referred to by many American fighting men who crossed swords with the formidable aircraft. Mitsubishi made many of their aircraft in Hiroshima. From the start of the war, the Mitsubishi shipyards in Nagasaki were heavily involved in contracts for the Imperial Navy. The Japanese military relied on Hiroshima for the supply of its aircraft and on Nagasaki for its ships. The region was used as a center for other industrial construction as well, by other smaller Zaibatsu and the aforementioned cottage industry houses. In other words, both cities could be considered military targets.

2. Only Japanese were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Wrong again. There were tens to hundreds of thousands of P.O.W.s and foreign slaves in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many of the slaves were Koreans and Chinese used as labor in these war industry factories. None of those who perished in the atomic bombings are mentioned in the casualty lists for that city, nor on any plaque within Hiroshima Peace Park where all other honored names are displayed. The city and governor consistently refused to permit it. Those killed are considered unmentionables. Like the ‘comfort women’, sex slaves conscripted from other nations such as Korea, China, Philippines, Singapore, to service Japanese military, they simply never existed. Not even in death. Recently, there has been acknowledgment and changes to this official stance, but it has come very slowly and with a long fight.

3. The United States was eager to test the atom bomb on a population.

Still wrong. The use of the then-new atomic bomb on a city, was an absolute last resort for the Americans. To have to use it on two cities was beyond last resort. There is no one living or dead who wished to use it on anything but a weathered steel tower if there was any chance in not having to. Unfortunately, the last resort became an option after the Battle of Okinawa demonstrated that the Japanese would not only fail to surrender, but would execute the civilian population as well, as they did with impunity on Okinawa. It’s worth considering that to this day, the only military the people of Okinawa despise more than the still occupying forces of the U.S. is the Japanese military, and that’s after several high profile rape incidents involving American military against local Okinawan children. Even with that, the Japanese of Okinawa still despise the Japanese military more.

The Battle of Okinawa displayed in stark relief what Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima had earlier hinted at. That it would take Operation Olympic, a total land invasion by Allied forces, planned and readied by hundreds of thousands to millions of veteran and new troops in staging areas across the Pacific, to stop the Asian nation. The astronomical amount of logistics and enormous cost, financial and human, in support and training alone would not have been expelled had the U.S. always intended to use the atomic bombs as many critics suggest.

The total deaths at the Battle of Okinawa have never fully been studied. But estimates show that more died there than in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, including those who died after the initial blast from radiation related illnesses. The figures that are often associated with Hiroshima and Nagasaki are almost always those in the most upper range of the estimates. In any case, many, many people died in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and places like Okinawa. No one can deny that. Yet, do we cringe at the mention of the Battle of Okinawa? No, we do not. Why not? Because it’s conventional war and conventional death. But more importantly, I believe, the primary reason is because there are very few images to evoke our emotion. So, it becomes a mere statistic. Numbers not images. Math not art. Faces move us far more than figures.

4. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved Japanese lives.

It is a sad and strange truth that in the end the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually saved Japanese lives.  This is not an unsupportable claim. For if Operation Olympic was to proceed there is no denying that millions of Japanese would have died, along with millions of Allied soldiers all in the name of getting the Emperor to sign a piece of paper.

Number 4 is a hard pill to swallow. Because of the images of nuclear war, and the effects of it, we tend to regard such an event as the complete and utter end of the world.

But it did not end the world. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, leveled, incinerated. Yet, combined, they don’t add up to the casualties suffered in Okinawa. But many might argue that Okinawa was not leveled, it’s towns were not stamped flat. No, they were not. But this discussion is about life, not things. People, not buildings. Humanity not machinery. So, we must not veer off our humanitarian quest only to pick up broken shields and count structures razed. This is about loss of life, human life. It is the heart targeted message of The War Game and all other anti-nuclear statements that life is what we are fighting for.

In previous wars, whole populations were decimated, entire nations were removed from existence, wiped off the map. In relative terms of populations, it would be like the earth opening up and swallowing all of North America, or Africa, or Europe in one single messy gulp. We’re talking mind numbingly large scale destruction. But the difference is, there were no cameras to record such horrors, no witnesses to give any heart wrenching accounts. No screaming children, no frustrated doctors applying salves to blackened, shiny skin. None of that. Because nothing lived.

Years ago, I had the good fortune to meet one of the last remaining members of the First Motion Picture Unit of the U.S. Army Air Force and the American in charge of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey which went in days after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki detonations to record and film what was left of those former cities. Any footage you have seen is most likely the footage that group and their Japanese counterparts took. He remarked that they had a few armed soldiers with them as they drove into the flattened city. He and his colleagues were scared to death about going in. Not because of the radiation. They were certain that they were going to be torn limb from limb by whatever survivors were remaining and with whatever strength those poor souls had left in them.

But they were not. They were saluted.

Those cities were sacrificed, perhaps we can look at it this way, to save the world from further and almost certain nuclear death. It is their example in the pictures and film which were taken, also with sacrifice, which can remind us what horrors are possible in our own time if we allow them. Images.

Thanks to those men who went in after the bombs, we have that visual legacy to consult. But think for a moment of those images of nuclear war, in footage and in films like The War Game and the power it commands. Certainly, the horror deters us, makes us think. So consider this. Isn’t it possible that we might have had another tragedy like the Nazi Holocaust, for example, if there were no pictures or film of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Buchenwald to shock us, to remind us what we as humans are capable of? Films like The War Game were made for just this purpose. To remind. To fill in what is missing in our visual library of real horrors. Yes, let them be reminders, but not propaganda.

The image is a remarkable thing. None of us would be sharing our thoughts here if images didn’t move us, didn’t sway us. Places like this site exist because images affect us. But we must remind ourselves that there are many horrors, different, but perhaps equally horrible and inconceivable to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the events depicted in The War Game, but which we have no image to relate to, to recoil from, to get sick looking upon.

If you have seen someone’s head explode from pressure applied into the ears, or an armless woman stumbling down the street with her forced-birth child dangling behind her legs, still attached by its umbilical chord and dragging on the road looking like a dirty, old shoe, except it’s screaming – or a naked man, standing in sub zero temperatures, having water poured on his arm, freezing it, and then having it intentionally smashed off like delicate glass with the blow of a hammer – or children hung on poles in the sun, being flayed alive, their skin peeled off them slowly as they try to scream but cannot because their vocal chords were cut out – or seen animal limbs sewn onto humans in place of the perfectly healthy ones that were chopped off – or the insertion of germs and disease into patients wide awake during operations – or the cannibalism of prisoners of war, the beheading for amusement, or any of the other myriad of tortures that went far beyond what the Nazis ever did, then you have seen war BEFORE the atom bomb, before the nuclear age. You have seen the Japanese in China.

War is horrible. All forms of it. Whether it is nuclear or non nuclear. It is horrible. Human beings can be the most – let me correct that – are the most horrible creatures on the planet. We have proven this time and again. We are the most dangerous creatures, because, as the Orson Welles’ Zaroff confesses in The Most Dangerous Game, we can reason.

If you ask an older Chinese, Indonesian, Southeast Asian, Singaporean or Filipino about whether or not the A-bomb was necessary to stop the Japanese, you will get a very different answer than the one usually given by most western college students. Very different, indeed. I’ve been to Hiroshima several times. On more than one occasion as a a teacher on a class trip. Visiting the Peace Park Memorial during one of these occasions,  I was accompanied not only by fellow Japanese teachers who were old enough to remember World War II, but by a survivor of the Hiroshima blast, an old Japanese gentleman, who was a small boy when that B-29 made its run, and who has seen things, horrors, none of us could dream up in our worst nightmares. Many of the people who come to visit the Hiroshima Peace Park and other places like it are Japanese school children taken there by their schools. This makes me wonder how many schools in America conduct similar visits to places where Americans perished in war. I can only hope that they do, because I think it would be more worthwhile for them than Disney Land or the Philadelphia Zoo. Foreigners, many of them from the United States, Canada, Europe also visit the memorial in great number. Many of them leave without understanding why the bombs were dropped, though. They see evidence of the horror and destruction, but very little in terms of explanation of what led up to that day. Images. Emotion. Ironically, it is the Japanese school children who are taught in school at least a small measure of the horrors of Nanking, about the gas and germ weapons tested on civilians, about the flaying in Burma and the beheading and torture at Bataan. Westerners are generally not taught this. And yet westerners are the biggest critics of the U.S. for the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, aside from those who lived through them of course. But even there, such as my elderly friend pointed out to me, ‘we Japanese brought it upon ourselves’.

Even a single warhead in today’s nuclear arsenal dwarfs the initial three detonations (including Trinity) as a Howitzer would a spitball made and spit by an ant. I think most people agree that total disarmament would be an ideal situation, but, like gun ownership, only if it was unilateral and guaranteed. But neither of those two conditions can be met with the degree of certainty needed for the stakes at hand. Today, it would only take one bullet, so to speak, to stop the world.

So, where does it leave us? Stuck in M.A.D. status until a clever person develops something that can disable nuclear warheads remotely, making them obsolete.

In The War Game man-in-the-street interviews it was quite clear that the filmmaker intended to show exactly how uninformed both the citizenry and experts were. The gap between what they thought they knew and what they actually knew was so great once the chaos started, like the absurdity of Dr. Strangelove, it would have been humorous if it wasn’t so tragic. Looking back on 1965 when The War Game was made, we think we are not uninformed as they were. We look at those people with skeptical eyes, marveling at their naivety. We think our parents and grandparents generations were so gullible, so foolish to think the way they did. Now, we’re certain we’re different. We think we have tons of data because of the internet, because we read this article or that book, follow this podcast or that blog, we think we have reams of inside information. We’re informed. We’re in the know. Like the Brattle audience, we’re savvy, sophisticated and knowledgeable. Nothing can harm us that we’re not prepared for, neither comedy nor horror.  We’ve smugly laughed the danger away. We’ve whistled past the graveyard and we’re fine.

But the reality is it won’t matter if we’re laughing or not. Because relatively speaking, we are those same people who were depicted in The War Game, those foolish folk, bumbling around in the dark, with simpleton plans and childish things. We distance ourselves from that lot.  We think we know as much as is knowable minus only a small fraction, a negligible amount. This is fantasy. It is the inverse that is true. We know very little compared with what can happen. And very few of us have experience beyond the images or emotion, neither of which can prepare us.

But what can happen? We’re making friends around the world, aren’t we? We’re beloved again, right? We’re on the right track, are we not? There’s no U.S.S.R. and no Berlin Wall. The missiles have been out of Cuba for a long time and all is well.

I sincerely hope so. But, in the warm and sometimes wet blanket of good relations we can also misplace other kinds of things, like the historical fact that we were friends, good friends with Japan in the years preceding the attack on Pearl Harbor, that we were allies with the Soviets, even war buddies just prior to the outset of the Cold war, and that we had agreements with China prior to the Korean war.

Only the foolish don’t hope for peace while remaining prepared for war. Even organisms in nature, from bacteria to orangutans, are linked to the concept that the defenseless perish. Period. Except those in captivity, that is.  But of course, as human beings, we believe we have evolved to a stage where ruthlessness and barbarity are no longer useful, no longer needed, and no longer effective. Yet, how many times has Captain Kirk had to confront that issue with powers greater than his Enterprise? Plenty.

In the magnificent film Ben Hur, Hugh Griffith’s character Ilderim disagrees with Balthasar’s plea for pacifism. He voices it to Judah Ben Hur, who will soon fight his nemesis in the arena of the chariots:

ILDERIM: Balthasar is a good man. But until all men are like him, we must keep our swords bright!

JUDAH BEN HUR: And our intentions true!

ILDERIM: One last thought… there is no law in the arena. Many are killed. I hope to see you again, Judah Ben-Hur.

Films like The War Game, Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe were made to sway us, to warn us, not of the Soviets nor the Chinese, but of ourselves, each of us. Of what we are capable of and what we can’t control. They may look antiquated and evoke surly chuckles in all the savvy places but each, in its own way, is no less real now than when they were made.

Though anachronistic, they are also timeless because they speak about our fears, and that never goes out of style. The dangers, now different, do exist and have always existed. Facing the different horrors of war, cold or hot, conventional or nuclear should be done equally and indiscriminately with the same even and steady hand that we choose to hold a candle by.

The atom and hydrogen bombs are not the most powerful weapons ever devised by man. The image is.

Aside from the many frustrating projects making demands on his time Schizoid Mann has begun work on a thriller about the cold war.

The War Game at Google Video.

Fail-Safe at Google Video.

Daniel A. McGovern at IMDB.