Iraq – “Ending” Combat

Air Attack on North Korean Train

In my lifetime, the United States has ended two wars – Korea and Vietnam – and pretended to end a third – Iraq. Korea ended in a stalemate that endures to this day, Vietnam was a loss, and it’s way too early to tell about Iraq. But the president has declared an end to the U.S. combat role in Iraq.  Since we’re leaving fifty thousand troops behind, I certainly hope somebody told the insurgents.

Withdrawing combat troops is a strange way to win a war anyway.  As Winston Churchill told the British after their successful WWII evacuation from Dunkirk, “We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by withdrawals.”

North Vietnamese Tank in Saigon

But, at least the Iraq War won’t end the way the Vietnam War ended with helicopter flights from the embassy roof. The end in Vietnam was both predictable and predicted by many observers and policy makers including President Eisenhower.  A product of a simpler age, Eisenhower actually thought that the nation should not go to war unless the nation agreed to go to war.

That was the job of Congress exercising its responsibilities under the Constitution and declaring war. Eisenhower specifically said that he would not go to war in Indochina unless and until the people of the United States, acting through their elected representatives, voted for a Declaration of War. Besides, along with President Roosevelt, he thought it was a bad idea and he wasn’t about to ask Congress for a war declaration.

President Eisenhower Meeting President Diem

Prior to the Japanese takeover of Indochina in the early days of WWII, it was a French colony. FDR adamantly opposed returning Indochina to France after the war. Believing that the French slowed the growth and development of the region and deprived its people of their basic freedom to choose their own governments, FDR made it clear throughout WWII that “French Indochina” would not be French after the war.

Unfortunately, he forgot to tell Harry Truman.

President Truman worried much more about Soviet communism than about some backwater in Southeast Asia. If the price of getting France to join the NATO embryo included giving them their Indochina colony back, Truman paid without hesitation. French President De Gaulle knowing his way around power politics, threatened to take France into the Soviet bloc unless Truman agreed to let France have its old colony back.

Charles de Gaulle during WWII

Truman, the old poker player, didn’t see the bluff. De Gaulle didn’t have so much as a pair of deuces, but Truman folded anyway and France moved back into Vietnam.

It was Truman, who first hit upon the idea of taking the nation to war without bothering with constitutional niceties, like congressional war declarations. That’s how we ended up fighting the Korean “conflict.” No reason to use a perfectly good Anglo-Saxon word like “war” when a convenient euphemism is at hand; the Constitution is silent about whom shall declare “conflict.”

These “Executive Branch” wars often don’t work out well for the simple reason that not all the American people are behind them in the beginning and no one expects them to last as long or cost as much as they do. The United States alone has suffered forty thousand casualties in Iraq and that doesn’t count all the psychic wounds. No one knows the full extent of the damage done to the Iraqi people and how that weighs in the scale with the removal of Saddam Hussein. By some calculations, we’ve already spent a trillion dollars on the project, mostly on borrowed money. Fifty thousand American troops remain in the country.  Moreover, most are fully combat capable and many are on combat missions as you read this, but since they are just “advisers” and “trainers” it doesn’t count as combat.

We’re leaving Iraq the same way we entered Vietnam.

Facts v. Opinions – The “Stella Awards”

Facts have no chance against opinions. They are like World War I infantrymen ordered again and again and again to mount mass charges against machine gun nests. The generals who ordered those suicidal attacks – and were not there – had the opinion that massed human bodies should be able to overrun those machine guns. The facts belied those opinions and so the generals ignored them.

I hasten to add that we all are subject to this phenomenon, including me. For instance, I have the opinion that George W. Bush is the worst president in American history. [1] Therefore; when evidence presents itself that he has done something right, I tend to discount it. For instance, wiping out Al Q’aeda’s Afghanistan training camps was the right decision, but I always seem to add my regrets that we distracted ourselves with Iraq before finishing the job in Afghanistan. I am unable to give him unqualified credit for anything.

On the other hand, my opinion is that Abraham Lincoln was our greatest president. Therefore, I tend to overlook the disastrous mistake he made appointing Stephen J. Field to the Supreme Court; a mistake for which we continue to pay the price. But that will have to wait for another post. Today’s is about the “Stella Awards.”

The “Stella Awards” constitute nothing but that persistent email that keeps showing up in our in-boxes about supposed stupid juries who award stupid plaintiffs gigantic sums of money for the stupid things they supposedly did. I got one of those emails just this morning. I could attach it to this blog, but I refuse. It is my piffling attempt to halt the stupid thing.

The email is named after Stella Liebeck, the plaintiff in the long-ago McDonalds hot coffee case. You remember the case. Mrs. Liebeck supposedly was driving a car and while driving put a hot cup of coffee between her legs and spilled it while attempting to get the lid off giving herself third-degree burns. The jury awarded her almost $3 million dollars.

No one ever mentions the actual facts of that case, which is the only real case in the email which, as I said before, is stupid.

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A. Mrs. Liebeck, 79 years old at the time, was not driving. Her grandson was. Almost 16 years ago.

B. The car was not moving. The grandson had stopped so Mrs. Liebeck could put cream and sugar in her coffee.

C. McDonald’s required its stores to serve coffee at a temperature between 180 degrees F and 190 degrees F.

D. You serve your coffee at home at temperature 40 to 60 degrees cooler.

E. Liquids at 180 degrees F cause “full skin thickness” burns (3rd degree) in 2 to 7 seconds. Mrs Liebeck had 3rd degree burns over her inner thighs, groin, peritoneum and genitals. She was in the hospital for 8 days during which the burns were debrided several times a day and she then had to have subsequent skin grafts. At the age of 80.

F. From 1982 until 1992, the time of the trial, McDonalds had more than 700 cases of third degree burns from its coffee reported to it.

G. McDonalds’ defense was that, while it knew of all the burns, it was going to leave its coffee at that temperature because “it tasted better.” Their own quality assurance manager testified that it was too hot to drink at that temperature and would cause burns in the mouth if anyone tried to drink it at that temperature but McDonalds’ own research purported to show that people drove home or to work before they tried to drink it or put cream or sugar in it.

H. The jury awarded her $200,000 in medical expenses but reduced it to $160,000 because they found Mrs. Liebeck 20% responsible. That was less than what she owed her medical insurance company.

I. The punitive damage award of $2.7 million was McDonalds’ revenues from one day of coffee sales. The judge ignored the jury verdict and reduced that award by $2.3 million. While on appeal the parties entered into a secret settlement. One hopes she got enough to pay her medical bills.

J. McDonalds now serves its coffee at 150 degrees or thereabouts.

K. Mrs. Liebeck is dead. McDonalds lives on.

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All the other cases in the email are complete fabrications. Lies. The emails always include the same ones: the woman who is tripped by her own child in a store, the guy whose hand is run over while he attempts to steal the hubcaps on the car, the thief trapped for eight days in the garage of his victim, the dog bite victim bitten while he was shooting his neighbor’s dog with a pellet gun, the women who fell in the bars; one on a coke she had just thrown at her boyfriend and the other attempting to sneak into the bar bathroom window to avoid paying the cover charge and that most wonderous urban myth – now more than 30 years old – of the driver who set the cruise control on the Winnebago and then got out of the driver’s seat and went to the bathroom; then sued Winnebago for injuries after it ran off the road because no one was driving the thing.

Here are the facts: Not one of those “cases” ever happened. Not one. They are propaganda; total fabrications. Lies. No such case would ever see the light of day in a real American courtroom. The email attempts to diminish our respect for our fellow citizens and our judicial system which has the consequence, whether intended or not, of helping large corporations avoid responsibility and hurting all the rest of us. Which gets me back to Stephen J. Field, but he has to wait.

There. I feel better. Sort of like those World War One generals. I just sent some facts out in a hopeless charge against the machine gun nests of opinion.

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[1]I struggle with James Buchanan who achieved his incompetency in just one term. It took George W. Bush two terms. Does this mean that Buchanan was better at incompetency than Bush or worse?