Remember, you don’t have to rely upon venerable correspondents such as Joe Galloway, or armchair warriors such as myself, to tell you what’s really going on in Iraq, Afghanistan and everywhere else that Americans in uniform are laying their lives on the line.
Increasingly, you can check in with the troops yourself. In "Cry Bias, and Let Slip the Blogs of War," The Wall Street Journal told how to tap into the thoughts and observations of more than 1,400 people who’ve actually been there — or are still there. For many of these bloggers in uniform, said the founder of Milblogging.com, "the sole purpose was to counteract the media."
There have always been at least some soldiers who have wanted to go to battle against Big Media. Some in the military blamed coverage of the Vietnam War for turning American public opinion against it. What’s changed? The Internet now allows frustrated soldiers and veterans to voice their opinions and be heard instantly and globally.
Not that all want to gripe about the press. The God-given right of all GIs to second-guess, mock and generally criticize higher-ups is alive and well:
An Army blogger in Iraq who calls himself "Godlesskinser," has a clock
on his Web site noting how many days, hours, minutes and seconds have
passed since President Bush vowed to capture Osama bin Laden.
Check out the opinions of people who daily risk their lives for what they believe in. I’m putting a permanent link up to the left to make that easier for us all.
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Your description of the blog sounded intriguing and appealing until you quote the founder: “There have always been at least some soldiers who have wanted to go to battle against Big Media. Some in the military blamed coverage of the Vietnam War for turning American public opinion against it.” Gee, what a shame. Maybe the Wall in Washington could have had 100,000 names on it for the same result, instead of the mere 50,000 on it now.
Undoubtedly all soldiers in Iraq are risking their lives, but do they all really “believe in” the cause? For those who don’t, would Mili-blog include their thoughts? What is the military’s policy on individual soldiers’ blogs? Obviously they don’t want to run security risks, so is there pre-screening of posts? Would that extend to opinions as well? I don’t know the answers to this, just asking.
Speaking of Joe Galloway, that piece he ran a couple of weeks ago was the most powerful summary of just what folly this has all been.
Or, Phillip, the U.S. presence could have prevented other disastrous developments in Southeast Asia over the next few years.
You never know. That’s why “alternate history” is such a popular field.
Yes, you never know. The US presence was proving so, um, “decisive” while it was there. So 8 years and 50,000 American lives maybe wasn’t enough. Maybe 15 years and 100,000 American lives would have done it. Truth is, since we A) did not really understand what was really going on in that country, and B) were not really fighting for the Vietnamese people’s sake but for our own geopolitical interests, it would never have mattered how many years we stayed or how many troops we sacrificed, how many bombs we dropped.
Vietnam revisionism is a little bit more in vogue these days thanks to the rise of the neo-cons, but it still surprises me when I come across it. Then again, we live in an area where many would like to have a “do-over” with the Civil War.
Unlike a lot of progressives these days, I don’t see a lot of parallels between Iraq and Vietnam. Sure, some surface similarities but the scope (for now) is not in the same ballpark.
It’s that so many pro-war people (including the military blogs you cited) bring up Vietnam in a “if only” tone, that to me is the dead giveaway. Their belief is not so much that it is in other peoples’ interest for America to flex its might more, but that it is in our own interest to finally take the shackles off, drop all the bombs necessary, use all the troops necessary, simply to prove the point to humanity that America will be the final arbiter of the world’s behavior, especially henceforth now that the Cold War as such is over. These people (and we have 2 or 3 examples as comment submitters on this blog) are not comfortable with a totally open democracy, prefer military solutions and prerogatives to civilian-generated ones, feel that a free and open press weakens our nation, and probably would prefer a military-based oligarchical right-leaning government here at home, if they were honest enough to admit it.
Unfortunately for them, mighty as we are, we simply cannot shoulder absolutely every burden in this world by military means alone. Like it or not, many challenges in the world require joint responses from multiple nations. That is sometimes difficult, sometimes we have to deal with obstreperous nations acting selfishly themselves, it’s messy, it’s time-consuming, it’s sometimes glacially slow, but obviously in the long run (and I’m talking evolution-of-the-human-species long here) it will have to be the way to go, if the species is to survive.
Perhaps it will take a threat to the species in general to hasten that day. Global warming, bring it on! Or, as I often tell my friends, I really wish a semi-hostile alien life force would hurry up and get here from another planet. Then we would quickly stop this junk about “My God is the real one and yours is a fraud” and “my nation is more worthy than your nation.”
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