Category Archives: War and Peace

Sunday’s Iraq war column

Iraq_mosque_1

Iraq: Why we’re there,
why we must stay

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
I WAS BRIEFLY taken aback when a colleague reminded me that we were coming up on the third anniversary of “the war.”
I thought we passed the fourth one last September. Within days after 9/11, I turned a file drawer over to “War,” and started filling it with articles, maps, photos and other items relating to “Afghanistan,” “Arabs,” “Britain,” “Bush,” “Civil Liberties,” “Iraq,” “Islam,” “Mideast,” etc. In my e-mail files, there are 27 folders under “War.” “Iraq” is but one.
Then I realized the other editor meant the Iraq campaign, dating from the 2003 invasion. I felt pretty thick. That was a huge milestone, worth addressing prominently. This war’s heaviest fighting, Antiwar2jpgpart and America’s greatest losses (since the one-day losses of 9/11), have been on that front. So last Sunday’s editorial took stock of where Iraq stands, three years on.
Today, after seeing, hearing and reading an avalanche of commemorative rhetoric from all sides, I address it again.

Lever of change
The war that began on 9/11/01 — that is, the long, asymmetrical war on the West that we Americans first fully recognized that day — was one we did not choose.
Maybe that’s why we had neglected for so long to connect the dots between the USS Cole and Al-Qaida, Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden, bin Laden and our retreat from Somalia, Somalia and poverty, poverty and tyranny, oil and U.S. support for oppressive regimes, those regimes and radical Islam, Islamists and terror.
The invasion of Iraq, as a critical element of this war, was a fight that we chose, as critics keep Iraq_saddam saying — but only in a sense. Iraq was where we decided to insert the lever with which we would attempt to turn back half a century of Near East politics and policies.
The fact that Iraq was the likeliest place to insert it was not our choice. It was Saddam Hussein’s. He invaded Kuwait, which caused us to lead a coalition to throw him out in 1991. He then violated, for 12 years, the terms established as the price of remaining in power. He shot at American aircraft. He defied the United Nations again in 2002, when he was told that his one chance to stay in power was full cooperation. (He also — although this is incidental to my point — was the one who paid bounties to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.)
The United States — and Britain, Spain, Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, Denmark (most of Europe, other than France and Germany) and about two dozen other countries — decided to take action.

About the WMD
And yes, pretty much all of those nations, and the countries that refused to participate (publicly), Iraq_brit_1 believed Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction. So did his own generals, who were counting on it. He did a wonderful impersonation of a man with something to hide, when all he was still hiding was the fact that they were gone.
I never thought his WMD programs were the best reason to invade. I thought he had them, but I doubted they were an immediate threat. His behavior on the subject gave the coalition additional justification to take action, but it never really moved me. I preferred the other big one the Bush administration talked about in 2002 — regime change. That, too, was fully justified, by Saddam’s behavior over the previous 12 years.
The idea, which has been iterated over and over by everyone from the president to Thomas Friedman, was to start a sort of reverse domino effect — to drop a big rock into the pond, and generate ripples of liberal democracy that would lap against, and erode, the status quo in Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Libya and, if we got lucky, maybe even Iran. That process has at least begun in every one of those places except Iran — and don’t give up on Iran.
In some ways Iraq wasn’t the place one would choose to drop the rock. It was profoundly, violently Balkanized and, like the country that spawned that adjective, had been held together by force. But it was the one place where the reigning despot had provided justification to step in.

Why take action?
Why drop a rock at all? Why disturb the status quo? Hadn’t we done all we could to prop it up for decades? Wasn’t that why the president’s Dad stood by and let Iraqi rebels he had stirred up be slaughtered (possibly the most shameful thing my country has done in my lifetime) — because creating a “power vacuum” in Baghdad wouldn’t be “prudent”?
Absolutely. We had propped up an intolerable status quo in the Mideast for decades. Why? To keep the oil flowing. I am dumbfounded when a war protester says Iraq is about oil. The first Gulf War was about oil; this is about the opposite.
This one is about knocking the oil barrel over to see if we can’t get something better than Iraq_girls_1 oppression, frustration, hatred and terrorism to flow out of it. It was never, ever going to be easy. It remains hard enough that fewer and fewer Americans see how we can succeed. The challenges do remain daunting, but enormous progress has been made — often in spite of the Bush administration’s decisions. We’ve had highly successful elections — the last one with broad Sunni support — and internal security is increasingly in Iraqi hands (which is why U.S. casualties have recently slowed).
Does forming a new government not present a huge hurdle? It does, but no more so than challenges already met. We have made it this far in spite of never having enough troops to provide the proper level of security.
However hard it is, we have no choice. We’ve knocked over the barrel, and we have to deal with it.

Many faults, one virtue
President Bush drives me nuts. His refusal to transform our energy strategies to make us stronger i Iraq_abu_ghraib n fighting this war is unconscionable. And don’t get me started on his undermining our international financial position, or his failure to fire Donald “We’ve got enough troops” Rumsfeld after Abu Ghraib.
But this deeply flawed man has one saving grace: When those planes flew into those towers, he got it. He knew that this was no longer his father’s world. He still sees it all rather hazily, but he sees it. And he’s stubborn as a stone. He will not give in to ripples of panic spreading through the electorate, not even (I fervently hope) to save his own political party.
When he pointed out last week that pulling back in Iraq would be up to future presidents, and future Iraqi governments, I could have hugged him if he’d been closer. It was about time that he said what I wrote the very week American boots hit Iraqi sand — that he had crossed his Rubicon and taken the rest of us, including his successors, with him.
It still stuns me that people can even consider pulling out, or ask when we will pull out — this year, next year? What utter madness.

The long haul
If we did that any time within the foreseeable future, our nation would lose all credibility. No country, including our worst critics, would believe in American resolve within our lifetimes. Nor would we. It would be much worse than our global fecklessness after Vietnam. When the day came (and it would come) that the world needed America to lead it in standing up to some obvious, World War-sized threat — say, a belligerent China or a nuclear-missile-launching Iran — no one would trust us not to leave them in the lurch. Nor should they.
Just as bad, we would have no credibility with terrorists. When the United States ran from Somalia after losing 18 men right on the verge of accomplishing the mission, Osama bin Laden drew certain conclusions about our resolve in the face of violence. The result was 9/11. What might he, and his millions of imitators, conclude if we ran from this exponentially greater mission? What horrors would they be emboldened to unleash if we were foolish enough to think we had the power to decide when it’s over?
We can’t leave, folks.
Even if the insurgencies ended today, we couldn’t leave. Even if the Sunni and Shiite gunmen turned on the foreign jihadists and drove them out tomorrow, then made friends with each other the next day, we couldn’t leave. Even if the hardheaded politicians in Baghdad formed a Madisonian democracy next week, we’d have to stay. It would be a long, long time before an infant republic could keep from being devoured by Iran from the east, Turkey from the north and Syria from the west. Our republic had oceans to keep it safe until it was big and strong; Iraq doesn’t.
As daunting as the situation is, there is only one way to be certain to lose: Give up. We’ve already Bush9 made this a lot harder than it has to be by showing doubt. Every American who says we shouldn’t be there makes the terrorists a bit bolder, and the would-be Iraqi democrats a bit more afraid to risk their lives on our assurances.
From his tax cuts to his Medicare drug plan to his threat to veto anti-torture legislation, there’s not much that President Bush has to sell that I would want to buy. But I pray to God and to my fellow Americans that he succeeds in selling the product he was taking door-to-door last week. The alternatives are too horrible.

Flashback: Bush crosses the Rubicon

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Everybody’s acting like it’s a big deal that President Bush said he would not be the one to finish the job in Iraq — that it would be up to his successor. (Well, everybody except The New York Times. They consigned it to the third paragraph of their lead story. They decided, for reasons that elude me, that it was a bigger deal that the president conceded that the war was eroding his political status.) Bush1_2

And I suppose it is — to anyone to whom this rather obvious fact is a surprise. But I have trouble understanding why it would be. This is what I always assumed to be the case. I guess it’s why I hardly know what to say to the growing number of people who talk about pulling out of Iraq, as if that would make any kind of geopolitical sense to do so — for this country, or for the rest of the world.

Once the first American boots were on the ground in-country, we were committed to a process that was bound to take longer than Mr. Bush would serve in office. But rather than rewrite what I’ve already said, I’ll just fill the rest of this post with the column that I wrote for March 23, 2003. It seems quite appropriate to the present moment:

Copyright 2003 The State
All Rights Reserved
http://www.TheState.com
The State (Columbia, SC)
MARCH 23, 2003 Sunday FINAL EDITION
SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. D2
LENGTH: 966 words

HEADLINE: THE ‘LONG HAUL’ WILL LAST LONGER THAN BUSH PRESIDENCY;
THEN WHAT?

BYLINE: BRAD WARTHEN, Editorial Page Editor
BODY:
GEORGE W. BUSH has crossed his Rubicon, and he has taken us with him.

Julius Caesar set world history on a new course when he took his legion into Italy in defiance of the Senate. President Bush has taken an equally irrevocable step by entering the Tigris and Euphrates basin to wage war in spite of U.N. objections.

The United States has rightly set aside its existing security relationships in favor of a new strategy. No longer can Americans be complacent isolationists who only rise up when prodded, then go back to our pleasures. Now, we have set out as knights errant to slay dragons, before the dragons can slay us and others.

This is one of those moments when everything changes.

The United Nations’ future is in doubt, as is NATO’s. Some of our best friends in the world have turned out to be something else altogether, and we’re going to have to sort that out. Going into Iraq is likely to rattle the foundations of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Iran and many others. It will change the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian standoff, cause North Korea to do who knows what, and freak out the Chinese more than that bomb on their Belgrade embassy did.

In other words, it will create both problems and opportunities, as do all of history’s great turning points.

This is all happening because the president has decided to use the military might of the most powerful nation in history to hunt down bad guys wherever they might be. It is a development that I welcome. With great power comes the responsibility to act.

Like The New York Times’ Tom Friedman, I worry that the president may have fumbled efforts to get international support – support that is crucial to long-term success, even if we don’t need it for the actual fighting. I fret that the president has good instincts about what to do in Iraq, but doesn’t clearly see how to make his goals in that area mesh logically with other policies.

But you know what? This is the guy we’ve got. And you know what else? He’s probably the only one stubborn enough to see this thing through. And that may be exactly what we need. We could maybe have had a more wonkish sort in the White House who was better able to articulate the big picture, but everyone I can think of who might fit that description would be far too likely to try to fight the war with one finger in the wind, ready to bolt at the first casualty or discouraging word.

George W. Bush is different. Something happened to him right after Sept. 11. He realized how dangerous it is to neglect the world, to let dangerous situations fester, to pretend that we have threats "contained" when all they have to do is buy an airline ticket.

Many others realized that, too. But most settled back into a routine after the main fighting in Afghanistan. Mr. Bush never settled back. He meant everything he said about the "long haul."

Anti-war protesters are wrong about many things, but they are right about the one thing that seems to be eating at many of them the most: We probably would not have gone to war in Iraq if George W. Bush were not president. Bill Clinton wouldn’t have done it. Mr. Bush’s own father wouldn’t have (it wouldn’t be prudent). FDR couldn’t even pull it off; as badly as he wanted to help Britain fight Hitler, he had to wait for Pearl Harbor (after which Hitler proved his madness by declaring war on us) to proceed.

George W. Bush doesn’t seem to care what this does to him politically, or to his place in history, or any of that usual stuff. He is going to see this thing through until the world is made safe from Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, the ayatollahs in Tehran and, yes, Osama bin Laden.

That is a fact that both reassures me and makes me worried about the long term.

The United States can’t back down now. To do so is to show the kind of faintheartedness that (among many other factors) led to 9/11/01. Osama bin Laden made certain calculations after we backed off from finishing Saddam the first time, and then skedaddled out of Somalia as soon as we suffered some casualties. He thought that all he had to do to defeat us was draw blood.

"The long haul" means a lot longer than four years, and there’s no going back. So what happens if this uniquely determined president is replaced next year? While I might like some of the people lining up to run against him in many ways, I don’t think any of them is as single-minded about this course of action as is the current president. And they need to be. There will be times when the resolve of the man in the Oval Office is tested as severely as that of Abraham Lincoln in his darkest hours.

And right now, Mr. Bush is the only one who’s enough of a cowboy to see it through.

So is that an endorsement of the incumbent in 2004? No. Because we have to face the fact that the "long haul" is also longer than eight years, and at the end of that time, we will definitely have a new leader. Whether we change horses in 2004 or 2008, we’re still going to be in midstream. This Rubicon is wider than the one Caesar crossed.

So what do we do about it? A lot of the burden falls on Mr. Bush himself. He needs to sell this war, both to the American people and to our sometime allies, with the same kind of relentlessness with which he has moved on Saddam.

Sure, he has tried. He’s done speeches, and generally said the right things. But he needs to try harder. That’s because his strategy is not going to succeed unless there is a sufficiently strong consensus in this country to support it for many years to come.

That consensus will determine who the next president will be. And whether Mr. Bush wants to think about it or not, there will be a next president at some point.

Let’s check the scoreboard again

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Maybe you can help me with this. I’m having a reading comprehension problem or something. First, read these initial four paragraphs of a story at the top of the front page of today’s New York Times:

LOY KAREZ, Afghanistan — When Haji Lalai Mama, the 60-year-old tribal elder in these parts, gamely tried to organize a village defense force against the Taliban recently, he had to do it with a relative handful of men and just three rifles. "We were patrolling and ready," he recalled.
But they were not ready enough. The Taliban surprised them under cover of darkness by using a side road. One villager was killed, and 10 others were wounded by a grenade. Two Taliban fighters were captured in the clash. The rest disappeared into the night.
The men at Loy Karez were exceptional in making a stand at all. Few in southern Afghanistan are ready to stand up to the Taliban, at least not without greater support or benefits from the Afghan government.
In fact, four years after the Taliban were ousted from power by the American military, their presence is bigger and more menacing than ever, say police and government officials, village elders, farmers and aid workers across southern Afghanistan.

OK, now, let’s review the facts as related about the incident with which the story leads:

An old Afghan man bravely decides to organize his village’s defenses against Taliban raiders. All he can muster is "a relative handful" of fighters with only three rifles among them.
The enemy achieves tactical surprise and outflanks the defenders.
When the shooting is over, the Taliban is not in possession of the village. They have apparently — and I say "apparently" because of the sketchiness of the details — been driven away, with one villager killed and 10 wounded. Two Taliban have been captured, and the rest "disappeared into the night."

So please explain to me, how is it that Haji Lalai Mama and his plucky band "were not ready enough?" It sounds to me like they were not only plenty ready, but flexible and tough. It sounds to me like they just plain outfought the Taliban. You pretty much have to overwhelm an enemy to capture two of them and run the rest off.

So it was a defeat because, before fleeing into the night like a scalded dog, one of the raiders managed to heave a grenade, killing one and wounding several others (or maybe the one killed was a separate incident; it’s hard to tell)? How do you figure? By what standard of post-battle assessment is that a defeat for the village? Sure, you don’t want to lose anybody, but come on.

For that assessment to be valid by a common sense standard, "But they were not ready enough" would have to be followed by an account of how the defenders were wiped out, their weapons taken, the village’s food stocks stolen or burned, most of the men killed, several of the women raped, and half the homes destroyed. Or something like that. Maybe the women wouldn’t have been raped, but stoned to death instead, these being religious fanatics and all. But you know what I mean.

If you don’t know what I mean, and you think that anecdote perfectly illustrates the overall problem of folks in southern Afghanistan not being "ready to stand up to the Taliban," please explain, so that I can understand, too. The overall problem may be just as the story indicates, but if so, that was a lousy anecdote to use to make the point.

Driveby I: United We WISH

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There’s a sign company on the access road along I-26 near Sunset Boulevard in West Columbia that has a particularly apropos way of advertising its wares: It’s one of those computerized electronic billboards that looks like thousands of little lights that can be lit in patterns with such sophisticated detail that they are almost photographic in appearance. (In fact, perhaps they are based on photos; I don’t know.) You know, the kind the State Fair has at the corner of Assembly and Rosewood.

Anyway, this morning I noticed that among its cycling messages is one that shows a waving American flag followed by, in big, bold letters:

"UNITED WE STAND"

We were so used to seeing that expressed by businesses and individuals right after 9/11 that we tend not to notice it when it is still expressed.

I couldn’t help thinking, sadly, that they should give it up and amend the sign to reflect reality. Maybe they should say, "United we should stand," or something like that — but I’ve noticed that most businesses tend to want to display vanilla pieties rather than messages that take sides and make a point that might tick off potential customers (with the exception of the business I’m in, of course).

"United we stand" only described America for a few wonderful weeks right after 9/11. Halcyon days. By the end of fall 2001, we had already returned to our sickeningly routine partisanship.

Grownups column

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Reprinting lousy drawings
just doesn’t make good sense
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
I WAS SORT of disappointed at Kathleen Parker’s take on the whole Danish cartoon/Islamic riots thing (see facing page) — not because I felt strongly about it one way or the other, but because it seemed so unlike her.
When I received the column from her syndicate, it was only the second expression of that particular sentiment I had seen since this craziness started (I’ve seen others since). The first came Cartoons4 from sometime radio host Michael Graham. That did not surprise me; it was just like him.
But I’ve had the opportunity in the past to speak with Kathleen about the philosophy that underlies her writing. On each occasion, I have appreciated (and identified with) the fact that although she is commonly labeled “conservative,” in fact that she does not think of herself as liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican. She describes her outlook as simply a matter of “being a grownup.” It’s my belief that her writing is generally consistent with that, which is why I like to read her.
That’s why I was disappointed to see her saying, essentially, that we editors should republish these cartoons because we can, because we are free and (by implication) because “they” don’t want us to. Or, to put it another way, to prove we are not “sensitive.”
That hardly seems like the grown-up response. It’s more like the eternal cry of the adolescent.
I choose not to republish those lousy cartoons. And they are lousy, by the way — typically European, most are by U.S. standards not even fully developed cartoons. They are lame illustrations, the kind a page designer might drop into a page just to break up the gray text.
Robert0212_1 When I run cartoons on this issue, they’re going to be good ones with a point, such as the seven we’ve run in the past week from our own Robert Ariail and others.
While I defend the right of those Danes to publish what they wanted, their decision to undertake the project was childish. Seriously, what grownup goes out of his way to mock anyone’s religion? And what did it accomplish? It put the rest of the West in the position of having to defend an immature editorial decision in the face of the even more infantile reaction of the kinds of lunatics who are all too common in Islamic circles. Personally, I’d rather defend something nobler than that.
I mean, if they wanted to decry the fact that Europeans were wusses about Islamist madness and show they weren’t going to be a part of that, why not criticize Islamist actions, rather than mocking the religion? There’s plenty to say within that arena — things worth saying.
And there would be nothing “fine” about cartoons mocking the Holocaust. As for “Piss Christ” and the like, my own personal reaction is that such “art” provides a good argument for reviving the Inquisition. (Maybe we can manage that now that we papists have taken over the Supreme Court.)
Anyway, I choose not to publish the lousy drawings. I take the grown-up perspective: I am free to publish them, but I’m even freer than that, which means I am free not to publish them. I do not feel Cartoons3_2 constrained by any need to prove I’m man enough to cock a snook at a bunch of pathetic idiots running around screaming in foreign cities. Nor do I feel the need to be “sensitive.” I do feel a need to be pragmatic and strategic, as someone who deeply wants my country to prevail in this war on terror.
That’s why I have written in the past that while people in the United States who loudly protest the war in Iraq have every right to do so, they need to be grown-up enough to recognize the consequences: They encourage terrorists and Baathists in Iraq to keep killing Americans (and Iraqis), because our enemies assume (with reason) that if they inflict just a few more casualties, we will cave. Protesters have the right to express themselves, but in the real world of cause and effect, they are encouraging the enemy.
It’s also why we said the president should have ditched Donald rumsfeld
after Abu Ghraib, even if one can’t draw a direct line of responsibility to him. Only a gesture such as that would have shown the world — and the people of Iraq, our proteges in the project of democracy — how seriously we take these things that happened on his watch. Showing that we stand firmly behind the ideals we espouse is far more important strategically than Rummy keeping his job. In fact, if he were replaced by someone who believed in sending over enough troops to get the job done to start with, we’d probably be better off.
(All of this follows the same reasoning we use when adults tell their teenage daughters not to go out dressed like that. Girls may see doing so as their right, but grownups know that, the world being unfair, exercising that “right” would make them more likely to draw the attention of evil men who would do them harm.)
The unifying principle in all these cases (except the parenthetical)? I want us to win the war.
Am I saying newspapers in the U.S. shouldn’t publish the cartoons because we don’t want to offend a bunch of idiots in the Arab street? No. I’m saying I see no sensible reason to do so.
Not to cast aspersions, but those people over there are nuts. They’ve been nuts for as long as I Cartoons5_1 can remember. One could provide all sorts of excuses for them if one were inclined to be “sensitive” — they are traumatized by alienation, by poverty, by propaganda, by an inferiority complex at their once-proud culture becoming subordinate to the West in so many ways — but hey, nuts is nuts. There’s absolutely no excuse for reacting violently to a few stupid drawings. But republishing them just to show we can is no way to lead them to sanity.
If you actually haven’t seen them, and want to, you can easily find them on the Web. If you do, I predict you’ll be sorry that you wasted the time.

A U.S. commitment can work

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A back-and-forth discussion on the subject of Bosnia among readers responding (initially, anyway) to a recent post reminded me of this piece from The New York Times, which I meant to draw attention to it at the time, but got busy with other things. Unfortunately, you can’t read it online now without paying for it.

The thrust of it was that no, the situation in Bosnia isn’t perfect — far from it — but we accomplished our goal there. Our goal was modest by the standard of what we’re trying to do in Iraq: We just wanted to stop the killing (at least, that was the goal once we finally decided to do something). We accomplished that.

The author, Roger Cohen, called the Dayton accords signed in 1995 “a messy, and unedifying, end to a conflict” but went on to say that “the Dayton agreement had one conspicuous merit: it stopped the killing that had taken about 200,000 lives. The quieted guns were a tribute to what American power and diplomacy can achieve.”

Note the word, “diplomacy.” The piece stresses the importance of working in concert with powerful allies, and draws some obvious contrasts with what has happened in Iraq. That’s the first of “two lessons” he says the Bosnia experience holds for Iraq.

“The second,” he wrote, “is that a 10-year American military commitment can bear fruit.”

Now note “10-year.” Also note “commitment.” The result is that eventually, one can draw down the troop deployment — we only have 200 in Bosnia now. But note again, all you impatient sorts: “10-year.”

Anyway, the part I liked best about the piece was the headline: “Lessons From Bosnia, 10 Years On: A U.S. Commitment Can Work.” I saw that as a fitting rebuke to the isolationists and do-nothings on both the left and the right.

In praise of an honest man

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It was really refreshing to read Ted Rall’s latest piece. Here’s an anti-war man of the old school, one who doesn’t mess about with half-measures. Disagree vehemently with his perspective if you will (and I’ll be with you on that) but you’ve got to admire his honesty.

He starts off by expressing his contempt for the inconsistency he sees around him:

"Support the Troops, Oppose Their Actions," reads the oxymoronic headline of an April 2005 essay at antiwar.com.

But he’s just warming up. He goes on to slice and dice the very "support the troops but oppose the war" position that I have objected to in this space — only from the opposite direction. While I support the troops and their mission, I have to appreciate Mr. Rall‘s consistency in opposing both:

If we are, as Jean-Paul Sartre posited, defined by our actions, most of
the blame for the murder of more than 100,000 Iraqis belongs to our top
government officials. But Bush’s armchair warriors couldn’t have
invaded Iraq without a compliant and complicit United States
military–one that, it should be noted, is all volunteer. These
individuals, who enjoy free will, fire the guns and drop the bombs. If
personal responsibility is to have any meaning, the men and women of
our armed forces have to be held individually accountable for the
carnage.

Oh, and by the way, he doesn’t stop at condemning soldiers who have done things that most of us would censure, such as the abuses at Abu Ghraib. He goes far beyond that:

Even if U.S. forces were not violating the rules of war in
Iraq–torturing, maiming and murdering POWs, robbing and subjecting
civilians to collective punishment, dropping white phosphorus and
depleted uranium bombs on civilian targets–the war itself, based on
false pretenses and opposed by the United Nations, would remain a gross
violation of American and international law.

So, you’re wondering, is he saying that soldiers and marines and sailors who just go to Iraq are war criminals? Well, I refer you to his next paragraph:

Soldiers,
they say, must obey orders. However, "just following orders" wasn’t an
acceptable excuse at the Nuremberg trials, where the charges included
waging a war of aggression. Do our government’s poorly paid contract
killers deserve our "support" for blindly following orders?

How bracing it is to read such rhetoric! None of that namby-pamby "support the troops by bringing them home" pablum for our Ted! The men and women who willingly bear untold sacrifices on our behalf are "contract killers" to him. No doubt where he stands.

Enter his world for a moment. It is a world in which the commander-in-chief is "an unelected imposter," and in which:

Every
order to deploy a soldier, aviator or sailor to fight in Iraq is by
definition an unlawful order, one that he or she is legally and morally
bound to refuse.

So what’s a soldier to do? Well, Mr. Rall’s got it all figured out:

The
military used to be an honorable calling. Not under Bush. Ethical
Americans considering a military career should seek a civilian job
until a lawful, elected government has been restored in Washington and
we have withdrawn our forces from occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. Those
who are already enlisted should refuse to reenlist. Soldiers trapped by
"stop loss" orders should apply for conscientious objector status
(which is difficult to obtain) or refuse deployment based on the
unlawful order principle. And if all else fails, there’s always
desertion.

OK, so there are a couple of places where he slips into the ambivalence that has characterized the current anti-war movement — such as when he says "The military used to be an honorable calling." (That assertion begs for elaboration, of course. When was it honorable, by Mr. Rall’s standards? Until January 2001? For about four years in the early 1940s? Up until 1783?) And there’s a confusing bit toward the end where he seems to hold up actions by the anti-war folks during Vietnam to "support the troops" as somehow backing his position.

But for the most part, he resolutely refuses to wimp out. He recovers quickly at the end, with a breezy, "OK, lefties? You can drop the ‘support the troops’ shtick now." You’ve got to give him that.

At this point, I should say that I’m sure there are thousands upon thousands of people who are honestly sincere in saying they "support the troops but oppose the war." But then, I’ve noticed time and again in my 52 years that the human brain has an almost limitless capacity for rationalization. That’s what enables people to say, "I’m not pro-abortion; I’m pro-choice," or "I’m not a racist, but…."

But set that aside. I’m sure there are many people who love the troops and hate the war and are not rationalizing, but are sincere about it from the bottom of their souls, both consciously and unconsciously.

I have to wonder, though: How many others out there, deep down, really and truly despise the troops themselves for fighting and dying (and killing) for us? Well, we seem to be at one and counting.

Finally

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Finally, voices of reason
talk back on Iraq
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
FINALLY.
Finally, after weeks of serious talk about taking the suicidal step of pulling American troops out of Iraq — driven by the steady drip of relentless news coverage of a casualty one day, two the next, and virtually nothing else; by poll numbers that fed on that coverage; and by political opportunism on one side of the partisan aisle, and political cowardice on the other — some people who knew better started talking back.
It started about 10 days ago.
That’s when The Economist sent out its last week’s edition, with these words on the cover: “Why America Must Stay.”
After going on at length, with brutal frankness, about the mistakes the Bush administration has made in Iraq (and I urge you to go to my blog — the address is at the bottom of this column — and follow the links to read this and the other items I will mention), the piece gave both the positive reasons and negative reasons why we have no choice but to maintain our force there until the job is done. The “positive” reasons had to do with political and military progress achieved. Some “negative” reasons: “The cost to America of staying in Iraq may be high, but the cost of retreat would be higher. By fleeing, America would not buy itself peace. Mr. Zarqawi and his fellow fanatics have promised to hound America around the globe. Driving America out of Iraq would grant militant Islam a huge victory. Arabs who want to modernize their region would know that they could not count on America to stand by its friends.”
Then, on Saturday, political scientist James Q. Wilson wrote in The Wall Street Journal of the kind of speech he’d like to hear President Bush deliver. He complained, quite rightly, that the president was wasting time “arguing against critics of the Iraq war who are trying to rewrite history,” when “What most Americans care about is not who is lying but whether we are winning.”
And we are winning — a fact of which most Americans are tragically unaware. Mr. Wilson went on to tell how the president should explain that. A sample: “We grieve deeply over every lost American and coalition soldier, but we also recognize what those deaths have accomplished. A nation the size of California, with 25 million inhabitants, has been freed from tyranny, equipped with a new democratic constitution, and provided with a growing new infrastructure that will help every Iraqi and not just the privileged members of a brutal regime. For every American soldier who died, 12,000 Iraqi voters were made into effective citizens.”
Then on Tuesday, Sen. Joseph Lieberman wrote — once again, in the Journal — a piece headlined “Our Troops Must Stay.” Informed by a recent visit to Iraq, his picture of a nation moving toward Liebermaniraq becoming a vital democracy (as long as we don’t abandon it) was even more compelling than the others. But my own anti-partisan heart was probably warmed most by this passage:
“I am disappointed by Democrats who are more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq almost three years ago, and by Republicans who are more worried about whether the war will bring them down in next November’s elections, than they are concerned about how we continue the progress in Iraq in the months and years ahead.” Amen.
Why such a flurry of similar statements of good sense all at once? It may be that the voices of grim reason finally piped up in alarmed reaction to the fact that the American people were actually starting to think of doing the unthinkable. They also wrote (very specifically, in Mr. Wilson’s case) in reaction to the appalling leadership vacuum left by the failure of the president of the United States to explain, and keep explaining, to his people the stakes in this war.
Then finally, finally, finally, the president reported for duty on Wednesday. As he should, he counseled “time and patience.” But he did more important things than that. He not only explained why we must think not of timetables for withdrawal, but measures for success. He also spelled out how we will achieve those goals. He showed a way to outcomes that too many Americans have Bushvictory_1 stopped being able to imagine.
And he addressed the mad talk about timetables for withdrawal, promising that “decisions about troop levels will be driven by the conditions on the ground in Iraq and the good judgment of our commanders — not by artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington.” In other words, by the brave men and women fighting this fight, rather than by Democratic opportunists and Republican cowards.
“Setting an artificial deadline to withdraw,” he said, “would send a signal to our enemies — that if they wait long enough, America will cut and run and abandon its friends.” Not only that, but it would tell them exactly how long they have to wait — and that would be insane.
The president’s speech was accompanied by the release of a 35-page “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.” In greater detail than the address, it set out the definition of victory, and the plans for achieving it. It also stated what should be obvious: “(T)he terrorists, Saddamists, and rejectionists do not have the manpower or firepower to achieve a military victory over the Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces. They can win only if we surrender.”
There remains much left to be said, and even more to be done. But it is gratifying and reassuring that the president and others are now discussing, in de
pth, the actual situation and what should be done about it. Finally.

‘Band of Brothers’ to go to Iraq

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I had thought that this was good news out of Iraq this week, and that this was even better.

Currahee But I probably took more heart from this news than from anything I’ve seen in a while. I realize the other things are probably more substantially significant, but there’s something reassuring on a gut level about the 506th PIR being resurrected, even if it isn’t technically a Parachute Infantry Regiment any more.

That unit distinguished itself to such a degree in Normandy, Holland, Bastogne and Germany in 1944-45 that the young men who have Currahee2_1 adopted "Currahee" as their battle cry (after the foothill near Toccoa, Ga., that the original soldiers of the 506th had to run up and down — three miles each way — as a routine, daily part of their initial training in 1942) have a tremendous tradition of honor to live up to. From what I’ve seen from our soldiers and Marines in the field in this war, I’m sure they’ll meet the challenge, and old heroes such as Dick Winters and "Wild Bill" Guarnere will be proud to call them brothers.

Dare we dream?

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Actually, the item on "Morning Edition" that followed the one referenced in my last posting holds much greater significance, and is worth listening to if only for this: It makes a passing reference to the possibility that Ariel Sharon, under attack from within his own party over the Gaza withdrawal, was thinking about forming a new, centrist party to challenge both Likud and Labour — if Bibi is successful in his attempt to overthrow him. (Which he was not — this time.)

Now set aside for a moment whether including "Sharon" and "centrist" in the same sentence constitutes an oxymoron (I would argue that it does not, given some of his moves lately — if you’ll let me ignore some of his other moves lately). What interested me about that was this:

If the leader of a nation who’s very existence is constantly under threat — a place where differences between parties are about the life or death of the nation, not just abstract ideology — can seriously think about minting a new party that charts a middle way, then why on Earth can’t we do the same here in the States?

Imagine a party in which John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden or our own Lindsey Graham might actually have a chance of getting the presidential nomination — or which, in the past, might have nominated a Scoop Jackson or a Howard Baker. Now that would be a party that might cause me to question my universal disdain toward the very idea of parties.

Exchange with Ted Rall

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Since some readers regularly e-mail me samples of his work, I thought there might be interest in this piece that Ted Rall sent me yesterday, and in the brief exchange we had on the subject. I think he was hoping I would buy the piece. He doesn’t know I’m not in a buying mode. In fact, he has my sympathy because fewer and fewer papers are likely to be in a buying mode.

Anyway, my initial reaction to the piece was as follows:

Actually, Ted, the only way we’re going to win is if it DOES become "boring"
enough that al-Zarqawi can’t get coverage any more. He can’t win, except by
demoralizing the American public to the point that it just wants to quit. And he
can’t do that without coverage.

But rest assured, Katrina will eventually fade into the background enough to
return to the daily suicide bombing being repeated over and over on the 24/7
boob tube news. And al Zarqawi will be a happy man, and won’t have to try so
hard to depress us.

Mr. Rall responded thusly:

It depends on whether we view al Zarqawi as the leader of a movement or just one more personality heading up one particular pyramid of insurgent cells (guess which one I think it is). I think the Iraqi insurgency is intrinsically undefeatable, first and foremost because the US isn’t willing to commit the half million troops that would have been needed to enforce total domination and law and order.

To which I responded,

I cite him as the guy taking credit for the biggest recent attempt to get our
attention. He and al Qaeda are indeed but one of the factions hoping we’ll just
get demoralized and go away…

Mr. Rall is right that we (if he means our leaders) have never been willing to commit enough troops. And he’s right that the terrorist attacks over there haven’t garnered the same kind of overplay in the U.S. media to which the terrorists are accustomed (due to Katrina). But he’s wrong about the rest. The various insurgents — al Qaeda, other assorted foreign jihadists, Sadr’s people, never-say-die Baathists, and so forth — can’t defeat us. Not unless we become so demoralized that we decide to let them.

Has America supported its wars?

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This really should be required reading for anyone out there laboring under the illusion that there is something uniquely awful and unAmerican about our involvement in Iraq — or in Vietnam, for that matter.

You think the American public is turning against the Iraq War in a big way? Well, get back to me when we’ve had a reaction as awful as the New York draft riots that Abe Lincoln had to deal with.

John Prine was not expressing such an unusual sentiment when he sang: "We lost Davy in the Korean war/And I still don’t know what for, don’t matter anymore."

Basically, it’s tough to maintain public opinion in favor of military operations in a democracy, even when they are necessary. The reasons why a war may be just and necessary are usually far too complex to keep before the electorate for an extended period of time. That’s why you see oversimplifications. All anyone who is now against the war seems to remember is "WMD," when it was and is much more complicated than that.

Anti-war activists almost always have the advantage, because their message is simple: Stop the killing. That’s why in the long term, opinion starts to sway their way. And that’s a serious problem when you engaged in something as extremely long-term as the War on Terror.

Yet another column, w/ links

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Leadership wanted to explain need to succeed in Iraq
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
“I DON’T KNOW how long it’s gonna take. It’s gonna take a while. And it’s gonna cost more money, and it’s gonna cost more blood.”
That’s what U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham told the Columbia Rotary week before last regarding Iraq. During that meeting, and in subsequent interviews, he talked about how important it is that the Iraq_mp_1 nation’s leaders explain to the American people — over and over — the connection between what we’re doing in Iraq and the war on terror, the absolute necessity of staying there until a stable democracy is achieved, and just how long and costly that is going to be.
Not that we have a choice to make: “The American people have no option. It was never an option.” The fight that we are engaged in in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere started long before this date four years ago.
“The root causes of this war had been building over time,” he said. “We ignored them. We disengaged. There were plenty of signs the terrorists were getting stronger and bolder, and we sent them the wrong signal.”
Until Sept. 11, 2001. After that, we fought back. But there’s a lot more involved in achieving peace and security than just fighting.
“There are elements of the War on Terror beyond the use of military force, and they are going to be expensive,” the senator said.
   Those elements are also the ones likely to take the longest time, he believes. People in Iraq and other Islamic countries have to realize that “Winner-take-all politics is not a democracy” — or at least, not the kind that works. They have to get not only the politics right, but the fundamental notions of the rule of law. “A courtroom is a place for the unpopular cause,” he said. “How long does it take to get honest judges? A long time.”
   And what about the home front? He agrees that we have to have a better energy strategy, and that includes both drilling in Alaska and an emphasis on conservation. It is, the senator said, “imperative that we get away from fossil fuels in general and Mideast oil in particular.” And we need to turn back to nuclear energy. Other countries, including France, have not had our qualms about using that cleaner source of power. “Surely we can be as bold as the French,” he told the Rotarians to general laughter.
   And then there’s hydrogen, although that is a long-term strategy. “We in South Carolina are going to become, if I have anything to do with it, the Detroit of the hydrogen economy — without the crime.”
Meanwhile, in Iraq, “The more troops in the country, the better,” for the foreseeable future, the senator said.
His explanation for why polls increasingly show that the American people want to pull out of Iraq is that they are not getting an accurate picture of what is happening. All they see is quick images of mayhem on television or “a few words in the paper” about the latest car bombing, and they despair. They think, “These people can’t help themselves; why should we help them?” Especially when it costs American lives.
But Iraq is worth fighting for largely because of the courage of the Iraqi people — the majority that wants their country to be peaceful and free. It is “the one place in the world where people are standing up to terrorists right in their own backyards,” he said. That makes it one place where we have to win if we’re going to win the larger war that we only fully engaged four years ago.
Aside from roughly 1,900 Americans, thousands of Iraqis have died in this cause, and yet they keep on trying. We have to “stand behind those who are willing to put their lives on the line to build a better Iraq.”
“If you talk about leaving soon, you don’t understand the situation,” he said. And more than once, he told me, “I want to fire the next general who talks about taking one troop out next year.”
“We’re talking about an exit strategy when we should be talking about a winning strategy.”
But what about members of Congress, including those in his own party, who are looking at the polls and talking “exit strategy”?
“Make ’em vote,” he said. “Take (Sen. Russ) Feingold’s resolution (to create a timetable for withdrawing troops) or something and make them vote for it.” He seems quit
e sure they won’t.
OK, fine. So we have to win in Iraq, the American people don’t fully understand why, we need more troops rather than fewer, it’s going to be more expensive than most taxpayers realize, and we have an administration in place that can’t seem to explain that, and that wants to cut taxes and do everything on the cheap. What about that?
First, Sen. Graham says he and other supporters of the war in Congress share much of the blame — for being too optimistic about Iraq going in, and for not explaining the stakes well enough to the public.
He also acknowledges that the president hasn’t done all he should: “His challenge is a constant focus that has been missing.” President Bush used to talk about the “long haul”; more recently he soft-pedaled that.
But he has seen the president change in recent days. “I think the president is learning from Katrina. I see this president adjusting.” Yes, I’ve seen some of the same things. I’ve actually seen him, for once, admit error, and work hard to make up for it.
Still, while I agree with pretty much everything that Sen. Graham has to say on the subject, I am Bush_honor_guard not as confident as he is that George W. Bush will exercise the leadership necessary to the situation. I agree with the senator, for instance, that the president gave some very good speeches explaining the stakes in the first days right after Sept. 11, 2001. But that was a long time ago.
All of that said, I hope Mr. Graham is right. Because this is the president we’ve got; we don’t have any choice there, either. If leadership does not emerge, from Congress as well as from the president, we will fail in this war. And this nation — indeed, the civilized world — can’t afford that.
Ultimately, as the senator said, “History will judge us not by when we left, but by what we left.”

Physicianow, heal thyself

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I was completely stunned when a regular correspondent shared this with me via e-mail. I could only respond thus:

What a presumptuous pile of pontification! How dare he presume to know the soul of another this way, and to pass judgment on it based upon such guesses? Does he think his literary license gives him the right to write omnisciently about real people the way he does fictional characters? Well, it doesn’t.

I’ve got major problems with this president, including many decisions he’s made (or not made) with regard to this crucial war. I often wonder whether I want us to succeed in Iraq more than George W. Bush does, and some days I’m quite sure I do.

But as healthy as my editorialist’s ego is, I would NEVER have the gargantuan gall to write something like this about another human being. I suppose one has to be a lionized author, sitting in the Hamptons contemplating in awe one’s own greatness, to produce rhetorical excess this extreme. Alas, we lesser lights must content ourselves with more humble assertions.

You know, he just plain looks a lot more intellectual than I do. Maybe if I grew back the beard, I could be more pompous, too. Not that I’d try to compete in HIS league.

The debate continues…

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Wow. I was so overwhelmed and lulled into a placid state by the kind comments in response to my Sunday column that I didn’t notice until just now that this debate was still going on (and this one, too, in a related vein).

Rather than continue to jump in with my answers and asides in the comments stream, I’m going to respond to a couple of my correspondents with this new posting — largely because I still haven’t mastered a way to insert links, much less files, conveniently into the comments format. I continue to admire those savvy folk who have figured it out.

Anyway, Portia said I had explained my lack of military service — one of the great regrets, or perhaps I should say gripes (since it wasn’t my choice), of my life — in a recent column, but she couldn’t get to it to provide a link. I’ve mentioned it more than once, but I have a feeling that this is the one to which she refers. If not, I’ll go back and look for another one.

Also, the link that Mike C provided was interesting, and I recommend it (although I got lost in exactly what the late William Jennings Bryan Dorn‘s namesake was urging Woodrow Wilson to do; I really need to bone up on that period). But I bring it up here because its title, and this passage …

The profound interpretation recognizes that if there is an invasion the decision for it and for its sweeping historical consequences will be in the hands of one man, The President of the United States, and that he – and he alone – must take complete moral responsibility for this massive intervention in the fate of our species. And this fact is conveyed in the title of Mr. Hammerschlag’s article: it will forever be Bush’s War, no matter what the outcome.

… reminded me of an older column of mine (and here’s where I really had to go to a posting rather than a comment, since I had to attach a Word file, that piece no longer being online).

Oh, and in answer to "Amos Nunoy‘s" last question, namely, "Did you know it wasn’t about mass weapons the whole time? You didn’t say," I most certainly did NOT write "Hey, there’s no WMD." Why? Because I thought, like everyone else, that Saddam had at least one variety of WMD (he had used it in the past, after all), and was working feverishly to develop others. In fact, we mentioned it editorially among the reasons to invade at the time — partly because that cause was more important to others on our editorial board than it was to me, but also because it WAS part of the argument. It just wasn’t what was important to me, and would not have been reason enough alone to justify invasion in MY mind. You can tell this by what I did stress at the time, such as (at least in passing) in the column linked in the paragraph above. Or, more to the point, this one. In fact, the latter is worth quoting here, in case you have trouble calling up that old file:

The answer to all of the above is: Sept. 11.

Before that, U.S. policy-makers didn’t want to destabilize the status quo in the Mideast. What we learned on Sept. 11 is that the status quo in the region is unacceptable. It must change.

Change has to start somewhere, and Iraq is the best place to insert the lever, for several reasons – geography, culture, demographics, but most of all because Saddam Hussein has given us all the justification we need to go in and take him out: We stopped shooting in 1991 because he agreed to certain terms, and he has repeatedly thumbed his nose at those agreements.

Iraq may not be the best place in the world to try to nurture a liberal democracy, but it’s the best shot we have in the Mideast.

That was written, by the way, the month before the 2003 invasion. You’ll notice, "Amos," that while I didn’t specifically mention WMD (because, once again, I thought that threat, while insufficient, was real) I DID say that the president, for Realpolitik reasons, wasn’t frankly stating exactly WHY we had to go into Iraq — or at least, wasn’t stressing it enough to suit me. That’s why that column was headlined, "The uncomfortable truth about why we may have to invade Iraq." I thought it was important to state those reasons more prominently beforehand, so I did.

Jim DeMint meeting

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I’ve had trouble this summer keeping up with my commitment, stated back when I started this blog, to let you know about meetings the editorial board has with newsmakers and other guests — although I have reported the main ones. I did mention Gresham Barrett the other day, and today I’ll catch up by telling you about Sen. Jim DeMint’s meeting with us back on Tuesday. (And by the way, Demint_2 the picture is not from our meeting. It’s an AP photo of the senator talking about bringing a new nuclear power facility to the Savannah River Site during a press conference in Aiken a week earlier.)

It was fairly uneventful — Lee Bandy, who was there as an observer representing the newsroom, didn’t write anything live off of it — but there were a few items of interest worth sharing:

First, he was fairly proud of having held the federal highway bill’s gargantuan total down to something close to what the White House had wanted, while managing to help South Carolina out in some significant ways. Since Cindi Scoppe is going to address that S.C. impact in the paper in the next few days, I’ll leave elaboration on that point to her.
Rest assured, Gov. Sanford — this is one Republican who is not coming after your job. Rather than criticize the governor’s performance on ecodevo, or complain that he’s hard to work with in that area, Sen. DeMint said, "We work well with him." He added that "I feel we’re poised for incredible growth in the state." Besides, "We’re not easy to reach, either."
He said he thought it strange that Majority Leader Bill Frist, who generally keeps a low profile on issues and works for consensus within the caucus, should choose to get out in front on stem cells, of all things. He also noted that folks keep defining the issue inaccurately: "The issue isn’t whether we do research; it’s whether the federal government pays for it." Good point, that.
It was good to hear him say that he’s learned a lot from traveling to the world’s hot spots and learning about foreign affairs. "You’re expected as a senator to be involved with that," he said. I’m glad he realizes that now. Last year, when I asked him to talk about America’s role in the world, he sort of blinked and said something along the lines of, "You mean, besides trade?"
He talked for a while about his health plan, which he said stresses "individual ownership" and portability. But the most interesting thing he said on the subject — and somehow we got onto another subject before following up with questions (something I need to do the next time I talk to him) — was this: "We’ve got to go there (meaning something like his plan), or we’re going to go to national health care relatively soon, because where we are is not going to work." At this morning’s board meeting, we were discussing that, and sort of kicking ourselves that we didn’t get him to elaborate.
Scared me no end by suggesting it would be possible to draw down U.S. troops somewhat in 2006. I continue to believe that would be suicidal; we need to go the other way, if anything.

I’ve been getting comments from anti-war folks upset because in my Wednesday column I said that withdrawing from Iraq now would be like "spitting on the graves of the 1,800 who have already given their lives." Well, I stand by that statement, and I add a corollary: If Republicans pull us out of Iraq in order to help themselves get re-elected, they’ll be doing something even worse than that.

Wednesday column, with links

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Where have all the heroes gone?
Nowhere, actually
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
APPARENTLY, there are no war heroes any more. At least, there are none that America feels like lifting up as examples and celebrating. This was the premise of a piece in The New York Times’ Week in Review section Sunday that explained some things to me.
There are, of course, actual heroes in the war on terror. The Times piece gave the names of three of them.
The problem is, I hadn’t heard of them. You probably hadn’t, either. And the contrast between that ignorance on our part, and the way Sgt. Alvin York and Audie Murphy (whose picture, portraying himself in the autobiographical Hollywood movie, “To Hell and Back,” was the dominant feature of the section’s front page) were lionized during and after their wars, is striking — and shocking. And stupid, if, as the story suggests, it reflects a deliberate policy decision on the part of our government.
The three mentioned were:

Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, Congressional Medal of Honor. He fought off scores of elite Iraqi troops to save his outnumbered unit before he was killed.
Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, Silver Star. She led a team that killed 27 insurgents who had attacked her convoy.
Sgt. Rafael Peralta received no medal that I’ve been able to trace. After sustaining multiple wounds to the chest and face during the November battle for Fallujah, he grabbed a live enemy grenade and tucked it under his body, sacrificing himself to save a roomful of fellow Marines.

In an earlier age, Sgt. Hester would have been brought home and sent across the country to sell War Bonds. But we don’t do that today, and not only because there are no War Bonds. (Remember, in this war, the homefront is not being asked to sacrifice in any way whatsoever; instead, we have tax cuts and soaring deficits.)
The NYT piece gave the following, admittedly speculative, “reasons” for this: “(P)ublic opinion on the Iraq war is split, and drawing attention to it risks fueling opposition; the military is more reluctant than it was in the last century to promote the individual over the group; and the war itself is different, with fewer big battles and more and messier engagements involving smaller units of Americans. Then, too, there is a celebrity culture that seems skewed more to the victim than to the hero.”
Amen to that last. Who get portrayed as heroes? Jessica Lynch and football star Pat Tillman — both victims. One was wounded and captured, the other killed by friendly fire.
And we hear about the mostly unsung victims who are killed, without any chance to fight back, by roadside IEDs. The message we get from that? “There’s just no use in continuing to try.”
The actual heroes do get mentioned. President Bush spoke of Sgt. Peralta — a Mexican immigrant who enlisted the day after he got his “green card” — at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast (surely you heard about it). And Sgt. Smith’s name pops up 154 times in the last two years in the news databases I searched. It’s sort of hard to keep the one Medal of Honor awarded in Iraq a complete secret, after all.
But compare Sgt. Smith’s name recognition to Brad Pitt’s. Or Sgt. Hester’s to Janet Jackson’s. Or Rafael Peralta’s to Rafael Palmeiro’s. See what we elevate as worthy of our attention?
Let’s confront another rationale the Times identified: Divided public opinion gives all the more reason to stress the nobility and achievements, not only of those who perform traditional acts of valor in combat, but of those who build schools, or train the new Iraqi army.
Our leaders fear to confront attitudes such as this one, expressed by one Kevin Canterbury in a letter to The Boston Globe:
“I am disgusted by the American media’s glorification of the blood sport we call war,” he begins. (What glorification? Has this guy seen the news?) “Truly sincere, honorable people like Sergeant Rafael Peralta, who make almost superhuman sacrifices to protect freedom and democracy in America, are used as props to personalize and humanize the big lie that the Iraq debacle is a just and noble endeavor.æ.æ.æ. There is nothing romantic about this war.”
No war was ever romantic. It is always an unbelievably horrible, nasty, bloody business. Society used to hide that, and do its best to romanticize combat. But to me, heroism means a lot more when depicted against the brutal reality: Are you more impressed by Audie Murphy in the sanitized battle scenes of “To Hell and Back,” or by the portrayal of Dick Winters’ deeds in HBO’s painfully realistic “Band of Brothers”?
Those of us who believe this war is necessary should not flinch from its horrors. We should hold up what heroes manage to accomplish in spite of it all. Are we squeamish about the fact that the heroism of Sgts. Smith and Hester involved killing the enemy? Yes, we are; even I am. But I think most Americans would appreciate what they’ve done, if they knew enough about them.
Confront directly the attitudes of those like Mr. Canterbury who take the untenable stance of “supporting the troops but not the war.”
As a political tactic, this is a smart improvement over the Vietnam-era practice of spitting (figuratively if not literally) on returning veterans. But when people say “support the troops by bringing them home,” I see it as spitting on the graves of the 1,800 who have already given their lives. That’s what abandoning Iraq would mean.
Soldiers kill. Soldiers get killed — and not in pretty ways, keeling over saying “They got me,” without a trace of blood. They get killed in the manner of Sgt. Peralta, whose remains could only be identified by a tattoo on his shoulder.
If we can’t face that, let’s give up on the whole thing. Let’s disband the military altogether, and just hope the rest of the world decides to show its gratitude by being nice to us from here on.
Or we can face a grim task, and openly respect those who distinguish themselves in performing that task for us while we sit on our broad behinds watching the Michael Jackson trial.
On the day after Sgt. Peralta died, his little brother received the first and last letter the Marine ever wrote to him. “Be proud of being an American,” he wrote. Young Ricardo Peralta should take that advice. And America, returning the favor, should be proud of his big brother.

Left meets right

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Who says left and right are polarized and will never get together? Not I.

Today I received copies of this same piece in The Independent from two very different people.

The first was Tom Turnipseed, whose anti-war views arise naturally from his leftist leanings (naturally to him, anyway — I continue to believe it’s ironic that "conservatives" support, and "liberals" oppose, what is a liberal war in the JFK mold).

Breaking my own rule about not responding to e-mail, but being in one of those moods in which I can’t help myself, I wrote back to Tom to say:

Well, that’s helpful. I suppose we should all go jump off a bridge or something, seeing as how everything is so hopeless.

What this writer misses is that it was already a Big War. I believe it was Tom Friedman who wondered, in the week after Sept. 11, 2001, whether we all realized that we were engaged in World War III. We were then (and had been for some time; it’s just that few Americans turned their attention to the jihadists until they pulled off something really big right here on our shores), and are now.

And it was never, ever going to be small or easy. And it’s going to go on for a long time.

Moments later, I received the exact same article from Rebekah Sutherland.

That’s quite a combo. Seeing as how "Reb" once informed me I was a socialist (and she was not joking), I wonder what she would call Tom?

If these two folks can be so in sync that they send me the same piece to read on the same day, there’s hope for more conventional "liberals" and "conservatives" a little closer to the center to get over their "red state/blue state" alienation and start interacting in a more civil manner.

And if there’s hope for that, there’s hope for all of us. I guess I won’t jump off that bridge just yet.

Refreshing intellectual honesty

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In a professional sense, there is nothing I admire more than intellectual honesty. It is one of the reasons why I rail against political parties and ideologies, because they encourage people to approach an issue or event thinking, "What’s in this for me and my side?" or "How do I spin this to support my preconceived notions?" instead of "What’s really going on here, and what are its true implications, regardless of what I want them to be, and what is the best course for the greater good?"

This is human nature (in the sense that it is something that someone who wants to be a better person should strive to rise above). And the moment one declares a party affiliation or embraces an ideology, one has surrendered to the temptation to follow this easy path. That’s why I avoid doing those things (one reason, anyway). But am I immune to the pull of this corruption? Of course not. I make my living laying opinions out before the public, and it is in my nature as much as it is in anyone else’s to approach each issue or event wanting to find in it justification, rather than refutation, of the position that every reader knows I have taken. After all, a portion of my reputation, such as it is, depends upon my opinions holding up reasonably well to scrutiny. But my reputation is worthless if I’m not able to able to resist that temptation sufficiently to see things as they are.

Whether I succeed in that or not, I leave to others to judge over time. My purpose in this posting is to recognize such intellectual honesty in another writer.

I get so sick of both knee-jerk criticism and knee-jerk defense of what our nation is doing in Iraq, that when I see someone approach the issue in an open-eyed manner, it is refreshing, and renews my faith in the potential of the human race. So it is that I would like to bring this piece from The Washington Post to your attention. It is written by an expert (which I am not) who supports our mission in Iraq (as I do) and has done so since the start (as I have), but because he cares so much about the mission, is enormously frustrated with mistakes the Bush administration has made in this critical endeavor (as am I). So you might say I think this guy is intellectually honest because I agree with him (mostly, anyway). And you may be right.

But there’s one important way in which this writer is different from me — his son is a soldier, and "Before long he will fight in the war that I advocated…." That gives a particular urgency to Eliot A. Cohen’s soul searching. And his own display of honesty is all the more admirable because he has been identified, fairly or not, with a particular ideology. The piece is well worth the read.

Probably my favorite part appears at the very end. I include it here in case you have trouble getting to the link:

There is a lot of talk these days about shaky public support for the war. That is not really the issue. Nor should cheerleading, as opposed to truth-telling, be our leaders’ chief concern. If we fail in Iraq — and I don’t think we will — it won’t be because the American people lack heart, but because leaders and institutions have failed. Rather than fretting about support at home, let them show themselves dedicated to waging and winning a strange kind of war and describing it as it is, candidly and in detail. Then the American people will give them all the support they need. The scholar in me is not surprised when our leaders blunder, although the pundit in me is dismayed when they do. What the father in me expects from our leaders is, simply, the truth — an end to happy talk and denials of error, and a seriousness equal to that of the men and women our country sends into the fight.

Both the cheerleaders and those who are doing all they can to make public support for the war "shaky" should read this realistic assessment. Then they should drop their simplistic poses and think about how we proceed from here.

bradwarthen.com

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