Category Archives: War and Peace

RE-enlistments up

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A colleague today pointed me to this story by a former colleague. (I was Dave’s editor when he was The State‘s military writer, a service he now performs for USA Today. We were also members of the legendarily bad, and aptly named, softball team — the Cosmic Ha-Has. Small world.)

This story, the thrust of which is that "Soldiers are re-enlisting at rates ahead of the Army’s targets, even as overall recruiting is suffering after two years of the Iraq war," sheds new light on a topic that I addressed in a recent column, light that shows us some good news amid the bad. And it does more than that.

Dave wrote:

Army officials attribute the strong re-enlistment rates to unprecedented cash bonuses and a renewed sense of purpose in fighting terrorism.

The first of those factors can be quantified, and Dave did so in his story — X percentage of soldiers getting between Y and Z amounts in re-up bonuses. But the second part is what strikes me.

Note the contrast: People who are already in the Army, and in many cases exposed to fire in Iraq, are re-enlisting beyond the Army’s hopes and expectations. In other words, the ones who actually know what it’s all about are signing up for additional hitches. Meanwhile, the young people who really don’t know much about the military beyond the 24/7 news reports about IEDs and suicide bombers are not signing up in needed numbers, despite the fact that impressive bonuses and personal benefits are dangled in front of them, too.

Why is that?

Dave quotes Col. Debbra Head, who tracks retention from the Pentagon, as saying that "The biggest thing is that soldiers believe in what they are doing." It’s easy for me to believe that, because I believe in what they’re doing, and I truly appreciate what they’re doing, because I believe it is enormously important to America, to Iraq, to the Mideast and to the world. I believe there’s nothing more important that an American could be doing right now than what they’re doing (they’re certainly making more a contribution than I am). And in their own, quiet way — letting their actions, in re-enlisting, speak for them — they’re letting us know that that’s what they think, too.

Shame we must not forget

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This week we mark the 10th anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica, and I wonder what we have learned about evil and how we should respond to it. We’ve learned a lot of details about what happened, from testimony before the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague. We know that some of the monsters responsible for it, such as General Ratko Mladic himself, are still at large.

But then, he’s not the only one responsible, is he? How about all the nations that stood by and let it happen, even though Srebrenica had been declared a safe haven by the United Nations, supposedly under the protection of UN (specifically, Dutch) troops. I don’t really get a say in what monsters Srebrenica1 choose to do. But all of us who live in liberal democracies have a say in whether our nations act when they have the power to do so.

The awful thing is, Western democracies have tended to wait until the worst has already happened before acting. Consider the last part of The Economist‘s reflection on the subject last week:

Visiting the cemetery in September 2003, Bill Clinton also gave a remarkably blunt, and politically astute, analysis of the political effects of the massacre. "Srebrenica", he said, "was the beginning of the end of genocide in Europe. It enabled me to secure NATO support for the bombing that led to…peace." In other words, without Srebrenica, America could not have won the support of its European allies for a sharp switch to a war-fighting (and thus war-ending) strategy in Bosnia.

On this reading, at least, Srebrenica was a sort of genocide to end all genocides (in one part of the world, anyway). It was also a necessary prerequisite to the dropping of the "bombs for peace" — which, by triggering a final, vast wave of forced population movement, left Bosnia’s military balance, and above all its ethnic balance, in a state acceptable to the region’s power-brokers.

For the bereaved mothers and widows gathering at the cemetery this week, that surely raises a hard question: was the shock of a massacre the only thing that could make the western powers change policy, and settle their own differences? Was there no other way?

Was it really necessary for 8,000 men and boys to be murdered in cold blood right under the noses of the troops of advanced Western nations for civilization to rouse itself from its torpor and confront evil? And if so, how long does that inoculation against fecklessness and indifference last? Must we keep on getting booster shots — in Rwanda, in the Sudan, and yes, in New York and Washington on Srebrenica2 9/11 for us to be willing to confront the menace. And how long does each of those updates last? Seldom long enough.

Today’s column, with links

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You want fear? Outrage? Londoners won’t give you the satisfaction

    THE MAN arrived at Queen Alexandra’s House, right next to the Royal Albert Hall, just as expected Thursday.
     “I’m here to deliver the carpet,” he said. “Isn’t this a mess?” He then went about his business delivering the carpet.
     “This,” of course, was the bombings that struck the London Underground and one of the city’s emblematic double-decker buses, killing dozens of Britons in a few moments that shook the world.
    But aside from those immediately involved, it didn’t shake up Britons all that much. The above anecdote was related to me by our own Randle Christian, whose fuller account of her impressions appears on the facing page.
     You will also find there the observations of Phil Lader, former ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. He wrote the piece on his Blackberry Friday while riding from London, through the Chunnel and on to Paris. To Mr. Lader, who wears more hats with more prestigious firms here and over there than I have ball caps in my closet, this is not an atypical day.
     We sort of played phone and e-mail tag throughout his journey, and finally made voice contact as he arrived in Paris.
    With apologies — which I assured him were quite unnecessary, as I knew exactly what he meant — he suggested that watching American TV news Thursday night from London, he was struck by how the tone and emphasis of it was a bit… off.
     You’d have thought from the U.S. telly that there was pandemonium throughout the city, and Britain6terror the length and breadth of Britain. Hardly. There was “no sign of panic,” he said, even in areas close to the actual incidents.
     There had been much more excitement on Wednesday, when Britons were literally dancing in the streets over having snatched the 2012 Olympics away from Paris. When I observed that such behavior as that didn’t sound much like the British (even with the added sweetener of having stolen a march on their neighbors across the channel), he ascribed it to the fact that “The pubs did a very good business” that day.
     They did all right on Thursday as well. Andrew Sullivan’s blog quotes one Londoner this way: “Work’s over but there’s little chance of getting home right now. Most of us are just going to go to the pub until the traffic has died down. It’s not callousness or indifference to carry on as normal, it’s quiet defiance.”
     Or as Mr. Sullivan quoted from a site called “The London News Review:” “What the (expletive) do you think you’re doing? This is London. We’ve dealt with your sort before. You don’t try and pull this on us….”
     In describing this unflappability, Mr. Lader worried, “You risk dismissing the human tragedy.” But the thing is, the Brits just don’t lose their cool about this sort of thing. In America, the nation weeps, mourns and shakes its fist in avenging rage. Even allowing for the significant gap in magnitude between 9/11/01 and 7/7/05, our reaction was qualitatively different, not just quantitatively. Perhaps terrorism on our shores shattered the sense of invulnerability that two oceans gave us for most of our history, whereas the British populace has coped much more directly and much more often with attacks, ranging from Hitler to the IRA.
     Even when the English get worked up enough to fight about it, they don’t let it interfere with their routines. In 1944, Americans were frequently flabbergasted when they had the Germans on the run, and the Yanks were all hot to press the advantage, and their British allies would stop, build fires and have their tea (Note: Search that page for the word, "brew"). If there had been a pub handy, they likely would have stopped for a pint. Lacking that, they made do (once again, search for "brew"). It wasn’t for lack of courage; British pluck is just different from its gung-ho American cousin.
     Mr. Lader had his own anecdote from that war: He told of German pilots using the Greenwich monument that marks the spot where the world begins its system of telling time as a navigational landmark for their bombing runs. Greenwich civilians would look up, see the Heinkel and Junkers bombers making their turns overhead, and then go on about their business, though fully aware of the aircrafts’ purposes.
     It was those people’s children and grandchildren that Mr. Lader’s daughter Mary-Catherine went to work with at Reuters on Friday, the day after the attacks. If not for people casually relating their inconvenience stories from the previous day — the Tube was tied up, after all — he said you wouldn’t have known anything had happened. I pictured workers speaking in the same tones characters in the BBC’s “The Office” used to moan about how many pints they’d had the night before.
     Mr. Lader spoke of the “resolve” and “determination” he saw among Lon
doners, which he thinks Prime Minister Tony Blair’s public comments on Thursday perfectly captured.
     But, I asked, resolve and determination to do what? To address the sources and causes of terrorism, or simply to go on about daily life (which actually, except for our volunteer armed forces, is pretty much what we’ve ultimately done over here — carry on as though nothing happened)?
     Mr. Lader didn’t know. He expected that some who have been furious at the PM will “have to look at Blair’s decisions in a different light.” But was this a “tipping point” in either British attitudes orTonygeorge the resolve of advanced nations to address terrorism aggressively, from fighting poverty to waging war? “Not necessarily.”
     While there might be some new “momentum” toward renewing the viability of the Western alliance, “It’s going to take more than that” — his “that” being the same as the carpet man’s “this.”
     The world, unfortunately, has become somewhat inured to such horrific incidents.
     So who knows what happens next. But one thing is clear: You don’t (same expletive again) with the Brits and hope to accomplish anything. You won’t get fear, or surrender (as in Spain) or even the polarizing hatred that Osama bin Laden hopes to sow between Mideast and West. The lads in the pub are just not going to give you the satisfaction.

A nation’s blood offering

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I mentioned in my column today about visiting Gettysburg. That was a week ago today, and of course, today is the 142nd anniversary of the last day of the battle. After the news of his death came between that day and this, a friend mentioned that Shelby Foote had maintained that one should always visit Civil War battlefields at the same time of year of the battle — partly so you’ll have similar weather, but also so that the foliage will be the same, so you can see things as the participants saw them.

Well, I did that, unintentionally. And I sincerely hope that it wasn’t as hot this day 142 years ago in that spot as it was last week. (One night last weekend, well after dark, my rental car informed me it was still over 90 outside — in Pennsylvania.) The men who were there suffered enough as it was. It was pretty rough strolling around there in a T-shirt; I can’t imagine fighting even in tattered butternut homespun, much less in a heavy wool dark blue military blouse.

As uncomfortable as it was for me, I have to praise the selflessness of my wife and youngest daughter for accompanying me. Touring battlefields is obviously not everyone’s cup of tea, and they really wanted to get over to Amish country the other side of Lancaster (given Amish pacifism, about as sharp a contrast with battles as one can find).

Being semi-sensitive to their wishes (we DID get to see some beautiful Amish farms before dark, just as the folks who own them were riding home in their buggies or taking their Sunday rest clad in 026_23a plain finery, in perfect gardens and alongside covered bridges), I decided to take a hit-and-run approach to the site.

I determined that I would find the spot on Little Round Top where, on the second day, a professor of theology named Joshua Chamberlain and his understrength Maine regiment acted with unparalleled courage in one desperate moment and saved the United States of America. (Yes, I realized that’s debatable, but if he had not stopped the Alabama troops who were trying desperately to outflank the Union line, this pivotal battle could have pivoted the other way.) I just wanted to stand in the place where history had stood on a cusp and was decided by sheer, suicidal determination. I expected to feel the power of the place. I didn’t realize that I would be even more awed by another spot altogether.

021_18a The ranger in the main building could hardly believe that was the only place I wanted to go. Still, she patiently showed me on the map the best way to get there, bypassing most of the carefully laid-out tour. When she asked if I was sure that’s the only place I wanted to go, I felt bad enough (her manner seemed to imply that my hurried approach showed insufficient respect to the dead whose final resting place Abraham Lincoln had dedicated only about 100 yards from where we stood.

So I added, "Where’s Cemetery Ridge?" "We’re standing on it," she said. "So where’s the stone wall?" "Right over there, the other side of that building." OK, then. I’ll check that out, too.

That was the thing, as it happened, that blew me away. I knew that the Federals had taken the high ground before the battle even started, and that Pickett’s Charge (as well as the advance of other elements of Longstreet’s corps) had been doomed from the start as a result. But to stand on that high ground, and look out at the perfectly clear fields of fire that looked down on the completely open plain upon which the Virginians advanced — not a scrap of cover to speak of; the trees they emerged from looking to be close to two miles away — I could feel what it must have been like to keep marching into certain death. The men who landed on Omaha Beach had a better tactical advantage than those Rebels did. And still they marched on. Could there have been one of them who expected to live through the next hour, much less prevail? And yet still they advanced.

No movie, no book — no matter how it tried to dramatize what happened — could capture the sheer futility of that situation the way I perceived it standing there and looking down upon the place where it happened. This photograph doesn’t do it. You have to stand there and let your eyes wander from  018_15a_1 the stone wall to those trees so far away, to the flatness below, to the markers behind and around you telling how many batteries of Union artillery poured lead and fire down upon the Southerners.

Little Round Top, when I went there later and saw where Col. Strong Vincent told Col. Chamberlain to "hold this ground at all costs" was every bit as inspiring as I expected it to be. But it didn’t have the emotional kick of standing at the High-Water Mark of the Confederacy and seeing where it left its stain on the magnificent countryside of Pennsylvania.

What was Lee really thinking, attacking the Union center so pointlessly after two days of other, wiser tactics failing? Was it a sort of ennui? A gesture of fatalism? Was he just fed up after three years of mostly successful campaigning? Did he just want an end to it either way — either break the Union Army completely right there in that moment, or suffer a defeat so crippling that it would hasten the inevitable end? (I’m sure there are many reading this who are far better-read than I about Lee’s motives, but who can really know?)

As glad that I am that the Confederate cause failed, I mourn those Southerners who gave their lives so uselessly. If I watch the movie version of this battle, I want to shout at the screen, "Listen to Gen. Longstreet, Marse Robert! Sometimes we South Carolinians know best!" I want his men to live.

But maybe that couldn’t be. Maybe the cliche that the sin of slavery could only be washed away with oceans of blood, both Northern and Southern, is the pure and simple truth. (And please, neo-Confederates, don’t start on the "it wasn’t about slavery" kick. Almost every political interaction between North and South since the beginning of the nation, from the Constitutional Convention through Bleeding Kansas, had in one way or another been about that one issue. Talk about tariffs and such all day, and you can’t get around the fact that one of the two economic systems involved in the debates was founded on slavery, which gave the land its economic value. Talk, as George Bush’s critics do today, about how the Republican president kept changing his stated rationale for the war as it wore on. None of that changes what is obvious to anyone who is not just bound and determined to rationalize that which cannot be justified. Read what the South Carolinians who made the decision to secede said to explain themselves — and don’t forget to do a search to see how many times "slave" occurs in the document. It just doesn’t matter that most Southern soldiers didn’t own slaves; that fact just makes them the victims of those who did.)

Maybe the fact that both North and South had winked at the problem for four score and seven years, tiptoeing around the issue in flawed compromise after compromise in an effort to keep the young nation together, meant there had to be such a titanic holocaust offered on the altar of fratricidal war. You can read that thought in books, but it just doesn’t have the same force as standing there, sweating and weary and ready to go home, upon the altar itself.

How does this happen?

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I wrote this Sunday while traveling in Pennsylvania, but was without Internet access, so I’m just posting it now:

I read in this morning’s paper – The Sentinel in Carlisle, Pa., to be
exact – that once again, terrorists have rounded up a group of Iraqi policemen
and executed them.

Here’s what the Associated Press story said about it: “In another attack in
the same region, insurgents rounded up eight police at a checkpoint outside the
western city of Ramadi, then marched them into their office and shot them to
death on Friday, police said Saturday.”

This sounds awfully familiar, and whenever similar atrocities happen, the reports are
far too sparse on details even to begin to answer the questions such news
naturally provokes.

Basically, how does such a thing happen? I mean, step by step. What
is done, what is not done, and what is going through the minds of the victims
at the time?

Do you ever hear of a group of eight U.S. Marines being “rounded up” and
herded into their own command post and shot? Of course not. If
eight Marines are killed, it’s usually by an explosive device taking out the
vehicle they’re all riding in -– no chance to react, just sudden death. It would
take a major engagement for as many as
eight Marines to be killed by small-arms fire -– as these policemen were -– and
they would take many of the enemy with them. They wouldn’t die all at once.
It would be one here, a couple there.

Why? Because the Marines will fight. And while there’s a long way to go with training and equipping Iraqi police and soldiers, we have seen that they will fight too. So why didn’t they this time?

These men had the courage to sign
up for the police force, knowing how that would paste gigantic targets on their
backs. They had to be on their guard at all times. So how did they get “rounded up?” It’s a real tactical challenge to simply
“round up” eight armed adversaries, without a fight first that kills a
bunch of people on both sides. I don’t see how you pull off a thing like this
without combat first. Oh, maybe once, with total surprise. But not more than once -– and especially not after the word gets around among the police that if
you let them capture you, they will shoot you like a dog.

As I write this, I’m about a stone’s throw from the U.S. Army War College.
Maybe somebody over there could tell me how you do this, but I
sort of doubt it.

Were the police unarmed? Maybe, but the sketchy report doesn’t indicate that. If the report hadn’t been so sketchy, perhaps I wouldn’t have so many questions; perhaps the "why" would be obvious. But as things stand, I’m left guessing. (My searches of the Internet, since I got back, have produced
nothing more detailed; if you have found something, please let me know.)

Were they talked into defecting to the
other side, only the offer to defect was a cruel trick? I have no idea. Were they betrayed by "friends"?

It can’t simply be the lack of the will to fight. No one is that apathetic. You don’t just shrug and
say, “OK, I quit,” when you know the almost certain outcome will be a bullet in
the back of the head. You don’t have to believe in Iraqi democracy or anything
like that to defend yourself in such a situation. You don’t even have to be brave; it’s a matter of
self-preservation.

So the question remains, how does this happen?

Actions have consequences

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I actually started writing this item on June 6 and set it aside, but the subject of my column today reminds me to finish and post it — that, and the fact that I keep getting more feedback from readers along the lines of that which prompted these thoughts to begin with.

On June 5, I posted an item about a dilemma we had over whether to publish a certain cartoon by Robert Ariail. In reaction to that, Phyllis Overstreet filed the following comment:

Frankly, I find this one much less offensive than the one in today’s (6/5/05)paper. Maybe Mr. Arial needs to be reminded that there is such an animal as patriotic dissent in this country.

She was referring to this cartoon, which makes the point that the Iraq insurgents could findGitmo_4 no greater friend in their cause than American opponents of the war. It was a provocative cartoon, and it succeeded in provoking a number of readers to respond passionately. Ms. Overstreet’s reaction was among the more restrained. For instance, Happy Dawg followed up her comment with the following: "I agree with Phyllis. Arial lost me when he started smoking wingnut crazy weed. Note to Arial: point your toe when goose stepping."

But let’s go back to what Ms. Overstreet said. There is, indeed, such a thing as "patriotic dissent in this country." In fact, if we don’t have it in this country, it’s doubtful you would find it anywhere else. One of our goals in Iraq is to help the people of that country build a system in which they can disagree — peacefully — with their government without fear.

If you oppose the war in Iraq, you have every right to say so. But here’s the rub: The fact that you have the right to do it doesn’t negate the fact that your vocal opposition does indeed give encouragement to the enemy. This puts sincere opponents of the war who also sincerely care about U.S. troops over there in a bit of a moral dilemma. There wouldn’t be much point for insurgents in continuing to kill Americans in Iraq unless they knew each act of terrorism would get big play in U.S. media, and would thereby further weaken the American public’s will.

The sincere protester doesn’t want to help the insurgents. (At least, most don’t. There are some — the sort of folks who would wear Che T-shirts, I suppose — who have such a muddled notion of whom we’re fighting that they confuse the Baathist thugs and foreign fanatics with some sort of popular movement to throw out the "American imperialists.") I know that. Robert Ariail knows that. That’s why, in his cartoon, the protester is looking extremely uncomfortable at being embraced by the insurgent. But no matter how unwilling an ally the protester is, he is still an ally of the terrorist. It’s a matter of having converging goals: Both would like the United States to get out of Iraq. Therefore, no matter how much they may detest each other, if the cause of one is advanced, so is the cause of the other.

There’s nothing anyone can do to change this dynamic. It’s simply the way the world works. Sometimes doing something you have every right to do — something that your conscience tells you you must do — can lead to evil results.  These realities have to be weighed carefully in deciding whether to exercise that right.

I’m sorry if pointing this out causes distress to good people. But the point is to provoke thought, which can often lead to discomfort. You may or may not end up agreeing, but the process of having one’s assumptions challenged is ultimately a salutary one.

For her part, Ms. Overstreet understands that. After posting her initial comment, she came back later to say,

I’d like to add that I think Robert is a great editorial cartoonist and that even though I didn’t care for his 6/5 cartoon, I was glad you ran it. He does exactly what he is supposed to do, and he does it eloquently and elegantly, with just enough wiseacre to make it entertaining …

I would say the same about her criticism of the cartoon. I appreciate her posting it. That’s what the editorial page, and this blog, are all about — people of differing views coming together to try to understand each other a little better.

A matter of perspective

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What conflict defined the 20th century more than any other? For an American, it would certainly be WWII. The first half of the century led up to and included it; the second half was shaped by it.

Counterintuitively, it is not the same for our "special relationship" partners across the Atlantic. I was reminded of this when I read a recent obituary in The Economist. As I’ve said before, I particularly enjoy reading those; they’re always so well written and I learn so much about the times I have lived in. (But sometimes I’m a little behind, this one ran May 26.)

The deceased was Albert ("Smiler") Marshall, who at 108 was the last British cavalryman of the First World War. As a cavalryman, of course, he embodied the loss of romantic innocence that his generation suffered in that conflict.

Anyway, what really struck me about the piece was this passage:

Very few men—perhaps a dozen now in Britain—survive from the conflict that marked modern history, and seared the modern conscience, more than any other.

The Great War traumatized Britain in a way that remains hard for Americans to understand. We saw it in British attitudes toward fighting Hitler — it’s why Chamberlain was a hero when he came back from Munich.

It’s even why, I suppose, the British public is so much less supportive of Tony Blair‘s decisions regarding the war in Iraq than Americans are of President Bush’s. (You think we’ve got dissent here, you haven’t seen dissent.) That might seem a stretch, but it seems as likely as anything else to explain the divergence of national characters when it comes to martial matters.

Europeans wonder when we’ll lose our bloodyminded cowboy innocence, and grow up. We wonder at their squeamishness. But to the extent that we can understand them at all, we can pretty much pinpoint where they lost their sense of the glory of war. It was at the Somme, and in the never-ending mud of the trenches.

We celebrate Sergeant York. They celebrate nothing about the whole, horrid mess. This continues to separate us.

There are many who would not have it so. I detect in the rhetoric of many who oppose this war a disappointment that we are not more like the British in this respect. Many believe that Vietnam should have done for this country what the First World War did for the UK. Actually, for them, it did. They seem perplexed that other Americans haven’t "grown up" the way they have, or the way the Brits — or more to the point, the French and the Germans — have. (And don’t forget soon-to-be-ex-Speaker David Wilkins’ new friends up north.)

This causes there to be more acrimony in the debate over the war than would be there otherwise. The fact that the rest of us didn’t become John Kerry causes them to look upon us with contempt — when they’re not just blaming it on "that cowboy."

For the other side…

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Charles Krauthammer’s piece on our op-ed page today feels so much like a direct counterpoint to Tom Friedman’s piece earlier in the week that I thought I’d provide you with this link to help you compare them to one another.
I always enjoy Mr. Krauthammer’s columns, and usually agree with them. But this time, he’s wrong. The detention facility at Gitmo represents a serious strategic liability to the United States in the war on terror. It’s not just the latest thing about the Koran. Like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo has become a symbol that stands for American hypocrisy. It doesn’t matter whether that perception is accurate. We cannot afford to keep operating such a symbol when we are fighting for liberal democracy, and most of the world believes we practice the opposite at that place.
Mr. Friedman wrote from the perspective of one who, like me, believed in this war from the beginning, and wants us to win it. That’s more important than standing on our pride, and essentially saying, "Well, since WE know we didn’t do anything wrong, let’s just tell everybody who says otherwise to take a flying leap." Even if it’s all unfounded, those who are propagating this image are winning the PR battle. So let’s try something else. Let’s be pragmatic. Let’s WIN.