Touchy, touchy

Patrick Lang: harpies, hippies, whatever; why can't they just leave me the hell alone?

I guess Patrick Lang still has me on his "don't let this hippie weirdo post comments" list. This goes back a couple of years, as I explained in Neo-Confederate ideas in a surprising place 10/04/06 and More on the Confederacy 10/05/06. Apparently he just didn't quite get it how some dang hippies might prefer the United States to the Confederate States of America in historical hindsight. Or at least fail to be impressed by the CSA as a model of honor and statesmanship.

Apparently he still doesn't appreciate my charm. He posted about this article by neocon guru William Kristol, It’s All About Him New York Times 02/25/08. Kristol actually kicks off his column complaining that Barack Obama's clothing style is insufficiently patriotic. (I'm not making this up.) Lang's comments in Kristol on Obama, Sic Semper Tyrannis 2008 blog 02/25/08, were fretting about the threatening implications of Obama's wife suggesting that her husband was inspiring to lots of people. ("Sic Semper Tyrannis", by the way, means "thus ever to tyrants", though often taken to mean "tyrants shall not live" or something similar. It's the state motto of Virginia since whenever; it was also the words John Wilkes Booth shouted in his most famous performance at Ford's Theater after blowing a hole in President Lincoln's head.)

I submitted the following comment on the post. Lang screens his comments and apparently he thought this was just too incendiary for his readers' tender sensibilities. His next post is called Agitprop not done here 02/26/08, complaining about "a wave of ... attacks delivered by a new group of the Harpies of the left, (seemingly a 'task group' made up for Obamian defense of the 'future')."

Did he mean "harpie" or "hippie"? The wounds of the "culture war" are enduring for some people, it appears. Too bad. Because he actually does do some well-informed, reality-based commentary on war issues. Anyway, here was my shocking harpie hippie comment:

"Vote with our feet?" You don't strike me as the kind of guy who's shy about disagreeing with someone.

In this case, at the sky-high altitude of abstraction in which Kristol is speaking in that quote, how could anyone disagree?

But his real point is not to convince people of cloud-level abstractions. He's trying to apply the standard conservative framing of what those bad liberals are about to Obama.

According to that narrative, liberals support nanny government, want to tell us how to live, want to shove their values down everybody's throats, etc.

Whatever validity there may be to the complaint, how much it applies to Obama and his policies can't be determined from the fact that his wife uses a rhetorical flourish like "a hole in our souls" in her speeches. A statement like, "Our souls are broken in this nation" doesn't in itself say to me that the speaker is suggesting a political solution. It sounds like evangelical Protestant commonplace to me.

Personally, I'd rather talk theology in church than in a political meeting. But haven't the Republicans been griping for years that Democrats hate religion, or look down on religious people, or some such alleged failing? So why should Republicans find the occasional evangelical phrase from a candidate's spouse as being threatening?

For that matter, the phrases as excerpted by Kristol in your quotation could suggest a more conservative interpretation (in the theological sense) that humanity suffers from Orginal Sin (see St. Paul, St. Augustine) and that government can address only a part of our needs. Honestly, I haven't been studying the texts of Ms. Obama's speeches for such clues, and I have no idea whether she or her husband share an Augustinian view of the inclination of the heart to sin.

Also, "Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed,” at least taken in the limited context of the Kristol quote here, may lean a bit toward purple prose in its style. But it doesn't really suggest anything more to me than that she thinks Barack will inspire people to be more involved and engaged with public affairs. That sounds like a straightforward quality of responsible citizenship to me. Has the idea citizens of a republic should be involved and informed about public affairs become a strictly "liberal" ideological notion now?

Of course, that's only in the quoted part. Kristol actually starts off the article by complaining that Obama isn't sufficiently patriotic for his standards because ... he doesn't wear a little flag pin in his lapel! How will the Republic survive?

Virginia state seal with "Sic Semper Tyrannis" motto: maybe Pat Lang thinks it means, "thus ever to hippies"

Lang defines his perspective in the second post as, "I have always thought of myself as a paleoconservative libertarian". This is worth remembering. There are quite a few people who have found reason to criticize the Iraq War who will not be entirely happy with the kind of withdrawal that Barack Obama is advocating. And they may also be highly critical of other of his policies, as well.

The Iraq War has been such a disaster that plenty of people have found reason to criticize it, if only to try to distance their own reputations from the disaster. But it has created what could be a misleading impression that expert opinion is more generally supportive of Democratic antiwar measures than is the case. This is a different issue than the general public dissatisfaction with the war, which grew to majority proportions even in the face of the dysfunction of the Establishment press. And it has stayed strong, despite the propaganda claims of the great success of The Surge (aka, the McCain esclation), again in the face of mainstrem media dysfunction.

Tags: barack obama, isolationism, patrick lang, william kristol

State Dept. staff protesting against Iraq assignments

Juan Cole has taken up the cause of career diplomats who are objecting to involuntary assignment to Iraq.

Pat Lang and Philip Carter do not sympathize with the diplomats' protest. Lang argues that for the Foreign Service proper, "They are not members of the uniformed services, but nevertheless are actually something more than mere employees. Like soldiers they are sworn to their duty when commissioned."

Carter advises them to "suck it up folks". And he makes the point, "Rarely have we seen clearer evidence in support of the statement that 'America is not at war; only America's military is at war'." But Cole also has a valid practical point:

... [T]ypically embassies in war zones are shut down by the secretary of state and the president for precisely this reason. Foreign Service Officers are civilians. They are not combat personnel and cannot perform combat duties. Indeed, if they had any military aspect it would doom their entire mission and make them useless.

At the risk of sounding like a Mugmump on the issue, I think there is validity in both perspectives. The State Department civilians have valid objections to being sent to the Green Zone in Baghdad. But Foreign Service personnel do have an obligation to accept hazardous assignments when needed, and they do have the option to quit their jobs if they strongly object, though quitting can have a big financial impact on both current income and pensions.

That's why it makes sense to me to see this incident as a particular kind of antiwar dissent. People not only have perfectly sensible practical personal concerns about very hazardous duty in a war zone. They also have concerns about taking on such duty in a situation where they are unlikely to contribute much beneficial, and may even object to the very nature of their assignment. Cole argues that they are being sent there to serve as "a shadow colonial administration of Iraq, which is not their job".

So, when activists from the 60s are wringing their hands over the supposed lack of an antiwar movement, this is one more place to look for it.

Tags: antiwar movement, antiwar protest, iraq war, juan cole, patrick lang, phil carter

Retreating from Iraq

Fortunately for us, the Washington Post is still allowing Tom Ricks to commit acts of real journalism. He co-authored an article about Pentagon war-gaming over Iraq War options, Exit Strategies by Karen DeYoung and Thomas Ricks Washington Post 07/17/07, that contains this reminder:

History is replete with bad withdrawal outcomes. Among the most horrific was the British departure from Afghanistan in 1842, when 16,500 active troops and civilians left Kabul thinking they had safe passage to India. Two weeks later, only one European arrived alive in Jalalabad, near the Afghan-Indian border.

The Soviet Union's withdrawal from Afghanistan, which began in May 1988 after a decade of occupation, reveals other mistakes to avoid. Like the U.S. troops who arrived in Iraq in 2003, the Soviet force in Afghanistan was overwhelmingly conventional, heavy with tanks and other armored vehicles. Once Moscow made public its plans to leave, the political and security situations unraveled much faster than anticipated. "The Soviet Army actually had to fight out of certain areas," said Army Maj. Daniel Morgan, a two-tour veteran of the Iraq war who has been studying the Soviet pullout at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., with an eye toward gleaning lessons for Iraq. "As a matter of fact, they had to airlift out of Kandahar, the fighting was so bad."

The risks involved in a pull-out is one argument that war supporters use to oppose any move toward withdrawal. Of course, no war critics that I can think of is pretending there are no risks to American troops in withdrawal. On the contrary, force protection concerns have bee a major piece of the various withdrawal proposals discussed in Congress.

But some war critics and probably most war supporters are likely to be underestimating the possible risks of some kind of actual rout occurring, at least in some parts of Iraq under certain conditions. A badly-implented, large-scale withdrawal would be one. The aftermath of an over military attack on Iran would be another. That's not to say it's inevitable, or even the most likely scenario. But it shouldn't be discounted. And it's one of the reasons I'm dubious about the feasibility of leaving 40 or 50 thousand US troops in Iraq for training and forays against "Al Qaida".

Josh Marshall adds his own comments in Getting Out, in Detail, TPM 07/17/07:

The situation in a destabilized country can change very quickly once the word gets out that the occupying power is pulling out. There are some harrowing examples from the Soviet pull-out from Afghanistan, particularly cases where they literally had to fight their way out of certain areas. A key issue here is that when you figure not just how many people but how much equipment the US has in Iraq you can't just airlift everything out.

To me this is an argument not to remain in denial for so long that we literally have no choice but to get out quickly. We still have time to manage a phased withdrawal which is integrated with a political plan. Not clear whether that will be the case in a year when we will no longer be able to sustain our current deployment.

Pat Lang has been warning about such risks for a while, notably in The vulnerable line of supply to US troops in Iraq Christian Science Monitor 07/21/06.

Tags: iraq war, patrick lang