Chris Hayes and Patriotic Correctness about "the troops"

Liberal journalist Chris Hayes took some flak from the usual suspects this past weekend when he suggested that talking about soldiers like 12-year-old fanboys gushing about their favorite comic-book heroes might not be entirely appropriate on all occasions for adult citizens in a democracy.

Paul Campos gives an account in Chris Hayes apologizes for saying something intelligent LGM 05/28/2012. Charlie Pierce recalls how Republican partisans "honored the troops" back in 2004. (What Are the Gobshites Saying These Days? Esquire Politics Blog 05/29/2012)

Chris is neither the first to catch this kind of flak nor will be be the last. I'm even seeing little inspirational posters to honor military dogs these days. I addressed this issue, for instance in Sleaze 02/17/2012. I posted on the issue on which Hayes' controversial comment touched in Do "the troops" = the war policy? 04/16/2012.

On 02/07/2007, I posted William Arkin gets in deep doody for not "supporting the troops". The links to Arkin's columns there are now broken. (Which is why I like to quote relevant passages from the articles I link as well as referencing the article name and source, which makes them easier to locate with a web search. Although I wasn't able to find versions of those on a quick search that I would consider reliable ones.)

Here's what I wrote about Arkin's offense against Patriotic Correctness in that post:

He was challenging the increasingly daffy political convention in America of arguing about Iraq War policy in terms of what's best for "the troops", who are routinely described as brave, noble, self-sacrificing, [fill in your favorite superlative]. We're against the war because we're asking too much of "our troops" who are fine, wonderful, etc. No, we need to stay in Iraq because "the troops" want to finish the job, being as they are brave, determined, capable, etc.

This convention has become increasingly popular over the last three decades. To a significant extent it's the result of having an all-volunteer military, though other trends have contributed to it, such as the Christian fundamentalists deciding that the military was a rich "mission field" for their message. But was result of all those trends is that fewer and fewer Americans have direct contact with the military themselves or through neighbors and family members. Idolizing "the troops" is kind of an informal but real psychological bargain.

The civilians who don't serve and haven't served gush about the nobility of those who do. Those in the military are expected to then be jacked around as the politicians and our infallible generals decide (the generals also being dedicated, noble, selfless, etc.), and they shouldn't make everyone else feel uncomfortable by bitching and moaning about it. More particularly, no one should make the offspring of affluent Republican white folks feel guilty about the fact that while they cheer for wars and recite bloody slogans as loyal Republicans are expected to, most of them don't feel moved to volunteer for those wars they find so vital to the interests of the Homeland. That's what we have fine, noble soldiers for, who just happen to be disproportionately Southern, disproportionately minorities and disproportionately working class. Military recruiters should confine their high-pressure recruiting efforts to mall and high-schools in working-class neighborhoods and not trouble nice young Republican white folks about such things.

And that's a big downside of this idolization of "the troops". Because "the troops" are strangers to so many Americans, and because they are abstracted to be the Best of the Best, it makes it psychologically much easier for most of the public to cheerfully agree and even applaud to send them off on dubious missions where their lives and bodies are placed on the line. Too many people view them as The Troops, not as what they are: men and women just like the rest of the society they come from, though with the demographic disproportions I mentioned above.

Arkin made the point in a clumsy way. But doing verbal somersaults to make Iraq War policy sound in the best interests of the soldiers is getting increasingly unreal. Anyone who's not a Big Pundit or totally into the Oxycontin worldview understands that it's obvious that war is never in the best interests of "the troops". Their best interests is in not being put in some Middle Eastern hell-hole where they may be killed or maimed or shot out their helicopters or driven to PTSD.

Also, it surely must be clear to most anyone not washed in the blood of High Broderism that whether the soldiers in the field want to carry on the fight is not the determining factor in war policies, unless things come to the extremes of the army collapsing or revolting. I'm not aware of any country which lets the rank-and-file soldiers vote on whether to initiate, continue or end a war. I suppose you could make some sort of romantic-Bolshevik case that they should get to decide by a vote. (Not that Communist governments ever followed such a practice.) Soldiers in the American Civil War got to elect some of their officers, a system that didn't have such great practical results.

But who outside Beltway punditry or rightwing think-tanks pretends that's the way the world works? Of course, wars are bad for the soldiers' health and well-being, including the businesses, marriages and family lives that are negatively affected by their absence. And of course the soldiers in the field don't get to decide, short of some kind of insubordination or revolt, whether or not their country is going to enter a war, keep on fighting or come to a peace agreement.

And I quoted Arkin describing the rightwing "populism" of war fans who argue for their policy preferences in the name of "supporting the troops" (even when "the troops" themselves have a diversity of opinions on the policies relating to the wars in which some of them are fighting):

But the bigger point is that any dissenting voices are just those of whores, politicians, tin foil hat liberals, or worse, un-Americans. In this view, there are no actual experts in this world, no one who studies and measures public opinion, no one who studies war or the military, who do not wear the uniform. This is not some post-modern relativism, it is pure anti-elitism. The elite think they know it all, while those who do all of the dirty work, who do all of the suffering, are methodically ignored and dominated.

But this is Tea Party style "anti-elitism". I quoted a Military Times analysis from late 2006 of a poll of soldiers that found, "Only 35 percent of the military members polled this year said they approve of the way President Bush is handling the war, while 42 percent said they disapproved." And, "in this year’s poll only 41 percent of the military said the U.S. should have gone to war in Iraq in the first place, down from 65 percent in 2003."

Tags: Tags: chris hayes, patriotic correctness, william arkin

The ghosts of wars past and not-yet-passed: Libya, Kosovo, Afghanistan

This report by Kim Sengupta, Rebels die as victims of their own disarray The Independent 04/03/2011 illustrates one of the limitations of air power in the Libya War:

The rebel fighters were celebrating "victory" in their usual wasteful way, loosing off round after round into the air, using up ammunition in short supply. But this time it was a suicidal mistake: seconds later their vehicles, and an ambulance parked near by, were destroyed in an attack arriving with shattering explosions.

Air strikes had been carried out by a pilot from the international coalition who then thought an anti-aircraft barrage was being directed at him. Fifteen people, including three members of medical staff, were killed instantly when the warplane, believed to be an A-10 Tankbuster, responded with its devastating firepower.

These were the second set of "collateral casualties" in two days: eight others died in another bombing aimed at a regime convoy passing through the village of Argobe, near Ajdabiya. It ignited ammunition, spraying shrapnel into nearby houses. Four of those killed were female, including three girls aged 12 to 16 from the same family; two others were teenage boys.

This 04/02/2011 report from Aljazeera English reports on the same two incidents:



Initially, the US-French-British approach in Libya sounded a lot like their approach in the Kosovo War. I've speculated that Juan Cole's enthusiasm for the intervention in Libya was largely based on an optimistic view of the Kosovo War. In a post of 04/01/2011, Defections, US Withdrawal Point to Political Solution in Libya Informed Comment, he seemed to confirm this:

US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates clearly has a model in his mind somewhat like Serbia in 1999-2000. In spring 1999 Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic sent troops into Kosovo, which began committing a massacre. NATO intervened to roll that back. During that war, Milosevic was indicted at the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

Milosevic's attempt to tinker with the presidential election of October 1999 provoked massive street protests against him. His military informed him that they would not support him. By spring of 2001 he was arrested by his own people and that summer he was surrendered to the United Nations.

NATO's aerial bombing missions were what stopped the advance into Kosovo of Serbian troops. But it was the world community's relegation of Milosevic to pariah status that helped the Serbian elite turn against him.

There are two problems with this. It's an unrealistic view of the Kosovo War, and the Western strategy in the Libya War is starting to look more like Rummy's fanciful approach in Afghanistan.

What we saw in the Kosovo War of 1999 was that air power can inhibit the use of ground troops but didn't prevent it. Cole writes, "NATO's aerial bombing missions were what stopped the advance into Kosovo of Serbian troops." But in fact, Serbian troops intensified their ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars after the bombing campaign began. William Arkin in "Operation Allied Force: 'The Most Precise Application of Air Power in History'," from Andrew Bacevich and Eliot Cohen, eds, War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age (2001) explains:

From the perspective of allied pilots, attacking forces in Kosovo translated into huntng down and hitting individual vehicles - with negligible effect on the progress of Operation Horsehoe [the ethnic cleansing campaign Serbia launched in March 1999 just before the NATO bombing began]. [US Defence] Secretary [William] Cohen would later claim that the attacks proceeded according to plan, creating the conditions that shifted the "balance of power" toward the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). NATO, he said after the war, had been "creating the possibility that the military efforts of the Kosovar Albanians, which were likely to grow in intensity as a result of Milosevic's atrocities in Kosovo, might be a more credible challenge to Serb armed forces." But that is patent nonsense. In claiming that its Phase 2 efforts [which started after the initial 48-hour Phase 1 bombing] constituted a serious effort to stop ethnic cleansing by killing its perpetrators, NATO (and by extension the Clinton administration) was being either stupid or disingenuous.

NATO initially hoped that Serbia would relent on the ethnic cleansing campaign after the Phase 1 bombing campaign of the first 48 hours had taken place. That didn't occur. NATO then had to extend the bombing into Serbia proper and strike urban targets. The air war began on March 25. Arkin relates:

Toward the end of May, with the support of American intelligence and Albanian artillery, the KLA mounted a counteroffensive. "The is the beginning of a new phase of aggression, the so-called land operation," Major General Vladimir Lazarevic, commander of the Yugoslav Pritina Corps, said. Regardless of the ferocious debate inside NATO about the need for a ground war, Belgrade saw threatening signs that suggested NATO preparations for just that contingency.

NATO shored up their international diplomatic support with the crucial backing of Russia, which had been Serbia's supporter. There was also increasing anger among the Serbian public toward Milosevic. The combination of these factors persuaded him to call off the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and leave the area, which was a part of the nation of Serbia, as a de facto NATO protectorate.

Milošević, like Muammar Qaddafi more recently, was indicted for war crimes and thus faced the prospect of criminal prosecution under UN auspices, it's highly questionable whether this makes the leaders more likely to capitulate in an immediate conflict, whatever its value may be in the larger scheme of things. Ousting Milošević was never a war aim of the Kosovo War. Had NATO had to send in ground troops, Milošević had to calculate that it might become the goal. Combined with the internal political pressure in Serbia, Milošević could and apparently did calculate that he was more likely to survive in power - and stay out of the hands of international prosecutors - if he capitulated to NATO on Kosovo.

Its now obvious that regime change is the goal of the US-French-British forces in Libya. More is on the line for Qaddafi and his close supporters in this war than there was for Milošević in the Kosovo War in 1999.

But we also now know that the CIA, the British MI6 and Western Special Forces are operating on the ground, giving military direction to rebel fighters and coordinating air strikes. This sounds far more like the approach that the Cheney-Bush Administration used under Rummy's direction in 2001 in the initial stage of the ongoing Afghanistan War. The idea was to use the CIA, Special Forces and air power to support the Northern Alliance forces to take power in Kabul.

That strategy worked in Afghanistan to put the Northern Alliance in power in Kabul. It didn't work so well in bringing maximum power to bear directly against Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida, although the damage done to Al Qa'ida seems to have been very substantial. In a grim irony, advocates of permanent war want to pretend that the bogeyman of Al Qa'ida is a greater threat to the United States than the nuclear-armed Soviet Union was, so even a decade later, it's hard to tell from the information in the public record just how far-reaching the damage to Al Qa'ida was in 2001-2.

But the "Afghanistan model" for the Libya War looks to me like an even grimmer prospect that the Kosovo War model. With bombing and no-fly zones, the external powers have the option to limit their involvement or to pull back, however complicated that might be in practice. It's not so easy to do when the US is so deeply involved in the Libya civil war as we've becoming in the last three weeks (and maybe earlier than that?).

Tags: afghanistan war, juan cole, kosovo war, libya war, william arkin

William Arkin on how the Pentagon won something out of the Iraq War

William Arkin thinks the Pentagon is determined to revert to its preferred position of preparting for war with the Soviet Union and avoiding any more of these "small wars" (counterinsurgencies). As he explains in For the U.S. Military, Iraq is So Over Early Warning blog 04/14/08:

I've written about how the U.S. military institution is the big winner in the Iraq war. After all the damage and loss, it got more money, more troops, shorter combat tours, new equipment and a pause to reset. Increasingly, we hear murmurings about China and a resurgent Russia and, of course, a nuclear-weapons-seeking, radical Islamist, Holocaust-denying belligerent Iran. Oh, what a wonderful world for the brass.

It's not that the Pentagon and the national security establishment are addicted to permanent war. It's more that they are over 9/11 and the mantra, uttered for seven years now, that "everything changed." In fact, nothing changed. The military doesn't really buy that terrorism is the number one threat to the United States, and, even if it did, it doesn't see the battle as its to wage. Sure, al-Qaeda is out there and the Middle East and South Asia, way beyond Israel, are suffering civilization-challenging sickness. But while we play whack-a-mole in Iraq and sit waiting for the Baghdad government to find South African-like political reconciliation, the bigger realization on the part of the brass is that whatever the job left in Iraq, it is not the job of tanks and "armies" and expeditionary Marines and navies and big planes and "intercontinental" anything. In other words, the American military itself has made its choice: The future isn't in Iraq. (my emphasis)

Arkin makes an important point that we should look very critically at the endlessly-repeated military complaint that the Army is nearly broken. We've seen at least the tip of the iceberg on some of the very damaging impact of the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War on the military. But the Pentagon is far better at lobbying for more money than at counterinsurgency. Having half the military budgets of the entire world just isn't enough for them!

Tags: iraq war, william arkin

Iraq War news

Marigolds2 has pointed out a video series that the Guardian is running on the Iraq War that's also being broadcast on ITV News. It doesn't offer embedding. But it's worth checking out:

Baghdad: City of walls 03/17/08

Baghdad's killing fields 03/18/08

Tom Hayden is observing the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq in part by writing on Pressuring the Democrats on Peace: A Commentary on the Fifth Anniversary of the War Huffington Post 03/18/08. This is important. I attended a town hall meeting my local Congresswoman, Barbara Lee, held this past weekend in Oakland. She talked about the Progressive Caucus' new proposal for withdrawing American troops and mercenaries ("security contractors") from Iraq. One of the things she said was that the "street heat" from the antiwar movement seems to have decreased somewhat recently.

Let's hope that can be quickly reversed. Even politicians who want to do the right thing need constituents demanding that they do the right thing. That's how democracy works.

Hayden notes that both Clinton and Obama, though committed to some kind of withdrawal from Iraq, have both left themselves wiggle room to cave in to the national security establishment after being elected and prolong the war. This would be a very bad thing. He observes:

Any possibility of ending the war this year is long over. The panic that gripped the national security elites last year that peace sentiment might end the war in 2008 is safely past. [The hawkish Democratic-leaning think tank, the Center for a New American Security, fretted last fall that "if no bipartisan consensus is reached before the Democratic and Republican primaries, the next president will likely be elected principally on a "get out of Iraq now" platform."...]

But he points to two key possibilities for the peace movement this year:

We can count on two developments, however. A spirited, well-funded educational campaign linking Iraq to the economic recession will be waged between now and November. And like it or not, the November election will be interpreted either as a voter mandate for peace or for the status quo. That offers the opportunity for an anti-war campaign linked to the economy and oil issues, while de-linked from devotion to any single presidential candidate.

Dave Neiwert gives a good rundown on some of the antiwar activity visible at the Take Back America Conference which he has been attending in Being responsible 03/18/08.

And William Arkin reminds us that anyone would be foolish to hope that Maverick McCain will suddenly become a pragmatist who realizes we need to get out of Iraq pronto once he's elected President (McCain's Iraq Dilemma Early Warning blog 03/17/08):

McCain is stuck on the notion that the United States can make Iraq whole, that all we need to do is defeat "al Qaeda" or some other external force. He is also stuck on a view of Iraq and the war that is deeply flawed.

On his current trip, McCain is once again demonstrating his visceral connection to the war and the American military. Almost a year ago, McCain traipsed around a Baghdad market (okay, maybe not "traipsed," because he was traveling inside of cordon of the U.S. military), decrying that the American people were not getting the "full picture" of progress. Later McCain had to back off of his optimistic statement.

McCain's trip is not a "campaign event" and he is not accompanied by a press entourage, but there is no question that we are previewing the 2008 elections. As bad as the American economy is, the Iraq war is ultimately going to determine who the next president will be. And McCain believes in continued American intervention and the military mission.

Tags: dave neiwert, iraq war, mccain, tom hayden, william arkin

War in Pakistan

William Arkin cautions about the US blundering into an ill-conceived military intervention in Pakistan (Don't open a third front in Pakistan Early Warning blog 01/28/08):

The danger of the U.S. military becoming more engaged in Pakistan now is not only that once again we are walking into a new country and a new culture that we don't understand, but also that we are leading with our military, thus connoting, no matter how modulated and sensitive that force will be, that we are on the path to yet another occupation, yet the other irony of our back to the future strategy to focus on Pakistan is also that militarily we will hardly commit the number of forces needed to make any short-term difference.

The administration's increasingly public expressions of concern about Pakistan reflect intelligence reports of a gathering storm. Ultimately though, our best military strategy is getting out of the way and assisting Pakistan to deal with the problem. If Washington wants to put more resources into the fight, than bolster the U.S. presence at the border in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda is not waiting in some trench line to fight us; they are waiting for us to blunder into yet another country so that they can once again scatter, while proving America's military crusade.

He also reminds us that the Afghanistan War was a failure early on and the triumphant claims from the Cheney-Bush administration about how great things went there were almost completely phony:

In late 2001, with the Taliban government in Afghanistan surprisingly and easily defeated, and with al Qaeda on the run, Rumsfeld and company, and the U.S. military particularly in the form of Gen. Tommy Franks, came to the conclusion that the "military" mission was over. So delighted were they with dodging a Soviet-style quagmire and so impressed were they with their lightning military success, they truly believed that the mop up was both minor and easy. No one at the top of the military food chain then believed that there was a long war ahead, and if anyone thought that that "war" was going to need the full participation of the non-military side of American power, no one was clearly articulating it. These were the days when Donald Rumsfeld's description of American fighting a new kind of war focused on Special Forces riding on horseback using laptops to call in air strikes not democracy and other slogans that would later emerge.

The bottom line was a poor assessment of the enemy and an error in understanding our own military achievement.

Tags: afghanistan war, pakistan, william arkin

On to Pakistan?

Benazir Bhutto, the leading opposition candidate for the national elections in Pakistan next month, has been assassinated: Benazir Bhutto assassinated Dawn (Pakistan) 12/27/07; Bhutto Killed in Bomb Attack Der Spiegel Online 27.12.2007; Bhutto killed in suicide attack Aljazeera 12/27/07; Benazir Bhutto, asesinada El Mundo 27.12.2007; Benazir Bhutto ermordet - Pakistan unter Schock von Hasnain Kazim Der Spiegel Online 27.12.2007

Her The opposition Pakistan Muslim League-N party is declaring they will boycott the upcoming election due to the assassination: Nawaz Sharif anuncia que su partido boicoteará las elecciones legislativas en Pakistán El País 27.12.2007.

This throws a wrench in the Cheney-Bush administration's plans for Pakistan: For Washington, Bhutto's loss is incalcuable by Suzanne Goldenberg Guardian Online 12/27/07; Pakistan's 2007 Crises Come to a Crescendo by Juan Cole, Informed Comment blog 12/27/07.

Oh, and the Cheney-Bush administration has planned to extend US military involvement in Pakistan in 2008: U.S. Troops to Head to Pakistan by William Arkin Washington Post Online 12/26/07.

Tags: benazir bhutto, pakistan, william arkin

Iraq and Democratic confusion

It's kind of a confusing time to be a Democrat. (Yeah, like it's ever any other way!) But for all the legitimate worry about whether the Dems caved too soon on the war funding bill and a withdrawal timeline - of course, they did cave too soon - when it comes to the Iraq War we also have to keep our eyes on the ball. And, when it comes to the Iraq War, the ball hasn't been in the American court for a long time. Whatever rhetoric the Dems or our "press corps" or whoever else want to wrap around it, what we're dealing with is managing defeat.

Joe Conason in Dithering Democrats Salon 05/25/07 worries that the Republicans are going to adopt something like the famous "Hamilton-Baker" plan. William Arkin argues that's just what Dear Leader Bush is setting up to do (A Bloody August Could Precede the Fall Early Warning blog Washington Post 05/25/07). Tom Hayden looks more closely at how this could play out in Escalation or Not? Bush Accepts Baker Huffington Post 05/25/07.

I've said it before and I'll probably have reason to repeat it more than once. This Iraq War is a disaster for the United States. I'm far more interested in seeing the US get out of this war than I am in seeing the Democrats benefit from it politically. The authoritarian Republicans have come to see everything everything as partisan politics. But policy politics counts for a lot in the real world. And staying in this war is bad policy for the United States.

So let's remember that adopting the Hamilton-Baker recommenations may play well in the Establishment press. The priests of High Broderism will undoubtedly hail such a move as statemanship of the higest order. But check out what Tony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has to say about the Iraq Study Group's recommendations in hindsight at the CSIS Web site about how little the Baker-Hamilton recommendations are worth in the subtlely titled The Iraq Study Group Absurdity and Iran 05/22/07.

The recommendations didn't look so good at the time, as Cordesman himself wrote. And, he says, they look even worse in retrospect:

Not everything dies when it should, and the Iraq Study Group is a grim example. Even at the time it was issued, it was a remarkably vacuous and unrealistic report. Its key recommendations were hopelessly impractical, and the detailed report – while good on some aspects of historical diagnostics – ended in a long list of sometimes contradictory conceptual recommendations lacking any justifications, details, and operational plans. It was at best a warning of what overblown committees seeking a lowest common denominator could not accomplish.

Looking back, The Iraq Study Group Report emerges as even worse. Its key recommendations never made sense. For example, there was never any chance that the development of the Iraqi Army could be rushed forward in ways that would permit rapid US force reductions, and recent months have made it all too clear that the Iraqi Army needs more time, more aid, and more US embeds and support. The existing schedule for creating an Iraqi Army already was far too fast. The months that have followed have shown it takes time, patience, and resources to build an effective military force. It takes political conciliation to allow it to operate in ways that serve the nation. Without internal Iraqi political conciliation, the Army can end up either fracturing along sectarian and ethnic lines or become a Shi’ite dominated force with a separate Kurdish force in the Kurdish area.

The ISG’s recommendations to speed development of the Iraq police force to serve the same purpose of enabling faster US withdrawals were truly absurd. ...

The ISG never addressed the issue of Iraqi conciliation in any meaningful way, or the level of internal civil conflict. It did not explain how its implied time schedule could avoid pushing the country towards civil war or suggest any practical ways to heal the fractures inside Iraqi society. It offered no useful plans for new incentives, and implied that a weak national government without strong Sunni participation, with a steadily more divided Shi’ite majority, and a Kurdish faction interested in autonomy, could somehow be pressured into effective action by some form of US benchmarks and deadlines.(my emphasis)

Conason argues in his article that the Democrats should have embraced the ISG plan as soon as it came out, by which time Cheney and Bush had already rejected it. But I just don't see much advantage, even in a political-posturing sense, to embracing a plan that was largely useless to begin with.

Events in Iraq are driving the course of the war and will continue to do so. Familiar saying like "riding the tiger" obviously apply. But the task facing the US is to extricate ourselves from a lost war while minimizing the damage. And conceiving it as other than "minimizing the damage" is unrealistic. This is Bush's War and the Republican Party's baby. The Democrats with a razor-thin majority in the Senate, and a majority that depends on hardline war supporter Joe Lieberman, are in a weak position to force through a withdrawal plan in the face of authoritarian discipline among the Republicans. The history of the anti-Vietnam War movement can be very misleading here. In those days, there really were moderate and even more-or-less liberal Republicans. That's just not the case today. The Republicans who pose as being critical of the war line up to vote for the administration position almost to a person.

The fact that 70% or so of the public want withdrawal to begin can't overcome the Republican prowar sentiment in the Senate. It's entirely possible that Congressional Republican support for the war could start seriously collapsing. But don't count on it. The "moderate" Republicans have racked up a very bad record during the Cheney-Bush administration.

The Democrats' most important tool to keep up the pressure and increase the chances of Republican defections on the war is through aggressive Congressional oversight, i.e., investigations. It's hard to see how support for the war can go much lower, since it's already down to pretty much white Protestant fundamentalists. But the intensity of opposition to the war can certainly increase.

Amazingly, Cordesman still says that The Surge is still the best plan. But Cordesman has been consistent and realistic-minded in seeing that the Cheney-Bush course would require ten more years or even longer of active US military involvement in Iraq. And he has been very explicit that he does not see The Surge as a good option, because such a thing does not exist:

The US has no good options in Iraq, either to stay or leave. At best, it can now only try find the least bad path of uncertainty and work out the best compromises over time. To do this, it must focus on its overall longer term strategic interests in the region, working with its friends and allies, and looking both at what can be done in Iraq and in the region as a whole. (my emphasis)

Tom Hayden has been around long enough for nearly everyone to have something against him. But he knows a lot about antiwar politics. And he reminds us that a Cheney-Bush withdrawal strategy could be tricky for the Democrats precisely because some of the most prominent Dems embraced teh ISG report:

This de-escalation scenario can be more problematic for the Democrats and the peace movement than an open escalation scenario. With an [Iraqi] oil law in hand, there will be powerful forces arguing that American casualties must come down as the presidential year of 2008 begins. What will the Democrats do and the media declare if some troops start coming home? After all, five of their powerful Beltway insiders have signed and promoted Baker-Hamilton.

Of course, all the players are talking about combat troops only, a future offensive against al-Qaeda in Iraq, and in these circumstances the war could re-escalate after de-escalating, or a fall 2007 "incident" could inflame the crisis again. It's happened before. It's about dampening and dividing the voters during an election year.

Tags: baker-hamilton, iraq study group, iraq war, joe conason, tom hayden, william arkin

Air power, the magic key to victory?

The Spring 2007 Army War College journal Parameters features an article on the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006: The 2006 Lebanon War: Lessons Learned by Sharah Kreps. Kreps looks at the hopes the Israeli military placed in air power during that war and how the results came up short. She argues that Israeli war planners say the Kosovo war as a model, reading its results to say that air power alone could defeat Hizbullah.

One of the tricky parts of this article is the concept that not so often discussed this way in civilian reporting, the idea that an emphasis on air power is driven by the "casualty aversion" of the home public, in this case Israel's. Air power can in theory minimize own-side casualties. But they also magnify casualties on the other side, including "collateral damage", aka, killing and injured civilian noncombatants, which can be seriously counterproductive to the goals of a war.

Also, as with any military article, it's helpful to keep in mind how particular analyses could be used in inter-service rivalries for funds and prestige.

William Arkin looks at what appears to him to be more than a little menance-mongering by the Air Force in Is Iraq Making China the Next Soviet Union? Washington Post 04/12/07. To the Air Force, it seems, the Chinese are coming after us on all fronts. Arkin's conclusion:

I for one can only see disaster ahead in trying to turn today's China into yesterday's Soviet Union. Not that we "lose," but just in terms of wasted energy and resources and the wrong course. We need not only to get out of Iraq but also a complete change in priorities.

Tags: air power, israel, lebanon, william arkin

Supporting the troops - and the "support the troops" slogan

The San Francisco Chronicle had a good editorial this past Sunday on the "support the troops" = "cheer for the administration's war policy" line that the Republicans are pushing, more and more frantically as time goes on, it seems, To honor the troops 03/18/07:

So what does it really mean to "support the troops?" In the administration's view, an echo of the reasoning that sent us deeper into the quagmire of Vietnam, withdrawing from a war somehow discredits the sacrifices of the soldiers who risked, and in some cases lost, their lives in the war. That rationale for continuing a war was nonsensical then - and it is nonsensical now.

A nation's support for its troops is not measured by its willingness to send soldiers into battle, but what it does for them when they get there - and what it does for them when they return home with the psychic and physical wounds of their duty. "Support the troops" involves much more than putting a bumper sticker on the car or sending packages of cookies to the soldiers. It means giving them the armament and strategy to succeed in their mission. It means giving the wounded the highest quality care. It means acknowledging, with dignity and decorum, the sacrifice of those who died.

In too many ways, the Bush administration has not given our troops the support they deserve in this war. Even setting aside the question of the necessity of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the troops have not been well served by their commanders in Washington. (my emphasis)

I've been reading a couple of the essays in a 1976 book edited by Anthony Lake, The Vietnam Legacy: The War, American Society and the Future of American Foreign Policy. After more than three decades of conservative re-imagining the history of the Vietnam War, it can be suprising to see what people were actually saying about in in real time, or in the immediate aftermath.

In an essay on "The War and the American Military", Adam Yarmolinsky talked about the officer corps' view of the war, civilian-military relations and the challenges they saw facing them at that time. One of the things he said is a real reminder about the way this idea developed that anyone who isn't cheering for our infallible generals and pretending to believe them even when they're obviously lying in our faces is somehow failing to "support the troops" or "honor the troops", etc. He wrote that, in addition to the general mood of skepticism and critical thinking toward the military that was widespread at the time:

A secondary effect on the military's relations with society is the extraordinary defensiveness of their spokesmen toward civilian audiences. Their rhetoric about the U.S. military may be the same as the rhetoric of the 1960s, but the tone is different. Criticism is anticipated even when it is not forthcoming. Even with an Administration [the Nixon-Ford administration] that is significantly less critical of the military than were the Kennedy or Johnson Administrations iwhich sharply attacked organizational practices and procedures even while increasing military budgets), the defensiveness has been intensified. It is as if military leaders see themselves being held responsible for all the shortcomings of American society.

In other words, there was quite a bit of just plain whining going on along these lines. This mood among so much of the officer corps was an important part of why the loss in the Vietnam War did not receive the amount of honest critical reflection that it deserved.

Yarmolinsky's description of the questioning of military claims and military authorities in that time is a reminder that a critical attitude in those matters is a very healthy thing:

The principal effect of Vietnam on the military's relations with society was to lower its prestige, at the same time that its size and potential influence were significantly increased. Nobody talked about a military-industrial complex in World War II or in the Korean War, and the phrase coined by General Eisenhower at the very end of his Administration only acquired general currency as the Vietnam crisis deepened.

The general identification of the military-industrial complex as a major factor in American society coincided with the development of an increasingly critical attitude toward the military, even within the congressional committees that had been the military's principal defenders. The criticism became skepticism and doubt, extending from the Vietnam involvement to the wisdom of particular military research and development efforts.

We shouldn't confuse "supporting the troops" with falling for budget boondoggle being promoted by amibitious generals or greedy Halliburton lobbyists.

Congress certainly needs to take a look at the failures, misdeeds and crimes on the part of civilian officials in the course of the Iraq War. But the military itself merits some real criticism, too, in connection with this disaster. William Arkin gave his own summary of some of those problems that need to be addressed in It's Time to See the Army like FEMA Early Warning blog 03/12/07:

Here's the Army, within its own share of responsibilities:

• Doing essentially nothing between the 1991 Gulf War and Sept. 11 to boost the number of Arabic speakers and increase cultural understanding of the Middle East, and doing nothing to understand Iraq and its internal culture up to the 2003 war.

• Not taking charge of post-war planning in the pre-war period, what had become the traditional Army mission with its 1990's Peacekeeping Institutes and its "experience" in Bosnia and elsewhere, and the shortchanging the effort with inadequate resources.

• Not understanding the Iraqi Army - their own military opponent - well enough to believe, as the politicos did, that they would remain in their barracks and resume their work for whatever Iraqi national government emerged. Chalabi and company might have served Kool Aid to Rumsfeld regarding how American would be greeted with flowers, but the Army didn't even understand the Iraqi Army and what it was.

• Garrisoning itself and slowly removing itself from the Iraqi street except to "patrol" and move goods and services around to the garrisons, the sure development of a moving target for IEDs and a practice now being reversed with forward operating bases and combat outposts

• Not equipping soldiers at the basic and personal level, necessitating - as the mountain of letters I've received attest to - that soldier's families' ship to them often expensive goods, gear that has become essential for the war the Army couldn't anticipate.

• Underestimating and then taking too long to recognize the post-war security challenges and the growing insurgency, even years into the occupation, and then not adjusting strategies, tactics, and deployments until it was too late.

• Developing the wrong military command structure for Iraq, taking too long to transform V Corps into a Joint Task Force, taking too long to develop training and detainee commands of substance and authority. As current Iraq commander Gen. David H. Petraeus said in his own confirmation hearings, "We took too long to develop the concepts and structures needed to build effective Iraqi Security Forces..."

The "we" here is the Army. These are Army decisions. ... Again and again, they [senior Army officers] demonstrated that they were more interested in tomorrow's budget and Washington lunches than soldier resources and hot meals. (my emphasis)

He also has some very useful thoughts about the political seductions of the air power enthusiasts' boosterism in Shock and Awe Worked, God Help Us Early Warning blog 03/19/07. The role of air power in the Iraq War and in planning for the future is something that Congress needs to take a serious and critical look at. Arkin writes:

If there is one thing that defines American military technology, one thing that floats seductively suggesting engagement without true commitment, it is airpower.

Airpower was the boost of confidence we needed in 2003 to travel on our own highway of death [into the Iraq War]. Given the current ground quagmire in Iraq, airpower will be even more our downfall in the future.

Air power didn't live up to its hype in the Iraq War - just as it has failed to do in every war from the Second World War on. At some point, Congress and the public need to start catching on to that. And making decisions accordingly.

Tags: adam yarmolinsky, air power, iraq, iraq war, support the troops, vietnam war, william arkin

Modest announcement

In the spirit of, "He who tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooted," (my favorite quote from labor leader John L. Lewis), I thought I would mention that the Washington Post's military-analyst blogger William Arkin quotes me (by my initials) in the first of several excerpts from letters he uses in a blog post today. His post is, Readers Speak: The "M" Word 02/16/07.

I sent him a generally-supportive letter which I derived from my original post (William Arkin gets in deep doody for not "supporting the troops" 02/07/07) about the dust-up he started in a post last week.

Aside from the comments left at his post, he's also used various excerpts from his correspondence on the issue in four daily posts, in addition to a couple of posts commenting on the controversy.

Tags: william arkin

Blogger blues

Melissa McEwan, the other ex-blogger (now a blogger again!) working for the John Edwards campaign that was slimed by the rightwing Catholic hate-monger Bill Donahue, has also resigned from Edwards' campaign. She blogs at Shakespeare's Sister (see her Announcement 02/13/07), that the main reason that she's leaving is because of "individuals who used public criticisms of me as an excuse to unleash frightening ugliness, the likes of which anyone with a modicum of respect for responsible discourse would denounce without hesitation" which made her "increasingly uncomfortable with my and my family's level of exposure."

While it's highly believable under these circumstances that she was receiving threats - which is what I read that to mean - I hope she is following what would be a sensible policy for anyone. Sending someone personal threats of violence is a serious crime and should be reported to the authorities, whether the threat is coming in a phone call or e-mail or whatever. Most people who send such messages are pathetic cowards who would wet their pants if someone actually suggested they take part in a violent attack on somebody. But that kind of stuff is still against the law and people who violate it should have to account for their actions.

As for other kinds of rhetorical "frightening ugliness", there's no reason to get too worked up over blowhard sacks of s*** who like to insult people just for the heck of it. Of course, if they start writing to your boss and claiming you're a heroin dealer or something, the libel laws might come into play.

The weirdest insult I ever got was in a lengthy message on an AOL message board about Austrian politics years ago. The writer went on about monkeys sitting on a beach staring at people, or something like that. It wasn't threatening. It was just crazy as it could be.

Also, William Arkin (The Soldiers Speak Washington Post Online 02/14/07) runs some more letters responding to his provocative post about the current habit of justifying all war policies in terms of caring for The Troops.

Tags: melissa mcewan, william arkin

People getting "DixieChicked"

Maybe Left Blogostan should set up some kind of "Whiners Back Off" campaign. Whining is actually a central part of the rightwing worldview, at least the low-brow and middle-brow versions. Look at some of the documentaries or historical accounts from the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and you'll see white Southern supporters of segregation whining like Serbs and Croats in the 1990s about how horribly persecuted they are.

In my own experience, white folks in my native state of Mississippi were particularly adapt at the whiny-white-people routine. But maybe that's just because I'm most familiar with that particular variant. For a very contemporary version of the same kind of whining, just tune into that racist dope-fiend Rush Limbaugh't radio show.

The whiny approach is much in evidence in the responses William Arkin has been receiving in the controversy I posted about last week. He's sharing some more of his correspondence, as in The Families Speak Washington Post 02/13/07, and plans to do more. If you feel an inclination to write him with a message of support or of sensible, non-wingnut and non-whiny criticism, he would probably appreciate it.

Also, Amanda Marcotte, one of the two ex-bloggers targeted by the Catholic League's bigot-in-chief, the noxious anti-Semite Bill Donahue and his following of whiners, has resigned from the John Edwards campaign and is thus free to respond to her detractors without having to vet her words through a campaign consultant. Check out her work at the Pandagon blog. It has been down part of the day due to what sounds like a denial-of-service attack.)

I'm sure I'm not the only practicing Catholic who would like to see the US Conference of Bishops make some kind of clear statement that no one should assume that that Jew-hating freak Donahue speaks for the Church or for American Catholics. That is, other than for those pathetic souls for whom "I'm a Christian" just means "I ain't no Jew". Those people are a disgrace to Christianity in general and to the Catholic Church in particular. The bishops should take action to save the "brand name" from being tarnished by association with Donahue's them. It's not as if the Church doesn't have sufficient marketing problems to contend with without people associating it with Donahue's brand of sleaze.

Tags: bill donahue, amanda marcotte, william arkin

William Arkin gets in deep doody for not "supporting the troops"

Actually, he was kind of asking for it. For a regular journalist, he does a pretty good blog. But as I've said before, sometimes he tries too hard to be provocative. And he apparently sent the wingnuts into a feeding frenzy this week with a column of his where he was making a very valid point but couldn't resist trying to be provocative:

The Troops Also Need to Support the American People Washington Post 01/30/07

This doofus rightwing Day by Day comic strip for 02/01/07 is an example of the negative reaction.

So Arkin tried to walk it back in a follow-up post:

A Note to My Readers on Supporting the Troops Washington Post 02/01/07

And he returned to the topic again in Demonization and Responsibility Washington Post 02/06/07, in which he speculates on the approach of his more "biting, fanatical, threatening" correspondents.

Check out his columns to see what the broohaha is about.

I've followed Arkin's columns for quite a while. He's one of the best military analysts out there and his Post blog is a great resource.

I understand what he was getting at. He was challenging the increasingly daffy political convention in America of arguing about Iraq War policy in terms of what's best for "the troops", who are routinely described as brave, noble, self-sacrificing, [fill in your favorite superlative]. We're against the war because we're asking too much of "our troops" who are fine, wonderful, etc. No, we need to stay in Iraq because "the troops" want to finish the job, being as they are brave, determined, capable, etc.

This convention has become increasingly popular over the last three decades. To a significant extent it's the result of having an all-volunteer military, though other trends have contributed to it, such as the Christian fundamentalists deciding that the military was a rich "mission field" for their message. But was result of all those trends is that fewer and fewer Americans have direct contact with the military themselves or through neighbors and family members. Idolizing "the troops" is kind of an informal but real psychological bargain.

The civilians who don't serve and haven't served gush about the nobility of those who do. Those in the military are expected to then be jacked around as the politicians and our infallible generals decide (the generals also being dedicated, noble, selfless, etc.), and they shouldn't make everyone else feel uncomfortable by bitching and moaning about it. More particularly, no one should make the offspring of affluent Republican white folks feel guilty about the fact that while they cheer for wars and recite bloody slogans as loyal Republicans are expected to, most of them don't feel moved to volunteer for those wars they find so vital to the interests of the Homeland. That's what we have fine, noble soldiers for, who just happen to be disproportionately Southern, disproportionately minorities and disproportionately working class. Military recruiters should confine their high-pressure recruiting efforts to mall and high-schools in working-class neighborhoods and not trouble nice young Republican white folks about such things.

And that's a big downside of this idolization of "the troops". Because "the troops" are strangers to so many Americans, and because they are abstracted to be the Best of the Best, it makes it psychologically much easier for most of the public to cheerfully agree and even applaud to send them off on dubious missions where their lives and bodies are placed on the line. Too many people view them as The Troops, not as what they are: men and women just like the rest of the society they come from, though with the demographic disproportions I mentioned above.

Arkin made the point in a clumsy way. But doing verbal somersaults to make Iraq War policy sound in the best interests of the soldiers is getting increasingly unreal. Anyone who's not a Big Pundit or totally into the Oxycontin worldview understands that it's obvious that war is never in the best interests of "the troops". Their best interests is in not being put in some Middle Eastern hell-hole where they may be killed or maimed or shot out their helicopters or driven to PTSD.

Also, it surely must be clear to most anyone not washed in the blood of High Broderism that whether the soldiers in the field want to carry on the fight is not the determining factor in war policies, unless things come to the extremes of the army collapsing or revolting. I'm not aware of any country which lets the rank-and-file soldiers vote on whether to initiate, continue or end a war. I suppose you could make some sort of romantic-Bolshevik case that they should get to decide by a vote. (Not that Communist governments ever followed such a practice.) Soldiers in the American Civil War got to elect some of their officers, a system that didn't have such great practical results.

But who outside Beltway punditry or rightwing think-tanks pretends that's the way the world works? Of course, wars are bad for the soldiers' health and well-being, including the businesses, marriages and family lives that are negatively affected by their absence. And of course the soldiers in the field don't get to decide, short of some kind of insubordination or revolt, whether or not their country is going to enter a war, keep on fighting or come to a peace agreement.

To make his point, Arkin chose a TV report which contained quotes from several soldiers in Iraq complaining about antiwar critics in the US.

What surprises me, though, is that he makes the following assumption:

I've been mulling over an *NBC Nightly News* report from Iraq last Friday in which a number of soldiers expressed frustration with opposition to war in the United States.

I'm sure the soldiers were expressing a majority opinion common amongst the ranks - that's why it is news - and I'm also sure no one in the military leadership or the administration put the soldiers up to expressing their views, nor steered NBC reporter Richard Engel to the story. (my emphasis)

Why would he assume that? There have been a number of indications that soldiers, including those serving in Iraq, are at least as critical of the war itself as the general population in the US. For instance, a recent Military Times poll (Down on the war/Poll: More troops unhappy with Bush’s course in Iraq by Robert Hodierne 12/29/06) found:

When the military was feeling most optimistic about the war — in 2004 — 83 percent of poll re spondents thought success in Iraq was likely. This year, that number has shrunk to 50 percent.

Only 35 percent of the military members polled this year said they approve of the way President Bush is handling the war, while 42 percent said they disapproved. The president’s approval rating among the military is only slight ly higher than for the population as a whole. In 2004, when his popularity peaked, 63 percent of the military approved of Bush’s handling of the war. While ap proval of the president’s war lead ership has slumped, his overall approval remains high among the military.

Just as telling, in this year’s poll only 41 percent of the military said the U.S. should have gone to war in Iraq in the first place, down from 65 percent in 2003. That closely reflects the beliefs of the general population today — 45 percent agreed in a recent USA Today/Gallup poll.

So I would fault Arkin for being too quick to buy into a bad assumption on the part of the war fans. In fact, in his 02/06/07 post about the responses he got, he remarks on the war fans' rather bizarre denial of the state of pubolic opinion on the Iraq War:

Other criticism focuses on public opinion, which commenters say I've misstated. It appears that many Iraq war supporters believe that public opinion against the war (and the President) is a concoction of the mainstream news media and the liberal elite. Moreover, some seem to believe that in the battle for public opinion, people like me are in some kind a contest with soldiers or veterans of the Iraq war as to who knows best.

As this line of argument goes, the soldiers themselves and those who have served in Iraq are the only ones who really know what it is like, what the war is about, and what should be done. The media in general and war opponents in particular intentionally and purposefully provide a negative and discouraging view that doesn't comport with what the soldiers see, so goes this argument.

If been surprised to see that attitude expressed in at least one of the "milblogs" I sometimes visit, where the writer seems to just take it for granted that polls showing heavy dispproval of the war are somehow faked, or meaningless. In fact, the various polls are showing a remarkable degree of dissatisfaction with the war. And based on previous experience in such things (Korean War, Vietnam War, for instance) that negative opinion on the war is unlikely to get much more favorable. So it is kind of stunning that some war fans manage to so easily disregard it.

He goes on to describe the faux-populism, or maybe rightwing populism would be a better word, framing that argument:

But the bigger point is that any dissenting voices are just those of whores, politicians, tin foil hat liberals, or worse, un-Americans. In this view, there are no actual experts in this world, no one who studies and measures public opinion, no one who studies war or the military, who do not wear the uniform. This is not some post-modern relativism, it is pure anti-elitism. The elite think they know it all, while those who do all of the dirty work, who do all of the suffering, are methodically ignored and dominated.

Give Arkin's three posts linked above a read. They provide a good look at the venom and often daffiness of the Iraq War's more enthusiastic supporters.

Tags: iraq war, william arkin

A religious criticism of the Christian-warrior general

The liberal Protestant magazine Sojourners has an message to General "my-God's-bigger-than-your-God" Boykin by Jim Wallis on its Web site:

General, I think the hymn "Onward Christian Soldiers" must have been written just for you. I'm sure your superiors have already given you a lesson in politics and public relations. And I've heard you have toned down your opinions and said you didn't mean to offend anyone. Whether you keep your job is a political question, the outcome of which we will know soon enough.

But I want to raise some different issues: biblical theology, bad teaching, and church discipline. General, your theology bears no resemblance to biblical teaching. You utterly confuse the body of Christ with the American nation. The kingdom of God doesn't endorse the principalities and powers of nation-states, armies, and the ideologies of empire; but rather calls them all into question. You even miss the third verse of "Onward Christian Soldiers," which reminds us, "Crowns and thrones may perish, Kingdoms rise and wane, But the Church of Jesus, constant will remain." And let's not misinterpret the famous first verse, "Onward Christian soldiers marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before." The cross, General, not the Special Forces.

The AOL Journal windmills of my mind has some comments on politics and exotic religious ideas here and here. (She's listening to Nanci Griffith, too, always a nice thing to do.)

The Sojourners Web site also has a brief article called The Hungry Spirit: Damnation Will Not Be Televised, which has some interesting tidbits in it. I especially like her little confession, involving one of the all-time great TV shows:

Almost everything I know about hell's eschatological aspects I learned from watching UPN's now-defunct series Buffy the Vampire Slayer - sort of an interactive "Divine Comedy."

Buffy was more theologically sophisticated than General Boykin, that's for sure.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian general, christian right, christianism, global war on terror, gwot, jerry boykin, jim wallis, william boykin, war on terror, william arkin

General Boykin's non-apology apology

Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin has really caught some flak over his remarks about how his religious beliefs animate his approach to fighting terrorism. He's now responded with a non-apology apology. That's a statement that's couched as an apology but isn't really.

For instance, if I say, "All left-handed Presbyterians are morons," and someone demands that I apologize for an offensive remark. So I respond by saying, "I'm sorry if anyone was offended by my comment on left-handed Presbyterian morons." That's not an apology, it's a sneer. I'm "apologizing" for someone else's response to what I said. What it really means is, "Anyone who was offended by what I said is a pathetic jerk."

General "God is on my side" Boykin gave a classic example by saying, "For those who have been offended, I offer a sincere apology." Translation: For anyone who claims they were offended, I'm sorry you're such a pathetic whiner and enemy of the One True God; for everyone else, of course, God is on Our Side.

Oddly, this same Los Angeles Times article I just linked quotes "Eugene Fidell, a military law specialist in Washington" as saying he was not aware of Boykin having broken any rules by his comment. "But he said the general's comments posed a 'management problem' for Boykin's superiors because they appeared to reflect 'profoundly poor judgment'." Uh, I would say so.

But Daily Kos has pointed out that military regulations do put limits on the situations in which a soldier can appear in public in uniform. (Boykin has often made his controversial religious declarations while in uniform.) More specifically, Army Regulation 670-1-10 (j)1 and (j)2 prohibit the wearing of uniforms in "the furtherance of any political or commercial interests" or while "participating in public speeches, interviews, picket lines, marches, rallies, or public demonstrations, except as authorized by competent authority."

So whether he violated regulations is still an open question in my mind.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian general, christian right, christianism, global war on terror, gwot, jerry boykin, william boykin, war on terror, william arkin

Onward Christian soldiers

Sometimes I read news that really scares me. The new deputy undersecretary of Defense for intelligence is Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin. He's in charge of the search for Osama bin Laden (we haven't all forgotten him, have we?) and Saddam Hussein. Gen. Boykin is a born-again Christian who sees his job as a bit more than a secular calling. He's been known to make public statements like these:

[Appearing] in dress uniform and polished jump boots before a religious group in Oregon in June to declare that radical Islamists hated the United States "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian ... and the enemy is a guy named Satan."

One Middle East expert quoted in the article flags the "Judeo-Christian" term as playing into radical Islamic propaganda against the "Christian-Zionist" enemy. In theological terms, too, it's a garbled concept, even though I know it's sometimes used by Christians with the intent to be inclusive.

"I knew my God was bigger than his [a Somali warlord's]. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

It may be worth noting that the US decided to pull out of the idol-worshipping warlord's country. But I guess that would be too much of a theological fine point.

"We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this.

[Of George W. Bush:] "He's in the White House because God put him there."

I've never really thought of the pro-Bush majority on the Supreme Court as messengers of God. But maybe my faith isn't as clear as the General's.

Military analyst William Arkin calls Boykin "an intolerant extremist who has spoken openly about how his belief in Christianity has trumped Muslims and other non-Christians in battle."

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian general, christian right, christianism, global war on terror, gwot, jerry boykin, william boykin, war on terror, william arkin

Two Articles on the Iraq War

Today's Los Angeles Times has two articles that shed important light on the situation our soldiers are facing in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Deadly Mistake Typifies Shaky Line U.S. Walks is a detailed look at an incident in which two Marines shot a civilian vehicle, killing three non-combatants.

The other is a column by military analyst William Arkin, focusing on the importance of good intelligence:

American armed forces have now been at the so-called war on terrorism for two full years. The White House, defending the increasingly controversial military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, released a progress report Sept. 10 declaring that the United States "has dismantled the repressive Taliban, denied [Al Qaeda] a safe haven in Afghanistan, and defeated Saddam Hussein's regime."

Dismantled, denied and defeated. Those are strong, even definitive, words. Yet the American military remains as fully engaged as ever in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Congress is being asked to add $87 billion to the Pentagon budget to continue the fight. ...

[I]t may surprise some to learn that a man like [Maj. Gen. Victory] Renuart [Jr.] sees victory in the war on terrorism hinging on something other than the military: He sees the key as providing education and economic development to countries where the seeds of terrorism grow.

"This is not just a military problem," he says. Terrorists "find a home in ungoverned spaces" and in countries "that are sorely lacking for jobs and a future for their people." The U.S., he says, must "invest in the world."

"If you can't get the angry young men off the streets," Renuart believes, "you are going to have to fight them."

Even with the wisest of policies and the best of luck - neither of which we're having at the moment - US troops are likely to be involved in Iraq and Afghanistan for quite a while yet. The more the public understands about what's going on, the better.

Tags: iraq war, william arkin