Decline and Fall

Of the 56 Senators and more than 200 Representatives who have signed on to legislation to improve GI Bill benefits, none of them is named John McCain. He's opposed to making the GI Bill more lucrative because "enhanced educational opportunities could negatively affect retention rates." You see, the last thing you would want is a military in which the troops feel like their military experience has prepared them to venture out into the wide world. No, better that they feel there is no escape because there aren't enough "opportunities" on the outside.

This isn't Supporting the Troops, it's Supporting the Defense Establishment. A veteran such as John McCain should know better; and he should do better by the young men and women he has sent, and pledged to send, to risk their lives in Iraq for his corrupt and pointless war.

Labels: Iraq, military

I'm glad to see that the media has finally done its job and uncovered the completely unsurprising links between the retired generals who serve as supposedly-independent Military Analysts on TV news and the Pentagon and Military Contractors whose talking points they invariably echo. It's one thing to know that there's no way these guys were picked because of their complete independence from the Pentagon and its big business contractors. It's another to have evidence that it goes so much further than that. It's a must-read.

A minor point I think deserves to be rebutted is this one from Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman:

It was, Mr. Whitman added, "a bit incredible" to think retired military officers could be "wound up" and turned into "puppets of the Defense Department."

If you believe this, you don't know the military very well. These guys all retired at the rank of Colonel or higher, and if there's anything a soldier could tell you about the guys at the top of the pyramid, it's that they seem to have no idea what goes on at the bottom of it. The Colonels and Generals I've seen in Iraq rarely leave their offices, except to take other Generals and Colonels on tours in their helicopters. They are briefed more than once a day on operations, but those briefings are often a bit... sanitized to protect their subordinates. They simply don't have the feel that the guys outside the wire have for what's going on. Given the lack of recently retired Buck Sergeant hired to be a Military Analyst on MSNBC, this makes for a somewhat skewed view of the battlefield.

But more tragically, there's a system in place that almost ensures that by the time you reach the rank of General, you've spent so much time with your nose up the ass of the people who made it before you that it's the only way you know how to operate. You see, there aren't all that many openings for Generals in the military, so they can be choosy in who they pick to wear those stars. One of the main criteria for making it that far is having a spotless or near-spotless OER (Officer's Evaluation Report). To get a good OER, you basically have to be competent in your position and not piss off your commander.

And what might piss off a commander? Well, considering that he's got an OER of his own to look after, anything that might wreck his next promotion is pretty high on that list. All this basically means that the last thing you want to do as a junior officer looking up at the stars is think outside the box, take risks, put yourself on the line, or any of those other things that businesses were hiring consultants to tell them to do 10 years ago. The people who make General tend to be above average in intelligence, but risk-averse, thanks to a system that encourages lockstep thinking and looks askance at anything that bucks tradition.

So no, Mr. Whitman, it's not "a bit incredible" that retired Generals are puppets of the system. That's how they got there in the first place. And thanks to the extremely lucrative after-market in the defense contracting and lobbying business, these retired Generals know they've got to dance with the one that brung 'em. The quote from retired Colonel John C. Garrett in an email to the Pentagon shows just how closely tied these guys are to the system that created them. Preparing to go on FOX News to talk about the (then-upcoming) surge, he stated:

"Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay."

Almost as painful as the system that reduces America's military leaders into glad-handing yes-men is the pathetic cravenness of a figure such as Garrett, whose pitiful servility to the Administration and the Pentagon is so clearly expressed in this quote. He's not a man, he's a robot, sent out to do the bidding of his masters. Instead of leading, he's following, like a Private in Basic Training. Instead of getting the opinion of a Pattonesque leader, a man of action, a thick-skinned, no-nonsense man's man that the viewers imagine they'll get when the magic words "Retired General" flash across the screen, they get this mincing courtier saying nothing that we hadn't already heard from Ari Fleischer or Sean Hannity. We want Chesty Puller, but we get Willy Loman.

Cross-posted at OOIBC.

Labels: Framing, Iraq, military, OOIBC

It has been quite a long time since I have posted anything. The fact is, I haven't felt up to it. Those final months in Iraq were more taxing, mentally and otherwise, than I could have expected. I simply did not have any thoughts that I deemed worth sharing. I thought, and wrote, that my diminished posting quality and frequency was due to a lack of intellectual stimulation, but as I have since discovered, it had less to do with that than with a sort of emotional distancing from everything and everyone that matters to me, to include my own sense of self. I was, and most likely still am, angry and depressed.

I know this sounds like a whiny, selfish, prozac nation excuse for what could have been chalked up to simple writer's block and staying too busy to keep up with my blogging, but it's the truth. The Iraq War, surprise surprise, is really hard on people, and its effects are felt in many ways. In the past five months or so I have removed myself from any real engagement with the world around me. My realization, open-eyed from the beginning, that the war I chose to involve myself in was immensely destructive and morally despicable took its toll in the form of ennui and biting cynicism. I noticed that I had grown more callous toward other people when I found myself sneering at everyone, particularly my friends and coworkers, for even the slightest breach of my standards of conduct.

At least I noticed before I left, which allowed me to warn my girlfriend a couple of weeks before my departure that I was a changed man, and not for the better. It's a good thing that I did, because even despite holding my tongue when I knew I was about to say something cruel to her, she observed that my usual joking was noticeably more caustic, and the light had gone out of my eyes. It's a testament to her that she recognized it as a symptom of my loss of compassion in the face of gross inhumanity and remained the caring person she has ever been.

I left Iraq on March 7, and have only in the last few days begun to feel a bit more like myself. In the intervening weeks, I have visited the Carribean coast south of Cancun, spent about a week and a half seeing friends in Arizona, and have now spent four days in Luxor visiting temples and learning, the hard way, how to haggle. The time in Mexico and Arizona was a time of emotional disengagement and relationship difficulty, but I've grown more at peace since coming to Egypt. I start classes in Cairo tomorrow.

I am finally back in a proper headspace to renew my blogging, and I am sure Cairo will provide many opportunities to do so. Also, I no longer feel the need to keep myself out of the blog, now that I no longer work for the Masters of War. So there will be more of me in the future, although hopefully not this sort of thing.

Labels: personal

Kevin Drum points to a Foreign Policy survey of U.S. military staff-level officers, and finds much to be discouraged about. For instance, only 22% would be open to allowing gays into the military in order to increase recruitment numbers, while 58% would be open to lowering education standards. This isn't what we would have liked to see from our military leaders, and fortunately, it isn't.

As one of Andrew Sullivan's readers points out,

The data from the survey clearly shows that it was heavily skewed towards a much older pool of retired officers: - 89% of respondents are over 50. 72% are over 60. 38% are over 70. - 92% are retired. 71% have been retired for more than 10 years.

If we were to try and define a typical respondent, he would be a 65 year old former colonel who entered service in the late 1960's and retired in the 1990s. Hardly representative of today's officer corps

It is generally accepted that older people are much less open to accepting gays into society than are the younger generation, so the age of the respondents plays a big role in these results. But even more than just their age, old military officers tend to be even more conservative in their outlook than those of a similar vintage in society at large. Particularly the generation polled here, shaped as they were by the polarizing Vietnam years. The guys that age I know who chose to devote their lives to the military often did so as a bulwark against the usual bugbears that degrade society, from the sexual revolution to abortion to secular humanism. Foreign Policy didn't survey a bunch of warrior-scholar David Petraeuses, they surveyed a bunch of Jack D. Rippers.

Also, one shouldn't make too much of a survey composed of staff officers only. Those guys are the furthest from the battlefield, and the furthest removed from the attitudes of the people who make up the vast majority of the military: the lower enlisted and buck sergeants who actually do the fighting. It's my earlier REMF vs. Cannon Fodder point again: the further you get from the regular troops, the more kool-aid you drink. Which is not to say that the troops are a bunch of open-minded, bleeding hearted sensitive types. It's just that they tend to care less about other peoples' personal lives. It's not so much acceptance as not caring enough to bother. Will & Grace meets the Nintendo generation in an introverted version of the leave us alone coalition.

One last point: maybe this result came about because of the way it was presented: of all the reasons for allowing gays to serve openly, "increasing recruitment" isn't a major one. It's a moral issue, not a practical one.

Labels: homosexuality, military

Most of Glenn Greenwald's posts are indispensable, but this one is especially so. As usual, I can find nothing to contribute to it. I endorse the whole thing. So go read it.

One thing that struck me about his post was the easy way he invokes Adam Smith to describe the affinity that the warmongering classes have for wars fought far away and at very little personal danger. Here's the passage he cites, a spot-on description of all of my right-wing friends who love to sit around and watch videos of terrorists getting killed by our superior firepower:

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies . . . .

They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.

What struck me about that was how impossible I once thought such a reference could be. People like David Horowitz often claim that the Universities aren't teaching the classics* anymore, and that if students read more classics, they would learn to embrace traditional values, whatever those are. The Right has claimed the mantle of the "defenders of the classical tradition" in the campus cultural wars, but when you read passages like this, you wonder if those crusaders have actually read the books they are hawking. And yet here's a bona-fide librul, quoting a dead economist who isn't Marx or Keynes, and getting the quote right!

A decade ago I, a studious young conservative who took the ISI's admonitions to heart, began working my way through the canon. What I found then, and when I subsequently got serious about the classics at St. John's College, where that's all the students read, was that there was nothing particularly "conservative" about these books.

There's no unified set of "values" running through the great books; in fact, one of the things that makes those books so great is the way they bucked the orthodoxies of their time and pushed the debate along by the sheer force of their arguments in the face of the absurdities of their ages. Reading through the likes of Aristotle, Descartes, Hume and Kant is much more likely to cause the thoughtful student to question whatever traditions he's embraced than to cause him to instinctively reject radical changes. He's more likely to give thought to the arguments of the reformers than to shun them instinctively, as Russell Kirk might have expected him to. In short, a grounding in the classics will usually serve to make a student more skeptical of received wisdom and thus more objectively liberal (though less radical) than he would have been had he simply been fed a diet of Bill Bennett's moralizing bedtime stories.

That was certainly what I found, and what happened to me, when I went to St. John's. I entered a conservative, came out a confused moderate, and am now settling into a skeptical leftism, thanks primarily to the "orthodox" education in the classics. Perhaps I extrapolate too much from my own experience, but you can see for yourself if you ever visit the campus: the student body is as left-wing as any in the nation, despite the ringing endorsement of St. John's in the National Review College Guide. Most the alumni I know are left-wing as well.

None of this is to say that any given classic will strike the modern reader as especially liberal in the modern context, nor that Greenwald hasn't engaged in a bit of quote-mining here, but I would at least like to see the reverential intonation of the great books removed from the wingnut campus agitators' bag of tricks. The fact that a lefty such as Glenn Greenwald could so easily employ the great expounder of capitalism in one of his hateful, unpatriotic and no doubt communist posts should at least give the lie to the idea that an education in the great books lends support to conservative orthodoxies.

* I use the term "classic" and its derivations throughout to refer to the whole of the Western Canon, not just the Greeks and Romans.

Labels: academia, conservatism, reason

A quickie: via Angry Arab, I learn that a fatwa has been issued condemning reckless driving. Lick this link to read the article in Arabic. For all I know, it's the announcement of Al Jazeera's Spring lineup. One day I plan to be able to read these myself.

This is, of course, hilarious to anyone who has driven or ridden in a car in the Arab world. "Reckless" doesn't begin to describe the general traffic flow. It makes L.A. look like a sleepy suburb down south.

This can only be a good thing, given the huge number of traffic fatalities in the Arab world. I'm glad to see Islam employed to encourage people to save their lives. I'd like to see Christian "fatwas" focus more on this kind of thing than on condemning gays to hell and supporting bad social policies.

And yes, I know that Islam is much more interested in doing unambiguously good things than in promoting terrorism, as some folks would have us believe.

Since I came to Iraq, my blogging has been pretty light, obviously. There are a number of factors at play here: partly it's due to the fact that my coworkers and bosses don't know that I do this. I've kept D&F a secret from them because I wanted to be able to blog freely, safe from the prying eyes of my reliably red-state colleagues and superior officers. Since I haven't mentioned any of them, or the nature of my job over here, I don't think I've written anything to set them off, so it's not like there's been any betrayal on my part. I just like to keep this part of my opinions to myself, even though they are all pretty well aware that I'm a librul.

But more than my (perceived) need to keep D&F to myself, I've found being over here to be intellectually impoverishing. The sad fact is that among my colleagues, there's very little in the way of nuanced political analysis. Every time I've tried to have a political discussion that goes below the surface, I have been stymied by their lack of engagement and generally uninformed outlook. Sure, they dutifully noted that my guy won in Iowa and South Carolina and that he seems like an OK dude, but they've never actually confronted me on it, which makes talking politics, well, boring. It's not that they're all unintelligent, it's just that their intellectual interests differ from mine, and their desire to engage in wars of words is much less than mine.

Refusing to engage me in Socratic dialogue (or Crossfire polemics) is their right, of course, and I can't really begrudge them. But not being challenged or engaged has dulled my intellect in a way that only felt familiar once I got out here and said to myself, "oh yeah, that's why I didn't stay in the Army."

In short, being in Iraq has made me dumber.

Exhibits A-C: this post, this post and this post. Reading these again is pretty depressing because I know I can do better. It turns out that I require more inspirado than I'm getting over here to churn out blogs that are up to my own standards.

So I will try to do better. Hopefully I will be getting more of an intellectual workout next month when I leave Iraq, first for Arizona to visit loved ones and then for Cairo, where I will be studying Arabic for two months.

After Cairo, I will join the masses of , overworked grad students as I begin my studies toward a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies (or something related thereto), first at the University of Arizona and then at whatever school will take me and fund me. I came to the realization about a year ago that the only time I have ever been really at home was in academia, so it only makes sense to make academia my home.

I hope I haven't lost too many of my readers, because god knows I never had many to begin with. In the future, you can expect my discussions of military matters to get more thoughtful, if less numerous, and you can expect more posts on the wider Middle East and, perhaps, the life of a grad student who is a few years older than most of his cohort. Also, I'll have more time to keep up with things and to write about them, which should make this site more worthy of your time.

Labels: personal

ACT I

Sunni Tribal Sheikhs: Death to America!
American Military: Would you please stop fighting us and start fighting Al Qaeda for us?
Sunni Tribal Sheikhs: What's in it for me?
American Military: Stability, a chance to be a part of the new Iraqi government, political leverage to empower the Sunnis.
Sunni Tribal Sheikhs: What about money?
American Military: Lots.
Sunni Tribal Sheikhs: Sounds good, but what we're really concerned about is making sure that Maliki doesn't screw us.
American Military: Oh yeah, you'll get your security, and, Maliki, yeah, that guy's great, isn't he?
Sunni Tribal Sheikhs: Um, no. He screws us, and we're out.
American Military: Security is awesome.

ACT II

American Military: Isn't it great how peaceful things are in Anbar these days? We did such a great job! Aren't we just the best?
Chicken Hawks: Isn't it great how peaceful things are in Anbar these days? Bush did such a great job! All those naysayers were wrong! Iraq is basically free these days, it'll be smooth sailing from here on out!
Naysayers: Didn't they say something about "political participation" or something?
Chicken Hawks (with fingers in their ears): Nyahh, nyahh I can't hear you!
Maliki Government: Symbolic, largely meaningless gesture.
Sunni Tribal Sheikhs: The Maliki government is the worst government on Earth. If we don't have real political participation in three months, the deal is off.

On the next episode of Anbar Awakening: will the American Military listen? Will the Tribal Sheikhs follow through? Will the Chicken Hawks notice?

Stay tuned....

Labels: Iraq

Spencer Ackerman has a written really interesting piece in the Washington Independent about the CIA's lack of experience in interrogations. Counter to what most of us assumed, they haven't been doing it that long, and they aren't the "experts" in interrogation most have assumed.

Surprising as it may be, the CIA has never really been in the interrogation business. After 9/11, it turned its back on its own limited history of interrogations and never consulted those in the U.S. with solid experience in that difficult art. Even in the seven years since it has built an interrogation capability mostly from scratch, the agency has never applied the best practices in behavioral science to improve its regimen. The result has been to privilege brutality out of ignorance, which, according to many experts and insiders interviewed, means that interrogation practices that produce faulty information are now at the very heart of the U.S. efforts against a mysterious and still-unfamiliar enemy.

The article suggests that the CIA consulted with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel--all countries who we already knew tortured--to develop its interrogation program. Nut I doubt that their use torture as an interrogation technique was as influenced by their consultation with Egypt, et al as this article suggests. The fact is that everyone who has ever seen a movie where the interrogator "does what has to be done" thinks they know what they're doing. I've been an interrogator for almost 15 years, and I would say that a good 50% of the people I meet who learn that about me imagine they know how I do my job. I've seen many, many completely untrained people go into the booth or offer their two cents, and that advice is always, EVERY TIME, to get vicious. These CIA agents were given the green light to do anything they wanted, and they licked their lips at the opportunity to play vigilante. They knew they could do some research into best methods, but that isn't nearly as fun as shaking your head as you lament that "desperate times call for desperate measures," is it?

So the problem isn't just that the CIA didn't have any sort of real interrogation program (I can't independently verify that, but it doesn't surprise me in the least), it's that everyone thinks they know how to interrogate, so when interrogators were needed, people volunteered themselves. The fact that there was no real oversight just confirms what Ron Suskind, Seymour Hirsch and others have been saying.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, torture

Andrew Olmsted, better known (to me, at least) as Obsidian Wings blogger G'Kar, was killed in Iraq. His final post.

Sometimes going to war is the right idea. I think we've drawn that line too far in the direction of war rather than peace, but I'm a soldier and I know that sometimes you have to fight if you're to hold onto what you hold dear. But in making that decision, I believe we understate the costs of war; when we make the decision to fight, we make the decision to kill, and that means lives and families destroyed. Mine now falls into that category; the next time the question of war or peace comes up, if you knew me at least you can understand a bit more just what it is you're deciding to do, and whether or not those costs are worth it.

R.I.P.

Lots of links to this piece around the blogosphere, but abuses like this can't be publicized enough. This is happening in America. The "land of the free." Back when I was a kid, you only heard kind of behavior from the Soviets:

Last Sunday I and a few other girls began our trip to New York. We were going to shop and enjoy the Christmas spirit. We made ourselves comfortable on first class, drank white wine and looked forward to go shopping, eat good food and enjoy life. When we landed at JFK airport the traditional clearance process began.

We were screened and went on to passport control. As I waited for them to finish examining my passport I heard an official say that there was something which needed to be looked at more closely and I was directed to the work station of Homeland Security. There I was told that according to their records I had overstayed my visa by 3 weeks in 1995. For this reason I would not be admitted to the country and would be sent home on the next flight. I looked at the official in disbelief and told him that I had in fact visited New York after the trip in 1995 without encountering any difficulties. A detailed interrogation session ensued.

...

I was exhausted, tired and hungry. I didn't understand the officials' conduct, for they were treating me like a very dangerous criminal. Soon thereafter I was removed from the cubicle and two armed guards placed me up against a wall. A chain was fastened around my waist and I was handcuffed to the chain. Then my legs were placed in chains. I asked for permission to make a telephone call but they refused. So secured, I was taken from the airport terminal in full sight of everybody. I have seldom felt so bad, so humiliated and all because I had taken a longer vacation than allowed under the law.

...

I was completely exhausted, tired and cold. Fourteen hours after I had landed I had something to eat and drink for the first time. I was given porridge and bread. But it did not help much. I was afraid and the attitude of all who handled me was abysmal to say the least. They did not speak to me as much as snap at me.

...

I was hugely relieved when, at last, I was told that I was to be taken to the airport, that is to say until I was again handcuffed and chained.Then I could take no more and broke down and cried. I begged them at least to leave out the leg chains but my request was ignored. When we arrived at the airport, another jail guard took pity on me and removed the leg chains. Even so I was led through a full airport terminal handcuffed and escorted by armed men. I felt terrible. On seeing this, people must think that there goes a very dangerous criminal. In this condition I was led up into the Icelandair waiting room, and was kept handcuffed until I entered the embarkation corridor.

These aren't the actions of one rogue asshole at INS or DHS. This is the procedure when a dire threat to national security like a young Icelandic woman tries to enter our country. This is the result of the politics of fear. I am ashamed to be an American.

Labels: GWOT, liberty

One of the biggest factors driving the insurgency in Iraq has been our ham-handed approach toward the Iraqi populace. In an insurgency, the support of the populace is the ultimate prize--lose that, and you lose the war. General Petraeus' much-vaunted counterinsurgency operations were supposed to address this issue head-on, and they have, up to a point. But one of the most glaring examples of our occupation behaving counter-productively has been our detention operations, where the policy seems to have been to arrest as many people as possible on whatever grounds are handy.

I'm not writing about this from the outside. In 2004-2005, and to a lesser extent this year, I have had close, inside contact with the detention programs in Iraq. I lived and worked at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons and saw firsthand how mass arrests have negatively affected our image over here. One of the most common refrains I have heard from Iraqis is that the Americans arrest them for no reason, then release them later without even bringing any charges. I would bet a year's salary that there isn't a single Iraqi who hasn't had this happen to someone close to him. It's what they have come to expect from us.

Now Major General Douglas Stone is seeking to change all that. (Link via Iraq Newsladder.) He's finally making the argument that many of us were making back when the war started: if you arrest innocent people, then keep them locked up with genuine badguys, they won't come out on the other end with a positive opinion of you. Or, as General Conway said after hearing out Gen. Stone, "If you roll up 150 guys in a village and you don't have probable cause, you've just created 150 little terrorists."

Actually, it's worse than that. Because it's not just the 150 guys you arrested who radicalize, it's also their families and friends. Moreover, you've just made anyone who has ever heard their story (and again, EVERYONE has) that much less likely to believe you when you roll through town distributing leaflets about how wonderful the "justice" and "democracy" you've graciously bestowed upon them is. If you want to know why the Iraqis have been so hesitant to jump aboard the America bandwagon, maybe this has something to do with it.

Which is what is so confounding about the fact that Petraeus himself planned for 40,000 detainees as part of the surge. Did Petraeus actually believe that locking up 40,000 people would somehow make the Iraqis like us more? How does it make sense that, at the very same time we began talking with insurgents and indeed fighting alongside them, we implemented a policy of arresting them at an even higher rate than previously? It simply makes no sense.

Any idiot could see three years ago that our detention policies were actively fueling the insurgency. Petraeus' counter-insurgency tactics were supposed to address the areas where our actions were fueling the resistance. I'm glad that someone is finally in charge who seems to get it, but why on earth has it taken four and a half years to reach such an obvious conclusion?

(Cross-posted at OOIBC)

Labels: Iraq

Labels: Iraq

Catching up on missed blog reading today. I've been out for a few weeks to some of the more remote spots in Iraq and noticed this at Unqualified Offerings from a few days ago:

The blast walls certainly seem omnipresent in Baghdad. I doubt there are as many in the rest of the country. Michael Totten has an interesting embed report from Fallujah that doesn't detail internal controls on movement in the city. He does refer to border controls, but stresses they are in the hands of local police forces.

Well, I'm in Fallujah and I can tell you that while there may not be blast walls separating one neighborhood from another (as is the situation in Baghdad), there is a wall around the entire city with controlled access points staffed by U.S. Marines checking the identification of everyone who attempts to pass through them. The ID's are produced by U.S. forces and are connected to a biometric tracking system that is run by U.S. forces. So Totten is wrong about the border controls being in the hands of local police forces. I find it amazing that he could have gotten that as wrong as he did, but I have no idea what Totten was shown when he was here.

But if you want to know why Fallujah is as calm as it is (and it is quite calm by the standards of this warzone), the walls and the iris scans are a huge part of it.

Labels: Iraq

George W. Bush: "[Musharraf has] been a loyal ally in fighting terrorists. He's also advanced democracy in Pakistan.... He hasn't crossed the line. As a matter of fact, I don't think he will cross any lines."

Joe Biden: "What exactly would it take for the president to conclude Musharraf has crossed the line? Suspend the constitution? Impose emergency law? Beat and jail his political opponents and human rights activists? He's already done all that . If the president sees Musharraf as a democrat, he must be wearing the same glasses he had on when he looked in Vladimir Putin's soul."

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and the American Dream: "All this spinning is making me sick."

Selected quotes from Hajji Abu Abed, the guy we are apparently paying $240,000 per month (do the math yourself if you don't believe me) to keep the streets of Baghdad safe from al Qaeda:

"Oh, people of Iraq, I had come to you with two swords, one is for mercy which I have left back in the desert, and this one" - he pointed his gun at the crowd -"is the sword of oppression, which I kept in my hand."

"I have to show them there is one commander. If the Americans don't like it, I will withdraw my men."

"Look, this head of yours, I will cut it off and put it on your chest if you don't tell where the guns are by tomorrow."

As you read the glowing reports about downturns in violence, remember that this is what they are actually referring to, and this is what the Administration and the Pentagon consider to be progress.

While I'm on the subject of who I'll be voting for, and speaking of fellow OOIBC Bloggers, the always excellent Army of Dude (whose blog, incidentally, drew me to OOIBC in the first place) has been nominated for Best Military Blog in the 2007 Weblog Awards, so go vote for him here.

And while you're visiting his site, be sure to read his fantastic riposte to Rush Limbaugh's "phony soldiers" remark. Makes the big, fat idiot look like the worst person ever, which isn't far from the truth. I would have linked it when I first saw it, but I was on vacation at the time.

We've all heard about the recruiting problems the Army is having lately thanks to the pressures on soldiers and their families as a result of the occupation of Iraq. What isn't talked about is how many NCO's aren't re-upping, and this poses an even more significant threat to the Army as an institution. For you non-military folks, I'll let fellow OOIBC Blogger Blue Girl explain why:

Without top-notch NCO's the force suffers. They fill a unique role, because they manage both up and down the chain of command. They transmit orders to the troops they supervise, and they have great influence over the decisions made by the officers they serve.

NCO's simultaneously prepare their units to complete their mission and know the personal pertinents of their personnel. They know whose kids are struggling to adjust, whose marriage is rocky, who is expecting a baby, whose mother is ill, who has an in-law "vacationing" on their couch and clueless about why they can't come play. They have the standing to pull a green Lieutenant aside and tell him or her the real score.

These middle managers are especially important in wartime. Not the least of all among reasons: seasoned NCO's keep Leiutenants alive long enough to become seasoned officers. There are more Sergeants leading Soldiers and Marines down dangerous alleys and on patrol than there are Lieutenants and Captains.

The amount of experience and professionalism that is walking out the door is having a huge effect on the Army right now, as it struggles to promote soldiers to positions of responsibility years before they have the experience needed to shepherd their PFC's and junior officers through hard deployments. I see it all the time: young soldiers, three years into their first enlistment, wearing Sergeant stripes. The quality of the NCO corps is definitely lower than it was ten years ago when I was a PFC looking to my superiors for guidance. Some MOS's, notably 97E, Interrogator, are so short-staffed that Sergeant stripes are virtually guaranteed. I've seen the most useless interrogators given stripes simply because there are so few NCO's to go around.

But if you think it's bad now, wait a few years. Those young Sergeants aren't just inexperienced, they got into the Army during a time when many of the usual filters designed to maintain quality control--intelligence, psychological profile, past criminal record--were jettisoned to get the Army to its recruiting goals in the first place. These low-IQ, borderline psychotic criminals aren't just manning the barricades, they will be running the store in a few years. Twenty years from now, some of these people will be First Sergeants, Sergeants Major and Chief Warrant Officers, which means that they will be the guiding influence on the next generation of soldiers. Our days of bragging about having the most highly-trained, proficient military in world history are swiftly coming to an end.

(All this comes, incidentally, at a time when the Air Force is actually downsizing. I personally know one former Staff Sergeant with a very rare and important skillset who was given thousands of dollars to leave early, and have heard second-hand accounts of even bigger payouts to junior officers. At the Pentagon, the left hand doesn't seem to know what the right hand is doing, and some are belatedly catching on to that.)

Andrew Sullivan's Atlantic cover story on Barrack Obama is worth a read. I knew I was an Obama supporter but I was having trouble articulating why, other than the fact that he seems to have a more philosphical outlook on issues of policy (embracing nuance, rather than pretending it doesn't exist) and the vague sense that he's got that whole "uniter, not a dividier" thing going on. Yes, he opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, but as a reformed Iraq war supporter myself, I could hardly hold that against Edwards. As for Hillary, I'd have trouble pulling the lever for her, if for no other reason than the fact that her legions of haters would never allow her to actually govern.

So yeah, I'm an Obama guy. He's got the best foreign policy people you've never heard of on his side, and he is the candidate in the best position (as Sully argues) to negotiate the pitfalls of simultaneously withdrawing from Iraq, repairing America's image abroad, and both strongly and effectively fighting terrorists. Plus he says really smart things that aren't very popular, such as this gem from 2002, which might as well serve as the header on this blog:

I don't oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war … I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.

Which brings me to another good reason to jump on his bandwagon: his eloquence. Can you even imagine that there would be enough material for a cottage industry of "Barrackisms" to arise during his presidency? That in itself would be quite a welcome change: a President who isn't a laughingstock.

Staying humane vs. staying alive.

I'm a couple of days late to this, but Matt Yglesias makes an obvious but crucial point regarding the futility of our adventure in Iraq:

The crux of the matter is that soldiers in ambiguous situations understandably tend to err on the side of their own personal safety and that of their fellow soldiers. Likewise, officers faced with ambiguous situations tend to err on the side of giving the soldiers under their command the benefit of the doubt. And courts-martial, likewise, err on the side of taking a favorable view of American soldiers.

All of which is fine. Unless you happen to be an Iraqi. Which is precisely why people tend not to enjoy being under foreign military occupation.

The reality of the matter is that to succeed, our troops would need to behave the way police officers do. But they're not cops, they're soldiers. And there's a good reason that soldiers act the way soldiers do. There's no way that it would be politically feasible -- or even appropriate -- for the US military to start treating Iraqi lives as more important than American lives. But that would be the only way to actually pull off what they've been asked to pull off. It's an impossible situation, and not one we should be putting people in.

The impossible situation isn't just limited to Iraq, however. This is a question I have wrestled with for a long time: can this war actually be conducted while maintaining the ideals of freedom and human rights that Americans and the West hold dear? I wanted to believe it was possible, but I don't really see it. It is always easy to talk about preserving the rights of those you fight against, but it's much more difficult to tell soldiers whose friends are dying before their eyes to respect the human rights of the people doing the shooting. (I can attest to this from personal experience: the only time I have actually wished someone dead was when he was shooting at me.)

The problem only gets worse when you start talking about assymmetrical warfare in which the enemy doesn't just look like a regular citizen, he is a regular citizen (or at least a subset of the regular citizenry that is indistinguishable from the rest of them). Given the choice between self-protection and large geopolitical goals (not that I'm convinced we have any), the Iraqis are going to lose every time.

So what do we do about this? We can't legitimately tell our brave sons and daughters and their families to go out there and take one for the team, but the more vigorously they protect themselves, the more innocent Iraqis die, and the further from our goal of establishing a peaceful rule-of-law democracy we get.

The result has been a mishmash of lofty rhetoric at the strategic level ("we do not torture") and hard-as-nails pragmatism at the tactical level (we torture). Soldiers are told that their safety is priority number one, then sent out into the battlespace with rules of engagement that ensure the enemy will get off a few shots before our guys have time to react. To say that this situation is untenable is to understate the case by quite a bit: it's a situation in which the soldiers are scarcely able to act without either breaking the rules or putting themselves at extra risk.

This is why being the "shining city on the hill" pretty much precludes preemptive war, leaping into battle without a coherent strategy and/or ill-defined objectives, overthrowing dictators who pose no threat to our nation's security, and occupation of foreign lands: everything we do in the interest of these things is either done counter to our values as a nation or at an especially great risk to our soldiers. Essentially we're telling our soldiers that they must find a balance between dying with honor or living with ignominy. That they tend to find ways to muddle through this with their consciences intact is a testament to their resilience, but they should have never been put in that position in the first place.

Yet another reason why "supporting the troops" doesn't mean supporting the way the President uses them, it means opposing the Presidents who would capriciously send them into needless, poorly planned and unwinnable wars.

Labels: interrogation, military

Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings:

Some day, other countries' versions of neocons will say "It's just like
2007, and [insert leader here] is just like Bush. If we don't start a
pointless war RIGHT NOW, he'll take yet another country! We must act NOW
to prevent another world war!"

Labels: Bush, humor, Iran, Iraq

Arrange to have your passport stolen.

On the one hand, you'll be out the $97.00 for a replacement. On the other hand, it can take up to two weeks for your new passport to arrive, which just means that you'll actually hit all those sights the guidebooks say to hit if you have extra time. Plus you can take day trips.

Having your passport stolen can, in fact, be teh awesome.

Now that I'm back in sunny Fallujah, I am kind of regretting my diligence in obtaining a replacement, because boy, was that extra week in Florence fun.

I've only just made the acquaintance of this place, so no idea whether I'll get to blog very often (or in fact at all), but hopefully I'll get a chance to report on the "Anbar Awakening" from the (relative) front. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

I'm a Rationalist Procedural Liberal Democrat Individualist Hayekian Progressive Federalist Altruist Cosmopolitan!

Or, if you prefer, a Hippie Reformer (i.e., a Pelagian Digger Right-Hegelian Whig)!

I'm glad we've managed to settle this matter once and for all.

Labels: humor, personal, politics

I'll be incommunicado for the next few weeks while I take a well-deserved (I think so, at least) break from this to spend a lot of time savoring this, this, this, this and this. I'll see you next month.

Labels: personal

Your instant all-purpose three-word rebuttal to the arguments against withdrawing from Iraq: It's Already Happening. Michael Ware reacting to Bush's speech, by way of hilzoy:

MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Anderson, my first impression is, wow. I mean, it's one thing to return to the status quo, to the situation we had nine months ago, with 130,000 U.S. troops stuck here for the foreseeable future. It's another thing to perpetuate the myth. I mean, I won't go into detail, like the president's characterizations of the Iraqi government as an ally, or that the people of Anbar, who support the Sunni insurgency, asked America for help, or to address this picture of a Baghdad that exists only in the president's mind.

Let me just refer to this, what the president said, that, if America were to be driven out of Iraq, extremists of all strains would be emboldened. They are now. Al Qaeda could gain new recruits and new sanctuaries. They have that now. Iran would benefit from the chaos and be encouraged in its efforts to gain nuclear weapons and dominate the region. It is now.

Iraq would face a humanitarian -- humanitarian crisis. It does now. And that we would leave our children a far more dangerous world. That's happening now. (...)

COOPER: The U.S. -- but the U.S. talks about reconciliation and the need for -- for Shia-led government to -- to reconcile with Sunni, even former Sunni insurgents. Does this government -- do -- so the Sunnis want to reconcile?

WARE: Not the ones that I'm talking to, certainly not the power brokers. I mean, I'm talking about the heads of the largest Shia militias in this country, men who sit in the parliament, men who are the chairmen of the security and defense committees, the parliamentary oversight watchdog committees.

These men are not looking for reconciliation. What they want is America to get out of the way and let us loose.

It's all there: delusionally-optimistic President, the arguments against withdrawal debunked in the simplest and most direct terms, and a clear view of the situation on the ground as it actually is. If only arguing politics were always this easy.

Labels: Iraq, politics