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

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

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

Hint: it's not always them.

BAGHDAD (AFP) — Hundreds of Shiites and Sunnis marched on Wednesday in protest at the building by US troops of a tall concrete wall separating their northwest Baghdad neighbourhoods, an AFP photographer said.

The protesters complained that the wall would promote sectarianism and demanded its removal.

Residents said that US forces last week began building the two-kilometre (1.25 mile) wall along the border of the mainly Shiite al-Shuala and adjoining Sunni-majority al-Ghazaliyah neighbourhoods without consulting them.

The demonstrators -- tribal leaders, clerics and local residents -- marched from one neighbourhood to the other carrying banners reading "No to the dividing wall" and "The wall is US terrorism."

The protesters demanded in a statement that the government intervene to halt the wall and ensure that the section already completed is demolished.

"The wall is in accordance with Al-Qaeda's plans," the statement said, adding that the barrier was being built to "separate family from family."

"The wall is dividing small neighbourhoods and will lead to the partitioning of Iraq," said Hassan al-Taii, a leader of the large Taii Sunni tribe.

He demanded that the Baghdad government destroy the wall and act against those "planting division and sectarianism among Iraqis."

Our ability to sacrifice any hope of long-term gain on the altar of "seemed like a good idea at the time" never ceases to amaze me. You know things are bad when the average Iraqi sees the strategic view more clearly than the guys we train and pay to see that view.

Link via Juan Cole.

Labels: Iraq, military

Michael Goldfarb is right to chastise some on the left for wanting to have it both ways regarding the Petraeus testimony--either Petraeus is a stooge for the Administration or he isn't. Here's the General's hand-wringing non-response to Sen. Warner's question of whether the Iraq war is making America safer:

"I don't know, actually. I have not sat down and sorted in my own mind."

That reaction seems to me to be a tacitly negative response. If he were truly the lapdog that he's been accused of being, he would have at least muttered something incoherent about success in Iraq being a "vital national interest" or something, but instead he hid behind what is, in all honesty, at least a somewhat legitimate dodge: it's not his job to assess the war's implications for the overall national security of the United States.

I say "somewhat legitimate," because, as a Four-Star General, one would think that he would have pondered this question at least a bit. Even if he hasn't spent his waking hours as MNF-I Commander agonizing over the pros and cons of the Iraq War vis-a-vis the threat to America proper, he certainly ought to have at least entertained some thoughts in that direction during the years he spent at the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center writing the Army's Counter-Insurgency doctrine. After all, he was back in the U.S. working explicitly on the Army's broader missions, which one would think would include things that fell under the heading of "support[ing] and defend[ing] the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic."

So actually, Petraeus should have been able to answer that question more fully at the time. Given the constraints of the political circus that his testimony could only be, I can understand why he would hesitate to dive right in with a bold declaration that the Iraq War is doing bupkis to protect America.

But then he got his bearings, remembered why he was there, and came clean in exactly the incoherent "vital interest" vein that we have come to expect from a political class that excels at saying nothing:

Candidly, I have been so focused on Iraq that drawing all the way out was something that for a moment there was a bit of a surprise.

But I think that we have very, very clear and very serious national interests in Iraq. Trying to achieve those interests — achieving those interests has very serious implications for our safety and for our security. So I think the answer really, to come back to it is yes.

"Very, very clear and very serious" national interests. Good boy. No word yet on what those interests actually are.

I suspect that his initial instinct--to run from that question with all his might because he knows the frank answer will be counter-productive to his Commander-in-Chief's staged love-in for a tragically ill-advised and destructive campaign--was borne out of unease. That hesitation betrayed a lot more about Petraeus' thoughts than anyone with a political axe to grind--left or right--is willing to admit.

I suspect that he is a man who is conflicted about the overall war, his role in it, and his responsibilities as a commander tasked with managing it. That he only came to his senses and played the political ball game when he had been allowed a moment to consider his options at least says that he has struggled with his faith.

Anyone who has ever believed in something and been put in a position where they had to act on those beliefs but entertained thoughts to the contrary should understand this. I know I do, because I came to Iraq the first time in 2004 with nothing but praise for the enterprise, only coming to realize that it was a bad idea and a lost cause after experience and reflection. That was a long process, though. Could General Petraeus be going through a similar existential crisis? I'd like to think so.

But even after changing my mind, I still had (and have) a job to do, as does Petraeus, only in a vastly more significant way. While I'm free to distance myself intellectually from the strategy and the entire war, he isn't. As Goldfarb concludes, "he's not there to defend the war--despite what the left is saying--he's there to defend the strategy." Goldfarb is right about that, but only in the sense that this "report" isn't really a report; it's a public relations campaign for a failed strategy. In a political culture that was less poisoned by naked partisanship, he would have been there to report on a strategy. But we always knew that wouldn't really be the case. Only a partisan hack like Goldfarb, however, would call that a good thing.

Cross-posted at OOIBC.

Labels: Iraq, military, OOIBC, politics

At least someone on the right can see the forest for the trees. While I don't agree with everything in his latest piece, By Bush's Own Standard, Surge Has Failed, his main point is unassailable, unless you're drunk on Rupert Murdoch's special Kool-Aid:

The purpose of the surge, they said, is to buy time -- "breathing space," the president says -- for Iraqi political reconciliation. Because progress toward that has been negligible, there is no satisfactory answer to this question: What is the U.S. military mission in Iraq?

Many of those who insist that the surge is a harbinger of U.S. victory in Iraq are making the same mistake they made in 1991 when they urged an advance on Baghdad, and in 2003 when they underestimated the challenge of building democracy there. The mistake is exaggerating the relevance of U.S. military power to achieve political progress in a society riven by ethnic and sectarian hatreds.

How do people not get this? The military is utterly unfit to the task of facilitating political reconciliation. Our very presence here ensures that reconciliation will not happen, because all we can do is arm our friends du jour, walling them off from each other, and bribe them to stop attacking each other, while creating potemkin villages for sympathetic journalists and politicians to base glowing reports upon.

Iraqis know damn well that America doesn't particularly care about them or their situation. We've all but abandoned our original goal of bestowing freedom and democracy upon them and are now just looking for a way to bow out that doesn't involve an airlift from the roof of our embassy in Baghdad.

But we will continue to fight here, because winning the political war in Washington is more important than winning the actual war in Iraq. Because saving (the President's) face is more important than saving (American soldiers') lives.

Labels: Iraq, military, politics

Kevin Drum's onto something here: the casualty figures in Iraq mean very little unless you take seasonality into account, which means, basically, that the level of violence in Iraq has been consistently higher in Spring and Autumn than it has been in Summer and Winter. Remember this when the Administration trots out a comparison between violence levels in April 2007 and August 2007 to show that the surge is working. It isn't. To quote Jim Henley, " They're bullshitting us."

But there's more to it than that. It turns out that the numbers don't include casualty figures for civilian deaths if they were the result of Sunni-on-Sunni or Shia-on-Shia violence:

Unfortunately, there's simply no reliable data series for civilian casualties over the course of the war, and the data for this year in particular gives every indication of being massaged to within an inch of its life (intra-Shiite violence doesn't count, car bomb fatalities don't count, al-Qaeda attacks against Sunni tribes don't count, the figures change mysteriously from one report to the next, the supposedly lower numbers for August are classified, etc. etc.)

The Administration and Pentagon are so invested in the "sectarian violence" meme that their statisticians rule out the possibility that intra-sect killings are meaningful. Which of course they are, because this isn't merely a sectarian conflict. The battle lines have been drawn in so many directions that there's no way to accurately characterize it.

Tribal feuds, for example, are often completely non-sectarian. The massacres of Sunni policemen by Sunni Islamic militants and Ba'ath Party loyalists are clearly non-sectarian. Ditto for the ongoing battles between Badr and Jaysh al-Mahdi.

My experience in 2004-2005 interrogating almost no Shiites testifies to this. Of the hundreds of Iraqis I met, almost none of them were killing or otherwise terrorizing Shias. The vast majority of them weren't radical Muslims, bin Laden acolytes or Saddam hardliners; they were motivated by nationalism. They opposed the U.S. occupation of what they saw as their sovereign land (silly them!) so they lashed out in the most meaningful way they could: at the "collaborators" in their midst aiding and abetting the occupying, colonial power. It's basic insurgency doctrine, folks. In my experience, "religious fanaticism" is the veneer that some in Iraq, and even more in the West, use to cover what is essentially the struggle to get out from under the thumb of a strongman.

The Administration won't cop to that, though, because they need to be able to paint the current troubles as "those crazy Muslims and their backward ways." Any hint that these people are motivated by the same desire for self-government that every other people who have sought to break their yokes of bondage has been motivated by must be carefully avoided to maintain the illusion that we're "liberating" them. The media and the Right scoffed when some reality-based thinkers declared that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," but deep down I think we all knew that was true. Ask the Irish, the Algerians, the French Partisans or the Sioux about that distinction.

This in no way excuses the use of suicide bombs and the targeting of innocents: these tactics are deplorable no matter who employs them. But they are effective, and that's something we still don't understand, four years after "Mission Accomplished."

Labels: Bush, Iraq, military, politics

One feature that I neglected to address in my recent posts on Blackwater was brought up by some of the commenters to those posts, for instance this one:

The scariest thing about some entity like Blackwater turning America into a police state is the fact that they hire foriegn soldiers of fortune. These Hessians could one day be marching down our streets and commanding American citizens at the point of a gun barrel. Just like they are doing in Iraq. And you see the results there. A lot of dead people.

Although I am hesitant to declare the police state nearly here, I am mindful of the dangers of allowing the seeds for it to be planted while we all assure ourselves that it could never come to that.

As for those foreign soldiers of fortune, I see them all the time. The most visible to me are the guys guarding our mess halls. All of the ones at my local facility seem to be from Uganda, as far as I can tell (I've had brief conversations with some of them). To a man, they seem like nice people, but then again so did Eichmann. The fact of the matter, however, is that they are standing outside (and sometimes inside) our dining facilities with loaded weapons. I've never asked if they have rounds chambered, but the magazines are in their M-16s, which means they could be firing three-round bursts withing seconds if the situation called for it.

While I don't live in fear of them staging an armed takeover of the salad bar, I do wonder what kind of status they might be afforded if their employer, EOD Technology, were called upon to provide homeland security. Doubtless there would be cries of protestation from all corners of the political spectrum shoudl they ever arrive stateside (the Dems would cry "civil liberties" while the GOP would play the xenophobia card, I suspect) but I'm not at all convinced that our Unitary Executive would pay them any heed. The legal aspect of this is something I am utterly unqualified to expound upon, so I won't.

We need to understand this very clearly: the United States is arming private armies of foreign nationals to provide security for its own military on installations in Iraq. This isn't a "coalition of the willing" here, because they aren't operating under their nation's flag. They are employees of American companies, beholden primarily to those companies, and they're paid for by the U.S. taxpayer. And it's not like they're only guarding the mess halls. Foreign security contractors go outside the wire just like Americans.

This would be distressing even if the ones I referred to weren't from a country that is one of the biggest offenders in the horrific production of child soldiers in the world. Were some of the guys guarding me while I eat abducted at a tender age by the Lord's Resistance Army? Somehow, I doubt their employer keeps statistics on these things.

But the point is not that they are foreign, but that they are there at all, and largely unaccountable for their actions.

Labels: Iraq, liberty, mercenaries, military

Gee, publish one item indicating the possibility that the powers-that-be are comin' to getcha, and you wouldn't believe who comes out of the woodwork. Prior to publishing my piece on Blackwater's Air Force and some other things that scare me, I had gotten maybe 1500 or so hits during the entire life of this blog, many of which were me, chacking how many hits I've had. I'm now pushing 10,000.

Most of them seem to have come here via the website of Jeff Rense, who is apparently fond of accusing the Jews of training chupacabras to implant radio sensors in the brains of neocons so that they won't leak the truth about Roswell, which is the site of ancient Atlantis. Or something like that. So let this be a lesson to you newbie bloggers: if you want to be read, publish a conspiracy theory.

I've received a few comments on the Blackwater story, most of which either accuse Blackwater of pushing the zionist agenda or the christianist agenda. One favorite ties Allah with the god of ancient Atlantis, which is just so amazingly far out there (read the Timaeus and the Critias some time: Socrates made up the city of Atlantis for the sake of argument) that I had to read it a few times to trace the mental leaps. I've seen what happens when you engage cranks (if you don't know what that is or how to spot one, check out the denialism blog and their Denialists' Deck of Cards for a humorous look at the phenomenon) so I'll avoid that here.

But there was a comment worth responding to at length, from a "Canadian Looking Dispassionately At The American Experience":

The problem with this article is it shows EXCESSIVE bias towards paramilitary groups which is what Blackwater is. Bias is good becuase it is an opinion, but excessive bias is fanaticism in its own right.

The author should also know that they are NOT generally disunited, unambitious and lacking discipline, unfaithful, unvaliant before friends, nor are they cowardly before enemies since the majority of Blackwater Associates have already been in service as Navy Seals, Army Rangers, Ex-Delta Forces, British SAS, etc. They're neither stupid nor untrained and in many cases DO IN FACT do their JOBS with professionalism and tact!

It does help to focus one's mind that 100 Grand A year + bonus is yours if you just DO YOUR DAMN JOB but many join Blackwater because they LIKE being professional soldiers and like the lifestyle. So you don't always have to rail against Blackwater since they do provide a useful service in uncivil times and being paid much more than regular forces can be sent to do the "Dirty Jobs" no one else wants to do!

Well yes, of course my piece is biased. It's my opinion, which is subject to change. Whether my bias is "excessive" or not is another story. I've spent nearly two years of my life in Iraq, and I have encountered many an employee of Blackwater and the other security firms who have security contracts here. (Technically speaking I'm a mercenary, even though I'm not even authorized to carry a weapon.)

Have I found that they are disunited, unambitious, lacking discipline, unfaithful, etc.? That's really an individual thing. They often, as my Canadian interlocutor asserts with a bit too many capital letters, "in many cases DO IN FACT do their JOBS with professionalism and tact." I'll admit, they do tend to be patriotic Americans, but that can take many forms. One form is the one that many on the Right take, which asserts that patriotism means following the President no matter what. They accuse those who protest the current state of American society of anti-Americanism. Many Blackwater contractors share this opinion. Actually, it's been my experience that this opinion is the default one among many sectors in Iraq, as this post indicates. I don't doubt that these people are patriots, but I'm really disturbed by the prospect of them flying around our country in military aircraft designed for close ground support.

I'm disturbed by the prospect of anyone doing that, though.

For most of the Blackwater types I've met, this definitely describes them: "they LIKE being professional soldiers and like the lifestyle." Sure they do--that's why they took a high-paying job to come over here. I do take issue with the "they're all former SEALs and Green Berets line, though: a good rule of thumb is that when someone claims to have been in Special Forces and starts telling stories about it, they're lying. The actual SOF guys I've known have tended to not brag much at all. The Blackwater guys I've known can't shut up about how awesome they are. A close friend who once worked for Blackwater told me that they all claim to have had some sort of high speed career, but most of them turn out to have been garden-variety infantrymen who served, it should be noted, in the 80's and 90's, when there wasn't much combat to be had.

Returning to my point, Blackwater is the closest thing we have to a Foreign Legion, and that should worry anyone who is concerned about civil liberties, if for no other reason that foreign legions, if they must exist at all, ought to be limited in their scope to foreign countries. I think my commenter hits the nail on the head when he says that they "can be sent to do the "Dirty Jobs" no one else wants to do." That's what scares me about them. Sure, right now they're all fighting the fight that our elected officials have sent Americans to fight. No matter how much deceit went into getting us into this war, Congress did, in fact, declare this war, and the President is our Commander in Chief. But what happens when that mission changes? Will our legislative branch have any say whatsoever in any domestic missions a Blackwater would conduct during peacetime? There's no reason to suspect that they would. In that case, they would be an armed wing of whoever paid them, in this case the Executive Branch of the United States government. Need I remind my readers that there is no provision in the constitution for such a thing?

Those "dirty jobs" are dirty not just because no one wants to do them, but also because they are in many cases illegal and the military can't do them. I'm one of those people who likes the fact that there are defined limits to the scope of what the military of a Constitutional Republic can do. That's why I find the Blackwater phenomenon dangerous, and that is why I think my short discussion of NSPD-51 is germane.

And for the record, I suspect that many Blackwater Paramilitary Troops would go AWOL rather than provide close air support to the suppression of, say, an anti-WTO demonstration. But do we really want to trust the individual consciences of these people to protect us should they ever be given that order?

Labels: conspiracies, mercenaries, military, politics, reason

Oops. It looks like the military has denied access to myspace and youtube. Can blogger be far behind? It looks like I'll have to post more surreptitiously.

On the other hand, this only makes my commitment to telling it like it is even more pressing. It seems to me that the only proper response to government encroachments on freedom of speech is to speak more freely. I hope I can do that.

Hat tip: Sully.

Labels: Iraq, liberty, military

The Military Readiness Enhancement Act has been reintroduced in Congress by Rep. Marty Meehan (D-MA). This bill would repeal the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, allowing gays to finally serve in the military. What has this ban wrought? How about more than 11,000 servicemembers kicked out since its inception, 55 of whom were Arabic linguists. Yes, that's right, 55 of the military's small core of Arabic speakers were discharged under other than honorable conditions for the crime of not being straight. This despite the growing number of servicemembers who served honorably while being forced to keep their orientation secret, including the first Marine injured in Operation Iraqi Freedom. A number of Generals, including the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have even come ou (don't take that the wrong way) in support of allowing gays to serve openly.

One of the most important moments in the American Civil Rights Movement was the decision to racially integrate the military. By forcing servicemembers to work with people they had never prviously worked with, the standard reaction of racist servicemembers went from "I could never work with no n****r" to "they're people, just like you and me." Naysayers at the time said that integration could never happen, even arguing that race relations were too tense to be able to ensure the safety of racial minorities in the military. But in general, the opposite happened: people who entered the military with racist ideas were forced to work with people they had never really considered as fully human and discovered that they were good people after all. I believe strongly that this will be the result of ending the ban on gays in the military.

When I was in the service I knew a few soldiers who were gay. They weren't lousy soldiers by any means--in fact, they were some of the most thoughtful, intelligent people I've known, exactly the sort of skillset you want in the Military Intelligence community. But they lived in constant fear that they would be "outed" by one of the people they considered their colleagues. Those people didn't make up the majority--far from it--but all it takes is one homophobe with an ideological axe to grind to ruin a soldier's career. So they lived in fear. I remember well the blatant violation of the "don't pursue" policy at the Defense Language Institute (where they train linguists) several years ago, in which a personal friend, among many others, was forced out just because she was attracted to women.

Is this the way soldiers ought to be treated in a free society? A society whose freedom is defended and guaranteed by thos soldiers? Of course not. The time to end the ban is now. Please sign the petition supporting Rep. Meehan's bill, and do what you can to support the Servicemember's Legal Defense Network in their efforts to end discrimination in the military.

Labels: homosexuality, military

More reason to be worried about the sabre-rattling that has been going on with Iran: they're rattling theirs right back. The Iranian press has said that the IEDs that killed 11 people in southeastern Iran are linked to America. They've even posted pictures of the offending devices. That's right, just as our President is claiming that Iran is behind IED attacks in Iraq, someone in Iran is claiming that we're behind IED attacks in Iran.

I'm not worried that we're actually doing it. As The Left Coaster notes:

Even if the United States were behind the operation, it is unlikely the Iranians would find weapons and materials that would be identifiable as American. US organizations that are involved in covert operations are very good about not leaving signatures that can be traced.

At least I'd like to think our boys are that good.

This just gives Iran even more reason to ratchet up their anti-American propaganda in preparation for another war that we can not afford to get into. They can afford it, however, because they know that they would receive the support of all of those nations we've pissed off since the lies and slander (remember "freedom fries"?) we engaged in in the runup to the Iraq invasion. I suppose that turnabout is fair play, but this will cost lives. Many, many lives.

(OK, I just read the Wikipedia entry for Freedom Fries. "Liberty Measles"? WTF?)

Labels: GWOT, Iran, military