Barcepundit: ¿DID YOU KNOW that the Zapatero administration (you know, the "no blood for oil", "Bush is killing innocents" and "let's get out of this illegal war" one) just gave Spain's highest military decoration to... gasp... can hardly say it... to... to the US Army Chief of Staff? Yes, the chief of staff of an army that, on behalf of Bu$hitler and his cronies, entered in Iraq and killed innocent civilians, tortured and murdered with no restraint, all based on a long stream of lies.
Maybe things are not going so bad there, after all.
Posted by: DanNY ||
06/05/2006 07:25 ||
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Be sickened. Be frightened. Be angry. But don't you dare be shocked.
Unless you've been had.
Either way, the time has long passed for domestic bliss born of ignorance, virtue and wilful denial.
For everyone who thought Canada could cower in a corner of the planet, unnoticed and unthreatened by evil men even when the most menacing of a very bad lot has twice referenced this country as a target for attack take a good, hard look at what's been presented and what's being alleged.
Three tonnes of ammonium nitrate, thrice the amount used by Timothy McVeigh to demolish a government building in Oklahoma City. Cellphone detonators. Switches. Computer hard drive. A 9-mm pistol. Soldering gun. Camouflage gear.
And 17 males born here or reared here, certainly settled here, some of them little more than children formally remanded yesterday on terrorism-related charges.
Kate Zernike's story on the front page of the Memorial Day Sunday New York Times, "Kerry Pressing Swift Boat Case Long After Loss," is an unfortunate reminder of the Times's embarrassingly poor coverage of Kerry in the face of the Swift Boat Veterans' for Truth charges in the 2004 election. Now as then, the Times acts as if the issues involved were between Kerry's latest representations of his record and the "unsubstantiated" charges of the Swift Boat group. The Times used the term "unsubstantiated" more than twenty times during its election coverage and continues to make no discernable effort to examine any of the charges in detail.
But there was plenty of evidence in the work of other news organizations that some of the charges, and the Kerry military records themselves, were worth examining seriously. I found numerous problems with Kerry's records on his website in my own reporting for the Chicago Sun-Times: a Silver Star with a V for valor listed that the Navy stated it had never awarded in the history of the US Navy, three separate medal citations with some heavy revisions in Kerry's favor signed by former Navy Secretary John Lehman who denied ever signing them, to name two...
What does it take to wake up a good reporter that there are some issues here besides one junior lieutenant's latest assertions on the basis, once again, of totally undisclosed records? It isn't simply a matter of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth "lies." The facts recited by Kerry make no military sense, fly in direct opposition to authoritative testimony, and are yet to be backed by any records anyone has seen. And Kerry keeps changing his story...
Kerry told Brinkley personally that he was a "no-show" at a national meeting of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Kansas City which voted on a resolution to assassinate six US Senators supporting the Vietnam War in 1971. One can understand why Brinkley would naturally have assumed that as a sitting US Senator himself, Kerry would have vividly recalled the occasion if he had been there. My reporting and Josh Gerstein's in The New York Sun and Scott Canon's at The Kansas City Star found quite a few witnesses, most of whom were working for Kerry's presidential campaign, who saw Kerry at the meeting and some saw him vote and his presence was confirmed by FBI taps as well. The FBI taps were surfaced by a left wing writer, Gerald Nicosia, for whom Kerry had hosted a book party at his Senate office.
Kerry flatly lied to Brinkley and continued to lie to the press until the story got so strong he finally had a sudden attack of minimal memory recovery. Brinkley had to print a correction, but not before Kerry showed another unattractive side to his approach to historical revisionism. He pressured several of the witnesses who confirmed his presence at Kansas City to change their stories. I reported it, and The New York Times confirmed my story in a front page story by Adam Nagourney and David Halbfinger.
One of those witnesses was a Marine who had been totally disabled in the fighting in Viet Nam and had been a Kerry supporter. When Kerry suddenly discovers a witness who has changed his mind in his favor, the circumstances might merit more than one grain of salt. And all this happened well before the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ever appeared on the scene.
Handing liberal opponents a sudden victory in their longtime battle over Armed Forces Radio content, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity may soon be removed from broadcast outlets serving American soldiers stationed around the world.
With last year's addition of liberal talk shows to the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service lineup, how could this happen now?...
In this new scenario, ALL political talk shows will be nearly eliminated, including those hosted by liberals Ed Schultz and Al Franken.
If Hannity and Limbaugh aren't being singled out for quasi- cancellation, that might seem fair, but the devil is in the details.
And it's a particularly ugly devil: upon closer examination, an astounding picture of anti- conservative bias is clearly revealed. Was it intentional? We don't know.
In a highly unexpected development, a radio consulting firm hired by the military has strongly recommended dumping these programs from stations that reach the vast majority of troops and others residing overseas.
After an extensive study was conducted that included a number of focus groups, Lund Media Research determined that talk radio and country music should be largely eliminated to make room for hip-hop, rap and pop formats, according to Stars and Stripes.
Only in rare cases where three military radio frequencies are available in a region would Limbaugh and Hannity survive in any manner. Even then, only about an hour of each show would remain on the schedule of the third station, rather than their entire three- hour broadcasts.
Included on the cut list is NPR's programming, generally regarded as liberal, but it would still air for at least three hours daily.
While the military must decide whether to act on Lund's advice, if it wasn't intending to take these recommendations seriously, we find it unlikely that AFRTS would pay a significant amount of money and assist in coordinating this research.
Until now, station programming decisions have been handled locally, with area brass making the call as to what was suitable for troops stationed in a particular conflict zone or military base. Under the new proposal, that will be centralized...
#1
It will be interesting to see how vociferous the outrage gets among the troops. I suspect it will be deafening and someone in DC will hear it loud and clear. I'd bet both Hannity and Rush won't be gone long, if they ever leave.
Posted by: mac ||
06/05/2006 10:15 Comments ||
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#2
This is just horrible. The talk radio recommendations are bad enough, but removing Country music to make room for rap is unconscionable. While Country has it's faults, it generally talks about traditional values, honoring your contry, loving your wife and kids, etc. Why replace it with an entire musical culture that denigrates women into whores and bitches, promotes rampant sexual promiscuity, murder, gang activity, a steady stream of vulgarity, drug abuse and gaudy materialsm? Is our military leadership so completely out of touch that they actually believe this will help the troops? Unreal.
Posted by: bk ||
06/05/2006 10:43 Comments ||
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#5
"Local brass making the descision about what the troops listen too?" Hmm, they must of steamrollered right over the AFRTS management, then. One of the things that station management felt very firmly about when I was serving as a broadcaster (from 1977-1997) was that local commanders COULD NOT dictate what we aired in the way of music. They tried, sometimes, but it was a point of pride for us to not be bullied into it by a local commander. This is why AFRTS had their own chain of command--- to insulate us from a local colonel throwing his own weight around. We went by polls of the audience... and what they said they wanted to hear was what they got.
What might affect what airs day to day in talk shows, is a little thing called host nation sensitivities: in other words, referances and topics that might offend the local national listeners: for instance, jokes about Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs go down like a cup of cold vomit in Japan; the Greeks were hypersensitive about everything, and the Spanish were sort of touchy about having lost the Spanish-American War.
So, what the AFRTS staff always had to do was to pre-screen a lot of news shows, and if a host-nation sensitivity came up... well, have to clear that with station management, or the local PA, or whatever. If a program is notoriously apt to offend local sensitivites, at some point it's just a lot less trouble to drop the show. We tried airing NPR, BTW, when I was at Hellenikon AB in the 80ies, but there were host nation sensitivites coming up so often, it was more trouble than it was worth.
And Rush was very popular with the audience, when he was finally included in the package in the early 1990ies... somewhat less so with the overnight staffer who had to listen it it all, and log the potential sensitivities.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
06/05/2006 11:28 Comments ||
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#9
Sgt. Mom: One of the more well known Armed Forces Radio censorships was during the Vietnam War, when they were broadcasting the Dr. Demento show. He played National Lampoon's 'Miserata', which made reference to giving up Taiwan. It was like two minutes of dead air.
Dr Demento is still on the air, BTW, and broadcast over the Internet, for you fans out there. I can't seem to find a copy of 'Miserata', though.
#10
The censorship of AFRTS during the Vietnam War era was precisely why later station managers felt so strongly about it...
The only way that they would approve killing a song or a news segment was on account of a host nation sensitivity. A local host commander trying to get them to kill something would be like showing a red flag to a bull--- it was a point of honor not to give in on anything other than host nation sensitivites.
Now, with so much programming available via satellite, or DVD, or various commercially available downloads, I'm fairly sure that AFRTS has less and less reason to exist. It's been a dying carreer field for years.
#11
The soccer message boards I frequent have several current and former service members bitching that AFRTS will not be carrying the World Cup which begins Friday.
#12
Who is the Asshat that thought the decision should be centralized? Sound like some commie reasoning to me. One size does not fit all and the local commander should be able to make those decisions and not some (very much removed) focus group. Hip hop? God where did we go wrong? FYI a lot of time I would switch over to static than listen to NPR (it made more sense).
#15
FOX had a report this AM about Government being desired to regulate RESTAURANT PORTION(S) SIZE(S)
- ARISE, YE FASCIST = HALFCOMMUNIST MALE BRUTES OF AMERICA = AMERIKKKA, OUR PIZZAS, NACHOS, HOAGIES, DELI, etal. IS AT RISK OF BEING LEGALLY FORCIBLY CONVERTED INTO MOTHERLY COMMIE CHICK FOOD!?
Two weeks ago, I pointed out that we live in something close to the best of times, with record worldwide economic growth and at a low point in armed conflict in the world. Yet Americans are in a sour mood, a mood that may be explained by the lack of a sense of history. The military struggle in Iraq (nearly 2,500 military deaths) is spoken of in as dire terms as Vietnam (58,219), Korea (54,246) or World War II (405,399). We bemoan the cruel injustice of $3 a gallon for gas in a country where three-quarters of people classified as poor have air conditioning and microwave ovens. We complain about a tide of immigration that is, per U.S. resident, running at one-third the rate of 99 years ago.
George W. Bush has a better sense of history. Speaking last week at the commencement at West Point -- above the Hudson River, where revolutionary Americans threw a chain across the water to block British ships -- Bush noted that he was speaking to the first class to enter the U.S. Military Academy after the Sept. 11 attacks. And he put the challenge these cadets willingly undertook in perspective by looking back at the challenges America faced at the start of the Cold War 60 years ago.
"In the early years of that struggle," Bush noted, "freedom's victory was not obvious or assured." In 1946, Harry Truman accompanied Winston Churchill as he delivered his Iron Curtain speech; in 1947, communists threatened Greece and Turkey; in 1948, Czechoslovakia fell, France and Italy seemed headed the same way, and Berlin was blockaded by the Soviets, who exploded a nuclear weapon the next year; in 1950, North Korea attacked South Korea.
"All of this took place in just the first five years following World War II," Bush noted. "Fortunately, we had a president named Harry Truman, who recognized the threat, took bold action to confront it and laid the foundation for freedom's victory in the Cold War."
Bold action: the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in 1947, the Berlin airlift in 1948, the NATO Treaty in 1949, the Korean War in 1950. None of these was uncontroversial, and none was perfectly executed. And this was only the beginning. It took 40 years -- many of them filled with angry controversy -- to win the Cold War.
The struggles against Soviet communism and Islamofascist terrorists are of course not identical. But there are similarities.
"Like the Cold War, we are fighting the followers of a murderous ideology that despises freedom, crushes all dissent, has territorial ambitions and pursues totalitarian aims," Bush said. "And like the Cold War, they're seeking weapons of mass murder that would allow them to deliver catastrophic destruction to our country."
The New Republic's Peter Beinart argues that Bush, unlike Truman, has shown no respect for international institutions. But the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan were unilateral American initiatives, and Truman used the United Nations to respond in Korea only because the Soviets were then boycotting the Security Council. Otherwise, he would have gone to war, as Bill Clinton did in Kosovo, without U.N. approval. Bush did try to use the United Nations on Iraq, but was blocked by France and Russia, both stuffed with profits from the corrupt U.N. Oil for Food program.
But as Bush pointed out, we have worked with 90-plus nations and NATO in Afghanistan and with 70-plus nations on the Proliferation Security Initiative. We're working with allies to halt Iran's nuclear program.
"We can't have lasting peace unless we work actively and vigorously to bring about conditions of freedom and justice in the world," Harry Truman told the West Point class of 1952. Which is what we're trying to do today -- in Iraq and the broader Middle East, in Afghanistan, even Africa.
Reports of Bush's West Point speech noted that Truman had low job ratings -- lower than Bush's, in fact. But does that matter now? Bush, as Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis has written, has changed American foreign policy more than any president since Truman, and like Truman he has acted on the long view.
"The war began on my watch," Bush told the class of 2006, "but it's going to end on your watch." Truman might have made the same point, accurately as it turned out, to the class of 1952. We're lucky we had then, and have now, a president who takes bold action and braves vitriolic criticism to defend our civilization against those who would destroy it.
#1
gosh, I wonder if their sour mood has anything to do with getting stuck into a war they didnt want and then having all their hard earned tax dollars squandered by an extremely spoiled brat who never had to be responsible for any of his actions. Hmmmmmmmmmm
Posted by: bk ||
06/05/2006 10:46 Comments ||
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#2
Yolu are speaking of Franklin Delano Roosevelt isn't it? Your rant applies wonderfully to him.
#5
[rant begin]
I guess I must be a part of that silent minority (or is it a majority?) that has soured in mood for much different reasons than bk suggests, and yet is able to see how sweet things really are here in the good 'ol US of A.
To start, I'm proud of the role this country, our elected leaders and-- last but never least-- our military are playing on the global stage right now. Call me what you want, optimistic or in denial, but never accuse me of being an ignoramus. I know all too well, as most here at Rantburg do (an educated and informed lot it has always seemed to me), what is going on out there and around here despite all the efforts of our once reputable MSM. The way I see it, in large part based on what I have actually seen, heard and read, we are fighting the good fight. We are taking the high road. And while the high road is harder to reach and thus more risky to take, I find the view is a hell of a lot nicer.
Wars are fought based on survival and ideals, both of which are so intimately intertwined in the American consciousness as to be nearly indistinguishable from one another. If only because our ideals are what sustain us, give us the freedom and liberty that we believe to be the true nature of society for all humanity. And so when they are threatened, be it here or elsewhere, in equal fashion so is our basic survival. Thus, we fight against those who would deny humanity it's "inalienable rights." Taking that into consideration, and in addition to the factors pointed out by Mr. Barone in his first paragraph, I think things are close to as good as they ever have been. Except for Clinton's second term, of course (speaking of denial...). Gosh dang it, the mid- to late-1990s were fun, weren't they?
What sours me these days is the piss and vinegar unfairly dumped on the President. Whether it's the flagrant and bold slander and libel put forward on a daily basis by the far left (moveon.org, etc) to the more subtle (though barely so) machinations and manipulations conducted in the name of "journalism" on behalf of the MSM (NYT, CNN, CBS, NBC, etc.) it absolutely astounds me that people in this country feel it is appropriate and acceptable to act in such a boorish and disrespectful manner. Then there is the intellectual snobbery and smarter-and-better-than-thou attitude of the left which sours me even more. We could be way over the hump and well on our way to a stable and secure Iraq if the rest of the world, starting with the media and Bush haters in our own county, pulled together and exercised some solidarity and commitment to the task at hand.
#6
"... conditions of freedom and justice in the world" > it may not look like it for many, but America's enemies are in reality fighting for repression, regression, totalitarianism and de-evolution, NOT for upwardly mobile, proactive,
"equalist" escalatory progress or even Utopianism. * FLANDERS character in SIMPSONS > "THEY TOLD ME SATAN/LUCIFER WAS PRETTY". THOMAS JEFFERSON? > "DEMOCRACY IS THE WORST FORM OF GOVERNMENT IN THE WORLD, EXCEPT FOR ALL THE OTHERS".
IF THE UNITED STATES is to win in Iraq, it needs an honest and objective picture of what is happening there. The media and outside experts can provide pieces of this picture, but only the U.S. government has the resources and access to information to offer a comprehensive overview.
But the quarterly report to Congress issued May 30 by the Department of Defense, "Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq," like the weekly reports the State Department issues on Iraq, is profoundly flawed. It does more than simply spin the situation to provide false assurances to lawmakers and the public. It makes basic analytical and statistical mistakes, fails to define key terms, provides undefined and unverifiable survey information and deals with key issues by omission. It deserves an overall grade of F.
The report provides a fundamentally false picture of the political situation in Iraq and of the difficulties ahead. It does not prepare Congress or the American people for the years of effort that will be needed even under "best-case" conditions nor for the risk of far more serious forms of civil conflict. Some of its political reporting is simply incompetent. For example, the report repeatedly states that 77% of the Iraqi population voted in the December 2005 election. Given that the CIA estimates that almost 40% of the population is 14 or younger, there is no conceivable way that 77% of the population could have voted. The report says 12.2 million voters turned out. The CIA estimates Iraq's population is 26.8 million. This means roughly 46% of the population voted.
The far more serious problem, however, is the spin the report puts on the entire Iraqi political process. Political participation surely rose. But that wasn't because of acceptance of the new government or an embrace of a democratic political process; it reflected a steady sharpening of sectarian divisions, as Sunnis tried to make up for their decision to boycott earlier elections.
The report touts a "true unity government with broad-based buy-in from major electoral lists and all of Iraq's communities." But its own data tell a different story. The one largely secular party won only 9% of parliament. The sectarian Shiite party, the United Iraqi Alliance, got 47%. The equally sectarian Sunni Iraqi Accordance Front got 16%, and the Kurdish Coalition got 19%. That hardly adds up to "unity."
The five-month delay in forming a government after the elections, the failure to appoint ministers of defense or interior and the fact that former Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari relinquished his post only after strong pressure from the United States and from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani are signs that progress is likely to be slow in the future as well. Sectarian conflict has become almost as serious a threat as the insurgency.
It is scarcely reassuring to be told by the Defense Department that the February attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra marked a defeat for the insurgents and Islamic extremists because it did not instantly lead to all-out civil war. It is hard to think of a worse definition of victory.
THE ECONOMIC section of the report contains useful data and reflects some real progress in the Iraqi financial sector. However, its analysis is flawed to the point of being actively misleading. No meaningful assessment is provided of the successes and failures of the U.S. aid effort, and no mention is made of the massive corruption and mismanagement of U.S. aid discovered by the special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction.
Nor is there meaningful analysis of oil developments, budget and revenue problems or future needs for aid. More than $30 billion in U.S. funds and nearly $35 billion in Iraqi money is involved, yet there is a serious risk that the Bush administration will do more than omit the inspector general's report. In fact, some State Department officials and Republicans in Congress are trying to put the inspector general out of business.
The report's handling of the key issue of Iraqi unemployment is symptomatic of the victory of spin over content. The report quotes vague national figures of 18% unemployment and states that other estimates range between 25% and 40%. By saying that unemployment and poverty "remain concerns" but that there are "substantial difficulties in measuring them accurately," it glosses over one of the most destabilizing aspects of Iraq. It ignores the failure of the aid program to create real jobs, especially for young men in areas of high crime and insurgency. Unemployment is not a casual macroeconomic factoid; it is central to bringing stability and security and to defeating the insurgency.
The Defense Department's reporting on the Iraqi police forces simply cannot be trusted. Death squads rampage in police uniforms, but there is only passing mention of staff problems, corruption, sectarian tensions or horrific prison abuses. There is no meaningful analysis of problems so severe that the U.S. has called for a "year of the police" and Iraq's new prime minister, Nouri Maliki, is considering reorganizing the entire force.
The United States is making real progress in some aspects of building the Iraqi regular military. Yet there is still a tendency to promise too much, too soon, to understate the risk and the threat, and to disguise the fact that the U.S. must be ready to support Iraq at least through 2008 and probably through 2010.
The U.S. cannot afford to repeat the mistakes it made in Vietnam. Among them was dangerous self-delusion. The strategy President Bush is pursuing in Iraq is high risk. If it is to have any chance of success, it will require bipartisan persistence and sustained American effort. This requires trust, and trust cannot be built without integrity. That means credible reporting.
The American people and Congress need an honest portrayal of what is happening, not half-truths by omission and spin.
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
06/05/2006 01:23 ||
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#1
Idiot. Population votes is only for those registered and able to vote.
#2
But, but Anthony holds the Saudi Super-Retirement-Fund Chair at the Middle East Wanky-wank Studies Institute! He predicted all manner of things prior to the Iraq War! He was wrong about every single one of them, but he's an expert! Hey, he used to hang with Peter Jennings, man. I used to marvel at all those grand confident statements - backed up with those nifty large-scale 3D stage maps! Peter nodded sagely when Tony spoke. Most of Amrican probably nodded right along with Peter. And promptly forgot all those soon-to-be-disproven predictions. That's the way of the Expert Business. Nuff said, I think! Tony's da Man!
#3
Cordesman has written a lot worse stuff than this. Unlike, say, John Kerry, he sounds like he WANTS to win. Maybe I'm soft on him because he's a first-rate reviewer of audio equipment.
#4
IF THE UNITED STATES is to win in Japan, it needs an honest and objective picture of what is happening on Guadacanal. The media and outside experts can provide pieces of this picture, but only the U.S. government has the resources and access to information to offer a comprehensive overview.
Lessee - did we have a comprehensive overview in 1942? But we won that one, didn't we?
Posted by: Bobby ||
06/05/2006 16:52 Comments ||
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Even in "good wars" things go horribly wrong. The following quotations from "Naples '44," by the late Norman Lewis (perhaps the greatest English travel writer of the past century), are instructive. Lewis was stationed in Naples following Italy's liberation from the Nazis, and he kept a diary:
"What we saw was ineptitude and cowardice spreading down from the command, and this resulted in chaos . . .
"I saw an ugly sight: a British officer interrogating a civilian, and repeatedly hitting him about the head with the chair; treatment which the [civilian], his face a mask of blood, suffered with stoicism. At the end of the interrogation, which had not been considered successful, the officer called on a private and asked him in a pleasant, conversational sort of manner, 'Would you like to take this man away, and shoot him?' The private's reply was to spit on his hands, and say, 'I don't mind if I do, sir.'
"I received confirmation . . . that American combat units were ordered by their officers to beat to death [those] who attempted to surrender to them. These men seem very naive and childlike, but some of them are beginning to question the ethics of this order.
"We liberated them from the Fascist Monster. And what is the prize? The rebirth of democracy. The glorious prospect of being able one day to choose their rulers from a list of powerful men, most of whose corruptions are generally known and accepted with weary resignation. The days of Mussolini must seem like a lost paradise compared to us."
If Lewis's account were the only surviving document from World War II, we might assume that allied nation-building ended in catastrophe. We would wonder why a morally outraged peace movement didn't stop our troops from carrying out their failed and brutal campaigns.
Sixty years later and caught up in another war, we are confronted by the massacre in Haditha. And we are also caught up in the anguish of another generation of young men and women asked to kill but to keep killing within "civilized" bounds, to take insults, be fired upon by men hiding behind women and children, yet not respond in kind.
To most readers this is an academic question of morality, or I-told-you-so politics. To those of us with loved ones in the military, the allegations of an atrocity committed by U.S. Marines in Haditha are personal.
All our troops confront the tortured "morality" of war. My son wrote this from his first combat tour in Afghanistan as a Marine intelligence noncom: "Date: 9/25/03 8:27:01 PM Dear Mom and Dad: I have learned that the right thing and the necessary thing are not synonymous, rarely are they even in the same ballpark. It's very depressing to see the results of some necessary actions, it's never pure, and there is no purity here . . .
"People ignore what they cannot see. They just don't want to know. The truth is too ugly and vicious to comprehend . . .
"In a natural state a human will kill, and kill not always for necessity, but for convenience as well. The only way that I know I am still me is that I hate that fact; I hate it more than anything I have ever known."
I think Lewis would have understood my son's distress. Perhaps he would have also understood my tears when confronting a son's loss of innocence. Yet I am proud my son volunteered, and of his two tours in Afghanistan and his mission in Iraq. And he is glad he served his country. I wish all Americans had a gut connection to the troops so they would know that people like my son don't kill civilians and that they anguish over the vicissitudes of war. And I also wish more people read books like "Naples '44" to give them some sense of perspective when terrible things do happen in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Judging by Lewis's diary -- and many other accounts -- the so-called Greatest Generation of World War II was often badly led and worse-behaved, and was certainly less merciful than our present-day soldiers and their leaders. We haven't carpet-bombed Baghdad or nuked Fallujah to spare the lives of our troops. Yet most Americans are glad we forced Italy, Germany and Japan to become democracies, however brutal our means.
The flag-waving boosters of our current war and their critics all seem to forget that war really is hell. Proponents sweep the inconvenient dreadfulness under the carpet (no photographs of coffins, please) while opponents are shocked, just shocked, at the nastiness. All sides seem to forget that there are no good wars, only morally ambiguous conflicts that lead to better or worse outcomes.
In this war, we do not have enough political leaders and opinion-makers receiving soul-searing letters from their children. Their sons and daughters are notably absent from our military. That's too bad.
A personal connection to our wars might discourage the sort of glib hubris that leads the media to trumpet events such as the Haditha killings without putting them in the context of the everyday heroism that is the norm, or in the context of history. And a personal connection to our military by our political leaders would give them a stake in our troops' welfare and what we are asking them to do.
It's time for the critics of our military to also earn a little moral authority by volunteering themselves or encouraging their children to do so. Anything less is nothing more than arm's-length moralizing.
Frank Schaeffer is co-author of "AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from the Military and How it Hurts Our Country."
He also wrote "Keeping Faith A Father-Son Story about Love and the United States Marines", which Bobby recommends
Posted by: Bobby ||
06/05/2006 14:10 ||
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#1
I am going to horribly over-generalize here; please forgive.
The 'elite' young people (children of wealth and power) do not serve in the military. Subconciously they feel guilty about it (as about everything else - the side effect of not EARNING self-esteem is lack of true self-esteem). In order to reationalize away that guilt they condemn the military and all its concerns as wrong, unworthy, evil, etc., and work to 'prove' they are right. Pretty much the same thing goes on in Western Europe as well.
One other major factor in this situation is the small family size - the smallest families belong to the elitest elites. With all the eggs in one or two baskets the parents are forced to be very protective and focussed on those few offspring, who then naturally become very focussed on themselves. Another unnatural situation, more guilt, more rationalization.
Goodbye western civilization, hello Islam.
#2
Sorry, Glenmore, but your belief that the children of the wealthy or elite do not serve is a fallacy or misnomer. Many do serve, and serfve well or nobly, but in my experience serve often without revealing their family backgrounds. And even for those that do overtly reveal their family backgrounds, their fellow soldiers do not care or are not concerned about it. What matters is their ability and performance as a soldier, not daddy's or grandad's trust fund(s) in his or her name. And, truth be told, in all Western and world military history, it is the "high-born" andor well-educated veteran, officer or enlisted class, that are often in the forefront or the catalyst for societal or national reform, political-economic change, or tech(s) innovation. One of the tragic things about the French Revolution is how many pro-Reform, Pro-Parlimentarian/Proletariat, neutralist or anti-Monarchy noblepersons were wilfully beheaded by the revolutionaries and Jacobins just for being what they are, NOT BECUZ THEY COMMITTED ANY CRIMES.
#3
People forget that War is Hell alot of bad things come with war, as I was saying in earlier post the longer this war goes the more brutal it will get.
People who follow the news frequently enough here in Baghdad know that a big security operation is coming and hearing several tough statements from Iraq's PM Maliki makes one anticipate this operation to be coming sooner rather than later and that it's going to deal with both wings of violence in Baghdad; the al-Qaeda terrorism (and allied local Sunni insurgency) and the out-of-control armed Shia militias.
So, any delay in appointing ministers in the three security-related posts largely serves the immediate interests of the troublemakers of all backgrounds because it also means the anticipated large-scale operation will have to be delayed as a result.
It is true that these three ministries are of great importance and thus the selection of people to fill these posts for four whole years must be made with utmost care but what I find difficult to understand is how making this choice could this take this long?
In my opinion, it is quite possible that there are parties within one or more of the political blocs that are trying to make this process take forever; of course it can't take forever but more like to delay it to win as much time as possible to delay military action against armed groups some of those parties are affiliated with; time they need to prepare themselves for the imminent confrontation or, to even succeed in appointing ministers that are inclined to impede such an operation.
Posted by: DanNY ||
06/05/2006 07:16 ||
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Do we really need social research to condemn Islamofacism?
By Rondi Adamson
TORONTO In the months following 9/11, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said that rather than constantly ask ourselves, "Why do they hate us?", we should instead ask, "Why don't they see us for who we really are?"
I thought about that following the arrests of 17 Canadian terror suspects last weekend. Most were citizens of Canada, born and bred, or residents. The police who announced the dragnet were careful to say that the young males did not represent any specific ethnocultural group - though all are Muslim.
Toronto's mayor, David Miller, after commending the excellent work of Canada's security forces, wondered aloud why young people might get involved in terrorist activities. We need "strategies to try to prevent that from happening again," he said. His earnestness awed me. Can he truly believe there is some "thing" Canadians can do (hold a "Hands Across Canada" event?) to prevent this kind of occurrence?
Canada is not France. Canada's Muslim population is not marginalized out of fear and contempt, not left alone to manage its own affairs. Even though a Toronto mosque had its windows smashed following the arrests, that sort of thuggery and stupidity is not systemic or common. Canada's Muslims are not prevented from attending good schools or holding high-powered jobs. Nor are they, for the most part, unwilling or unable to fit in peacefully and productively. So the mayor's concern was misplaced. His comment should have been something along the lines of, "I wonder what Canada's Muslim leaders/moderate Muslim citizens can do to prevent this kind of thing in future?"
In countries like Canada, or England, or Spain, where citizens have been shocked by the news of home-grown cells, I believe more needs to be asked of Muslim religious and community leaders. Western Muslims are a powerful potential ally in the broader "war on terror." It is true that most Muslims are not terrorists. But we need Muslims themselves to admit that most of the terrorists who threaten us are Muslim.
Aly Hindy, a high-profile imam in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough, called the arrests "an attack on the Muslim community." He went on to say that, "We are abusing our boys for the sake of pleasing George Bush." Rather than speaking out against extremism, or entertaining the notion that perhaps his country's security forces know what they're doing, Hindy called the charges against the men "home-grown baloney."
Even moderate Canadian Muslim groups, willing to show faith in Canada's justice system, are mitigating their statements. The Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) praised the work of Canada's spy agency and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. But then they scolded the Canadian government for not funding "academic research to diagnose this serious social problem and provide scientific solutions to it." A scientific solution to Islamofascism? Bring it on.
The group also chastised Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper for portraying events "as a battle between 'us' and 'them.' " Following the arrests, Mr. Harper stated that "we are a target because of who we are. And how we live." One wonders - do the members of the CIC not consider themselves part of the "we" Harper referred to, when he spoke of Canadians? If so, that is indeed revealing.
The Muslim Canadian Congress fared only a tad bit better. They praised the police, and expressed dismay that members of their community might be guilty as charged. And then they managed to blame President Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and even Harper for the fact that any such terror cells might exist. So far, only the Council on American-Islamic Relations Canada (CAIR-CAN) has managed to issue a condemnation of terror, and praise of the police, without tacking on a "but," a "Bush," or a "Canadian troops in Afghanistan."
I was happily surprised at CAIR-CAN's press release. I shouldn't have been. We must expect that Western Muslims will wholeheartedly condemn Islamofascism, without any conditions placed on that condemnation. Without that, we may reach a point of divisions too deep to mend.
Rondi Adamson is an award-winning Canadian journalist.
Posted by: john ||
06/05/2006 18:37 ||
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#1
He assumes the "moderates" don't also support the idea of jihad.
"Moderate western muslims" will condemn Danish cartoonists and claim Islam has been insulted.
They will not protest the activities of Osama bin Laden, call for his death or claim he insults islam.
Fatwa against cartoonists.. none against Osama.
Moderate indeed...
Posted by: john ||
06/05/2006 18:50 Comments ||
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OK. Blogs like this look great and are starting to draw a lot of people away from the liberal MSM. So much so that many people are now saying they ignore MSM and get their news from the "internet".
But when are blogs really going to start hurting MSM? When are blogs that are successfull like this one and many others going to start going after MSM advertisers? Where their REAL bread and butter comes from?
#1
I truly have no idea about all that "stategic angle", I'll let that to people more informed and well-thought than me.
All I know is that msm are a thing of the past for me (well, I still watch teevee the morning), and that the internet, mostly blogs (but also jewish media, free-market, conservative or rightwing websites or forum), is used for "re-information", IE bypassing the msm bias, and trying to find something perhaps not truly "objective" (as I like my websurfing partisan), but which I deem as much more faithful to the conclusions I've come to on my own.
#2
What I ment by going after their advertisers, was to find a way to lure that money away from MSM to blogs.
I think there needs to be a confederation of blogs that will offer advertisers a good price compared to MSM and all members of that confederation will allow a small page space on one side for their ad. That space can be a rotating banner that rotates from one ad to another and appears on all the blogs.
What you need now is for a bunch of blogs to select someone to represent them and they get a small cut and send the rest of the ad proceeds to the bloggers.
#3
GE5705, did you have in mind something like this: Conservative Blog Advertising Network
What you don't mention is that there is very little original reporting done by blogs - most blogs comment on stories appearing in old media.
#4
Chuck, I'll dispute that statement. More and more digging out the facts behind the news (sometimes called investigative reporting) is being done by blogs.
#5
The MSM committed suicide. The only reason they aren't dead yet is because there are still lots of people who aren't online yet. While it's true that the blogs feed off the MSM reporting - when the money comes to the blogs, the good reporters will make their money independently on the internet.
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