That's what I think, anyway. Democrats should insist on funding the thrilling conclusion of Our Mideast Adventure on the books, and begin investigating previous spending. But if one-time president George W. Bush wants to keep playing the "not leaving til we complete the mission" idiocy then let him do so, after make him define what it is.
Honestly, the only thing left now that will save Iraqi lives is to getting them out of Iraq. That being beyond our ability, and considering the Bush administration's performance this week in tossing aside even the moderate reality-facing/substantial ass-covering of the ISG, it is time to acknowledge that when it comes to saving American lives a complete and utter repudiation of the still-active neo-neocon approach is essential, or we'll be losing them indefinitely. A party which is still beholden to the 24% (and, incredibly, still dwindling) of the public which refuses to accept reality even after being slammed in the face repeatedly is a party which has not learned its lesson. We have nothing left to sustain our Iraq plan with, assuming there was one. The public--which dozed through things turning bad, then irrevocably bad, signed several blank checks, and was still swayed enough by arguments that Democrats "didn't have a plan", or Republicans "were tougher on defense" to relect a goddam chimpanzee--deserves multiple lessons. The public which does not yet understand that we do not possess a standing army of limitless strength, and which is so clueless about the sustained manpower and matériel drain that last year the public debate was at least partly turned on the idea of John Murtha as a lilly-livered appeaser, has to be shown without chance of contradiction. No better way to do so than to leave Bush playing toy soldier, and leave him holding the bag. Better the continued loss of life which we can at least try to minimize than to wind up with John McCain dreaming up more new sure-fire primary-winning adventures this time next year.
Thursday, December 14
Olio
• Alzheimer's has all but pushed real life to the margins the past several days. I keep trying to write about it, but it's tough to stand outside it all and put it on paper. You imagine you're prepared, and that you see how bad things are, and then they get worse, and once in a while you see through that enough to realize the end result is a life erased.
• I never got around to mentioning the November 30 agreement between Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter and Planned Parenthood of Indiana which has ended Carter's attempt to grab the medical records of girls under fourteen years of age. Carter has agreed not to appeal the Appeals Court ruling that upheld Planned Parenthood's request to stop the seizures, which had been described as a naked political ploy pandering to anti-abortion forces by at least one blogger matching my general description. Whether the November elections had anything to do with Carter's decision is merely obvious. Whether there is truth to the rumor that Carter's Medicare Fraud Unit minions obtained the original batch of records by misrepresenting themselves and their legal status to a selected, part-time clerk will apparently not be litigated now that the suit has been upheld, leaving us no choice but to assume there is.
• Reader quiz: In the following comment:
"The genius of Tom DeLay is now seriously in question," said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University.
Which is the ameliorating factor: "political science professor" or "Southern Methodist University"?
• Army, Marine Corps To Ask for More Troops
By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 13, 2006; A01
...Senior Pentagon officials stress that the U.S. military has ample air and naval power that could respond immediately to possible contingencies in North Korea, Iran or the Taiwan Strait.
"If you had to go fight another war someplace that somebody sprung upon us, you would keep the people who are currently employed doing what they're doing, and you would use the vast part of the U.S. armed forces that is at home station, to include the enormous strength of our Air Force and our Navy, against the new threat," Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a briefing last month.
Got that? Prior to the Iraq disaster Army doctrine called for 400,000 troops in response to an invasion of South Korea by the North. Now it's 1/4 of that (our strategic reserve, once crack regular troops, now composed of actual reservists) and the Air Force. It's actually been that way since around Spring 2004 at the latest. Jesus (and Bush 41) wept.
• I never got around to mentioning the November 30 agreement between Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter and Planned Parenthood of Indiana which has ended Carter's attempt to grab the medical records of girls under fourteen years of age. Carter has agreed not to appeal the Appeals Court ruling that upheld Planned Parenthood's request to stop the seizures, which had been described as a naked political ploy pandering to anti-abortion forces by at least one blogger matching my general description. Whether the November elections had anything to do with Carter's decision is merely obvious. Whether there is truth to the rumor that Carter's Medicare Fraud Unit minions obtained the original batch of records by misrepresenting themselves and their legal status to a selected, part-time clerk will apparently not be litigated now that the suit has been upheld, leaving us no choice but to assume there is.
• Reader quiz: In the following comment:
"The genius of Tom DeLay is now seriously in question," said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University.
Which is the ameliorating factor: "political science professor" or "Southern Methodist University"?
• Army, Marine Corps To Ask for More Troops
By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 13, 2006; A01
...Senior Pentagon officials stress that the U.S. military has ample air and naval power that could respond immediately to possible contingencies in North Korea, Iran or the Taiwan Strait.
"If you had to go fight another war someplace that somebody sprung upon us, you would keep the people who are currently employed doing what they're doing, and you would use the vast part of the U.S. armed forces that is at home station, to include the enormous strength of our Air Force and our Navy, against the new threat," Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a briefing last month.
Got that? Prior to the Iraq disaster Army doctrine called for 400,000 troops in response to an invasion of South Korea by the North. Now it's 1/4 of that (our strategic reserve, once crack regular troops, now composed of actual reservists) and the Air Force. It's actually been that way since around Spring 2004 at the latest. Jesus (and Bush 41) wept.
Wednesday, December 13
Tuesday, December 12
Reasons I Generally Do Not Watch The Network News
#473) The actuaries say I have about twenty-five years left. There is apparently never going to be a guarantee that on any given night during that time Diana Spencer, late ex-wife of a participant in one of the world's most famous and last-remaining human inbreeding experiments, will not be a major story, no matter how dead she remains.
#474) There is an increasing likelihood that the news itself becomes stupider in an ever-downward spiral chasing the broadcasting of the aforementioned news. For example:
a) It was reported last night that George W. Bush, onetime President of the United States, is concerned about his legacy, and told someone or other that he saw himself as a latter-day Truman, unappreciated but finally justified fifty years hence.
1) This missed the point--which is only to be expected--that that isn't really what happened with Truman's reputation, but instead conflates what might be termed, on the one hand, reality with, on the other, the ad campaigns for a couple of Truman biographies, which is the sort of thing George W. Bush is a lot more likely to be familiar with.
2) It also misses the point that Truman had, even by the end of his life, begun to look better if only by comparison with what followed, and if that happens with George W. Bush (I'm not sure it's even theoretically possible) we'll all be dead and mercifully out of the reach of advertising.
b) This concern, coupled with the latest White House tactic of convening a new, ad hoc Iraq Study Group every seventy-two hours or so, led to further speculation about Bush's relationship with his father, known in common parlance as "Bush 41" the way that Spencer dame is known as "Princess Diana". [Is that just me? Doesn't the boarding-school-locker-room towel-snapping faux conviviality of "41" and "43" make one want to stick one's finger as far down one's throat as it will go? It's a constant reminder, at one and the same time, of the depths to which the public discourse has sunk into sitcom blather and of the fact that these two Bozos of Brahmatude are on our Permanent Record whether we personally deserve them or no, smothered in the rancid gravy of the attendant knowledge that Barbara Bush's sex life is now part of our national treasure. ]
1) It doesn't seem to strike any of the news hairdos that it may be the oddest, and possibly the saddest thing ever, at least since the invention of the vacuum tube, that the President of the United States can be spoken about--with as much seriousness as can be mustered in this comic age--in pop-psychological clinical terms which were, prior to his ascent to the national stage, the exclusive province of early adolescence. To my knowledge, "He's trying to outdo his father" has never before been uttered to explain the actions of anyone old enough to have a driver's license.
2) Which made me wonder, however briefly and insincerely, just what it might be like for the theoretical mentally-balanced wingnut who'd voted for the guy twice and now learns that on top of everything going to hell it has happened, basically, because his boy has the testicles of a hamster.
#474) There is an increasing likelihood that the news itself becomes stupider in an ever-downward spiral chasing the broadcasting of the aforementioned news. For example:
a) It was reported last night that George W. Bush, onetime President of the United States, is concerned about his legacy, and told someone or other that he saw himself as a latter-day Truman, unappreciated but finally justified fifty years hence.
1) This missed the point--which is only to be expected--that that isn't really what happened with Truman's reputation, but instead conflates what might be termed, on the one hand, reality with, on the other, the ad campaigns for a couple of Truman biographies, which is the sort of thing George W. Bush is a lot more likely to be familiar with.
2) It also misses the point that Truman had, even by the end of his life, begun to look better if only by comparison with what followed, and if that happens with George W. Bush (I'm not sure it's even theoretically possible) we'll all be dead and mercifully out of the reach of advertising.
b) This concern, coupled with the latest White House tactic of convening a new, ad hoc Iraq Study Group every seventy-two hours or so, led to further speculation about Bush's relationship with his father, known in common parlance as "Bush 41" the way that Spencer dame is known as "Princess Diana". [Is that just me? Doesn't the boarding-school-locker-room towel-snapping faux conviviality of "41" and "43" make one want to stick one's finger as far down one's throat as it will go? It's a constant reminder, at one and the same time, of the depths to which the public discourse has sunk into sitcom blather and of the fact that these two Bozos of Brahmatude are on our Permanent Record whether we personally deserve them or no, smothered in the rancid gravy of the attendant knowledge that Barbara Bush's sex life is now part of our national treasure. ]
1) It doesn't seem to strike any of the news hairdos that it may be the oddest, and possibly the saddest thing ever, at least since the invention of the vacuum tube, that the President of the United States can be spoken about--with as much seriousness as can be mustered in this comic age--in pop-psychological clinical terms which were, prior to his ascent to the national stage, the exclusive province of early adolescence. To my knowledge, "He's trying to outdo his father" has never before been uttered to explain the actions of anyone old enough to have a driver's license.
2) Which made me wonder, however briefly and insincerely, just what it might be like for the theoretical mentally-balanced wingnut who'd voted for the guy twice and now learns that on top of everything going to hell it has happened, basically, because his boy has the testicles of a hamster.
Monday, December 11
Sorry, You're Caller Number Six, But Thanks For Playing Our Game
ISG must stand for, uh, Inane Strategy Guesswork
December 10, 2006
BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist
Well, the ISG -- the Illustrious Seniors' Group...
Okay, uh, like, enough with the Depends jokes, already; it already sounds like we've stayed at Open Mike Night an hour and a half too long. The oldest member, William Perry, is about the same age Reagan was when he left the presidency, and Don Rumsfeld, the guy who was in charge of Iraq until recently (in case you'd forgotten) is at roughly the median age for the group, and you've still got dirt on your pantsleg from showing those two your appreciation.
December 10, 2006
BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist
Well, the ISG -- the Illustrious Seniors' Group...
Okay, uh, like, enough with the Depends jokes, already; it already sounds like we've stayed at Open Mike Night an hour and a half too long. The oldest member, William Perry, is about the same age Reagan was when he left the presidency, and Don Rumsfeld, the guy who was in charge of Iraq until recently (in case you'd forgotten) is at roughly the median age for the group, and you've still got dirt on your pantsleg from showing those two your appreciation.
Now Is Not The Time To Be Fixing Blame. Now Is The Time To Lay The Groundwork For Our Future Outrage When It's All Clearly The Democrats' Fault.
David Brooks: "Anybody Wanna Buy a Used Domino Theory?" * New York Times December 10
At one point last week, in the artificial excitement over the release of a report which had been openly and purposely delayed so as not to risk injecting facts into a national election, it looked as if we were going to suffer an infestation of artificial nostalgia for the artificial bipartisanship of our pundit class. I heard on two or three occasions that the report "rejected both sides' argument" or "put the Democrats to the task" or somesuch, but it seems to have died a deserving death. It has to be tough these days on our opinion leaders, drovers of conventional wisdom and shapers of clichés, even when they aren't stuck with Brooks' role of overt "conservative". God knows they loved the war, and the war's backstory: how a plucky political party from the right side of the tracks picked itself up and proved that Vietnam was just a bad dream and they were the world's defenders of Right and True and Good and Plenty. So much so that nobody seems to have come up with an exit strategy for all the limning and the hymn-singing, either.
Brooks, if I recall correctly, tucked a brief mention into one of his columns, something along the lines that he was being forced to rethink the whole Iraq thing. That was roughly a year after everything had turned irrevocably to shit, meaning it was about six months after the vanguard of Beltway insiders had figured out that Something Was Up. I don't recall that he ever delivered. It's possible it happened sometime after the Times' Cone of Silence descended and I missed it, but for the most part Brooks has gone blithely forward since that point excusing support of the war as something of a wrong turn taken at an unfamiliar intersection in a bad downpour, a decision that delayed getting to grandma's by forty minutes or so.
Really, it's impossible for me to understand how this:
can be taken as anything other than an insult to the intelligence, even of the supposed middle-dwelling, middle-thinking, open-minded non-partisans of the mass media and our Exoburbs. It's not that Brooks couldn't possibly be right--blind pigs and truffles, after all--it's that if the pig, on pretext of finding you that rare, earthy, eukaryotic ambrosia, had previously led you under the wheels of a fucking bus well, you'd have barbecued him three years back.
Of course Brooks makes no mention of how we got to this point, anymore than he acknowledges that this Domino Theory is the exact opposite of the one we were promised four years ago. Whether it has penetrated anywhere near the skull of Mr. Brooks that we will not be able to keep troops in Iraq indefinitely**, whatever the circumstances, remains unclear. But we do know that we are now being asked to accept the idea that it is the removal of those troops--not the ideas that sent them there on an ill-defined mission they were in no way able to complete, nor the men who allowed them to stay, or to return for three or four tours, who fractured the army--it's the removal of those troops which will be the cause of whatever disaster unfolds in Iraq. Take it from the people who got us into it in the first place.
* Not the actual title, but it should be.
** There's some Superman tie-in commercial out there I've paid little attention to, but it repeats a common comic-book idiocy as Superman catches a flying train or a falling building or something and stands there holding it up. In reality it'd fall apart, and it'd crush him like an ant, no matter how strong he was. This is a precise model for the Go Big and Go Long fantasies.
In fall 2007, the United States began to withdraw troops from Iraq, and so began the Second Thirty Years' War. This war was a bewildering array of small and vast conflicts, which flared and receded and flared again across the entire Middle East, but which were joined by a common theme.
At one point last week, in the artificial excitement over the release of a report which had been openly and purposely delayed so as not to risk injecting facts into a national election, it looked as if we were going to suffer an infestation of artificial nostalgia for the artificial bipartisanship of our pundit class. I heard on two or three occasions that the report "rejected both sides' argument" or "put the Democrats to the task" or somesuch, but it seems to have died a deserving death. It has to be tough these days on our opinion leaders, drovers of conventional wisdom and shapers of clichés, even when they aren't stuck with Brooks' role of overt "conservative". God knows they loved the war, and the war's backstory: how a plucky political party from the right side of the tracks picked itself up and proved that Vietnam was just a bad dream and they were the world's defenders of Right and True and Good and Plenty. So much so that nobody seems to have come up with an exit strategy for all the limning and the hymn-singing, either.
Brooks, if I recall correctly, tucked a brief mention into one of his columns, something along the lines that he was being forced to rethink the whole Iraq thing. That was roughly a year after everything had turned irrevocably to shit, meaning it was about six months after the vanguard of Beltway insiders had figured out that Something Was Up. I don't recall that he ever delivered. It's possible it happened sometime after the Times' Cone of Silence descended and I missed it, but for the most part Brooks has gone blithely forward since that point excusing support of the war as something of a wrong turn taken at an unfamiliar intersection in a bad downpour, a decision that delayed getting to grandma's by forty minutes or so.
Really, it's impossible for me to understand how this:
Chaos spread as governments in Lebanon and Jordan collapsed. The Palestinian Authority fell into complete dysfunction as Hamas and Fatah waged a low-boiling civil war. Al Qaeda reveled in the bloodshed and spread it with rapturous fury. The spreading disorder vindicated an observation that the historian Michael Oren had once made: that there are really only three nations in the Muslim Middle East: Iran, Turkey and Egypt. The other nations are make-believe.
can be taken as anything other than an insult to the intelligence, even of the supposed middle-dwelling, middle-thinking, open-minded non-partisans of the mass media and our Exoburbs. It's not that Brooks couldn't possibly be right--blind pigs and truffles, after all--it's that if the pig, on pretext of finding you that rare, earthy, eukaryotic ambrosia, had previously led you under the wheels of a fucking bus well, you'd have barbecued him three years back.
Of course Brooks makes no mention of how we got to this point, anymore than he acknowledges that this Domino Theory is the exact opposite of the one we were promised four years ago. Whether it has penetrated anywhere near the skull of Mr. Brooks that we will not be able to keep troops in Iraq indefinitely**, whatever the circumstances, remains unclear. But we do know that we are now being asked to accept the idea that it is the removal of those troops--not the ideas that sent them there on an ill-defined mission they were in no way able to complete, nor the men who allowed them to stay, or to return for three or four tours, who fractured the army--it's the removal of those troops which will be the cause of whatever disaster unfolds in Iraq. Take it from the people who got us into it in the first place.
* Not the actual title, but it should be.
** There's some Superman tie-in commercial out there I've paid little attention to, but it repeats a common comic-book idiocy as Superman catches a flying train or a falling building or something and stands there holding it up. In reality it'd fall apart, and it'd crush him like an ant, no matter how strong he was. This is a precise model for the Go Big and Go Long fantasies.
Saturday, December 9
Friday, December 8
Happy Birthday
Dmitri Kasterine photo
Samuel Burl Kinison
December 8, 1953--April 10, 1992
"You're five feet away. Give the kid a fuckin' sandwich!"
Those Who Refuse To Learn From History, Teach
Victor Davis Hanson, "Our Pearl Harbor" Townhall, December 7
Lemme say first of all that I resent this. Beyond the intellectual dishonesty of the Pearl Harbor metaphor industry, it's simply disgusting that Hanson uses Pearl Harbor on Pearl Harbor Day as an excuse to jump to Iraq by paragraph three and never look back. It's a pathetic War on Xmas skirmish over crappy consumer nicknacks in the Name of the Lord, except with charred and mangled corpses. Though it is the sort of thing one finds with some frequency among the celebrators of military posturing who come to it later in life, like, say, after they've avoided actually serving themselves.
The men who died that day, and in the days and weeks following, do not deserve to be someone else's GI Joe dolls in a diorama contest. Not on December 7.
Even in the days of shock that followed the WTC/Pentagon attacks, the whole "9/11 Is This Generation's Pearl Harbor" thing rang hollow. We knew, deep down, that 9/11 was the work of a murderous terrorist gang--a large portion of whom were now dead--and not the first blow in a titanic military struggle. Our reality is Hollywood F/X and teevee actioners. We think in scripts. We're connoisseurs of cheap melodrama. We knew the butler didn't do it. The Pearl Harbor business was always an just an opportunistic political argument disguised as history lesson.
[We did, however, tell phone interviewers we thought Saddam Hussein had booked all the flights, but I'd argue that this actually reinforces my point. How does 60% of the public "know" something that isn't true? Not because Dick Cheney told them to--60% of the public does not watch Tim Russert--but because a popular villain had been recast as the story's Mr. Big. It was like using a Gallup poll to cast the next Batman sequel.]
Which brings us back to Hanson, and the current state of Pearl Harbor Metaphor sales: once an excuse for, or a fantasy of, responding to 9/11 with our superpower military abilities, they now must account for why putting those fantasies into practice gave us the vaporous War on Terra and its sadly all-too-real attendant clashes without experiencing anything like the success of WWII. Or much of anything like success, period, for that matter. (This is actually a fairly easy thing to answer at Townhall: we haven't killed enough people.)
There's a weird sort of nostalgia that goes along with reading Hanson. It takes me back to the early days of teevee, when picture tubes would last on the order of two years or so, and then they'd begin doing weird stuff like going all fish-eyed or exhibiting central black holes or something. Hanson's pop scholarship always seems in danger of simply blinking out altogether:
It's just breathtakingly stupid and twice as dishonest. What does a WWII carrier battle have to do with a superpower routing a bunch of mountain guerillas in the poorest nation in Asia, apart from the fact that Hanson now needs to compare timelines? If you made the argument in 2001 that we'd still be fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2006 you got your traitorous ass scoffed off the continent by the likes of Victor Davis Hanson. Now, somehow, it's simple historical perspective. We could have predicted this, except we were busy selling a different set of lies at the time.
Okay, small point of rebuttal anyway: having won the Battle of Midway in June of 1942, we did not have to refight the Battle of Midway on a weekly basis for the next five years and counting. We won at Midway--at a time when we were sending the bulk of our resources to Europe, and which represented the defeat of an enemy which was superior to us in quality and quantity of manpower, matériel, and experience--the way most battles are won: the enemy made more mistakes, and it still turned on luck. If the Japanese of the 40s had had a relative version of the technological advantages we have in Afghanistan today, June 1942 would be remembered for the Battle of St. Louis.
Of the latter: there were certainly extremists who had been charging Roosevelt with all sorts of dastardly deeds from the moment he was elected. They called them "Republicans". So while I would certainly not deny they were charging FDR with inviting the attack on Pearl during the war, I've never read of it. That business came later, at the end of the war, after it was revealed that we had broken the Japanese code. Such speculation is, now, another conspiracy theory cottage industry, but it came about after the war. Dewey famously had that information (from George Marshall) in 1944 but refused to use it. An act of partriotism, they say, since that would have revealed we'd broken the code; but the fact is it would have been scandalous and self-defeating as well. It didn't win him the Election of '48, either.
As for the former, yes, indeed. Pearl Harbor was investigated twice during the war--the first time just a couple weeks after the attack--and more than a dozen times after. Compare the twelve months and mounting political pressure from the victims' families it too to get the Bush administration to sign off on a blue-ribbon 9/11 panel. Not to mention the attendant cries of "treason!"
Yeah, I thought there might be.
It's impossible to choose just one answer to this. The most obvious, perhaps, is that we chose to invade actual nation states and fight conventional wars with what passed for their armies. So saying now that we aren't fighting conventional armies just sorta begs the question of what it is we think we've been doing. It's not as if this little difficulty isn't inherent in the very concept of a War on Terra--something you might expect a professional war buff to have picked up on--and, again, it isn't as if people weren't saying this in 2001, only to be shouted down.
On a positive note, though, we are winning the War of Excuses. Big, big lead on that one.
Excuses do not turn battlefield losses into victories, but excuses did work to mitigate our defeat in Vietnam in the glorious domestic public relations campaigns that followed, so we get "Today's terrorist blend[s] in with civilians" (yesterday's didn't?), a reenactment of the old VC argument with new costumes. And we remind the Professor, once again, that the people who prosecuted the war told the public three years ago that these amounted to a few Dead Enders.
As I've said before, Hanson's job now seems to be rewriting select moments in military history as Moral Tales for Young Children. There's no epistemological justification for acting as if guerilla warfare was invented four years ago, or acting as if it's dashed unsporting of the enemy not to show up in infantry squares like Friedrich the Great.
Not surprisingly, Hanson's frequently genocidal, but uniformly stateside and cozy commenters see in this sad little exercise in wish fulfillment and counting on one's fingers a second coming of Clausewitz. It is no doubt impossible to convince any of them there's a distinction between war and video gaming, for that matter, between war and commercials for video games. But we suspect that Professor Hanson himself is actually aware of the distinction between global war taking place in a half-dozen theatres of operation, and a five-year and counting slog which has fractured the most powerful army on earth and accomplished less than nothing. We know that he has no use for war coverage, unless it be uniformly positive, but let us at least acknowledge that the Homefront public of the 1940s knew its men were still at war in 1944, if not exactly where. So let's perform our own comparison: had WWII been a one-nation battlefield, like Iraq or Afghanistan today, how long do you suppose the public would have remained supportive of Mark Clark's dithering incompetence in Italy? Four years?
Lemme say first of all that I resent this. Beyond the intellectual dishonesty of the Pearl Harbor metaphor industry, it's simply disgusting that Hanson uses Pearl Harbor on Pearl Harbor Day as an excuse to jump to Iraq by paragraph three and never look back. It's a pathetic War on Xmas skirmish over crappy consumer nicknacks in the Name of the Lord, except with charred and mangled corpses. Though it is the sort of thing one finds with some frequency among the celebrators of military posturing who come to it later in life, like, say, after they've avoided actually serving themselves.
The men who died that day, and in the days and weeks following, do not deserve to be someone else's GI Joe dolls in a diorama contest. Not on December 7.
Even in the days of shock that followed the WTC/Pentagon attacks, the whole "9/11 Is This Generation's Pearl Harbor" thing rang hollow. We knew, deep down, that 9/11 was the work of a murderous terrorist gang--a large portion of whom were now dead--and not the first blow in a titanic military struggle. Our reality is Hollywood F/X and teevee actioners. We think in scripts. We're connoisseurs of cheap melodrama. We knew the butler didn't do it. The Pearl Harbor business was always an just an opportunistic political argument disguised as history lesson.
[We did, however, tell phone interviewers we thought Saddam Hussein had booked all the flights, but I'd argue that this actually reinforces my point. How does 60% of the public "know" something that isn't true? Not because Dick Cheney told them to--60% of the public does not watch Tim Russert--but because a popular villain had been recast as the story's Mr. Big. It was like using a Gallup poll to cast the next Batman sequel.]
Which brings us back to Hanson, and the current state of Pearl Harbor Metaphor sales: once an excuse for, or a fantasy of, responding to 9/11 with our superpower military abilities, they now must account for why putting those fantasies into practice gave us the vaporous War on Terra and its sadly all-too-real attendant clashes without experiencing anything like the success of WWII. Or much of anything like success, period, for that matter. (This is actually a fairly easy thing to answer at Townhall: we haven't killed enough people.)
There's a weird sort of nostalgia that goes along with reading Hanson. It takes me back to the early days of teevee, when picture tubes would last on the order of two years or so, and then they'd begin doing weird stuff like going all fish-eyed or exhibiting central black holes or something. Hanson's pop scholarship always seems in danger of simply blinking out altogether:
It’s been five years since Sept. 11. After such a terrible provocation, why can’t we bring the ongoing “global war on terror” — whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere — to a close as our forefathers fighting World War II could?
Is our generation less competent?
Not really. The United States routed the Taliban from Afghanistan by early December 2001. America’s first clear-cut victory against the Japanese, at Midway, came six months after Pearl Harbor.
It's just breathtakingly stupid and twice as dishonest. What does a WWII carrier battle have to do with a superpower routing a bunch of mountain guerillas in the poorest nation in Asia, apart from the fact that Hanson now needs to compare timelines? If you made the argument in 2001 that we'd still be fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2006 you got your traitorous ass scoffed off the continent by the likes of Victor Davis Hanson. Now, somehow, it's simple historical perspective. We could have predicted this, except we were busy selling a different set of lies at the time.
Okay, small point of rebuttal anyway: having won the Battle of Midway in June of 1942, we did not have to refight the Battle of Midway on a weekly basis for the next five years and counting. We won at Midway--at a time when we were sending the bulk of our resources to Europe, and which represented the defeat of an enemy which was superior to us in quality and quantity of manpower, matériel, and experience--the way most battles are won: the enemy made more mistakes, and it still turned on luck. If the Japanese of the 40s had had a relative version of the technological advantages we have in Afghanistan today, June 1942 would be remembered for the Battle of St. Louis.
Do we lack the unity of the past?
Perhaps. But we should at least remember that after Pearl Harbor, a national furor immediately arose over the intelligence failure that had allowed an enormous Japanese fleet to approach the Hawaiian Islands undetected. Extremists went further — clamoring that the Roosevelt administration had deliberately lowered our guard as part of a conspiracy to pave the way for America’s entrance into the war.
Of the latter: there were certainly extremists who had been charging Roosevelt with all sorts of dastardly deeds from the moment he was elected. They called them "Republicans". So while I would certainly not deny they were charging FDR with inviting the attack on Pearl during the war, I've never read of it. That business came later, at the end of the war, after it was revealed that we had broken the Japanese code. Such speculation is, now, another conspiracy theory cottage industry, but it came about after the war. Dewey famously had that information (from George Marshall) in 1944 but refused to use it. An act of partriotism, they say, since that would have revealed we'd broken the code; but the fact is it would have been scandalous and self-defeating as well. It didn't win him the Election of '48, either.
As for the former, yes, indeed. Pearl Harbor was investigated twice during the war--the first time just a couple weeks after the attack--and more than a dozen times after. Compare the twelve months and mounting political pressure from the victims' families it too to get the Bush administration to sign off on a blue-ribbon 9/11 panel. Not to mention the attendant cries of "treason!"
But there are significant differences between the “global war on terror” and World War II that do explain why victory is taking so much longer this time.
Yeah, I thought there might be.
The most obvious is that, against Japan and Germany, we faced easily identifiable nation states with conventional militaries. Today’s terrorists blend in with civilians, and it’s hard to tie them to their patron governments or enablers in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Pakistan, who all deny any culpability. We also tread carefully in an age of ubiquitous frightening weapons, when any war at any time might without much warning bring in a nuclear, non-democratic belligerent.
It's impossible to choose just one answer to this. The most obvious, perhaps, is that we chose to invade actual nation states and fight conventional wars with what passed for their armies. So saying now that we aren't fighting conventional armies just sorta begs the question of what it is we think we've been doing. It's not as if this little difficulty isn't inherent in the very concept of a War on Terra--something you might expect a professional war buff to have picked up on--and, again, it isn't as if people weren't saying this in 2001, only to be shouted down.
On a positive note, though, we are winning the War of Excuses. Big, big lead on that one.
Excuses do not turn battlefield losses into victories, but excuses did work to mitigate our defeat in Vietnam in the glorious domestic public relations campaigns that followed, so we get "Today's terrorist blend[s] in with civilians" (yesterday's didn't?), a reenactment of the old VC argument with new costumes. And we remind the Professor, once again, that the people who prosecuted the war told the public three years ago that these amounted to a few Dead Enders.
As I've said before, Hanson's job now seems to be rewriting select moments in military history as Moral Tales for Young Children. There's no epistemological justification for acting as if guerilla warfare was invented four years ago, or acting as if it's dashed unsporting of the enemy not to show up in infantry squares like Friedrich the Great.
Not surprisingly, Hanson's frequently genocidal, but uniformly stateside and cozy commenters see in this sad little exercise in wish fulfillment and counting on one's fingers a second coming of Clausewitz. It is no doubt impossible to convince any of them there's a distinction between war and video gaming, for that matter, between war and commercials for video games. But we suspect that Professor Hanson himself is actually aware of the distinction between global war taking place in a half-dozen theatres of operation, and a five-year and counting slog which has fractured the most powerful army on earth and accomplished less than nothing. We know that he has no use for war coverage, unless it be uniformly positive, but let us at least acknowledge that the Homefront public of the 1940s knew its men were still at war in 1944, if not exactly where. So let's perform our own comparison: had WWII been a one-nation battlefield, like Iraq or Afghanistan today, how long do you suppose the public would have remained supportive of Mark Clark's dithering incompetence in Italy? Four years?
Thursday, December 7
Okay, That Much Is Settled: They Are That Stupid, And They're Liars
Neocons by Nigel Parry for Vanity Fair:
Five Gummos in search of a brother with talent.
David Rose's piece in the January Vanity Fair is well worth the read, and provides us with much to talk about, the first on that list being, "If the Democrats do not haul these guys and every other Republican thug associated with the Bush Crime family in front of committees, under oath, and squeeze them until their eyeballs bleed there is no hope left for this country."
For now I'll just leave you with this. David Frum:
"I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that, although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."
Statement of Senator Feingold
On the Iraq Study Group Report
December 6, 2006
“Unfortunately, the Iraq Study Group report does too little to change the flawed mind-set that led to the misguided war in Iraq. Maybe there are still people in Washington who need a study group to tell them that the policy in Iraq isn’t working, but the American people are way ahead of this report.
While the report has regenerated a few good ideas, it doesn’t adequately put Iraq in the context of a broader national security strategy. We need an Iraq policy that is guided by our top national security priority – defeating the terrorist network that attacked us on 9/11 and its allies. We can’t continue to just look at Iraq in isolation. Unless we set a serious timetable for redeploying our troops from Iraq, we will be unable to effectively address these global threats. In the end, this report is a regrettable example of ‘official Washington’ missing the point.”
On Olbermann:
"The fact is this commission was composed apparently entirely of people who did not have the judgment to oppose this Iraq war in the first place, and did not have the judgment to realize it was not a wise move in the fight against terrorism. So that's who is doing this report. Then I looked at the list of who testified before them. There is virtually no one who opposed the war in the first place. Virtually no one who has been really calling for a different strategy that goes for a global approach to the war on terrorism. So this is really a Washington inside job and it shows not in the description of what's happened - that's fairly accurate - but it shows in the recommendations. "
December 6, 2006
“Unfortunately, the Iraq Study Group report does too little to change the flawed mind-set that led to the misguided war in Iraq. Maybe there are still people in Washington who need a study group to tell them that the policy in Iraq isn’t working, but the American people are way ahead of this report.
While the report has regenerated a few good ideas, it doesn’t adequately put Iraq in the context of a broader national security strategy. We need an Iraq policy that is guided by our top national security priority – defeating the terrorist network that attacked us on 9/11 and its allies. We can’t continue to just look at Iraq in isolation. Unless we set a serious timetable for redeploying our troops from Iraq, we will be unable to effectively address these global threats. In the end, this report is a regrettable example of ‘official Washington’ missing the point.”
On Olbermann:
"The fact is this commission was composed apparently entirely of people who did not have the judgment to oppose this Iraq war in the first place, and did not have the judgment to realize it was not a wise move in the fight against terrorism. So that's who is doing this report. Then I looked at the list of who testified before them. There is virtually no one who opposed the war in the first place. Virtually no one who has been really calling for a different strategy that goes for a global approach to the war on terrorism. So this is really a Washington inside job and it shows not in the description of what's happened - that's fairly accurate - but it shows in the recommendations. "
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