In today’s WSJ Opinion Journal, Shelby Steele writes eloquently and forcefully on a subject familiar to regular protein wisdom readers: the dangers of undue (and artificial) deference to Otherness, particularly its tangible effects on protecting the security of the US. From “White Guilt and the Western Past”:
There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.
For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along—if admirably—in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one—including, very likely, the insurgents themselves—believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.
I believe this is true—and I believe that the source of much displeasure with Bush and co. from supporters of the war stems from what they see as fear of appearing too brutal.
But compassionate conservatism, whatever you think of the concept domestically, clearly shouldn’t extend to war—and there are times when the international equivalent of Sherman’s march through the South would, in the long run, save American soldier’s lives and foreshorten the conflict.
I don’t doubt Bush’s belief in the rectitude of this fight. And I understand that in a world of 24/7 news cycles and the proliferation of personal home video —where the opportunity to use images of war’s inevitable carnage as a tool against war itself is often seized upon with relish by those who disagree with a given military action—the President and his administration are in a tough position, trying to balance the war for hearts and minds with the necessity for taking care of business on the ground.
But it is clear that any military action in which the US is involved will be met with protests by those whose disagreement with the US is inveterate. So trying to please them is a losing proposition—and not one that should cost us the life of one additional US soldier.
Similarly, the insurgents and terrorists we are now fighting aren’t any less likely to engage in heinous acts of terror simply because we have shown restraint; in fact, it is possible that just the opposite obtains: specifically, that our restraint, and the terrorists’ understanding of our belief in the need for restraint, actually emboldens them.
Which is why there are times when we really should turn off the “smart” bombs and show our seriousness by putting the world on notice that, when we believe the situation calls for it, we are willing to ignore the inevitable bad press and the howls of protest from human rights groups, and exhibit a show of strength and military professionalism that is politically disinterested and tactically thorough and lethal.
Of course, no one wishes to see innocent civilians die (only the unserious make the claim that those who support what they consider to be a necessary war somehow luxuriate in collateral deaths). But at the same time, from a practical standpoint, there is nothing wrong with fighting a war as if it is a war—and sometimes the only way to disabuse the enemy of the notion that we are constrained by a moral calculus that makes little sense in urban combat situations is to refuse to show the kind of restraint they have come to anticipate and count on.
And why the enemy has come to count on our restraint has to do with a number of factors—most of them social, and nearly all of them tied, in some respect, to a sense of hyperpower guilt and arbitrary “respect” for the culture of Other, which often paralyzes us by giving us the out of refusing to conclude with any certainty that our cause is objectively (or at the very least, contingently) just.
Steele explains it this way:
It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world’s population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West –l ike Germany after the Nazi defeat—lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.
I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but because people stigmatized with moral crimes—here racism and imperialism—lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not.
They struggle, above all else, to dissociate themselves from the past sins they are stigmatized with. When they behave in ways that invoke the memory of those sins, they must labor to prove that they have not relapsed into their group’s former sinfulness. So when America—the greatest embodiment of Western power—goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin of imperialism. Thus, in Iraq we are in two wars, one against an insurgency and another against the past–two fronts, two victories to win, one military, the other a victory of dissociation.
The collapse of white supremacy—and the resulting white guilt—introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization with the evil of the Western past. And this stigmatization is power because it affects the terms of legitimacy for Western nations and for their actions in the world. In Iraq, America is fighting as much for the legitimacy of its war effort as for victory in war. In fact, legitimacy may be the more important goal. If a military victory makes us look like an imperialist nation bent on occupying and raping the resources of a poor brown nation, then victory would mean less because it would have no legitimacy. Europe would scorn. Conversely, if America suffered a military loss in Iraq but in so doing dispelled the imperialist stigma, the loss would be seen as a necessary sacrifice made to restore our nation’s legitimacy. Europe’s halls of internationalism would suddenly open to us.
At the heart of what Steele is saying here is an idea that I have critiqued at length in other contexts (particularly, the formation of identity narratives, and their impact on how we deploy “history” epistemologically). In short, the only way this guilt works is if we come to believe that we are, by virtue of certain cosmetic or superficial or logistic similarities, responsible for the actions of those in the past who were in many other respects “like us”. And this can only come to pass if we internalize certain historical occurrences as a form of cultural “memory”.
But it makes no sense to say we “remember” things that we took no part in, and so it makes no sense to culturally hamstring ourselves over events that we are under no obligation to take ownership of.
Which is not to say it is inappropriate even to acknowledge past national sins (and so be circumspect about letting shameful history repeat itself); rather, it is to say that acknowledging “learned” history is materially different from being told we must “remember” that history—and the difference is not at all trivial1.
Continues Steele:
[…] White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people whose problems—even the tyrannies they live under—were created by the historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must “understand” and pity our enemy even as we fight him. And, though Islamic extremism is one of the most pernicious forms of evil opportunism that has ever existed, we have felt compelled to fight it with an almost managerial minimalism that shows us to be beyond the passions of war—and thus well dissociated from the avariciousness of the white supremacist past.
Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be “good,” in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly desperate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today’s international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort–only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.
Today words like “power” and “victory” are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, “might” can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today’s atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.
[my emphasis]
Which is why it is so essential that we as a culture work to defeat the institutionalized linguistic assumptions that, because they misunderstand signification, allow for both the stigmatization Steele points to and our acceptance of that stigmatization—the very thing that convinces us to accept guilt for the actions of others “like us” in the first place.
Concludes Steele:
America and the broader West are now going through a rather tender era, a time when Western societies have very little defense against the moral accusations that come from their own left wings and from those vast stretches of nonwhite humanity that were once so disregarded.
Europeans are utterly confounded by the swelling Muslim populations in their midst. America has run from its own mounting immigration problem for decades, and even today, after finally taking up the issue, our government seems entirely flummoxed. White guilt is a vacuum of moral authority visited on the present by the shames of the past. In the abstract it seems a slight thing, almost irrelevant, an unconvincing proposition. Yet a society as enormously powerful as America lacks the authority to ask its most brilliant, wealthy and superbly educated minority students to compete freely for college admission with poor whites who lack all these things. Just can’t do it.
Whether the problem is race relations, education, immigration or war, white guilt imposes so much minimalism and restraint that our worst problems tend to linger and deepen. Our leaders work within a double bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a problem—win a war, fix immigration—they lose legitimacy.
To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes problems linger. What but minimalism is left when you are running from stigmatization as a “unilateralist cowboy”? And where is the will to truly regulate the southern border when those who ask for this are slimed as bigots? This is how white guilt defines what is possible in America. You go at a problem until you meet stigmatization, then you retreat into minimalism.
Possibly white guilt’s worst effect is that it does not permit whites—and nonwhites—to appreciate something extraordinary: the fact that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus, but it is simply true. There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant. If there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time, there are millions of whites who only feel goodwill toward minorities.
This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life—absorbed as new history—so that America can once again feel the moral authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems. Then, if we decide to go to war, it can be with enough ferocity to win.
[my emphases]
Precisely correct. As I’ve mentioned here on numerous occasions, the first fight we must win is internally and domestically. And it is a fight for the soul of classical liberalism, which is being undercut (in my estimation) by nearly 40 years of a concerted effort by those whose goal is power and control to relativize meaning and deconstruct, through incoherent linguistic assertions that have unfortunately been widely adopted out of self-satisfied feel-goodism (specifically, an ostensible deference to the Other that allows us to convince ourselves we are “tolerant” and “diverse,” when in fact we have created the conditions to turn those ideas into something approximating their exact opposites).
Taking back the grounds for meaning—and being willing to fight for those grounds against those who try to shame us out of reasserting them—is the first step toward the recovery of our belief in our strong and generous national character. To that end, we should draw a lesson from the charges of Bill Bennett’s “racism”—cast by those who don’t believe Bennett intended to say anything racist, but who insist, rather, that his words themselves were racist (an idea that grants that public perception is the locus of meaning, and that the utterer can be held accountable for the public perception). Such a dismissal of the importance of intent has led, predictably, to a rhetorical condition wherein those who protest the loudest (and can play to our emotions) will have effectively seized control of “history” as it is constructed and disseminated through language.
This is the will to power—and it is only possible in the vaccuum left by the marginalization of a truly coherent interpretative paradigm.
1 As I’ve written elsewhere: “From the standpoint of identity formation, a similar experiential project to the project of self signification (or perception) is promoted. What makes a particular history our history is the charge not that we learn that history but that we remember it. In this sense, “heritage” is based upon “remembering” a past that we’ve never “actually” experienced (e.g. slavery, the Holocaust). “Remembering,” under these conditions, is not experiential, though the mechanism that allows it to function is the belief that it is, indeed, experiential. What differentiates my knowledge of slavery, for instance, from another’s heritage of slaveryâ€â€though neither of us has ever experienced slavery, and neither of us properly “remembers” itâ€â€is the project of turning history (what happened) into memory (what happened to us). Historical fact is refigured as narrativeâ€â€a set of signifiers making up a story (the integrel or supersignâ€â€itself an hypostatization of selective historical events cohered by narrativity). And the project of identity formation hinges upon our willingness to experience these signs rather than to interpret them as representational to make the signs our signs (opposing them to the signs of others) rather than to conceive of the signs as representative of historical events, as having an origin other than our own experiences of either creating or interpreting them. The “meaning” of history, thus, is refigured as experiential; our personal “interpretations” of historical representations are foregrounded, shifting intention away from historical actuality (accident) and re-placing that intention onto the “receiver” of the historical (causal) narrative. Such a project, therefore, allows us to claim ownership of certain
historical narratives. By turning “events” we haven’t witnessed into “experiences” we haven’t
participated in, we have re-signified historical occurrenceâ€â€added to it our own “meaning”; and
by re-signifying history as narrative (representation), we have made history our own, have turned it (or, in most cases, one of a multitude of narratives of it) into our own text, which we
subsequently re-enact or remember (cf. Theories of the performative).
“But what is striking about this project is that to “experience” history by way of “remembering” things we’ve never actually experienced is to claim that something preceding this maneuver allows us to consider that history ours to “remember” in the first place. That “something,” where cultural identity claims (re: “racial” claims) are made is, I’ll argue, the appeal to essentialismâ€â€the appeal not to practices or beliefs or knowledge (all of which anyone can affect ), but rather to blood. In a milieu wherein science suggests that no essential difference exists between blood, it is difficult (given the essentialist claims which underpin any racial construction argument) to justify the promotion of race as a viable project. Race is either an essence or an illusion. Those who believe race to be an essence have no need for a project qualifying race as somehow socially constructed; and those who believe race to be non-essential, I’ll argue, have no theoretical grounds for promoting race as a projectâ€â€save that race has been promoted as a project, and that so much socially depends upon continuing this (mistaken) project.”
What ever happened to Fallujah? It would be interesting to see a followup.
Wow.
So it’s down to this: we’re just not killing enough people because we’re weighed down with “white guilt.” And the solution is to shed the guilt and kill more people.
Wow. But as to metanarratives: a key plank in the PW metanarrative is the belief, articulated by Steele, that:
… no oneâ€â€including, very likely, the insurgents themselvesâ€â€believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to …
That, there, is an article of faith. In fact there are many who doubt that we have the “raw power” to defeat the insurgency, because insurgencies are tremendously difficult to defeat, both tactically and politically. But the PW metanarrative has no room for that possibilty. The PW MN says: we could do it; it’s those sissy liberals that stop us.
We do have the raw power to nuke Iraq into glass. Is that what you’re suggesting, Jeff – – that we just bomb the everloving shit out of the place to prove that we aren’t guilty anymore?
Why should someone feel guilty of the acts of ancestors in the part? As long as one does not repeat these acts. Why should I feel guilty about slavery and racism if I’ve never owned a slave or been a racist? Face it, no group or society is morally pure, and never has been. When will black africans apologize for their role in the slave trade?
And to address the point of our trolls, part of war is destroying an enemy’s will to resist. This is harder to accomplish when you pussfoot around on the battlefield. Face it, our enemies only repect strength.
beetroot,
Since folks like yourself are going to accuse us of doing it anyways, what’s the difference mr root?
Double wow. Here it comes. It’s always this: Kill more. Kill kill kill.
Kill kill kill kill kill.
Kill kill kill kill kill kill kill.
Actus asks a good question: how’s Fallujah? We tried it there. Killed a lotta people. Showed a lotta strength.
No, beetroot. The point is to bomb the crap out of a place that needs a good bombing to show that we value our soldiers’ lives over those of the bastards who started it.
As for the issue of hand-held video cameras being used as propaganda tools, I wonder if this is a passing thing. I think they work for two reasons. The first is that war really is hell. Nobody wants to see it, and if you must you certainly don’t want to be involved (even at a distance). The second is, I think, the ability to transmit images of war in near-real-time is a new capability. Will the public eventually come to accept war for what it is (or at least what it looks like)? If so, then the ability of terrorists, etc. to use those images/videos as a propaganda tool will at least be lessened, if not go away all together.
Either way, I think you’re right. We need to stop ‘fighting wars’ and start ‘finishing wars’. As I’ve heard many times, ‘We don’t train to fight, we train to win.’ You win wars by (to paraphrase Victor Davis Hanson) making the consequences of the conflict so horrible that the enemy loses heart and surrenders. The alternative is a long slog like had in Vietnam. I hope we choose to win, rather than just fight.
It also apparently survived the 24/7 news cycle. Maybe not much happened. Maybe reporters don’t go to fallujah.
Actually, beetroot…we showed a heck of a lot of restraint in Fallujah. Yes, we killed a lot of people, but we did it by putting Marines and soldiers in harms way. We did not do it with 500-lbs bombs.
He’s right. A good example: the “Highway of Death” in GW1 – it was really nothing that hadn’t been seen a hundred times in WWII (although the carnage was confined to a smaller space) and yet it caused Bush (1), State and the general staff to back away from chasing the Iraquis all the way to Baghdad and killing Saddam and his monster’s brood when they should have been. Result: Thousands of unnecessary dead in the next 10 years, and quite possibly, 9/11 itself.
Beetroot sez:
One could, for instance, consider the deployment of more than 1/3 of our troop strength. One might countenance the notion that we might want to increase recruitment levels. Heck, we could even get whacky and try to see if we can get back up to the 54 combat brigades we had after the Gulf War from our current 30.
But all this aside, do you have anything to back up your belief that “insurgencies are tremendously difficult to defeat, both tactically and politically” and that, as a result, “[you] doubt that we have the “raw power†to defeat the insurgency”?
Past that, it would seem that your comment:
Speaks to a willful misreading of the author’s intent – that once upon a time, countries fought wars in a manner that would lead one to believe that they were, in fact, fighting a war, whereas today, one most certainly doesn’t get the impression that the United States is actually conducting its warfighting activities with the same vigor that we might have seen during, let’s say, the Civil War.
BRD
beetroot,
You just made Jeff’s point. Rather than address his argument you shriek hysterically about bombing brown people into glass. Meanwhile, Iran dreams of the day that they can turn Jerusalem into a parking lot. It’s classic pomo karate. Paralyze victim with guilt whilst picking his pocket. It’s an old racket dressed up in academic cant.
We’re in a fight. We’re the good guys. What price are we willig to pay to win? The bad guys can’t beat us, and they know it. So what’s a terrorist to do. Why convince the good guy that he’s bad, so he’ll quit.
God knows they’ve got plenty of help.
Beetroot also opines:
I think you may, just may, be on the way to a most elementary understanding of the concept of warfare. I have significant doubts, as I am nearly certain that you lack the toolset to contextualize killing in view of warfare in anything other than some puerile bumpersticker slogan. But hey, maybe the horse can learn to sing.
BRD
I have read enough of your posts to know you are fairly intelligent, beetroot, so dishonest, bad-faith bullshit like this has to be intentional. Go fuck yourself.
Actus, Beatroot, et al.
Item 1 – weapons systems have increased in lethality by roughly an order of magnitude per decade ever since the end of the Second World War. For those in the stands – that means that 60 years on, you’re looking at weapons systems that are roughly a million times more lethal than their World War II era counterparts.
Item 2 – consider the attitude towards collateral damage, bombing of civilian targets, total war, and casualties that typified the conduct of the Second World War.
Hypothesis (combining Items 1 and 2), one might suppose that if we prosecuted warfare with the same set of guidelines that informed World War II, but using weapons systems 1×10^6 times more lethal, that, in fact, one might see a significant uptick in collateral damage and civilian death toll.
Empirical test (Fallujah) – Why don’t you fill in the blanks for me here, folks.
BRD
And JG, it appears your may need to append the Instant Lefty Boilerplate to include a couple dozen metanarratives. Another word soon to be rendered meanlingless by the Idiocrats.
Jeff, I’m trying to be certain I understand what it is that you (and Mr. Steele) seem to be arguing. Is it your position that to whatever extent we are “slogging†along in a less than ideal situation in Iraq, it is because Rumsfeld et al. were constrained by “white guilt†and a consequent fear of prosecuting the war properly? (I confess to finding that idea risible, about Mr. Rumsfeld.)
You believe that if we bombed more massively, with more death and disruption of Iraq, we would win? And be regarded as benevolent liberators by the surviving population?
I mean, at some point doesn’t that sad trope of burning the village in order to save it come into play? But—and outside of non-specific, airy recommendations that we adopt a “show of strength and military professionalism that is politically disinterested and tactically thorough and lethal”— just exactly what is it you think should have been, or should still be, done?
You guys ever notice how Jordan doesn’t seem to have much problem with Palestinians?
I agree completely.
We need to shed the white guilt and be more like Saddam. I mean, that guy knew how to quash an insurgency!
Btw, I didn’t know that avoiding the commission of war crimes was considered an incident of white guilt.
They’re only war crimes if you lose, Geek.
/cynicism
Thats the thing. What happened there? I had heard that we had kicked out about 2/3 of the population—ethnic cleansing. Did we let them back in? I don’t know what the followup is.
Mona,
Not to speak for Jeff, but here’s an example of where I think we hamstring ourselves by showing “restraint”.
Take Iran. There are multitudes of comments from officials around the world (including our chief ally Britain) that military action of any kind – to say nothing of the use of nuclear weapons – is completely unacceptible.
My question on this is, why take the option off the table? That’s an example of false restraint, as if there are no conditions under which we’d conceivably go all Curtis LeMay on some nation or group, even if it makes sense to do so.
That necessarily gives nations such as Iran breathing room to “negotiate” and engage in “diplomacy” – code words for letting so-called repressed countries and societies do what they feel like doing with relatively little consequence. Even if by letting these countries/societies off the hook we allow them to engage in imperialistic actions of their own. Is there little doubt, for example, that Iran has designs on being the chief arbiter of power and money in the Gulf region?
Let’s switch to Iraq: If we hadn’t invaded, is there really much doubt that sanctions would have been lifted in relatively short order? There was already a hell of a lot of pressure to end the sanctions, both from a business perspective (the oil companies of several countries) as well as an ongoing p.r. war waged on (alleged) dead babies and decrepit hospitals.
The latter, of course, plugged directly into the subject at hand – that is, the collective guilt of Western society can be poked and prodded in a way that shapes positive results for our ostensible enemies. For a graphic representation, all one has to look at is Michael Moore’s infamous kite-flying scene in Farenheit 9/11.
Back to the Iraq sanctions – if they had been lifted, the logical event following would be to end the no-fly zones. I have little confidence that the UN/IAEA would have any more effective with Saddam than they’ve been with Pakistan, North Korea and Iran. I’m guessing AQ Khan would have been quite keen to resume his talks with Saddam once the world let him off the hook … again.
Personally, I think the glass-parking-lot stuff is hyperbolic, though I am loathe to rule it out. In the current situation, any military action of any kind is treated as suspect sui generis. There’s a line of thought – quite popular as it turns out – that since the West is inherently corrupt, evil even, that anything it does is by matter of course tainted.
It’s so ingrained that even a military intervention in, say, Sudan would be assumed to be yet another example of Western imperialism. Never mind the fact that much of the pressure to leave it all alone comes from China and Russia.
I don’t think even George Clooney could change that mindset.
Mona,
I don’t pretend to answer for Jeff, but for myself the answer is we really shouldn’t give a rat’s ass about whether Iraq [or anyone else] regards us as benevolent liberators. Our only concern should be eliminating our enemy until he reaches the point where he loses his will to remain our enemy. If that never happens, then we should in good conscious kill them all with ruthless efficiency and let Allah sort them out.
VietNam is a classic example. Not only did we have superior foces, superior arms and better equipped and better trained forces, we were never “unleashed”. We could have ended the conflict simply by leveling major cities in the North – yet that was politically untenable. Sure there would have been a lot of civilian casualties, but the “War Machinery” of the North would have been eliminated.
My problem with the DoD in the Iraq situation is a lack of “prosecution” of the war from the start. Had we simply stated that hostile fire from any location (mosques, residences, etc) would be met with total destruction, we would have had actionable Iraqi intelligence from day one. Granted there would have been some mosques obliterated in the early stages, but when they realized we were serious, the residents would not allow them to be used.
I posit that there would be a lot less innocent Iraqi deaths had we taken that position. In an urban environment, the local populace have to force the terrorists out in the open. The intelligence we are getting today re the terrorists, we would have recieved a couple of years ago.
My point is that when you go to war, you need to go to win – not be popular. What good is having an automatic weapon if you’re going to resort to throwing stones.
Sort of reminds me of bayonet training in boot camp. The instructor said that if you were unable to pull the bayonet out, after skewering your enemy, just fire a round while pulling. My response was that if I still had a round to fire, I wouldn’t be sticking someone with a bayonet.
Geek, Esq.
Some sophistry deserves more sophistry. Y’all start with:
So let’s see if we can get to what he really means. Let’s be a bit more direct and phrase it as:
To add to the mix the next quote: “Btw, I didn’t know that avoiding the commission of war crimes was considered an incident of white guilt.”
We can try that as:
NB: I don’t suggest that Geek necessarily advocates these positions, but rather show by counterexample that with deliberate, willful misinterpretation, anyone, even our esteemed Geek, can be made to sound much more unhinged than they really are.
BRD
Bombing Iran would not adequately compromise its nuclear program. A land invasion is not a feasible option.
Actus,
On Fallujah, non-combatants were encouraged to leave for some time prior to the offensive, in a bid to reduce collateral damage. Some left, some stayed, the offensive took place, control was restored, and civilians returned to their homes.
That’s about all.
BRD
What about the homes that were destroyed?
OK. We can all go home. Iran will definitely get a nuke. Start building your fallout shelters – ask your parents where their plans are. Geek had definitively stated that we can’t stop them by bombing. He is obviously an expert military strategist with inside knowledge of Iran’s nuclear capabilities, the behind the scenes workings of our and Israel’s military capabilities.
So. Go on home. Geek has spoken.
Geek, Esq.:
To you care to actually argue, support, or reason any of these points, or am I to regard these the same way one might regard belief in the Flying Sphagetti Monster?
BRD
Look:
The basic complaint of this essay is that we haven’t been willing to kill more innocent Iraqis–that we’re too squeamish when it comes to collateral damage.
Every innocent Iraqi killed by the US serves to recruit people for the insurgency. That means killing even more innocent Iraqis, and thus even more popular resentment towards the US and support for the insurgency.
If an invader could use brute force and ruthlessness to quell an insurgency, the Soviets would have succeeded in Afghanistan.
Is it like political Tourette’s syndrome or something? This uncontrollable typing of completely incoherent and inappropriate phrases in lefty posts?
Oh…obligatory ignore acthole comment.
Please don’t feed the acthole.
Charlie writes:
But I thought we were dedicated to establishing Iraq as a peaceful democracy under the rule of civilized law, so as to spread democracy fever throughout the ME; that Iraq was to be, as the Baghdad bloggers put it, “the model� Your view, however, is that we should just use overwhelming lethal force in that nation to kill people who are immersed in a death cult, and who think dying for “the cause†is a-ok? And what of the Shia and Sunnis who are in a blood feud; just blow them all up as well? How on Earth can we vanquish all such people without turning Iraq into a cinder block?
But then, cinder block is fine by you?
That is simply not true. Had we prosecuted the war correctly in the first place we would not have been faced with the insurgency we have. Actionable intelligence by locals would have been forthcoming so much sooner and in larger quantities.
What we are seeing now, we would have seen earlier.
Add on to provide actus some links, FWTW. I doubt they capture the true essence, and you can no doubt find much more critical articles.
CS Monitor from February 05.
WaPo story from APril of last year showing a devastated city trying to get back on its feet. (My point being that if Fallujah had been flattened and the earth salted, as some seem to suggest, then there would be no reason for officials to visit)
Keep in mind that this is the sine qua non (I’m way into the Latin today) of American viciousness to a large number of people. In this case, there really does seem to be evidence that an aggressive approach has yielded benefits, benefits that will never be acknowledged by any of the usual suspects chiefly because it was done by the United States.
Anyway, you can likely find others. A simple Google search brings up a ton of lamentations and a multitude of commentary about those chem weapon allegations from last year. Curiously, there doesn’t seem to have been much written on the subject since then. Of any sort. Commentary seems to have stopped right around November of last year.
Is it a “no-news-is-good-news” kind of thing? I don’t know. I do suspect that if the place were still a hellhole viper’s nest full of insurgent/jihadist operatives, we’d be no doubt hearing about how we fucked up the place with our ham-handed approach.
Geek sez:
That elides some of the more basic points about the article, which as you’ll recall starts by discussing the scale of the war. It’s not so much that anybody is seriously advocating the bombing of hospitals, but warfare in general is no place for get of jail free cards and safe zone. A battlefield is a battlefield is a battlefield. A war is a war is a war. We seem to have conflated warfighting with social work, and as a result do neither of them well.
—
—
I’ve discussed this elsewhere, but there is a significant difference between an insurgency and a low-intensity proxy war. Both Vietnam and Afghanistan (not to mention Angola, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Namibia, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Laos, Cambodia, and a whole host of other places) were proxy wars, rather than pure insurgencies. You’ll also note, just for sake of interest, how many of those low-intensity proxy wars resulted in defeat or victory for the “insurgents”.
All in all, I think if you read what the article actually said it’s not as reactionary or earth shaking as some people’s readings of it would suggest.
BRD
The conclusion of Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Let’s not forget that Lincon’s “firmness in right” included Sherman’s March to the Sea–a terrible swift sword, indeed.
His confidence and strength presumes a vast moral authority. Debate the legitimacy of the authority if you will. The point is that he presumed to have it, and with it he conducted a war of nearly unlimited brutality. And he saved the country by burning Atlanta to the ground.
Good, Goddamn Jeff! You’ve brought us a cornucopia of moonbats! Everybody, go wash your hands before you dig in.
Where to begin, where to begin?
Nowhere. Have fun with the moonbat fruitbaskets, wingnuts. Ignore actus.
Somebody bring up that sanctions are technically an act of war, a species of siege and have precipitated wars since Athens kicked Megaran traders out of her agora.
Somebody else bring up the utility of merely killing enemy ‘combatants’ instead of capturing and releasing them to fight again.
Somebody else bring up the fact that we could move our ENTIRE military into Iraq, or Singapore for that matter, but if we cannot enter a mosque where the bad guys are, it doesn’t matter.
Somebody else let the howling moonbats figure out that bullets don’t work unless fired. Which is the point of this whole affair.
We should not be excessively brutal, just brutal in the application of force. We see targets, we should devastate them. Where targets do not exist, we do not touch them.
This limp noodle coddling of plain-clothes terrorists means that they can continue to hide and endanger civilians. Our political inability to reach into the heart of our enemy extends violence, victimizes civilians, rewards terrorists and does violence to servicemen.
But don’t take my word for it. Read the circumstances that lead to the Geneva conventions. That’s what this is all about.
How do you know this?
That’s not the point of the essay at all. The point is that an inappropriately large sense of cultural guilt prevents us from comprehending our enemies (and thus their tactics and goals) and taking actions to defeat them. It’s not even limited to Iraq, though mona, actus and yourself seem to believe that’s all Steele is considering here.
Comprehending it as a call to kill more innocents is a willful misreading of the article.
I am convinced had we told the Iraqi people, “If you harbor, assist or even have terrorists in your neighborhood, you are putting your life and the lives of your family and neighbors in jeopardy. We will mercilessly destroy these people and anyone who helps them” and then followed up on that statement, we would be out of Iraq today, or have a minimum training force there.
That is how you win a war – you destroy the enemy, wherever he takes refuge. Make the people force him into the open.
BRD:
If you really think that defeating an insurgency and defeating the greatest military power in Europe are the same kind of challenge, I really don’t know what to say.
Yet you still managed to speak. Pity.
For a brief discussion of the military options, see this from the hippy peaceniks at Redstate.
If one contemplates the very real prospect of some armed Shiite militias, who heretofore have been relatively inactive, coordinating their efforts with the Iranian government, one can quickly see why a ground invasion is not a feasible option.
Geek,
Ok, if you want to be hip deep in misreading, let me try again:
Every innocent US aid worker killed by the insurgents serves to recruit people for the US military. That means killing even more innocent US aid workers, and thus even more popular resentment towards the insurgency and support for the US military.
On the off chance that I’m being too subtle here, is that the assertion you make and others have been making for some years that we shouldn’t fight wars owing to some sort of spiral of violence in which each death simply strengthens the resolve of the other side is foolish. It’s not been supported by any of the warfighting history of the last several millenia. I keep seeing this assertion and those who keep making it seem content to rest on the logical laurels of the argument without any empirical examination to see what, if any, fact supports this assertion.
BRD
Geek,
By the “greatest military power in Europe” you mean NATO right?
I’m reminded of a line from Unforgiven, the greatest Western ever made:
Little Bill: You just shot an unarmed man!
Bill Munny: He should have armed himself if he was goin’ to decorate his saloon with my friend.
Geek is an idiot. He takes his opinion and boldly states it as fact that there is no arguement with. When asked for data to back up his assertions, he remains mute. My question for him is, “How the fuck do you know what the air capability of the US and Israel are?” “How the fuck do you know that bombing Iran is not feasable?”
Put up!! Or you could, STFU.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden did not act as recruiting flash points. They drove the fear of G-d into an enemy that needed to know enough was enough.
um- I think everyone has taken to the fight already (so a note on my part may be too late), but I might suggest that Jeff is pointing to a few restriants beyond “glassing them” (and I don’t think Jeff has ever seriously argued for such tactics):
– the bemoaning of the use of local media to promote our messages as a form of evil US propganda (implying indoctronation or lying)- limiting our ability to stop people from being indoctrinated into the Islamicist camp.
– the redefining of “torture” to cover activities that now almost mirror, say, being held in prison- possibly hampering interrogation methods, but most certainly limiting the military’s ability to remove threats from the field of engagement for indefinite periods.
– the portrayal of unfortunate accidents (ex: mistakes made at roadside checkpoints that result in civilians being mis-targeted as possible terrorists) as evidence of the US’s war on Islam- promoting alterations to policing/security methods that both increase risk to the soldiers and decrease the effectivity of such methods.
In short, the administration and military planners find themselves having to edit, end, or ignore plans that could in some way promote the portrayal of the US as evil-cowboy-warmonger-Snake-Ghandi, lest they surrender more of that vaunted “international prestigue” and “moral high ground”…but in doing so, they drag on a situation that diminishes both regardless.
While this may be seen as an attemp to defend Geek, it ain’t.
I challenge the thesis that we are not doing well (as well as doing good) in Iraq. Guerilla wars are never fast, and the application of overwhelming force has never won one. Instead, the losers in guerilla conflicts have more often erred on the side of applying too much force rather than too little (c.f. France in Algeria, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan).
By clearly focusing our efforts on the insurgents and doing our best to protect and minimize damage to civilians, we are positioned to win the support (or at least non-opposition) of the people. Mao’s dictum (a guerilla is a fish that swims in a sea of people) still applies.
I contend that this this strategy is succeeding. Tips from Iraqi civilians are dramtically up over the last year, and seem to be leading to increased success. And while April was a bad month, the overall trend in casualties is downward.
I reject the call for a significant increase in brutality, just as I reject the idea that we are losing in Iraq. The current course of action mirrors the strategy of successful anti-insurgent wars of the past. For those interested in more information try
http://www.brookings.edu/fp/saban/iraq/index.pdf
or http://www.strategypage.com
Regards,
Neil S
tw: Common wisdom isn’t.
I’d say that at least the first two incentivized the Soviet Union to get the bomb.
But we know that terror works on those weaker than us. Terror is a weapon of the powerful. Our terrorizing of latin american populations worked at defeating insurgencies there.
Look, we’re being successful in Iraq, and you really shouldn’t listen to the defeatist MSM meta-narrative.
I disagree with Neil and I denounce your use of the word “brutality”. I think you hit on the “success” we are having now in Iraq – the actionable intlligence being recieved from the locals.
Had we prosecuted the war as I indicated above, that actionable intelligence would have been forthcoming a couple of years ago to the extent it is now.
I don’t think you have to be “brutal” to get the point across. I think you just have to factual and follow through with what you say you are going to do.
Iran now states that the first response to a military attack on them will be to strike Isreal.
Neil,
I think I would mostly agree with you on that. I think a part of the problem is that we don’t necessarily have a good model for what such an endeavor should cost (“in blood, treasure, and prestigue” as some like to say), so a number of people trump up quotes about how easy everything would be and cluck their tounges in disappointment.
(I’d also guess someone making such arguements would also point to the errant former General or Government Official declaring the whole thing a “quagmire”- an point I also do not find convincing- but that’s just a guess)
If there’s anyone on the planet with less right to ask this question than Ms. No-fair-asking-me-I-just-listen-to-the-experts, I’d like to know who.
So rls, your approach wouldn’t have encouraged shoot and scoot tactics, with the enemy taking pot shots from mosques, followed by American destruction of the same? Do you really believe that approach would have won the cooperation of the Iraqi people?
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. We have had the lowest casualty major military operation of it’s kind, ever; and we’re being told it’s a clusterf**k? I guess I’m just confused and bewildered.
Neil
No one has commented on how two of America’s problems are going to solve each other: our growing Mexican population may have many problems, but White Guilt ain’t among them. Judging by how Mexico acts now, those folks aren’t shy about ruthlessness towards the brown-skinned. We may end up with guys who go literally from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli (and east another 2000 miles to Tehran if need be.)
And the incentivation of the Soviets proved the incentivibility of further incentivisation of previously unincentibly incentives.
beet, you forgot “break stuff” it’s “kill people, break stuff” or so i’ve been told.
tw: in my house we add, “but not radios”
We might have reached our present stage of conflict a little earlier, but I don’t know that I buy that such a method would have been that huge a factor when a number of entanglements arise from political constraints (as in trying to facilitate a political situation in Iraq, not regarding American politics)- to turn it around, wouldn’t a more efficinet effort by Coalition forces against the insurgency taken pressure off the naiscent government to reach meaningful agreements, resulting in increased sectarianism and a slowdown later in the process?
ps- sorry if my spelling is horrible today, my mind is a pulp of misery.
Neil,
My point is that it is too late now to adopt my ohilosophy. Had we made it clear from the outset that we would mercilessly (not brutally) eliminate any safe haven a terrorist chose to use, and then did so, the Iraqi populace would have turned them out a couple of years ago instead of now.
We would not only be ahead of schedule, but IMHO there would be less civilian deaths. Granted some of those that died would be a result of our policy and not terrorist suicide bombings.
I don’t denigrate the effectiveness of the military effort in Iraq. I am one that believes that the progress over three years is extraordinary. I just think it could have happened faster with less loss of life, Iraqi and our people.
But I don’t run around stating what it is we should have done strategically, then or now; I do, in fact, take in a variety of opinions, and am entitled to ask what I like of those do feel qualified to offer such. A few months back Reason did a round-up of various libertarians and their views as to what we should be doing in Iraq. Glenn Reynolds’ one word response was: “win.” That’s a vacuous evasion, and I don’t find Jeff’s formulation much more helpful.
And so I repeat:
“Butâ€â€and outside of non-specific, airy recommendations that we adopt a “show of strength and military professionalism that is politically disinterested and tactically thorough and lethalâ€Â just exactly what is it you think should have been, or should still be, done?”
The point is to bomb the crap out of a place that needs a good bombing to show that we value our soldiers’ lives over those of the bastards who started it.
Kill kill kill! Insult my intellectual toolkit all you want, BRD, but I think it’s pretty clear that the basic argument here is that America is too constrained by guilt to wage war as lethally as necessary. As Jeff puts it:
… and isn’t that just a nice bookish way of saying, “Let’s take off the pink panties and kick some fucking ass”? Jeff goes through a lot of intellectual gyrations to explain where the pink panties came from, and why they must be shed, but at the end of the day, the result he seeks is this:
He’s saying that to win the war, we need to act like Sherman: apply massive and indiscriminate force. He’s saying that we’re too wimpy to do it, and that we need to de-wimpify to get it done.
Am I wrong? Isn’t this what he’s saying?
Dear Jeff:
Something else applies here. Think of how frequently Christianity and Catholicism are bashed by the Left. Again, a case of taking several characteristics that do not apply to the group at large, and have not for several hundred years (unlike Islam, which seems not to have changed), and use that to delegitimize everything the group says or believes. No matter how morally upstanding the Roman Catholic Church is, the Left will forever point with glee and Schandenfreude to the child-molesters in the ranks and imply not only that all Catholics are kiddie-fiddlers, but that they secretly long for the return of the Inquisition.
The barbarism of an organization within the Church that ended a good 400 years ago, the perverse desires of a relative few priests – all of that serves to sufficiently tarnish the RCC in the eyes of the Left that they can justify ignorance everything Pope Benedict says. “Oh, the leader of the child molesters and witch burners has something to say? By golly, you BET we’ll listen!”
Well, it’s their funeral – and ours too.
Pardon – the first graph of the post above is a quote from Tom, above.
See my post at 1:07 above. I fought in VietNam in a “politically correct” war and history will tell you that that was a mistake.
I will state again that I think Iraq now is a successful military operation. Three years from invasion to a democratically elected government, with warts and all. I just think it could have been done better, quicker and with less loss of life (Iraqi & Coalition).
One question for Actus and other differently abled thinkers out there: When General William Tecumsah Sherman acted on his belief that civilians propped up the military and made it possible for them to continue to fight by starting his march to the sea, was he thereby committing a war crime? Or would it have been better to allow a high intensity conflict to go on and claim another few hundred thousand lives before effectively surrendering and sundering our nation since we refused to try and win? No doubt you would have happily voted for George in 1864, George McClellan, that is.
Ignorance of history is not becoming.
Turing Word: figure, as in go figure.
The past barbarity of the US armed forces aren’t really doubted in my mind.
PLEASE!!! Do not engage acthole. This tells you all you need to know about him.
I am dead serious. PLEASE do not respond to his posts. PLEASE do not address him. All you need to know about acthole is that he is breathing air that someone else could be breathing. Basically all he does is take up space.
Actually, beetroot, you’re wrong. I don’t think that’s what Jeff is saying—because Sherman’s March cannot be reasonably characterized as “indiscriminate”. He targeted the logistical capacity of the Confederacy to wage war. He succeeded in that goal, and unquestionable saved lives (both Northern and Southern) in so doing.
If they hide in mosques, kill them in the mosques where they hide. Refraining from doing so will only further incent them to hide in mosques. If they wear women’s clothing, give them a quick Geneva-approved tribunal followed by a quick Geneva-approved firing squad. Refraining from doing so only incents them to wear women’s clothing. Etc.
This isn’t a complex argument, although Jeff’s verbosity might make it seem so. Honest folks from Geek’s and beetroot’s side will at least give him the benefit of the doubt that the verbosity is an artifact of an honest attempt to unpack the cultural freight surrounding the differences in assumptions about the legitimate use of military force—in this particular instance, a discussion of the justified degrees of force—that obtain in our cultural milieu. Dishonest—or perhaps merely stupid—people will compare it to one-word koans.
Allow me to add that people who have already proved themselves—repeatedly—to be both dishonest and stupid will respond with ahistorical non sequiturs.
Phil Smith, so when Jeff writes:
You take him to means simply that if insurgents are in mosques we should kill them in mosques? And summarily execute them if they are in women’s clothing? That’s all Jeff meant by “a show of strength and military professionalism that is politically disinterested and tactically thorough and lethal,” that will result in increased civilian deaths? “White man’s” guilt has kept us from doing these things, which would be sufficient to win if we only would do them?
I did not say “summary”. That’s just your clumsy and (transparently) dishonest attempt to strawman from “tribunal” and “Geneva-approved”.
I’ll consider engaging with you, but only if you retract that.
I find it fascinating that Mona is able to remove her head from Glenn Greenwald’s ass long enough to comment here.
I find it amazing that she asks a question. I answer it. She ignores said answer. Then she picks out Jeff’s “carpet bomb” analogy, which point was, that when we bombed Libya we did it at night when there would be the minimil “collateral” damage – the same with the “aspirin factory” that Clinton bombed and if we keep to that scenario with respect to Iran then, yes, we will be engaged in another “partial” war, which is a lot like showing up for a gunfight with a knife.
Mona is SHOCKED, SHOCKED I tell you that someone would be ballsy enough to say that when we go to war – we should go to war to decimate the enemy and those that enable or harbor the enemy, whether they be civilians or combatants. SHOCKED!!
She just refuses to consider that if one initially prosecutes a war with the full might of the military, that one will, in the long run, shorten the conflict and thus save lives, civilian and military. Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden provide historical context to that fact.
Sinbad,
Would Greenwald’s ass be considered a WMD?
His prose is clearly a war crime.
Mona, beetroot, geek, actus, et al.
I am going to repeat myself: You guys ever notice how Jordan doesn’t seem to have much problem with Palestinians?
Feel free to ignore me again, I am kind of used to it.
Hmmm.
Actually we’re up to 43 combat brigades since the US Army’s transformation effort into Brigde Combat Teams (BCT). It’s still an ongoing effort so the total number might increase.
Regardless it’s true that the combat effectiveness of today’s brigades has far exceeded past maximums with combat experience, new technology, new procedures and particularly the online group-think that currently describes the US military in it’s experience sharing initiatives.
okay, and maybe you can clarify this for me, but it’s my understanding that comparing “brigades” doesn’t really work any more. yes, congress has a limit on the number of them, but they also don’t specify how many soldiers make up a brigade.
I’m largely in Neil S’s camp. Certainly the first Coalition response to Fallujah—trying to get former Baathists to patrol the place—didn’t work (something those who decry the “disbanding” of the old Republican Guard always miss). But the history of counter-insurgency demonstrates that more lethal tactics always produce a quicker victory. In that regard, I found it odd that Steele mentioned Algeria. The French didn’t use much restraint there and did worse by most statistical measures (e.g., casualty rates, etc.) than the Coalition in Iraq. I don’t draw a firm conclusion on causation—US training and materiel today are undoubtedly better than the French in the 50s and 60s. But it is an example where the willingness to be lethal and accept collateral damage still resulted in a loss for the French (thereby reinforcing their general tendency toward cheese-eating surrender-monkeyism).
Ya. they expelled them. that strategy worked real well for israel too.
Like I said, ahistorical non sequiturs. Right. On. Cue.
Hmmm.
Yet another liberal who has absolutely no idea what Sherman did in his march.
Take it on its face. We have anti-runway bombs that fragment into mines and leave an airbase unusable. We could use these, but we don’t out of a sensitivity. Instead, we will mount multiple sorties to knock out bases with cratering bombs (this changes with JDAMs, but the principle holds). We waste military resources, hours of planning, man-decades investigations, hundreds of hours for sensitivity training every year. None of this promotes safety, and ultimately drags fights out into ridiculousness, costing more lives.
Our military prisons are better run than Dutch civilian prisons; fact. We prosecute our soldiers for any infraction, like in Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, and for much more pedestrian offences (like the two soldiers that married Iraqi women during their tour in 2003-4). We go the extra mile for safety whether it makes military sense or not. Clinton’s cruise missile attacks on empty Afghanistani tents and al-Shifa are the crowning achievement of this pseudo-war.
And how do you guys square the uproar over Willy Pete of all things with the notion that we are following war in even in nominal brutality. The mind truly boggles.
I know it didn’t involve purple fingered smiling faces.
beet, I think there’s a subtetly (oddly enough in this context) to this:
I don’t think he’s saying to ALWAYS act like Sherman. But to achieve our ends, we have to have the option in our pocket.
We didn’t hold back against the supremacist Nazis or the the supremacist Japanese. Those groups had extraordinary resolve that didn’t waver – and maybe even got stronger – in the face of the Allies’ relentless advance. It still took actions like Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to finally break the core will.
I’d argue the same for Sherman – else there could very easily have been a significant guerilla war in the South.
Sometimes, those types of actions are called for. Certainly, I wouldn’t think our enemies would hesitate to do the same to us, given the opportunity. Would you agree?
As it stands right now, I’m afraid this so-called guilt complex would be more insterested in prostrating ourselves in front of enemies similar to the Confederacy, the Nazis, the Soviets, etc. than in fighting for itself.
This is, to me, a shame because I personally believe we have a lot to fight for.
Ahistorical non sequitur.
Will we be treated to the hat trick, sports fans?
Phil,
PLEASE! Do not feed acthole. I really believe that if he/she/it is ignored that he/she/it will eventually just fade away.
PLEASE!!!!!
You people watch too much TV.
The lefties on this thread aren’t questioning tactics. They want the United States of America to be disgraced in Iraq, and around the world for that matter. They want the troops brought home. It’s easier to spit on them here. And God forbid, we consider the use of force, unless it’s to protect Rosie O’ Doughnut’s fat ass. And forget fighting to win–that’s an outmoded, racist ideology.
Do you think “turning off the smart bombs”, etc. might undermine the larger goal of making democratic allies of other Moslem nations, showing them the benevolance of the American way and how wrong Bin Laden is to accuse us of barbarism?
I’m not engaging with him, Ray, I’m merely documenting his mendacity. But I’ll let it go.
Phil smith writes:
I apologize; I was typing quickly on the way out of the office. You did not say summary.
Jeff’s post truly disturbs me—a lot. And in this thread I see some talking about Hiroshima or Dresden; nukes or carpet bombing. Jeff himself refers to Sherman’s (he of “all out war”) march. (Does he not know about the utter destruction of the South, about Reconstruction with federal troops occupying and running state and local governments under martial law for a decade or better in some 10-12 states? Is THAT what we should shoot for in Iraq, to prove we are over our “white man’s guilt”?)
However, Jeff frequently has claimed that I and others misread and misunderstand him. So, before I decide to state an opinon anywhere else about this post, I’m hoping to ascertain what it is exactly that he means. That which he seems to mean—i.e., at least carpet-bombing, as opposed to the “smart” bombs he finds too effete— is shocking to me, but if I’m wrong, I’d like to know that.
Sherman’s march don’t look so successful now that you look at the Jesusland maps either.
I think this is a seminal piece in modern American political discouse.
The repugnant, deeply racist core of the American right is now on display for all to see. And much of the rightwing blogosphere rises to the bait, and makes their stand.
Thank you so very much for this clarifiaction.
Okay. So I’m “airy” (which I take to mean not specific enough), but at the same time, my invocation of Sherman’s march suggests that I always and forever am interested in the bloodiest, most ruthless strategy.
Got it.
To answer those duelling charges, I’m simply going to repost what I initially wrote, only this time, I’ll highlight what some of those who’ve come here looking to draw from my post what they already believe of me—that I’m a bloodthirsty chickenhawk warmonger—failed to notice the first time around (or else found incovenient to their theses):
Anyone with firing synapses can recognize the conditions in that formulation—but then, I don’t always have the luxury of dealing with such types.
Let me point out, too, that I also wrote this:
To be clear, by saying “I understand,” what I mean is, I understand. And I recognize the delicate balancing act.
I simply note, in this piece, that we need to be willing to do more of Shermanesque than we have done, because to do so can shorten wars (not that it always does, of course, which is, again, why I have made such actions conditional).
Those who wish to twist my words to mean otherwise so that they can practice their legalistic parsing of my meaning with a series of red herrings and non-sequiturs, have at it.
But don’t delude yourselves into thinking I’m taking your objections seriously—because I know that they are based on nothing more than a desire to object, which has become almost formulaic with some of you who comment here.
No. We are so far away from carpet bombing that it is frankly insulting. Actual bombing would be a good first step. And who and what would we carpet bomb?
We don’t even have the aircraft to sustain a massive air campaign to destroy a city like Dresden which required firebombs, two days, hundreds of planes and 4000 tons of bombs. All of that is hyperbole. Even on the ingress into Iraq, we would not have destroyed cities.
We could have attacked right into the heart of the SUnni triangle, however, but for caution. We could have stormed Mosques, but for caution. We could have taken Fallujah the first time, but for caution. We could stomp the ratlines entering Iraq from Iran and Syria but for caution.
This is a real phenomenon of restraint that you libs are ignoring at your own peril. Reality is going to bite you on the ass if you ignore it long enough.
Mona,
I hate to break it to you but war is about killing people. Sorta the them vs us. And the more of them you can kill, the quickest way you can, while not getting killed yourself is how you determine the winners. You cannot let the enemy establish safe havens that are untouchable, they way we have in Iraq and the way we did in Nam.
In Nam we had basically three demarcation lines, the North, Laos and Cambodia. Had we blown hell out of all three we would have severly limited the eventual loss of life, both in US bodies and Asian bodies. Especially the millions in Cambodia.
Had we been prosecuting the war in Iraq with the fervor we should have, (you can call it ruthlessness, barbarity or brutality if you want) we would have less fatalaties, both civilian and military.
I am firmly convinced that had we initially made it clear (by our actions, with no apologies) that we would destroy anyone and anyplace that offered harbor to people that wanted to kill our troops, we would have had Iraqi’s ratting on terrorists from day one.
[…] Shelby Steele wrote about in 2006, and that, at the time, (mostly white) progressives were quick to dismiss as non-existent, taking the opportunity to attack Steele and those who dared considered his argument for what that […]