Violence (5): More "Rules of Engagement"

Herschel Smith provides some of the reactions he got to his post on rules of engagement (ROE) that I quoted in my last post in The NCOs Speak on Rules of Engagement The Captain's Journal 12/13/06.

I was a bit amused at one of his correspondents for accusing him of being a "Jane Fonda" (which in Right Blogostan is a synonym for "traitor") because he was even discussing the ROE.  Smith rightly responded that the guy is full of bull, because he hadn't been using any material not publicly available.  (I say a "bit amused" because the basic intent of the comment was exceptionally nasty, given how the rightwingers use "Jane Fonda".)

This is the kind of thing that war critics have to deal with all the time, though, frivolous accusation of endagering our soldiers, dishonoring the troops, or much worse.  Smith writes, a bit ruefully, "I must confess, I have never been compared to Jane Fonda before."

Mike Rentner in the comments to that post makes a good point about the examples of supposedly overly-restrictive ROE cited in it: they allow judgment calls in the particular situations.  And making the ROE more permissive would still leave an ROE of some kind in place.  And the same problems would occur if a soldier winds up shooting up a car and killing a whole family.  The repercussions would still be largely the same.  I would think the "CNN problem" would be less than the problem of their relatives looking for revenge or at least becoming far more hostile to the Americans.

But one problem I have with the discussions we've been seeing lately in various forums about the supposedly restrictive ROE is that it's almost impossible for anyone not familiar with the specific situation to evaluate them.  Whether it's sympathizing with the complaint or rejecting it.  The ROE are very specific and differ from one setting to another.

Plus, as one of the NCOs quoted in Smith's post observed, the soldiers who have to face those difficult choices like the first NCO you quote here faced in many cases may not even have seen the actual written ROE.  That doesn'tinvalidate these anecdotal complaints.  But it does mean that the particular complaints could have more to do with the unit's commanders than with the ROE as such.  As compelling as these complaints sometimes sound, it really is virtually impossible to make an honest judgment on them without on-the-spot knowledge of the situation.

Unfortunately, these stories are often misused to argue vaguely for being "tougher".

But it's hard to see how these ROE complaints can be an argument for anything unless the person complaining states clearly what their alternative is?  In the case of the first NCO example in Smith's post, is he suggesting it's a bad idea to show a warning sign?  Exactly how would he change the ROE for the type of situation he describes so that the choices would be easier?  Unless we know what he's actually suggesting as an alternative, it's just a complaint that we may find sympathetic.  But it's hard to see how anyone could make a serious judgment about the complaint's validity just based on what examples like these present.

Mike Rentner also begins his comment with a very worthwhile observation: knowing about faults in the ROE - even if we have enough information to make some kind of informed judgment - doesn't really tell you much about the broader conduct of the war.

Tags: iraq war, blogs

Violence (4): "Politically correct" ROE?

Herschel Smith of The Captain's Journal weighed in on how Politically Correct Rules of Engagement Endanger Troops on 12/06/06.  These "rules of engagement" (ROE) pitches on how to get tougher and supposedly more effective in the Iraq War rely in large part on a slight-of-hand of which war fans are particularly fond.  They focus on the individual soldier and equate very specific tactical issues to strategic success in the war.

A lot of civilians probably have only the vaguest idea about what rules of engagement are.  US Army Field Manual 27-100 gives some pretty extensive definitions

in Chapter 8 Rules of Engagement.  It opens with this definition from the Army's Operations Field Manual:

War is tough, uncompromising, and unforgiving. For soldiers, the rigors of battle demand mental and physical toughness and close-knit teamwork. Between the anxiety of battle, soldiers spend long hours doing routine but necessary tasks in the cold, wet weather and mud, moving from position to position, often without hot meals, clean clothes, or sleep. In war, the potential for breakdown in discipline is always present.  The Army operates with applicable rules of engagement (ROE), conducting warfare in compliance with international laws and within the conditions specified by the higher commander.  Army forces apply the combat power necessary to ensure victory through appropriate and disciplined use of force. (my emphasis)

Any army has to have some kind of rules of engagement.  Otherwise they couldn't enforce discipline under combat conditions.  And these are not static conditions.  In field combat, one set of ROE would apply.  On occupation duty, another would be used.  A different set of ROE might be applied in a relatively peaceful area than in a more dangerous area.  Manual 27-100 continues:

ROE are driven by three sets of considerations: policy, legal, and military. An example of a policy-driven rule is Executive Order 11850, which prohibits first use of riot control agents and herbicides without Presidential approval. An example of a legal-driven rule is the prohibition, "hospitals, churches, shrines, schools, museums, and any other historical or cultural sites will not be engaged except in self- defense." An example of a military-driven rule is the commonly encountered requirement for observed indirect fires for the purpose of effective target engagement. ROE are not the same as fire control measures. Fire control measures are implemented by commanders based on tactical considerations. An example of a fire control measure serving tactical purposes is the common requirement in ground operations that the artillery tubes organic to a unit will not fire beyond a designated fire support coordination line (FSCL); this ensures an efficient division of labor between fires controlled at one level and those controlled by higher levels of command. Moreover, it helps prevent fratricide by indirect fire.

The purposes of ROE quite often overlap; rules implementing strategic policy decisions may serve an operational or tactical military goal while simultaneously bringing U.S. forces in compliance with domestic or international law. As a result, troops in the field may not always appreciate the reasons why a leader fashioned a particular rule.

ROE must evolve with mission requirements and be tailored to mission realities. ROE should be a flexible instrument designed to best support the mission through various operational phases and should reflect changes in the threat.

There's nothing sacrosanct about a particular set of rules.  But, at the same time, a variety of considerations have to go into ROE decisions, from the strategic goal of the army to the very specific conditions in a particular place.  So a soldier fighting in Sadr City might have a very valid complaint about one aspect of the ROE at a given time.  That doesn't mean the same complaint would apply to Ramadi, or Mosul, or Kirkuk.

It also means that arguments based on very specific situations are very difficult for anyone else not familiar with that immediate to judge their validity.  That means if we're being honest, it's difficult to argue about very specific ROE complaints.  At the same time, if war fans expect their gripes about alleged ROE problems to be taken seriously, they would have to be specific about what changes they would like to see made in the ROE they complain about.  And they would also need to be clear as to whether they're complaining about ROE based on operational issues or strategic issues.  Manual 27-100 defines elements that all ROE should include:

Operational requirements, policy, and law define ROE. ROE always recognize the soldier’s right of self-defense, the commander’s right and obligation to self-defense, and America’s national right to defend itself and its allies and coalition partners against aggression. In the Standing Rules of Engagement (SROE) for U.S. Forces, the Joint Chiefs of Staff provide baseline guidance and procedures for supplementing this guidance for specific operations. Effective ROE are enforceable, understandable, tactically sound, and legally sufficient. Further, effective ROE are responsive to the mission and consistent with unit initiative.

In all operations, ROE may impose political, operational, and legal limitations upon commanders. Withholding employment of particular classes of weapons or exempting the territory of certain nations from attack are examples of such limitations. At the tactical level, ROE may extend to criteria for initiating engagements with certain weapon systems (for example, unobserved fires) or reacting to attack.

Instead, what some of the ROE complaints I've been seeing quite a bit lately do is to portray some very specific tactical restriction, e.g., a requirement to put up warning signs at checkpoints, as somehow irrational or inappropriate and then project that complaint onto the entire war effort, claiming somehow some evil civilian or bureaucrat is hampering the whole process.  That kind of leap of faith is one only the gullible should be expected to make.

With that in mind, let's look at Smith's complaints about "politically correct" ROE.  One of his complaints is:

The military has also tightened rules of engagement as the war has progressed, toughening the requirements before a sniper may shoot an Iraqi. Potential targets must be engaged in a hostile act, or show clear hostile intent.

Okay, so what does Smith want this rule changed to be?  A rule that you can't gun somebody down unless they are "engaged in a hostile act, or show clear hostile intent" doesn't seem to be unrealistic on the face of it.  It's certainly far more permissive for the sniper than the rules urban cops in the US operate under.  What ROE does Smith want instead?  Permission for the snipers to just shoot anybody they thinks looks like they need killin'?

In another instance of a vague gripe with no alternative, he quotes an item from the frivolous rightwing Web site Newsmax complaining that "commanders may limit the individual right of self-defense."  Again, without knowing something very specific about the alleged problems it's causing in particular situations and what the proposed alternative would be, how can anyone make a resonable judgment about that complaint?  Of course there's going to be some limits applied.  Otherwise you'll wind up with things like, "Well, that six-year-old kid gave me a dirty look so I thought he was going to attack me and I gunned him down in front of his parents."

Those kinds of things really don't serve any justiable tactical purpose, much less strategic ones.  Unless, of course, the strategic goal is terror, in the old-fashioned, French Revolution sense of a Reign of Terror.

After giving these kinds of vague complaint, Smith writes:

I have given the broad outline of a change in ROE, along with four such pieces of anecdotal evidence, and this is only from main stream media reports.

If he gave even a "broad outline" of what alternative ROE he wants, it must have been somewhere else besides that post.

Presented in this form, the supposed complaint about "politically correct" ROE isn't much more than a gripe that we ain't killin' enough a' them thar A-rabs.

Plus, as war propaganda, this ROE-complaint business has a problem.  Smith explicitly argues that American soldiers are hestitating to fire in life-threatening situations because of erroneous ROE:

Consider the psychology of the warrior. Even if not a single Soldier or Marine had died as a result of hesitation due to ROE (that is, even if this danger is only potential and has not become actualized), the psychology of fear has set in. Not fear of the enemy, but fear of firing a weapon. This fear can cause hesitation, and even theenemy knows the U.S. ROE and can and has taken advantage of them. Hence, there is increased danger for our troops, and they know it.

What we need are robust rules of engagement.  What we have are confused Soldiers and Marines, afraid to fire their weapons. (my emphasis)

War fans normally like to present The Troops as brave and noble warriors, the best of the best, etc.  For some war fans, they defend those credibly accused and even convicted of war crimes as being heroes anyway.  But here's "The Captain" saying we've got brave heroic soldiers out there "afraid to fire their weapons".

In the absence of any reality-based specifics, though, it's all silly.  This is an example of how people arguing in the air can get caught up in their own verbal somersaults.

In fact, training for soldiers as well as cops and anyone else who is expected to use deadly force at times in their jobs involves regular training on when to use force and when not to.  Anyone who's not in a total panic or a psychopath is likely to be reluctant to point a weapon at another human being and kill him with it.  That's why training focuses on when to refrain from firing and when you're required to fire.  And that involves some kind of rules of engagement.  No commander in their right mind is going to tell people to go patrol an area and just shoot anyone they feel like shooting.

In fairness to Smith, in a later post that I'll discuss separately, he himself gets accused of being a "Jane Fonda" because of one of the comments he made in a different post relating to ROE.

Tags: iraq war, milblogs

Violence (3): Let's git colonial

I think of this one as the "let's go colonial" rant.  Blackfive excerpted it:  The whole thing is at Ace of Spades Thoughts On The Firestorm Over Iraq 12/07/06.

This is kind of a classic "middlebrow" rightwing rant.  As analysis, it's worthless.  As an example of the ugly rhetoric about killing and violence that colonial-type wars generate, it's banal and depressing.  As an example of the contradictory, foolish floundering around to position oneself to use a "stab-in-the-back" excuse for the loss of Bush's Iraq War, it's sad but instructive.  Ace writes:

With the American forces departed, the restraints come off the Shi'ites entirely. What, precisely, will all those militias do when they no longer have American patrols to dodge, or American soldiers to snipe at?

Of course the full force and fury of decades of hatred and desire for vengeance will be visited upon Sunni men, women, and children. What we are seeing as far as "sectarian violence" now is nothing compared to what will transpire when the moderating force of American troops is removed from the equation.

It's unlikely that the role of hated foreign troops is more "moderating" than inflaming, on the whole.  What will Ace be saying if Bush makes the threatening tilt toward the Shi'a side in the civil war?  This is probably an indication:

That's [surrendering to the Shi'a] their [the Sunnis] best option. The other option - the one they may finally have brought to fruition - is to have no power at all, and to be driven out of the cities into the barren (and oil-free) wastelands of the western deserts, to live out their lives in misery and privation, and to occasionally have these sad lives cut short by Shi'ite gangs raiding villages and killing them by the dozens.

It's time to use that fact to our advantage. It's time to get "realistic." And the realistic way to settle this is to announce - couched in diplomatic language that makes it seem less vicious than it actually is - that unless the Sunnis disarm immediately, and before the Shi'ite militas do, the US can no longer justify the cost in lives to protect the Sunnis from Shi'ite militas. Compliant Sunni areas that give up or drive out their Al Qaeda or Ba'athists terrorists will have US/coaltion garrisons to defend them, and vigorous patrolling to protect them from murder.

Areas which do not comply will be left to the tender mercies of the law of superior firepower.

I hate to treat this like it's more reality-based than it is.  But I will point out that the Sunnis have reason to be dissatisfied with the level of protection they are getting against Shi'a militia.  And vice versa.

In fact, Ace sounds like he's already in favor of the escalation, tilt-to-the-Shi'a option:

The warplan should be the opposite of that suggested by Baker. Baker claims we must stop making fighting Al Qaeda the priority, and instead seek peace. That's quite wrong. We should refocus on killing Al Qaeda and Shi'ite militiamen who attack US troops, and let peace seek itself, through the brutal methods by which peace is usually ultimately had.

The word "pacify" has a nice connotation, suggesting coddling a baby by giving it warm milk to suckle on. In historical reality, populations are "pacified" through extremely brutal, dirty, and nasty means, killed, raped, butchered, and driven out of their homelands until they ultimately lose all hope of military victory and all desire to fight. ...

In any area where the US is not so welcome by the locals, then they have chosen the manner by which their dispute shall be settled, and such disputes are never settled happily. One side is simply killled and brutalized so badly they're no longer capable of fighting at all.

Let that be the victory in Iraq.

I guess Ace has gotten beyond all that girlie-man talk about bringing democracy and liberating the Iraqis and being their friends and yadda, yadda.  He's ready for the let's-teach-the-ungrateful-natives-a-lesson phase that all colonial wars get to, if they go on long enough.  It really sounds like that's being partially put into practice already.

Tags: iraq war, milblogs

Violence (2) "Rules of Engagement"

Glenn Greenwald in War advocates v. flatworms Unclaimed Territory blog 12/13/06 picks up on a trend I've been noticing, as well:

What the dead-ender war advocates really seem to crave is not so much an increase in troops but an increase in our willingness to use military force - i.e., indiscriminate killing. When they urge greater "resolve" to achieve "victory," they don't really talk about strategies that increased troops could enable as much as they excitedly beat their chest and spit out extremely vague and manly phrases such as: "do we have the will to do what needs to be done"?

Here's an example from another "milblog", Blackfive.  I call this one the "rules of engagement (ROE)" rant. Rules of engagement (ROE) are the parameters in which soldiers operate in a particular situation. The un-subtle demand for more violence against Iraqis in general is sometimes couched, as it is here, in the form of complaints about the ROE. Blackfive says this is from a friend whose online alias is "Just the Average Savage". "Average Savage" writes:

Let me tell you a little something about ROE (Rules of Engagement). In Baghdad thousands of people are moving around all the time. Many houses, all of them, have guns. On a general scale, none of them are planning any wrongdoing at all. But they don’t think that Americans can accomplish anything, either, because they know we can’t search at will, can’t shoot at will, can’t detain at will.

If you wish to stop a car approaching a checkpoint, you must first post a sign a long way down the road, if it is ignored, you must verbally warn them, and use a green laser to get the drivers attention. If still ignored, you must fire a warning shot with an M4, then a M240, then, finally the kill shot. If at any time the car turns away, all you can do is TRY to pursue it, never shoot at it. Technically, similar rules exist for dismounted operations, and that puts more soldiers at risk than you can possibly imagine. I’m not sure Johnny on the street has this information, but Muhammed in the mosque sure does.

I don't know if he's described the ROE accurately; he seems to be referncing recent experience in Sadr City.

Now, Average Savage never tells us exactly what he'd like the alternative ROE to be. Maybe he just wants to be free to shoot any of them A-rabs he thinks needs killin'. Does he not want to post signs at checkpoints? Does he not want to have to signal the approaching drivers? Just shoot at any car that he has a bad vibe about?

The problem, of course, is that if your goal is to establish order in Iraq, it's generally better to minimize the number of families gunned down at checkpoints. The locals tend not to appreciate things like that. If the goal is to just kill A-rabs, though ...

Average Savage continues:

I can’t even tell you how pissed it makes me to hear a JAG officer suck in breath as he tries to think real hard how to explain the murky depths of our ROE. A system that used to be a way of allowing soldiers to avoid hurting civilians by using certain weapon systems at certain times has once again degenerated into a complex “Cover Your Ass” legal trick for higher command. Believe me, it isn’t there because Colonels and Generals WANT us to fight this way, it is there because YOU do.

That is right. If you are an American, and you are reading this, you share fault. Give CNN ratings, fall in line with those that have hounded the steps of the American Soldier criticizing his every fault while looking away from the success of his missions, and heralding at the tops of their lungs the number of dead without ever talking about the value of the lives lost. Long after specials on fallen soldiers and the human toll are just file footage, soldiers such as I will remember the deaths of the ones we cared about, and know the price of that cost. And while they talk about how out of control the violence in Baghdad has become, soldiers grind their teeth wishing they could just do the job they know. Wishing they could take all the weapons from the people in this city, clear every house, stop all traffic, and most of all, secure Sadr city.

Here the idolatry of soldiers by rightwing both secular and Christian-fundamentalist comes full circle. It starts with The Troops being praised to the high heavens for their willingness to sacrifice for the country and the military being held up as some kind of ideal, clean, orderly society.

Now, after thewar in Iraq has dragged on longer than US participation in the Second World War, after the "bad apples" of Abu Ghuraib and assorted other embarassments, after liberating and then re-liberating city after city, Average Savage attacks his fellow Americans for not being good enough for our glorious military - because we civilians and the Liberal Press are demanding that grunts in Iraq be allowed to gun down whoever they please whenever they feel like it.

At this point, I'll introject my skepticism about this kind of thing on the "milblogs". I don't object to people using pseudonyms on the Internet or in blogs. But in this case, where we have the pseudonymous Blackfive quoting the pseudonymous Average Savage, we can't be that confident of whose voice we're getting there. Is he really a soldier in Iraq? Maybe, but who knows?

It's a dreary rightwing rant. But here are the last three paragraphs:

For all the hope of America that we will be safe, no one has ever said, "I can't wait until our soldiers charge in there and kick ass!" When people say that our soldiers aren’t doing anything over here, that we need to come home, they never bring up that we don’t do anything because of all the pressure THEY THEMSELVES HAVE PUT ON US.

Well, it's always a safe blowhard-white-guy posture to talk about kicking ass (unless maybe you're actually getting in someone's face at the moment). But if there's anything other than testosterone-charged verbal posturing in this, it's that most of our soldiers' training is in conventional combat operations, not counterinsurgency. And counterinsurgency is about winning those famous "hearts and minds", not about blowing away any building where a sniper might be hiding.

That's the kind of war our great Republican leaders put the country and our soldiers into. It's a little too late to gripe now that's it's not about blitzkrieging an opposing regular army.

The movement against the war has TWO sides. One, that soldiers should come home because they can't make a difference and this is a mistake. Two, soldiers over there are unable to do the job, and when they try, they kill the wrong people, torture prisoners, and dishonor themselves.

What's this supposed to mean? That the Army and everyone else should stop worrying about who the soldiers kill, whether they're torturing people or whether they're doing something dishonorable?

You have the finest army in the world, America. Best equipped, highly trained, and already established on the ground in Iraq. If the people at home stopped merely wishing things would get better, and tell us to make them better no matter what, it would. We are ready to fight, are you?

Yes, the finest Army in the world. An Army trained primarily to fight Soviet Army Central pouring through the Fulda Gap in Germany. That's not who they're fighting in Iraq and not the kind of enemy they're fighting.

He wants to be allowed to make things better "no matter what"?

Whatever this is, it isn't a serious set of ideas about what could be done differently in Iraq. It's just a rant about how we should just be killin' A-rabs and not worry about who. It's disgusting.

Tags: iraq war, milblogs

Blue Dog loves Christmas, too

If you're still looking for a small gift (it's a little too big for a stocking stuffer), George Rodrigue's A Blue Dog Christmas would be a good choice if you can score a copy. The picture above, "I'm All She Wants", is one of many from that book.

Personally, I love the Blue Dog. How could you not?

Tags: blue dog, blue dog christmas, christmas, santa claus, weihnachten

Idolatry

I often use some form of the word "idolatry" to describe the Republican and especially the Christian Right Republican ostentatious praise for the military, both "the troops" and our infallible generals.

Here are two pieces from today that illustrate important aspects of my problem with that whole thing. One is from pundit David Gergen, quoted by  Duncan (Atrios) Black from CNN on 06/21/06:

The president has contended all along in this war that politics would not drive decisions, that his decisions on how many troops and how to deploy them in Iraq would depend upon the commanders on the ground, upon the top military officials and the government.  Now he has staked out a position, at least his aides are staking out a position in favor of a strong surge of American troops into Baghdad.  A decision with which the joint chiefs and the commanders on the ground disagree. S o here we have not just the commander in chief but the politician in chief and the president who has to ask himself the question, does he want to override the wishes of his own generals?  That's a big, tough call.

As I said in my review of H.R. McMaster's book on Vietnam War decision-making, no President is going to long tolerate a situation where his chief military advisers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) are publicly (through leaks or otherwise) dissenting from his military policies. Nor should he.

But that's exactly what's been happening this week, regardless of exactly who has been making the news leaks. The JCS are opposing the "surge" escalation strategy that Cheney and Bush are apparently committed to in the Iraq War.

Yet Cheney and Bush are in a bit of a dilemma about that. Because one of the misguided "lessons of Vietnam" that is especially popular with the blowhard white guys to whom Rush Limbaugh and similar Republican ideologues appeal is that the military wasn't "allowed to win" in Vietnam. The civilians held them back and put too many restraints on them and that's the only reason they lost, the argument goes.

Pandering to that sentiment, Bush and Rummy especially have said over and over and over again that they're doing what their commanders say needs to be done to win. And if they need something other than what they have, all they have to do is ask and they've got it. And if the commanders are not recommending more troops, Bush and Rummy wouldn't think of going against their military commanders.

While Cheney and Bush still have some true believers who will cheer for whatever decision they make on escalation in Iraq, it's hard to believe that this about-face where they are not set to reject their commanders' wise and sacred and wise advice won't intesify the cognitive dissonance that especially good Republican white folks must be feeling right now. It widens the credibility gap, in other words. And while it won't diminish the pretenstions of hardcore authoritarians to be devoted to "honoring" the military, it is a reminder to the reality-based that ultimately, the civilian authorities make military decisions based on a wide range of factors, including their judgment of the enemy's intentions and the possibilities for diplomacy. And that often means rejecting some of the military advice they receive from the JCS - although there are informal ways to avoid have unwelcome written JCS recommendations come to the President and the Secretary of Defense.

I have also argued that popular idolizing of the military has some dark sides, even for the soldiers being "honored". Maybe especially for them. The all-volunteer military has been very popular with both the general public and the officers corps. It has generated an informal but real psychological "deal", in which the military doesn't trouble the public with military conscription, and the public in turn celebrates the generals and the ordinary soldiers alike as Heroes, even if they are technicians on a domestic army base or spend most of their time lobbying for boondoggle weapons systems.

Wesley Clark pointed out in a magazine interview with Duncan Murrell several years ago (Oxford American May/June 2003). Murrell wrote:

The irony, as [Clark] see it, is that while the relationship between the military and the general public has improved since the Vietnam, the experience of actually serving in the military has become less common. The result is a perception of soldiers as the embodiments of ideals - duty, honor, country - reinforced by a sentimentality unsullied by first-handknowledge of soldiering. Such admiration for the military is powerful, but not quite powerful enough to drive the sons and daughters of the middle and upper classes into recruiting offices. "We've been the beneficiaries of that lack of familiarity," Clark says, which has allowed the leaderhsip of the United States to use the military as a symbol, sending soldiers off to wars that don't affect most American families directly by putting their children in harm's way. ...

...[A]mbivalence toward leaders, Clark says, is common in any organization, including the military. But such healthy, educated skepticism is missing when Americans make soldiers into symbols, or when political parties make generals into saviors. This naivete is symptomatic of something very dangerous, in Clark's view. "The paradox is, or the danger is, that when everybody doesn't have an obligation to serve, the costs of service can become diconnected from the rhetoric of governments."

Andrew Bacevich in The New American Militarism (2005) discusses the ways in which a good part of that view of soldiers as being special embodiments of "duty, honor, country" has come from conservative Protestants targeting the military for proselytization.

I also heard him give a speech back in May 2005 in which he also commented that he thought that it's a real problem when people treat soldiers as ideals and stressed that people should keep in mind that soldiers are people just like everyone else.  He also thought this idolatrous attitude (he didn't use the word "idolatry") made it easier for the public to consent to sending them off to kill and die in wars.

I was reminded of that in seeing this post by Murray Waas, the reporter who has done such outstanding work on the Valerie Plame leak scandal: The Wag Time Pet Spa Conspiracy... And a Cancer Survivor's Right to Respect Huffington Post 12/21/06.  The post is a long explanation of his viewpoint in a dispute over a story being prepared about him for the Washington City Paper which goes into his history of having survived cancer in his 20s.  He objects tothe reporters' suggestions that portray him, in Waas' words, "as a person who was so broken by the experience of having cancer, [that he was left] bitter and angry from the experience." He then writes:

But conversely, there are those who have portrayed me as a hero for having been a cancer survivor and for some modest achievements in life. And even though they don't know it, by putting me up on a pedestal, even though they have had good intentions, they have taken away from me a portion of my humanity as well.

Some of that same effect is at work in the idolization of The Troops that we see among the Christian Right and also among some more secular war fans. And one result is the problem both Clark and Bacevich point to: an excessive willingness to see soldiers imagined as comic-book Heroes sent off to a war of choice like Iraq.

I want to go back to the cognitive dissonance Republicans must be feeling right now over the Iraq War and a lot of things connected with it. Sara Robinson at the Orcinus blog writies in All Over But the Shouting 12/21/06 about how rightwing authoritarians, for whom she uses the abbreviation RWA, tend to respond to defeat. I think she's overoptimistic about the decline of the Christian Right, but that's another topic. On RWAs and defeat, she writes:

Because of these beliefs, the first authoritarian response to any failure - a lost election, dropping ratings, or a stymied legislative agenda - is to demand that ever-stronger authority step in to enforce even more draconian standards. At this late hour, when their three-decade-long party is finally showing signs of breaking up, the hardcore RWAs are increasingly the only ones left. Drunk on the hard stuff, this is how they think: The more they lose, the more obstreperously they will insist on doing more of whatever it was they were doing before, back in the days when they were succeeding. ...

Stay tuned. It's only going to get weirder for a while.  We're probably going to see even more Fundie Follies in 2008, as the realization dawns that their social and political clout are fading. The more acutely they feel the loss, the more outrageous their attempts to push old favorite themes to new extremes will become. Which will, of course, only speed the continued loss ofclout and followers, and turn up the volume on the general derision level. Which will, in turn, lead to even stranger pronouncements and more aggressive attempts to ship us all back to the 19th century, the shuddering machinery throwing off bolts and sparks and passengers with every accelerating and doomed orbit. (my emphasis)

Combined with the fear of many senior Cheney-Bush officials about going to prison for various misdeeds and what looks to be an even uglier turn of events in Iraq, this RWA tendency to strike back with more of "the hard stuff" is likely to make 2007 and 2008 two of the nastiest partisan years we've ever seen.

Tags: authoritarianism, iraq war, mcmaster, surge

Light of the Stable

Emmylou Harris' Light of the Stable is still my favorite Christmas album. It was originally released in 1979, still the pre-CD era.

The cover art on the current CD edition (see above) was previously only available on a single version of the title song.  I like the way the artist mixed elements of the story around.  Instead of three wise men, three angels.  Instead of angels in the field, the angels are in the stable.

A couple of the tunes are country-gospel favorites that you don't here very much, "Christmas Time's A-Coming" and "Beautiful Star of Bethlehem".  The title song "Light of the Stable", I've only heard on this album, but it's a lovely song, and Emmy shows her ability to render it reverent but not stuffy.

Emmy is my favorite singer, so I can't claim to be very objective. But her versions of the well-known traditional hymns "O Little Town of Bethlehem", "The First Noel" and "Silent Night" are just outstanding.  Her versions of "Little Drummer Boy" and "Away in a Manger" are also excellent.  She gives "Away in a Manger" a poignant sound that fits well with the lyrics but gives lost in most versions because it's treated more like a lullaby.

Two less-familiar songs were included on the original album, "Golden Cradle" and "Angel Eyes".  Both are good, but I was first familiar with "Angel Eyes" in the duet version she did with Willie Nelson, who sings harmony on this version.  But I always thought it was more of a tribute to Emmy herself, although the "You can move the hearts of men" line could fit the Christ-child, too, though in a different way.  I also like the lines in that song: "The ways of the world are feeble/Don't give up on simple people".

The current CD version includes three additional songs that presumably were recorded about the same time but never released before: "There's a Light", "Cherry Tree Carol" and "Man is An Island".  As a hardcore Emmy fan, I'm glad to have the extra tracks.  But in this case, as in others where "bonus" tracks are added, they don't necessarily add to the overall effect of the album.

Especially since I was used to the way it originally was.  Christmas makes me nostaglic for the good ole days.  When football was still the roughest thing on campus, and kids all still respected the college dean.

Tags: christmas, emmylou harris, santa claus, weihnachten