It isn't on-line yet, or even out officially, but I'm reading the Washington Post Magazine cover story for tomorrow, because its delivered a day early.
It's tomorrow, and the link to the article is here (log-in required).
The title of the article is "Their War," and the cover blurb is "Us vs. Them: As mistrust, resentment and misunderstanding grow between the civilian and military communities, can America wage a just and effective war?"
Ye Ghods!!!!!!!!!!
In point of fact, the article is somewhat less provocative than the blurb, but the subtext is far more chilling:
The military believes it's waging a "just war" in Iraq; the civilian community does not, and is preventing them from winning.
Shooting people is all that's needed to win against this enemy.
Victory is both achieved and defined by military action. The only way to fight against the enemies of our nation is to join the army or marines.
Thus, those who protest the blunders and anti-American arrogance of the Bush/Cheney illegal regime are both "against the troops" and "against America" because they want us to "lose."
One can even see this: The invasion of Iraq is a "just and effective war." What!!!!!!!???????
Once again, the WaPo proves it is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the RNC, willing to bullshit in whatever way it takes to support Rethuglican propaganda.
I will be writing the ombudsman -- again -- protesting against this bullshit, but the grounds for objections are so subtle and complex that one doubts their tiny minds will be able to accept them.
I will be following up, and linking to the article, when it appears on washingtonpost.com, and I encourage all of you to follow up, and protest, with me.
Added text:
Finished the whole article. While, as I said, less provocative than the blurb, what strikes me about the whole thing is the clichés, the lack of originiality, the acceptance of groupthink assumptions, scattered throughout. The writer, Kristin Henderson, is described as "married to a Navy chaplain" and "the author of While They're at War: The True Story of American Families on the Home Front." While, thus, not a career journalist perhaps, she certainly buys in to all the standard cant of the journalist caste in today's environment.
The theme is supposed to be "What happens to a democracy when its civilians live in one world and its warriors in another?" But the only political leader she mentions -- and interviews -- is Chuck Hagel, who is both a war veteran and a Republican. She does not talk about how much an outlyer that makes Hagel, because the entire Bush leadership team avoided military service (including Bush going AWOL), and there are many veterans among the Democratic leadership. In the name of non-partisan "fairness," she leaves out key facts in the present situation.
Another example of her non-partisan partisanship is when she writes:
To some degree, the gap between the military and the people ahas been masked by one of the other lessons of Vietnam: Don't blame the soldiers for the military misadventures of our civilian leaders.
Which begs the question, who has been "blaming the soldiers" for the Iraqi quagmire?
Another example of her false "balance" is in this passage:
In the heat of an unpopular war [Vietnam], decades of social trends boiled over: the development of relativistic theologies, growing legal emphasis on the rights of the individual and the emergennce of the teenage years as a time free from both parental restrictions and adult responsibilities. The trends empowered and united war opponents with a moral cenrtainty that surpassed anything seen during previous conflicts . . .
That sounds to me like something straight from the RNC playbook, a list of what they think went wrong in the sixties, and have been trying to undo ever since. And, just an aside, how can we blame both "relativism" and "moral certainty" for the same problem? How can we assign them to the same people? Can we not talk about the "moral certainty" of the neocons that led us into this fiasco in the first place?
Henderson has written an article on an important subject that could have been thoughtful but isn't. She has allowed the WaPo editors, or her own thoughtlessness, to distract her from the real issues of importance, both particular to the current situation and of more universal import. She talks about how civilians don't understand that the "military's basic job is to break the enemy's will by killing him, or threatening to." And that the attitudes and skills needed to do that job are very different from popular conceptions. She also talks about the "can do" attitude of the military and its leadership, as opposed to the "strategic (whatever that means)" viewpoint of civilian officials. What she doesn't talk about is the possibility that one role of the military is to protect our citizens for too much knowledge of the culture of the warrior, and about the proper relationship between civilian and military leaders, and how breaking that relationship got us into the quagmire we currently occupy (as well as the country).
Henderson's e-mail is kh@kristinhenderson.com. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
Let's join her for a real discussion, and challenge the assumptions that she avoided.