I just sat through the News Hour's coverage of Patraeus and Crocker's testimony before the Senate and while I am tempted to turn this into who won the struggle of ideas, HRC or BHO but that is largely irrelevant. I prefer Obama, so I am going to think he is smarter ant those who prefer Clinton will have the opposite reaction, that her questioning proves she is truly ready on day one to kick some ass. However I think it would be hard for any of us to fall into polarized bickering over how much we fucking hate Frederick Kagan and how the sections chosen by the News Hour highlighted the fact that John McCain and Joe Liebermann are a genuine threat to our stability.
I tried to do a brief search on what a grunt makes a month, but lets say it is probably less than $20,000 a year if married and less than $15,000 a year if single. I realize this goes up as they move through the ranks but I am thinking here of those GIs who responded to the President's call to arms after 9-11 and joined the military expecting to go stomp the crap out of Al Quaeda and are now on their third, fourth or fifth tour of duty in Iraq.
I did this because I was watching the News Hour tonight, we don't have cable so it and Amy Goodman are my major sources of news and as they covered the Ambassador and General's testimony, the questions by the Senators and the analysis of Frederick Kagan and William Odom (who looked like he wanted to crawl down the fiber optic cables and beat the living shit out of Kagan) I was pondering how much they as a group earn.
No matter how you feel about the war, or the motivations of those GIs who oppose it or continue to support it, it is necessary to bear in mind how much that small group of people have shafted the GIs who were motivated to serve their country by a deep and abiding patriotism and how much could have been achieved, fixed up and gotten off the ground if we had directed that passion an energy toward problems at home instead of sending them into a meat grinder.
What is worse, their duplicity and complicity is compounded by the fact that most of them do not seem to have a fucking clue. We spend so much time here criticizing McCain for his lack of the most basic understanding of the differences between Shiites and Sunnis. I would go so far as to say this occasionally verges on the snarkiness because it makes us feel good to think he is a dumb fuck. Sadly, given the success of the viral meme about Obama's religion, McCain is no more stupid or ignorant than most Americans, a large number of whom think Obama is a muslim and Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Where I would say most of the readers here differ from McCain, is how we are basically willing to admit we know all too little about the middle east in general and Islam in particular. Furthermore if we are looking for a little guidance to help us make sense of what is happening we naturally gravitate toward the Juan Cole's of this world, who do know what they are talking about.
Having said this, bitching about John McCain's ignorance misses the point. He is not alone in his blinkered and ruinous view of the world. My impression from watching the coverage Senate Armed Services Committee hearing today is that not only do none of them get it, they in fact revel in their stupidity claiming it to be "experience." This is then compounded by the media's slavish addiction to allowing fucks like Frederick Kagan to come on and frame their discussion.
As I only saw PBS coverage I am obviously at a disadvantage, there may, for all I know have been strokes of intellectual genius, soaring rhetoric and a critical grasp of history, but in the coverage I watched three things struck me.:
First, how the Ambassador was able to get away with his observation that we had absolutely nothing to do with the traumatization of Iraq. While Saddam was a murderous bastard and his offspring particularly vicious, Before the first Gulf War, Baghdad was a modern city with the best institutions of higher learning in the Middle East, a thriving secular middle class, who may have had to belong to the Baathist Party to get ahead in their careers, but how is that different from having to become a baptist in the South in order to thrive economically. Yes he was responsible for the deaths of 300,000 of his people in 35 years, but the most notorious of his crimes were enabled by the Reagan and Bush administrations. However these pale in comparison to the consequences of our butal interventions in Iraq since 1991. It is hard to look at Iraq today and conclude, to paraphrase Colon Powell's Pottery barn analogy, we did not just break the pottery, we bulldozed the establishment and then shot the owners. Yes Iraq is a traumatized society, and we traumatized it. How dare the US ambassador sit there and somehow pretend we have no responsibility.
Second, while I do not know the motivations of those Iraqi's who deserted. For John McCain and Patraeus to sit there and critique them for doing so is offensive at best and ignorant at worst. Soldiers desert, not because they are cowards, they do so because they make a rational decision that those ordering them into battle are not worth dying for. What is more, if they desert and then join the other side in the fighting, does not mean they are untrained, it means they want to fight for those they are supposed toattack.
Third, for Frtederick Kagan to sit and pontificate a deliberate lie as evidence he was right all along and not be chaallenged by Judy woodruff is unacceptable. as Juan Cole has argued at great length, Sadr did not seek a cease fire it was the Maliki government.
Thankyou for reading this
James