Curiously, Bill O'Reilly's bold new idea on how to win wars came out
at the exact moment he had a new book to sell.
Bill O'Reilly remains
an odd fellow.
On Sunday’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, O’Reilly not only continued to push for the privatization of the U.S. armed forces by replacing the troops with an outsourced 25,000-man mercenary army, but he also stated point-blank that there aren’t any active-duty military commanders who are capable of defeating ISIS.
We don’t have any Pattons today. But I was with Henry Kissinger today and he told me that my idea of a worldwide anti-terror force paid for by coalition nations under [crosstalk] so let’s win the war, and that’s what George Patton would say.
This notion of O'Reilly's that America ought to outsource our wars to massive mercenary armies is very strange, although it does take the Rumsfeldian notion of military privatization to its logical extreme. There's the question of whether we really want a group of 25,000 heavily armed profiteers wandering around the Middle East under no particular rule of law—I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest
no—and the further question as to whether aforementioned rampaging army would stop shooting things when we told them to—again, our experience with arming even small foreign forces might give pause there. The role of American mercenary forces in undermining the proper U.S. military's stabilization efforts in Iraq is well-documented, as it turns out that having bands of trigger-happy,† for-profit buccaneers zooming through towns shooting whatever they want to shoot is
not an effective path to winning hearts and minds, but never mind all that because I'm sure if Bill O'Reilly were in charge he'd patch all those problems right up.
Somehow, though, all that has now morphed into a plug for his latest book. This one somewhat inexplicably claims that Gen. George Patton did not die from injuries sustained in a car crash as the rest of the planet has long been led to believe, but from a secret plot because let's face it, secret plots are so much more interesting.
Patton was being tracked by Soviet intelligence. He had around the clock guards who were worried about the press, they weren’t worried about anybody else. His wife was in the hospital room with him. And he’s having cognac, and he’s laughing with the nurses, and he goes to sleep, and he wakes up dead. Why? [...]
Stalin had a factory that produced traceless poisons back then, but now with our advanced technology, we could see if there was something in Patton’s remains.”
And that's why we should dig the well-moldered corpse of Gen. George S. Patton out of the ground and test it with some advanced technology to figure out the mystery of why this cognac-drinking car crash victim somehow "woke up dead."
This seems to be a new (?) and very commonplace method of conservative history-telling. Come up with some historical event, claim that the truth is completely different because you are a history-minded genius uncovering truths that all the real historians have never been able to suss out, sell a book saying so, repeat. The Founding Fathers were all Roman Catholic priests, why not; the Civil War was not about slavery, but about northern attempts to stifle southern business entrepreneurship; the Nazis were far-left communists because c'mon, fellow conservatives, doesn't it feel so good to say so? And look how hard we looked at the cover art!
With his claims of unrecognized foreign policy genius and his suspiciously premised, dubiously sourced history premises, Bill here's been increasingly sliding into Glenn Beck territory. He's either just doing it for the money or is having a slow, Beckian break with reality, but which?