Brains: One Long Form You Have Got To Be Kidding Me...

[elfs]

File this one under "You have got to be kidding me." In a piece for NRO, Andrew McCarthy reaches for mind-boggling levels of searing idiocy and vies with Joseph Farah for the crown of fools. In a hand-wringing article about the Status of Force Agreement reached between the United States and Iraq, McCarthy writes:

INCONVENIENT FACT: THE IRAQIS DON'T LIKE US

This last point is the one that gnaws. Thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds have been expended to provide Iraqis the opportunity to live freely. And this despite the facts that (a) the U.S. interest in Iraqi democracy remains tenuous (our interest was the elimination of Saddam's terror-mongering, weapons-proliferating regime), and (b) Americans were assured, when the nation-building enterprise commenced, that oil-rich Iraq would underwrite our sacrifices on its behalf. Yet, to be blunt, the Iraqis remain ingrates.

"Ingrates!" Jesus wept. You'd think the Iraqi people ought to be happy that we wrecked their infrastructure, killed thousands of civilians, removed official barriers, and created resources stresses that led to intertribal warfare that killed tens if not hundreds of thousands more, and saddled them with the Maliki administration.

"Ingrates." Can you name a single war anywhere in which invaders were welcomed? Anywhere? Any time? Even in Germany and Japan, which McCarthy cites as positive examples, did not want our invading forces; they lived with them and wrote good things after we were gone. But they weren't happy ever with our presence.

McCarthy wrings his hands further over the fact that Iraq's government isn't going to be our puppet but will instead pursue its own interests in the region, interests which coincide with Iran's in a lot of ways. And we shouldn't be surprised: many of the most competent administrators Maliki has, the ones who know how to run an agency, were trained in Iran, and Maliki accepted them knowing this. Shiite Muslims dominate both countries. You'd think McCarthy never read right-wing pornographer Tom Clancy. In Executive Orders, written in 1996, Clancy points out that if Saddam Hussein goes down, Iran's and Iraq's Shiite interests converge on counterbalancing the Sunni/Wahabbi economic strength of Saudi Arabia. Seven years before our war with Iraq, Tom Clancy had done more research and understood the problem better than McCarthy ever has in the six-year-long course of the war.

McCarthy ends with this charming layer of permafrost:

Victory in Iraq has never meant a functioning democracy. It means defeating radical Islam, which in turn means routing al-Qaeda and leaving behind a stable Iraq that is an American ally against jihadist-sponsoring regimes like Iran.

But "radical Islam" wasn't a problem in Iraq. Saddam Hussein was the problem in Iraq.

I hope McCarthy is being disingenious with his audience. I hope he's just lying to them about the threat of "radical Islam" in Iraq.

Because if he really believes what he writes, I can only conclude one thing: Andrew McCarthy is a true-blooded Crusader. The brown people of Iraq never mattered to Andrew McCarthy. They are irrelevant to his agenda, and if they die in horrific numbers, Andrew McCarthy doesn't care. All that matters is that the United States gets its base of operations from which to kill more "jihadist-sponsoring" brown people in Iran.

When Ann Coulter wrote of the Middle East, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," National Review Online killed her column, citing "journalistic differences." McCarthy has revealed himself to be a proponent of callous state violence without regard for law or humanity. It is time for National Review to fire Andrew McCarthy as it fired Ann Coulter, and for the same reasons.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

The only reason that the Germans & Japanese accepted our occupation was:

1. We bombed them, their mothers, and their children until they begged us to please stop.
2. We were nowhere near as abusive as they feared. And we were definitely not as abusive as they themselves had been when they occupied neighboring countries at the start of the war.
3. Our military actually maintained order; the chain of command knew how to maintain order and was dedicated to maintaining order. That included an expectation that the Germans & Japanese wouldn't be overjoyed that we'd levelled their cities.
4. Better the Americans than the Soviets.

Compare and contrast to what happened the past 8 years:

1. The politicians were too cowardly to tell the American public the truth: that war means killing people. That we'd better be damned sure, before we even consider invading, that we, as a nation, are willing to kill someone else's grandma, even if by accident.
2. We adopted the "interrogation" tactics of the former Soviet Union and the fascist nations of the 1930's.
3. We told our troops the patently-absurd lie: that they'd be welcomed with flowers, that the Iraqis would be overjoyed that we'd just killed Grandma with a cluster bomb.
4. Over the past 8 years, the US has started to become the Soviet Union, complete with political operatives telling the military how to do their job.

[tagryn]

complete with political operatives telling the military how to do their job.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point, but isn't that the whole principle behind civilian control over the military?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Civilian control over the military is about telling the military what to do, and letting the military decide the how. In many ways, the Bush Administration did it exactly backwards: it surrendered much of the "what" to "the generals on the ground," basically allowing Franks and Petreus to decide policy-- and they did a good job of figuring out what could be accomplished-- but often limited the "how" for the matter of political expediency.

The current administration couldn't have been more callous with tin soldiers.

[tagryn]

Meddling by the civilians in military strategy and tactics is much more the norm than the exception, unfortunately. Some examples: in the "Blackhawk Down" intervention in Somalia, the request for armor and Spectre gunships was turned down as being too politically provocative. In Afghanistan, the prohibition against going into Pakistan wasted many opportunities, specifically at Tora Bora by not being allowed to pursue into Pakistan. In Vietnam, there was widespread meddling by the political side in strategy and even tactics, not just things like refusing to allow raids across the the DMZ and into Laos and Cambodia, but down to the level of President Johnson determining target lists (for all his failings, I absolve Bush of that). Even in the more distant past, there's examples such as in the Civil War, where Lincoln was constantly making "suggestions" to his generals until Grant came along, who showed a level of competence which allowed Lincoln to feel he could finally afford to take his hands off the steering wheel and let Grant run the war.

Iraq actually suffered from less of this than other situations, when looked at in historical context. The problem was largely that the overall aims were left muddled and kept changing, and that Rumsfeld had definite ideas about how things should go & resisted any interference from State and other non-DoD actors, not that the politicos specifically told the military "do this operation this way, but not this one that way."

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

I think that you are misunderstanding what I said.

Civilian control of the military means that the chain of command ends not at some general, but at the government, usually an elected official. In the US, at least, that means (or used to mean) that the President is responsible for the military while it is engaged in hostilities, while Congress is responsible for initiating hostilities. Disengaging the military (e. g. a peace treaty) requires both Congress and the President. When the military isn't engaged in hostilities, it's under control of Congress (read the Constitution: Congress has the power to raise armies, maintain them, and disband them).

Political operatives have no authority to issue commands to the military under the Constitution. Ever. Period. End. Of. Story. Orders come from the President, via the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The previous US regime may have decided that political appointees in the Excecutive Branch had the power to issue military orders, but that's a really, really major stretch of the law.

But that's besides my point: political operatives telling the military how to do its job is both self-defeating and dangerous. It's self-defeating because micromanaging any group is self-defeating. Micromanaging a military can cost lives. It's dangerous because — well, we want civilian control, not party control of the military. Having one political Party in control of the military is a recipe for civil war and/or authoritarian dictatorship. Witness the old Soviet Union (who, BTW, had political officers meddling in the military, to the resentment of the officers and enlisted men alike).

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

Saddam Hussein, for all that he governed Iraq with an iron hand, effectively controlled the rivalries and hatreds between and among the various groups in the country (i.e., Kurds, Shia, Sunni, this tribe vs. that tribe); he didn't resolve any of the conflicts, he merely ensured that anyone getting out of line only did it once. When the US deposed him, it blew the lid off of the pressure cooker, and a democratic government doesn't oppress its own people. So you've got the majority Shia wanting to get their own after decades of domination by the minority Sunni, the Kurds wanting their autonomy, individual tribes avenging generations-old slights by neighboring tribes...

More and more, it seems as if Lloyd Biggle was correct. "Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny."

[(Anonymous)]

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point, but isn't that the whole principle behind civilian control over the military?

When it affects at a tactical level, no. You don't tell an architect how to design a building, you rely on the fact that he knows how to do it. You might provide certain specifications, but the more you specify the more likely you are to screw up the results.

As to Germany, well he obviously forgot the crappy state East Germany was in for years.