Month: September 2006

I didn’t know her, but Michael Ledeen did. Here’s his beautiful tribute. Money quote:

Like all creative persons, she was a bundle of contradictions, for those inner turmoils are what drive such people to create. She reveled in her non-conformism and her independence, but she was also profoundly traditional, both privately and intellectually.  She could not bear to live in Italy. She was repulsed by what had happened to her Florence, but she was also intensely Florentine and I never doubted that she would find the strength to go there to die.  She loved to make trouble, even for her family and closest friends, but her thoughtfulness and humanity required her to be close to the family cemetery when she left. She didn’t want to be a burden.

Yes, she was a little crazy. But good crazy.

A reserve soldier who fought in Iraq writes:

I was deployed in my reserve unit (USMCR) as part of operation Desert Storm and Desert Shield. Marine infantry, and we were on the front lines, supposedly to guard a gunship base, but really, though, the gunships guarded us. 

Not too much later, it was time to take prisoners. One of the platoons went north, and when they came back, there were stories about how Iraqi soldiers lined the roads, trying to surrender. I spent a week guarding Iraqi men in a makeshift prison camp, a way-station really, and more than I could count. They didn’t look like they were starving or dehydrated. Apparently, once the ground war began, they just pitched their weapons and headed south at first opportunity. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize that they knew bone deep that they’d get fair treatment. We gave them MREs (with the pork entree’s removed) but almost immediately some Special Forces guys arrived and set up a real chow line for them. We gave each man a blanket, (I kept an extra as a souvie) and I think I saw a Special Forces doc giving some of them a once over.

Once, only once, one of them got all irritated and tried to get in one of the Corporal’s faces, loud. (I was a lance-corporal). He wouldn’t back down, so the Corporal gave him an adjustment, a rifle butt-stroke to his gut, not hard, but he went down.  The Corporal sent me for the medic. The guy was ok, and now calm (or at least understanding the situation), and hand-signed that he was out of smokes and really, really needed one…  Not a bad guy, just stressed-dumb and needing a smoke.  None of the others prisoners in the camp even registered it.

We went north to mop up not long after that. I saw the Iraqi weapons: rocket launchers a little smaller than semi-trailers, hidden in buildings, AKs in piles, big Soviet mortars and anti-tank mines, everywhere but unarmed. They had food too. Pasteurized milk to drink, but most gone bad by then. Some of the mortar rounds were still in crates. They had long trenches that were hard to see in the dunes, bunkers with maps, fire-plans laid out, and blankets, all placed with decent vantage for command and control. They even had wire laid for land-line communications. The point is, they could have fought. Not won, no they couldn’t have won, but they could have fought. Instead, they chose to surrender.

Looking back, I think that one of the main drivers in these men’s heads was that they knew, absolutely, that they’d get fair treatment from us, the Americans.  We were the good guys. The Iraqis on the line knew they had an out, they had hope, so they could just walk away. (A few did piss themselves when someone told them we were Marines. Go figure.) Still, they knew Americans would be fair, and we were. 

Thinking hard on what I now know of history, psychology, and the meanness of politics, that reputation for fairness was damn near unique in world history. Can you tell me of any major military power that had it?  Ever? France? No. Think Algeria. The UK? Sorry, Northern Ireland, the Boxer Rebellion in China…  China or Russia. I don’t think so. But America had it. If those men had even put up token resistance, some of us would not have come back. But they didn’t even bother, and surrendered at least in part because of our reputation. Our two hundred year old reputation for being fair and humane and decent. All the way back to George Washington, and from President George H.W. Bush all the way down to a lance-corporal jarhead at the front.

Its gone now, even from me. I can’t get past that image of the Iraqi, in the hood with the wires and I’m not what you’d call a sensitive type. You know the picture.  And now we have a total bust-out in the White House, and a bunch of rubber-stamps in the House, trying to make it so that half-drowning people isn’t torture.  That hypothermia isn’t torture. That degradation isn’t torture. We don’t have that reputation for fairness anymore. Just the opposite, I think.   And the next real enemy we face will fight like only the cornered and desperate fight. How many Marines’ lives will be lost in the war ahead just because of this asshole who never once risked anything for this country?

This president must never be forgiven for what he has done to the reputation of this country.

Radar Online does some investigation of various hair styles on Capitol Hill. My favorite: the "Just Nuts" look.

Michael Crowley notices a sign of the times.

Glenn Reynolds and I have had our differences. But we have at least one thing to bring us together. Yesterday, we both became uncles. Here’s the first guarantee that the Sullivan name will continue on my DNA line. He’s called Ben. He looks quite pleased to be here. And he has more hair than I do.

The conservative revolt appears to be growing. Here’s Dick Armey talking to Ryan Sager:

Where in the hell did this Terri Schiavo thing come from? There‚Äôs not a conservative, Constitution-loving, separation-of-powers guy alive in the world that could have wanted that bill on the floor. That was pure, blatant pandering to [Focus on the Family President] James Dobson. That’s all that was. It was silly, stupid, and irresponsible. Nobody serious about the Constitution would do that. But the question was will this energize our Christian conservative base for the next election …

Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies. I pray devoutly every day, but being a Christian is no excuse for being stupid. There’s a high demagoguery coefficient to issues like prayer in schools. Demagoguery doesn‚Äôt work unless it’s dumb, shallow as water on a plate. These issues are easy for the intellectually lazy and can appeal to a large demographic. These issues become bigger than life, largely because they’re easy. There ain’t no thinking.

But there’s been a lot of following and excuse-making, hasn’t there?

Marty Lederman brings light to the detainee debate:

It’s important to be clear about one thing: The question is not simply whether, in the abstract, it would be a good or acceptable idea for the United States to use such techniques in certain extreme circumstances on certain detainees. I happen to think that the moral, pragmatic, diplomatic and other costs of doing so greatly outweigh any speculative and uncertain benefits — but that is obviously a question on which there is substantial public disagreement, much of it quite sincere and serious.

Instead, the question must be placed in its historical and international context — namely, whether Congress should grant the Executive branch a fairly unbounded discretion to use such techniques where such conduct would place the United States in breach of the Geneva Conventions. And that, of course, changes the calculus considerably. Does Congress really want to make the United States the first nation on earth to specifically provide domestic legal sanction for what would properly and universally be seen as a transparent breach of the minimum, baseline standards for civilized treatment of prisoners established by Common Article 3 — thereby dealing a grevious blow to the prospect of international adherence to the Geneva Conventions in the future?

That’s what is at stake: whether the global super-power, sixty years after helping create the Geneva Convention, now wants formally to legislate that its minimum standards of humane treatment no longer applies to the U.S. and thereby to any other government on earth. The consequences of doing that are so grave – for U.S. troops and for the world at large – that we simply cannot allow it to happen.

A reader writes:

I agree wholeheartedly with your opinion that the White House’s pressure tactics against the JAG chiefs is "breath-taking and shameless." But, the JAG chiefs were not without a choice. If they really felt as strongly about this matter as they seemed to in front of Congress last week, then the only honorable thing for them to do, in my opinion, would have been to resign their commissions in protest, no matter the personal consequences. By signing those letters, the JAG chiefs stained their own honor and violated their sworn oaths to defend the Constitution. We are truly living in dark times when the defenders of our Republic so meekly surrender to the thuggish cabal that currently haunts the White House.

They’re also soldiers and were being pressured by their commander-in-chief. Some lee-way is merited, in my view.

Brooklyn, New York, 11 am.

Islam has its own version of the End-Times. And Ahmadinejad believes the Apocalypse is coming. A fascinating first-person account of how Iran’s leadership has fused religious prophecy with political power here. And, yes, it scares the wits out of me as well.