Month: November 2006

A new salvo from the Christianist-in-Chief.

While the media is obsessed parsing the ad libs of someone on no ballot this fall, something truly ominous has just happened in Iraq. The commander-in-chief has abandoned an American soldier to the tender mercies of a Shiite militia. Yes, there are nuances here, and the NYT fleshes out the story today. But the essential fact is clear. In a showdown for control of Baghdad, the Iraqi prime minister took orders from Moqtada al-Sadr, and instructed the U.S. military to withdraw from Sadr City. The American forces were trying both to stabilize the city but also to find a missing American serviceman. He is still missing. Money quote from the WaPo:

The move lifted a near siege that had stood at least since last Wednesday. U.S. military police imposed the blockade after the kidnapping of an American soldier of Iraqi descent. The soldier’s Iraqi in-laws said they believed he had been abducted by the Mahdi Army as he visited his wife at her home in the Karrada area of Baghdad, where U.S. military checkpoints were also removed as a result of Maliki’s action.

The crackdown on Sadr City had a second motive, U.S. officers said: the search for Abu Deraa, a man considered one of the most notorious death squad leaders. The soldier and Abu Deraa both were believed by the U.S. military to be in Sadr City.

The U.S. military does not have a tradition of abandoning its own soldiers to foreign militias, or of taking orders from foreign governments. No commander-in-chief who actually walks the walk, rather than swaggering the swagger, would acquiesce to such a thing. The soldier appears to be of Iraqi descent who is married to an Iraqi woman. Who authorized abandoning him to the enemy? Who is really giving the orders to the U.S. military in Iraq? These are real questions about honor and sacrifice and a war that is now careening out of any control. They are not phony questions drummed up by a partisan media machine to appeal to emotions to maintain power.

And where, by the way, is McCain on this? Silent on Cheney’s "no-brainer" on waterboarding. Silent recently on Iraq. But vocal – oh, how vocal – on Kerry. It tells you something about what has happened to him. And to America.

(Photo of an American soldier in Iraq – not the missing guy – by Yuri Kozyrev for Time.)

Laura Branigan’s "Self-Control." I have to say it is a near-perfect expression of the genre.

Because we desperately need some humor right now.

A reader writes:

John Kerry hits the nail on the head – and a mere day after it occurred to me for the first time how close I came to getting stuck in Iraq myself. Back in 1986 my poor parents worked their butts off to find some way to get me into a decent college. I had decent grades so money was the main problem. 

One of the potential ways around that money problem was – yep – ROTC. As it was, the powers that be wouldn’t let me into ROTC since my eyes weren’t that great, but that turned out to be a huge blessing. Had my parents ended up sticking me into military reserve service to get the funds that would send me to college, I might have ended up in Iraq – in Gulf War I, which started the year after I left college. Whew! A very very close call indeed.

Of course, if anyone dares speak the truth about military service – that many if not most people get into it not as a patriotic enterprise but as a lucrative job or source of job training, they get their heads lopped off by hateful attacks and slander. Some people went to Iraq because they really wanted to fight for our country there. But only some of them. Most just got stuck there. It’s high time people dropped the silly pretense and admitted it.

Andrew – don’t fall for the silly Karl Rove hype machine this time.

I’m not. But there is a real issue here – an ambiguous criticism of the troops – and it wouldn’t be hard to correct it. I intend to focus on the real issue right now: the failed war in Iraq. My reader worries about being sent to Iraq War I. But that war was waged by a competent, decent president, not an incompetent, indecent one. That’s the real issue in this election. And we owe it to the troops not to be distracted from it.