Meaningful Distinction:
 

 
Patrick S. Lasswell Look outward for something to accomplish, not inward for something to despise.
pslblog at gmail dot com
 
 
   
 
Thursday, May 27, 2004
 
Murthering Great Amalgamation of Bruce Photos

As requested by various family member. Sorry about the long load time.

Beware The Brindled Bedhog! The Sheet of Bruce

Images linked to smooth loading...

Monday, May 24, 2004
 
Dog Blogging

Our new dog Bruce. Here he stands watch, ever vigilent for dropping bits of heaven.



The bowl...the bowl is empty...

Tuesday, May 18, 2004
 
Dismissing the Value of Life and Death

About twenty years ago a bunch of my friends and I were discussing the possibility of going to war and killing people. The subject was more germane for us than most folks; all but one of my circle of friends ended up in the service, and the question mattered. The one of us who didn't end up serving in the military just could not see losing his life for something because it was too valuable. My contention then and now is that something that you cannot spend has no value. The difference to a vending machine between a bent nickel and a ten thousand dollar bill is nothing. The universe is not a vending machine, of course, but the accomplishment record of people who think their lives too valuable to risk is roughly equal to that of people who accept that their lives are worthless. Somewhere in the middle are people who risk what they have and then work like hell to redeem what they have chanced, and these people accomplish things.

My friend Michael Totten is arguing today about the immoral case against the war. The current subject of his concern is somebody arguing the infinite value of the innocent lives that get lost in any struggle. I think the argument is the same as the one I had two decades ago. Accepting the risk of putting lives on the line implies accepting value for your actions and responsibility for those lives and your own. Michael is arguing against people who refuse to take responsibility for their lives, and choose to do so in the pages of national magazines. For a lot of people, endorsing the war means accepting responsibility for their own lives. How much better it is to cloak yourself in the obscurity of an infinite value than to risk an honest assessment of your life.

On approaching the steps of Appomattox Courthouse, Robert E. Lee said, "I would rather face a thousand deaths…" In the end he had the courage to put a value to his pain, and accept that price for his actions. I really do not expect as honorable a surrender from those opposed to the very concept of war. They really have shown themselves to be infinitely less prepared to face consequences.

Monday, May 17, 2004
 
Compelling Story without Motive

Seymour Hersh has written what appears to be a damning story about Rumsfeld's involvement in torture committed by US forces around the world; the only problem is that he has no evidence to establish motive. Unnamed sources the highest levels of US intelligence have confirmed the accusations; but nobody has given Hersh any evidence for why Rumsfeld would approve such a thing. If Seymour Hersh took his story and presented it to a court of law, he would be lucky if he avoided a contempt charge. None of what he presents in his story would stand up to judicial scrutiny, or he should have sought an indictment. In all the feeding frenzy to attack anyone involved in the torture scandal, the issue of character has been ignored. Would Donald Rumsfeld have approved of such a policy?

The biggest problem I have with Hersh's story is not that it is not plausible to believe about the Secretary of Defense, but that it really doesn't apply to Donald Rumsfeld. All of the accusations make sense for any SecDef since Forrestal, but Rumsfeld's identity is that he changed how the US fights wars. For him to revert to the policies that used to be common would mean that he had abandoned the changes he's been working to create since he took office. The man who joyously cited photos of "…the first US cavalry charge of the 21st Century" on the pages of Foreign Affairs magazine, and has pushed incessantly for the US military to abandon rote methods, would have to be profoundly motivated to abandon his identity. Because Iraq was never going so badly as to require Rumsfeld to change his identity, Hersh fails to establish motive.

The cop-out would be to say that Washington changes people and that the pressure on the Secretary of Defense to accomplish results would justify his taking any action. Thirty years ago that might have been true for Rumsfeld. Today, that just seems ludicrous. He is a multi-millionaire executive doing his last tour of duty and trying very hard to make things right. The traditional temptations of power, money, and sex seem pretty weak when compared to the reality of the man. He already has power, money, and apparently quite a few sincere offers for a septuagenarian. There just does not seem to be enough reason to make Rumsfeld abandon his principles and consent to the kinds of policies that are being attributed to him. Without the motive portion of the triangle, the accusation collapses.

Saturday, May 15, 2004
 
Ending Global Idiocy

Michael Totten asked me to help out shifting the tone of comments on Marc Cooper's blog a little to the right of Che Guevara, so yesterday I chimed in. I noticed that one particularly insistent troll was yammering away prodigiously and hit him upside the head with a reality stick. Pity was that he has immunity to such things.

The topic revolved around the effectiveness of the Bush Administration's actions to influence terrorists since 9/11 against Al Queda. The troll was of the opinion that there were no terrorists in Iraq, and if there were they didn't have Al Queda union cards, so that didn't count as real War on Terror activity. I explained as how our Army and Marine snipers had been killing 35-40 insurgents a day, many of them foreigners, and over a thousand had died in the last month. All of these were confirmed good kills, and I'm sure a very high percentage of them were of leadership types. I asked what could possibly more influential to the terrorists than killing them. His answer: ending global poverty.

I declined to answer the idiot at that point, although Michael Totten did his usual great work in destroying that argument on its merits. This morning I thought it through and realized how profoundly stupid that troll's argument was, and also how common that thread of idiocy is. On June 30th, the bulk of governing functions in Iraq will be handed over to Iraqi's. Right now, there are the remnants of a festering insurgency. Every major Islamist terrorist organization is providing fighters to the disruption of Iraqi reconstruction. The house in on fire and this moron's response is to weed the neighbor's garden.

Ending global poverty is a lofty goal, and a worthy one, too. Personally, I think that we have the tools to accomplish a lot of this in my lifetime, and we have finally come to an awareness of the actions we can take to make this happen. One of the key solutions is integrity and the crucial value of transparency in government. The most clearly identifiable cause of poverty is bad governance; for the reality immune, that does not mean another four years of "W". Amongst the worst administers in the world are religious fanatics; if you include communism as a religion, all the worst rulers are religious fanatics, and some of them worship Marx.

Iraq is about to be given self-governance and try to lift itself out of poverty. To help them achieve this, the idiotic troll wants us to cease combat operations against the religious fanatics and focus on doing something somewhere non-confrontational. The United States is not going to do that, instead we are going to do our part to end global idiocy. Every day, another 35-40 high order idiots leave this world courtesy of US military force, and the world is a better place for it.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004
 
Hat Tip: Instapundit

Sunday, May 09, 2004
 
In Defense of the Strategy of Miserable Troops

I spent three miserable years in the Navy from 1988 to 1991 doing my part to keep an undermanned ship afloat and functional, upon reflection; I must grudgingly admit that this was probably a good thing. Don't get me wrong, we should have gotten more support and better training to do our jobs with fewer people, and it sucked to be on that ship. It destroyed any possibility of my advancing rapidly and nearly caused me to have a nervous breakdown. The thing is that I was a lot better sailor and our ship was a lot more effective at critical elements of naval warfare than many fully crewed ships of the same class. A key part of this was not that we were assigned better sailors, but that we had to be better because there was nobody else to do the job. It was never somebody else's problem. We were miserable as individuals, but as a unit, our morale was high.

A lot of people are seeing the solution to our problems in Iraq in assigning more troops; multiple times the current number of forces. I disagree. The belief that security and efficiency comes with greater numbers is compelling, but based on illusions. The primary illusion is that all our forces are always engaged in the kind of firefights that make the evening news. The secondary illusion is the view that all Iraqi's are like the animals in Fallujah who mutilated our citizens. The third illusion is that a significant fraction of our troops are as out of control as the idiots who tortured prisoners in Abu Gharib. The final illusion is the concept that diminishing responsibility of individuals improves efficiencies. The first three illusions have been dealt with very well here, here, and here, so I won't go into them. What I can speak of with assurance is the illusion of diminished responsibility.

The traditional view of military behavior, and for many people the only understanding they have about what servicemen do, is the vision of troops marching in formation and standing in ranks. That neat, comprehensible view of ranks and files of troops operating as a singular will is compelling as all get out; it makes sense. About a century and a half ago, the breach loading cartridge firing rifle made that kind of military obsolete. A century ago, the development efficient machine guns and logistics systems to supply them, made that kind of military behavior in the field suicidal. Troops still march in ranks because it is easier to keep track of them, but that mostly happens in parades and training commands. Today, the average serviceperson is a specialist with months of training, even is they are "just" carrying a rifle. Each one of them is made aware of their responsibilities, and when given the opportunity, they carry them out to the best of their ability. There are marginal troops in our current forces, but my experience is that even marginal troops do their best when it matters.

The main effect of doubling or tripling our current number of troops in Iraq would be to make things not matter so much. The morale effects of taking troops away from important duties and making their efforts irrelevant is much worse than taking casualties. There is a fair amount of military history to back this up; Marines who were fighting on the line in Guadalcanal one day could not climb the nets onto the troopship the next day after they had been relieved, for example. My experience backs this up, too. Sailors on regular Navy ships were slower and didn't train as hard as sailors on reserve ships where effort was more crucial.

Our current force levels in Iraq mean that our troops there will be miserable, but will have the high morale of people who are personally responsible for doing something important. While it may seem the right thing to give misery company, it is not really the successful thing to do. Our primary goal in Iraq going forward needs to be the establishment of a successful democratic state, not the development of a comfortable duty station. We do not need a draft; we need to let the people on the scene do their jobs. If you want them to be less miserable, send them double-stuff Oreos.

Thursday, May 06, 2004
 
UCMJ for Civilians or Yes, the Abu Gharib Idiots can be Executed

I had the privilege of attending Marc Cooper's reading at Powell's on Hawthorne tonight with Michael Totten and Sean LaFreniere . After the reading, I made my statement that I felt the Abu Gharib idiots should be hung from the highest yardarm, and that I meant it literally. They claimed that there was no way we could do that…ah, civilians. The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) is not like civilian justice systems. The purpose of the UCMJ is not to safeguard individual liberty; it exists to maintain order in the armed forces whose job is to safeguard the freedom of the nation. Military personnel surrender substantial portions of their constitutional rights, but by no means all of them, upon enlistment or commissioning. One of the most critical of the surrendered rights is the scope of conduct that is allowed; bad discipline has destroyed armies without number, and the UCMJ reflects this.

899. ART. 99. MISBEHAVIOR BEFORE THE ENEMY
Any person subject to this chapter who before or in the presence of the enemy--
(3) through disobedience, neglect, or intentional misconduct endangers the safety of any such command, unit, place, or military property;
shall be punished by death or such punishment as a court- martial may direct.

There are other relevant articles that carry open ended punishments, but Article 99 is exactly relevant to the intentional misconduct of the soldiers who took the pictures. Unlike in previous wars, the presence of the enemy is now everywhere. American and Coalition military and civilian personnel will die because of the misbehavior of these soldiers. They deserve to die for their crimes and the damage they have done to their fellows and the discredit they have brought to their nation. The UCMJ they are subject to provides for that punishment.
 
Hang the Right People, Roger

Roger,

I realize that right now you may not care very much about the procedures of the military, but I hope you can take a minute to do so. While military justice is awfully roughshod in some places, it does tend to make sure that innocents under its jurisdiction are not punished. The press and the media never provide that kind of protection. The problem here is that Rumsfeld is under an obligation to make sure that at the end of the day, the United States has an effective security apparatus. The press has an obligation to sell papers, and the media has a compulsion to attract viewers; neither of them have much accountability for the damages their stories may cause.

If it were up to me, the idiots in those photos and responsible for them should hang from the highest yardarm for the damage they have done to the mission. Those stupid braggarts are costing the lives of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines as surely as if they were planting the bombs themselves. Afterwards, if the UN wants to try their corpses for crimes against humanity, we should send them the coffins with our compliments and assist with the prosecution. The spooks involved in this should hang as well. The CIA directors responsible for them should be fired for hiring dumb people, and imprisoned for failing to exercise control. For reference, I am not speaking rhetorically.

Another thing to keep in mind is what the Wall Street Journal said today, the military justice system is what brought this problem to light. This tends to indicate that this system is not actually broken, and that Rumsfeld's subordinates were doing their jobs. I do not see how calling for Rumsfeld's head on this makes things better. Yes, he is responsible, but he has exercised his authority correctly. Punishing subordinates for doing their jobs right is always a bad plan. If Rummy had wanted to cover this up, he had the perfect opportunity to make all the involved parties go away in a car bombing. What kind of behavior can we expect of the next Secretary of Defense if we start rewarding cover-ups?

Update: Thanks to Roger for the link.

More: IRAQ NOW, has a great discussion of this story.

 

 
   
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