McCain's support for our troops

Senators James Webb (D-Va.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) have each sponsored bills to boost veterans' educational assistance to cover the cost of tuition at state universities. This update to the G.I. Bill would cost taxpayers anywhere between two and a half to four billion dollars over ten years -- a drop in the bucket compared to what the war in Iraq is costing us. Most members of Congress think this is a wonderful idea. Isn't it the least we can do to "support our troops"?

Guess who opposes this proposal? Senator John McCain. Why does he oppose it? He fears it will discourage soldiers from re-enlisting, leaving us short of warriors to fight our glorious War on Terror. McCain comments, "I want to make sure that we have incentives for people to remain in the military as well as for people to join the military."

Stop a moment and consider: what does this say about why people join the military in the first place? Could it be that a large number of them are essentially economic refugees -- poor people who could not afford college and figured that it was somewhat less humiliating to don a soldier's uniform than a blue Walmart vest? People who, if given a chance for a good education -- and a good job to follow -- will leave the military in a heartbeat?

Rich man's war, poor man's fight. It was ever thus. Perhaps those who call for a return to the draft have a point. If not just the kids of poor folk but everyone was responsible for fighting this war, maybe the war would be brought to a conclusion a whole lot sooner.

Post-script: Last week a funeral at Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati for Matthew Maupin, whose remains were finally recovered four years after he was kidnapped, tortured, and killed in Iraq. How did he end up in Iraq? He had joined the Army Reserve to make a little extra money for college.

McCain's Two Big Ideas

For his campaign John McCain is selling himself as our foreign affairs / security expert, asserting his manifest superiority in this realm over the Democratic candidates. "You wanna talk about war? Well, I know war!" Yet his statements on Iraq seem to suggest the opposite: that, when it comes to what is actually happening on the ground in Iraq, he's pretty much clueless. Take for instance his repeated assertion that Iran is training Al Qaeda terrorists and sending them back into Iraq to kill American soldiers. This is of course impossible. Al Qaeda is Sunni, Iran is Shiite, and never the twain shall meet.

It was almost inevitable, though, that he make this particular mistake. What he did was conflate the two Big Ideas about the war that he is deploying on the campaign trail: (1) that the enemy in Iraq is the same enemy that struck us on 9/11 and that (2) the enemy in Iraq is Iran. Never mind that these two assertions are mutually exclusive. McCain will continue to assert them.

Why? Because the reality on the ground of Iraq is too complicated for public consumption --also too damned hopeless. McCain's big ideas simplify things. According to McCain, the war in Iraq is a proper response to the crime that was committed against us on 9/11 and the enemy in Iraq is a coherent nation state that potentially could be defeated in a war. See? Simple! Wrong on both counts, but simple.

McCain's strategy is borrowed from Bush and his cronies: just keep saying the same thing over and over again, regardless of its relation to the truth (for example, that there is a link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein), and perhaps enough people will believe it for it to have a political effect.

cheney on the move

News Brief: Vice President Dick Cheney today visited the smouldering remains of a large Iraqi orphanage that burnt down last night after being struck by a U.S. Navy submarine-launched Hellfire missile. Standing amidst the ruins he observed that he thought the fire "had gone very well," that "we were making good progress," and that "it was well worth it." When one reporter observed that Cheney was standing on a pile of charred corpses he responded that most of the children were "dead enders" to begin with and many had "links to Al Qaeda." One of the few surviving children shouted out "God bless you, Mr. Cheney!" at which point Cheney picked up a rock and, hurling it with great force, struck the child in the forehead. "Take that you little Baghdad bastard!" Cheney was heard to mutter before climbing into a Humvee and heading back to the Green Zone for a meeting with the oil minister.

War yawn

"It’s not just torture we want to avoid. Most Americans don’t want to hear, see or feel anything about Iraq, whether they support the war or oppose it. They want to look away, period, and have been doing so for some time."

The above from Frank Rich's column in today's New York Times. He right. Nation-wide battle fatigue has set in.

Went with my father to see Kimberly Pierce's Stop-Loss last night, which is a very intelligent and artful film. Still, I felt antsy throughout the screening, and I winced when some of the familiar arguments against the war were put in the mouths of the beautiful young actors; statements of the by-now-obvious-to-almost-everyone truth that this war in is a very bad business that damages anyone who is involved in it. For all of its sincerity, Pierce's film hardly an eye-opener.

More to my taste would be an absurdist representation of the war on terror, something along the lines of Tony Richardson's Charge of the Light Bridgade or Mike Nichols' Catch-22. A feature film with the wry sense of a Michael Moore documentary. Fewer tears, more jeers.

Rich is right. This war has come to seem like a chronic, wasting disease. The end is not imminent but inevitable and it will be bad. Let's ignore the war just as we ignore the inevitability of our own death, lest we be paralyzed by the contemplation of it. In the corner of our minds is the vague hope that Bush's departure from Washington will somehow result in our troops coming home. This hope persists even though neither of the Democracts likely to replace him are guaranteeing that withdrawal will happen immediately upon their achieving the office. And if McCain wins? So long vague hope.

on Honor

What is honor? a word. What is in that word honor? What is that honor? air. A trim reckoning! -- Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1


I grow weary of the cult of the soldier in wartime. Weary of hearing people praise the soldiers for having served "honorably." How is it possible to serve honorably in a dishonorable war? An illegal war of colonial conquest? It would be like saying one has served honorably in a group action that, under close analysis, resolves into a gang rape. How can anyone who serves in this abomination of a war come out of it unsullied?

What can we say of our soldiers that is true? We can say that they've been tricked into serving in a dishonorable war -- have been fooled by words such as "duty" and "honor" and "freedom" and "democracy." We can pity them for their misuse and abuse, for being put in harm's way for no good reason and for a host of bad ones.

In my eyes, the most honorable soldiers in this war have been those who, possessed of the intelligence to see this war for what it is, have refused to continue to serve and have done so at the risk of their freedom. Now there is true honor. There is true courage. There is true patriotism.

Am I saying it is impossible for a soldier in Iraq to behave in an admirable way? Of course not. The soldier who throws himself on a grenade to save his fellow soldiers is acting courageously, and we admire courage. Yet we find ourselves wishing that he had never been put in the horrible situation where he had to make this fateful decision. We rightly blame the warmongers who put him there.

Rich man's war, poor man's fight. Never truer than now, than with the fight in Iraq.