November 10, 2002
Jeanne quotes a Washington Post article that summarizes some remarks by General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to the effect that “there is a debate taking place within the Pentagon about whether the United States needs to change its priorities in Afghanistan and de-emphasize military operations in favor of more support for reconstruction efforts” and that “it may be time for the military to ‘flip’ its priorities from combat operations aimed at hunting down al Qaeda and Taliban fighters to ‘the reconstruction piece in Afghanistan,’” which the Post calls “a notable shift in priorities for an a Pentagon that has eschewed nation-building exercises.”
So far so good, but Jeanne’s own remarks are:
You’re a little behind the curve, honey. We have been trying to tell you for almost a year now that keeping Afghanistan from falling back into the chaos that made a cozy little nest for terrorism was at least as important as tracking down the big guy with the beard. Okay, so you’re a little slow. We forgive you. You don’t even have to apologize or anything. (It would be a nice gesture, but we understand about all that stupid macho pride stuff…) Just do it. And if you’d like more advice, feel free to call on us any time.I don’t get this. Where is it established that General Richard B. Myers suffers extraordinarily from “macho pride”? Does Jeanne D’Arc know something the rest of us don’t about General Myers having a record of being unable to acknowledge mistakes? For that matter, do we know that these remarks represent a substantial shift in General Myers’ view of how we should comport ourselves in Afghanistan? (The Post calls it a “shift” for the “Pentagon,” but it’s unclear whether the term “Pentagon” is being deployed as synecdoche for “Secretary Rumsfeld” or “the officer class”.) Further: As the Post article notes, General Myers delivered his thoughts as “after-dinner comments Monday night at the Brookings Institution.” How frequently do hard-core Bush Administration neocons get their views out to the press by delivering them as after-dinner remarks at the Brookings Institution?
I don’t know much about General Richard B. Myers, but from here his quoted observations seem level-headed. From whence comes the assumption that he’s hitherto been in favor of the Administration policies of which Jeanne is critical? Indeed, there’s been a great deal of well-documented tension between this Administration and top military management, some of it because of Rumsfeld’s military-reform agenda and some of it because military people often tend to think the world is a more complex and intractable place than political ideologues do.
I may be suffering from a moment of humor-impairment, but it seems to me Jeanne’s remarks demonstrate one of modern liberalism’s chronic problems, which is that too many of us regard ourselves as being in a kind of culture war with the military. Perhaps because I’ve gotten to know a number of actual military professionals in my years as a book editor, I’ve come to think this is a mistake. By and large, the American military executes goals, rather than setting them—and this is a feature of our system, rather than a bug. In my experience, if you can actually get military people to talk about what they think we ought to be doing (which they’re frequently reluctant to do—see the feature, not bug, mentioned above), they often turn out to have nuanced and well-informed views.
A smart liberal like Jeanne D’Arc would have no trouble readily agreeing that the workers inside a business often have insights about its condition which elude high-level management. This commonplace observation can be found in Marx and also in every third business book. Why, then, should it be surprising when military professionals turn out to have thoughtful observations about the details of the deployment of American power? In the enterprise of manufacturing American foreign policy, the military are the proletariat—the workers and low-level managers on the factory floor.
It’s true that military officers are often socially conservative, for a variety of reasons; and it’s true that, as an institution, the military could stand to grow up a little bit on certain issues. But it’s also true that capable people who have been out into the world on the front lines of American power usually wind up knowing things that both liberal and conservative pundits don’t quite get, and liberals in particular could stand to cultivate the habit of listening to them without condescension. [10:42 AM]
You know, this post begins to clarify something for me. Which is, that there's a lot of difference between urban liberalism and rural (or rural states) liberalism. And the times when people say 'liberals have trouble with this' (this in this case being culture war with the military) and I don't get it, well, maybe it's that gap between rural and urban.
I'm beginning to think that liberalism in public is most often represented as having something to do with cities and it's not (or has no reason to be) dependent on that. There are lots of places where it truly makes no difference, but guns seem to me to be one place where it does, maybe attitudes toward the military are another.
Of course, my mind still boggles at 'radical leftist academia,' as some of the most conservative people I've ever seen are university professors, so maybe I really do live in an alternate world.
Good point. The generals are the ones who've expressed their misgivings about the civilians' adventurism all along. I'm having difficulty articulating the nub of the issue here, but it has to do with American perceptions of career military types and what control they really have over deploying troops; it may well be that the consensus is that the civilians in charge have less control than they really do. This doesn't strike me as only a liberal misconception, however.
I've noticed for years that there are things going on in the military that are pretty much under the radar but are showing an interesting shift. For example, they are increasingly concerned with things like not having to disrupt their families because of being stationed in weird places, being shuffled all over the country and things like that. Even day-care.
Check this out for another take on the military.
Bravo, Patrick.
I worked at the Pentagon for a number of years, and as a defense contractor, moved in military circles all the time.
The knee-jerk liberal response of military/police/any uniformed service=EVIL, always rankled me. My favorite was a protest called "A Day Without The Pentagon" that we allowed a couple hundred green-haired high-school kids to have right on our own front doorstep.
All I could think was: If we complied with your request and even had *one* day without the Pentagon, you would lose your freedom to protest anything at all. We are here *protecting* you.
Such even-handed treatment of the military as is reflected in your comments is refreshing. Liberals should take note of it. I do think the changing climate of the left, post 9/11, is bringing more people around to attitudes like yours.
Myke, I think history provides all of us--not just the "left"--with abundant reasons to mistrust military organizations. And I can't help noticing that many people on the Right who display a fine strong grasp of the ills to which unfettered government is prone, seem to lose their objectivity entirely when the swollen governmental bureaucracy under discussion is an armed and uniformed one. (I have more than once proposed that if a Democratic Congress were to re-charter the Deparment of Health and Human Services as a heavily-armed paramilitary organization, the Republicans would subsequently defend it--and fund it generously--forever.)
As for "one day without the Pentagon," well, we had over 150 years without the Pentagon, by which I don't mean just the building but also the national-security State that the postwar defense bureaucracy administers.
I think liberals need to keep in mind that we have a military establishment for a reason, and that short of the miraculous establishment of the City of God, we're likely to continue needing to have one. And, moreover, that while the military virtues of honor, valor, loyalty, and discipline may not be 100% of the recipe for a happy human psyche, they are in fact real virtues, and society needs them.
And conservatives need to remember that the military is just as prone to the sins of corruption, self-dealing, and featherbedding as any of the social-services bureaucracies they love to bash--and that the military has a lot more resources for preventing their own sins from coming to light.
Sure. It's like copyeditors. What they do isn't always pleasant, and when they go bad it can be a horror, but ground-level reality is that they're there to help. Which is why Production is a service department, and our military guys are the armed services.
They're not aliens. They're us and ours.
Congratulations on, whether you intended it that way or not, a superb Veterans' Day tribute post.
Thanks. I didn't even think of that until I emerged from the subway at 5th and 23rd this morning, and saw the Veterans' Day parade assembling itself.
Happy Veterans' Day. Remember, if you think a war is stupid (and many of them are), it's not the soldiers' fault. That's the point of Eric Bogle's "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda."
I'm not sure if this is rural liberalism or just ancestral yellow-dog Democrat party loyalty, but a list of the (relatively few, so they stand out) counties carried by McGovern in 1972 includes a fair number of rural ones, especially in western states. (I'll dig for a list on request.) This phenomenon has been less-seen in recent years, however.
Huh. I just finished my own Veterans Day post before heading over here. As usual, my approach is more blithering and gassy than yours, but it's nice to feel like part of a movement for an hour or so.
i went back and read jeanne's post, and what patrick read as knee-jerk military-distrust, i read as comic irony. one big big problem with cyberspace, is that the lack of facial expressions and tonal inflections leave a great deal of usual communication techniques out of the equation.
i don't think that jeanne is anti-military; i know that i certainly am not. i am anti-invastion-of-iraq; i am anti-stupid-ass-wars-for-profit-or-bragging-rights; i have always maintained (and i am thinking jeanne would agree with me) that it's not the military that make wars; it's the politicians, and the military is there to clean up the politician's mistakes.
i know plenty of people on the left who support and admire and endorse our men and women in uniform...i would suggest a quick perusal of this article on intervention magazine, war veterans gather to stop a new war. to support the military and be on the left are not necessarily antithetical
Right on, Patrick!
The American mentality and societal attitude toward the military was drastically diiferent before WWII and afterwards: we are still living (even in 2002) with the aftermath of that change: and the effects of the war in Vietnam, and how it played out in our consciousness, are still with us - even when the political aspects of the conflict have faded into history.
Skippy, who is indeed a fine bush kangaroo, writes:
i went back and read jeanne's post, and what patrick read as knee-jerk military-distrust, i read as comic irony.
Tricky stuff, irony. I don't generally read charges that someone suffers from "macho pride" as "irony." I read them as straightforward attacks.
one big big problem with cyberspace, is that the lack of facial expressions and tonal inflections leave a great deal of usual communication techniques out of the equation.
With all due respect to Skippy, whose blog I have been quite enjoying lately (have I mentioned that he is indeed a fine bush kangaroo?), this is one of the staler and dumber cliches of the online world.
The "lack of facial expressions and tonal inflections" found in "cyberspace" poses absolutely no problem not also faced by good old prose writing. We overcome these problems with skill, with good will, with criticism, with inventiveness, and with slack. I don't know who first dreamed up the idea that online communication poses some kind of special problem not previously faced by Shakespeare, the authors of the King James Bible, George Orwell, S. J. Perelman, R. Lionel Fanthorpe, and the hundreds of millions of people who have written letters to one another in the history of the English language, but it's a dopey idea and it should stop right now. Good writing is within the reach of everyone who isn't mentally impaired. And the proper response to discovering that your "comic irony" didn't work isn't to blame the medium of prose -- it's to make it work better for you next time. (As I think the mysterious "Jeanne D'Arc," whom I suspect of being a professional writer herself, would agree.)
Jay C., I'm a little unsure what you mean when you claim the American attitude toward the military was transformed by World War II. I would have said Vietnam myself, but I'd like to hear you say more.
before i begin my response to patrick's response to me, let me say that i am quite honored to be on his permanent blogroll, and find his work to be both erudite and interesting.
that being said, onward:
of course, great writing is not good writing, which is not mediocre writing, which is not bad writing.
there is very little great writing in the world, and even less in blogtopia (yes! i coined that phrase!).
blog authors usually don't take the luxury of rewriting, or thinking out their posts in long hand before assembling them in coherent manner (i could be wrong about jeanne, she may have labored all day and night on her post, but i sincerely doubt it).
i still see irony and humor is what jeanne wrote, and writes. i'd ask that one finds a recurring theme of anti-militarism in her work before accusing her of it. the worst you can say is that she wrote without thinking (a common complaint in blogtopia!)
and, one by one: shakespear wrote to be performed, by people with inflections and expressions, not read.
the authors of the king james bible wrote to re-interpret the word of god (from the geneva version), and thus were translators at the worst and vessels of the almighty at the best, more than authors.
george orwell, and sj perlemen, i believe, had editors. very few people are great writers without editors.
it's to my great shame that i don't know who r. lionel fanthorpe is, but i bet he wasn't a blogger.
"I don't know who first dreamed up the idea that online communication poses some kind of special problem..."
i think it was s.j. perleman. or else that fanthorpe guy.
ok, one more thing, and i'll move on with my life...
all i can say about the left being anti-military is, i'm what you would call on the left, and i am not; i don't know anybody who is; i haven't run across such feelings that apparently everyone else has; i didn't see anti-military feelings in jeanne's post. strictly anecdotal, but those are my experiences.
I said nothing about Jeanne D'Arc's "feelings", which are between her and God. I was discussing rhetorical habits, which often lead us further down the garden path than "feelings."
I see lots of "irony and humor" in what Jeanne writes, but you know, not in that piece. And here's what Skippy is being a little thick about grasping: when the audience doesn't see the humor, it's generally not the audience's fault.
As for all this special pleading about blogs not being labored over and redrafted multiple times on virgin foolscap, well, bullshit, he said politely. I'm not talking about some unattainable standard of machine-tooled prose. Jeanne D'Arc is a good writer, which is why I do her the courtesy of taking her seriously and disagreeing when I think she's wrong. Skippy T. B. K. appears to be verging on saying "Don't take me seriously, I'm just saying the first thing that comes into my head, and if you challenge me I'll talk about how blog writing is uniquely lacking in facial expressions and in-person nuance." I find this attitude discouraging. I found it discouraging in science fiction fanzine fandom when I was young and I find it discouraging in weblog writing now. Have some sodding self-respect. For crying out loud.
What Jeanne fails to recall is that the very first thing that the US miitary did in Afghanistan was humanitarian -- droppng food packets -- because that was all they could do.
She also fails to note that we've been doing humanitarian projects right the way along, though there's a certain level of shooting that you have to get through before paving roads and building schools will do more than provide the bad guys with more targets.
The way I read GEN Myers'remarks was that the only debate was on exactly when the Army was going to switch from mostly digging foxholes to mostly digging wells, and he was of the opinion that now would be a good time, and yesterday would have been better.
The interesting thing to me was that he made the comments in that particular venue. Was it a way to get out to the public that he wasn't happy with the set of orders he'd been given?
It's hard for someone like Jeanne (who I speculate has had little contact with serving members of the armed forces) to figure things like that out. It's a mannered society, full of very subtle mores.
Making public remarks to civilians is something that I'd expect would happen only if he'd been frustrated in every attempt to get the people in his chain of command to listen to him. My guess is that he's been wanting to switch over to humanitarian ops since before Jeanne realized that humanitarian ops might be worth doing.
Well, I suspect Jeanne has been clear on the value of "humanitarian ops" all along, but that aside, I agree entirely with the above. And I will go further and say that Jim Macdonald is one of the people in my life who has (without being polemical about it) caused me to gradually realize that my notions about "the military" were, shall we say, insufficiently nuanced.
Depending on Jeanne's age it's entirely possible that GEN Meyers was thinking about humanitarian ops before she was even born.
Just as a by-the-way, I see that our court-appointed president is putting forth a "zero tolerance" position toward Iraq (and we all know what kind of foolishness that entails), and is further claiming that he doesn't need UN permission to do whatever he pleases.
So, how about a betting pool? How many think that we'll be in a shooting war with Iraq by Friday afternoon, and who thinks Bush will wait until Monday morning?
Very nice post, and interesting comments, though I have grave reservations about the underlying premises re humanitarian aid/nation-building - projects of bugger-all difficulty and questionable feasibility that Jeanne treats here with flippancy, and has in the past "solved" with what I consider a pollyanna wave.
On a couple of peripheral issues:
1) One of the finest rejoinders ever, Patrick, to the "stale and dumb" one-can't-do-irony-without-emoticons school.
2) On the change in attitude toward the military before and after WWII. I'm not sure what Jay C. is getting at, and I know nothing about the history of popular views of the military. I do recall an interesting comment my mother once made in passing, about military careers being very much looked down upon before WWII. My father had begun his career as an Army officer in the 30s; I don't know if she was remembering perceived snubs from a limited class of people, or a general societal attitude. But I'm curious to know more.
I think that the entire stereotype of the stupid general can be laid at the feet of General Sir Douglas Haig and his companions in the chateaus of the Great War.
On the subject of humanitarian ops, surely the excellent results of the Marshall Plan haven't been forgotten.
Further: the single most effective thing that England did when pacifying Scotland was after the first Jacobite Rebellion, when General Wade built a road through the Highlands.
More, on the subject of Afghanistan. We are talking about a country that has one single paved road. This leads to isolation that bolsters the local power of warlords and decreases physical and social mobility.
Paving roads connecting cities and towns would be a good thing. So would be duplicating the Rural Electrification project from the USA. So would building a local washing machine factory, and a local laundry detergent factory. All of these things would make the world a better place, and Afghanistan a more stable one.
Many years ago, I worked in Latin America. One of our triumphs there, one that I credit with the rise of elected democracies in the region (where military strongman dictatorship had been the rule) and breaking the power of the bandits was our building farm-to-market roads. There's no reason to think that what worked before isn't worth trying again. There's no reason to think that the military, which did it before, isn't keenly aware of the origin and necessity of humanitarian ops.
There's a huge amount of room for positions on exactly how much humanitarian aid the US should offer to Afghanistan and what would be the most effective. Certainly, when the Taliban were in control, humanitarian aid was useful, but military support was needed even more to get rid of them. To the degree that Harmid Karzai's government is unstable, and rogue military commanders and Taliban supporters still plot to destroy it, there's a need for military force and intervention. Surely a lot would be lost if the Taliban were to take back over, or if Afghanistan were to collapse back into case.
However, as the government strengthens, we can shift more and more resources into humanitarian aid. Reasonable people can disagree about exactly how much effort is required, and when to make the shift. There are plenty of responsible people on both sides with different viewpoints.
There's quite a lot of sniping from many sides about what's going on in Afghanistan, but I'm willing to bet that most of us (myself included) don't have a good idea of the true state of the country. There *is* humanitarian work being done right now. Is it enough? Is the government of Afghanistan stable enough that we can switch more resources away from military action, or do the warlords still threaten? I don't know, and most pundits don't either, yet still have an opinion.
Plenty of people are willing to jerk their knees and say "humanitarian effort won't work; why bother" (on the isolationist and libertarian right), or that "more humanitarian effort is needed" (on the left), when they don't know what the real situation is. A blind assumption that, *of course* Bush's government isn't doing enough humanitarian effort, no matter what the situation is, is just not convincing.
In general, though, the debate is healthy, and I'm sure one has been going on, and continues to go in, inside our government.
Patrick writes:
"And conservatives need to remember that the military is just as prone to the sins of corruption, self-dealing, and featherbedding as any of the social-services bureaucracies they love to bash--and that the military has a lot more resources for preventing their own sins from coming to light."
I'm more of a "cynical libertarian" than a "conservative" but my reply is that such things are in the nature of government, which is why government should be kept to an absolute minimum. You can't eliminate corruption in the military by eliminating the military, because foreigners who kept their military will come and kill you. With social services agencies, on the other hand....
Interesting discussion, Its nice to see leftists have a fine and nuanced discussion re the military. As they have secured our freedom of speech etc with thier blood.
But please retire the phrase selected President. The President was the duly elected President of the United States, there was no re-count afterwards that actually showed Gore winning. Maybe people who use the phrase selected President forget that A: we are not a democracy, the US is a constitutional republic, the President is not elected by the people but by the 50 different states. B. The rules governing the elections and selection of elctors (you know the electoral college) are left to the legislators of each state. The Florida Supreme Court re-wrote the law, willfully ignoring the actual wording of the law to egineer a desired outcome. SCOTUS - slapped them down for that which they blithely ignored and issued another ruling which at that time violated the equal protection clause as well at the clause in the constitution governing elections of Presidents. The rules were well known before the election, Democrats tried to change the rules after the fact because they did not like the outcome. And lastly, while much has been made of Al Gores 500,000 vote margin of victory in the popular vote, this is a meaningless, as it is not a popular vote and also suspect as many states did not count absentee ballots after the outcomes were decided. Bush was elected, you may not like him or his policies but he was elected. If you don't like the rules change them before the elections, not after.
Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
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