Ron Sylvester: Iraq vet: Wounds outlast combat: The Wichita Peace Center sponsored a video/talk at the library last night, where a local Iraq War vet, Ethan McCord, talked about the WikiLeaks "Collateral Murder" video. It basically shows a US helicopter mowing down a group of Iraqis on a street in Baghdad, one of whom was carrying a video camera (mistakenly identified as some sort of weapon). A van then pulls up, the driver trying to load up the wounded to take them to get help. The helicopter then destroys the van. McCord was one of the first soldiers on the ground in the video. He pulled two badly wounded children out of the van, and carried them to an Army vehicle nearby to be taken for treatment. (Not clear if that even happened, since at one point we hear orders countermanding use of the vehicle to help the civilians, let alone whether they survived.) McCord left Iraq disabled with wounds from an IED, and is currently working with Iraq Veterans Against the War. Another Iraq vet, Will Stewart-Starks, also appeared.

For me the most striking thing about the talk was the detail in how US soldiers are desensitized and brutalized to fulfill their combat roles, and how this is constantly reinforced through the ranks. When asked about fragging, which happened often enough in Vietnam to sour the officer core on the draft, McCord pointed out that today's soldiers are more likely to kill themselves. He then cited yet another case just a day or two ago.

There was much play on the "support the troops" meme, but what I took away is something different. The real atrocity isn't what happens when you put troops into action, regardless of the reasons for doing so; rather, it starts in basic training, when you start to turn normal people into soldiers. Once they are soldiers, their skillset and survival instincts are bound to produce atrocities, as we've seen continuously in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those atrocities raise serious questions as to whether there is any practical political use for the US military in foreign nations where the US wants to consolidate any sort of friendly popular alliance -- i.e., where the collateral damage intrinsic to the way US troops are trained and deployed makes it impossible to sway enough "hearts and minds" -- and that should be enough to convince us to shy away from those wars.

But the human cost of supporting this kind of military goes back further, all the way to basic training. If we really cared for the people who fall under the "support the troops" slogan we wouldn't turn them into soldiers in the first place. We'd work to give them education, jobs, a chance to build families and grow old without the scars of war.

One person at the meeting made the point that he voted for Obama in 2008 specifically to stop the war, then was shocked when Obama turned around and escalated the war in Afghanistan. He didn't seem to take this personally -- e.g., as an example of the perfidy we expect from politicians. Rather, he wondered what there is in the power structure in Washington that bends people who should know better to their will. Another person pointed out that as we were meeting Obama was speaking about the semi-withdrawal of US forces and semi-closure of the US war in Iraq. Reading about Obama's speech in the paper this morning was far more disappointing than imagining it last night. There was no need for Obama to hie off to an army base to frame the speech, or to make a big show of going around shaking hands with soldiers. And there was no excuse for saying this:

As we do, I am mindful that the Iraq War has been a contentious issue at home. Here, too, it is time to turn the page. This afternoon, I spoke to former President George W. Bush. It's well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one could doubt President Bush's support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security. As I have said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hope for Iraq's future.

It's bad enough to continue some Bush policies because you can't move the federal bureaucracy around fast enough to realign it on a new set of principles. But it's something else completely to go out of your way to whitewash George W. Bush, a president who ended eight years of one miserable, cynical failure after another with public support polling around 22% -- Obama, despite being the victim of a well-financed, professionally-managed smear campaign, as well as the drag of two wars and a huge recession he didn't start, still polls better than 45%. If Obama was elected for any reason at all, it was to bury Bush. What he said isn't just false -- if Bush was truly committed to our security, he wouldn't have started wars to engender future attacks on us; if he loved our country, he wouldn't have bankrupted the government and filled it up with corporate cronies to pick over the remains; if he cared about our young people he wouldn't have turned so many of them into soldiers to be cracked in hopeless, pointless foreign wars. And it's not time to turn the page: there are still 50,000 troops in Iraq, more than double that in Afghanistan, plus unlimited air power and imperial embassies relentlessly poking and prodding their way in what should be the internal affairs of other countries; there are still strong efforts to resist our presence and dominance, and they will keep fighting as long as we are there; there are still millions of displaced people, with little hope of returning to any sort of normal life until we leave; and we are still burning up hundreds of billions of dollars every year we stay, while our own country rots and collapses. Just because Obama has surrendered to the pro-war forces in this country doesn't mean we should; all it really means is that Obama has become as much a part of the problem as the hawks he once ran against.

Then Obama goes on to say:

Americans across the political spectrum supported the use of force against those who attacked us on 9/11. Now, as we approach our 10th year of combat in Afghanistan, there are those who are understandably asking tough questions about our mission there.

Uh, hullo! Some of us were dead set against "the use of force against those who attacked us on 9/11" as of that very day. Obama may be asserting that we're not in the political spectrum, not even at the far fringes of it, which would be a pretty insulting position to take for someone so eager to forgive and cozy up to war criminals like Bush. But more importantly, it's a downright stupid position to take. One big reason so many people went along with the "use of force" idea after 9/11 is that they didn't have the faintest notion of what they were getting into. Had it been well understood that nine years later "use of force" would wind up meaning that 4,400 US soldiers would die, another 32,000 would be wounded (many gravely), that 20-25% of US soldiers would suffer from PTSD (leading to a rash of suicides), that we would have burned through $750 billion in direct expenses while incurring long-term debts and liabilities of several trillion dollars, that we would have vastly destabilized Iraq and Afghanistan (and less directly Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and Lebanon, while pushing Iran much closer to developing nuclear weapons), that even after drawing down troops in Iraq we would still have more than 160,000 troops stationed in Asia, that we still wouldn't be able to lay our hands on the two supreme leaders of Al-Qaeda, would we still be talking about near-unanimous "use of force" support?

Some of the people who opposed that "use of force" did so for basic principles, but some were just a hell of a lot smarter than the conventional wisdom. But then conventional wisdom was pretty dumb to think that you could round up a small cell of religious fanatics on the far side of the world with a huge army and air force and navy that were built to reduce whole nations to stone age rubble. In fact, the only people, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who were in any way responsible for 9/11 who were captured were picked up by old-fashioned police work, by Pakistan -- we'll see about bringing them to justice when/if they ever get a trial, but we've so debased the concept of justice along the way it may not matter.

As if that wasn't enough, let's wind up with one more Obama quote:

Every American who serves joins an unbroken line of heroes that stretches from Lexington to Gettysburg; from Iwo Jima to Inchon; from Khe Sanh to Kandahar -- Americans who have fought to see that the lives of our children are better than our own. Our troops are the steel in our ship of state. And though our nation may be travelling through rough waters, they give us confidence that our course is true, and that beyond the pre-dawn darkness, better days lie ahead.

First, the wars that Obama lines up here aren't equivalent, and to the extent that they form a trend line we should be disturbed. The American Revolution was a war to throw off an abusive foreign power, fought against their troops on our soil. The Civil War was a struggle between competing notions (ideals and interests) of what our nation should be, with one side defending their custom of holding most of their workforce in perpetual slavery. WWII was a war that we reluctantly entered after an aggressively imperial Japan attacked us, or more specifically our relatively benign imperial interests in the Pacific. Korea can still be painted as a defensive war, but only if you assume that our occupation of Korea is legitimate and a Korean invasion of our occupied zone isn't. Although Vietnam was superficially divided like Korea, it was us who invaded there, with over 500,000 troops to prop up a puppet government that even we had to overthrow several times before we got a stable combination. And Afghanistan didn't even offer us the fig leaf of a favorable invitation: from 1979 on we deliberately and perversly wrecked a country that meant nothing to us, promoting a religious fanaticism that ultimately turned back on us, leading us to further escalate the destruction.

There are three vectors to these wars: one is that each one is further removed from home; the second is that the ideals we use to justify these wars have become ever more debased; the third is that the soldiers have become more mercenary -- even before the draft was eliminated the balance of effective force shifted toward the professional air force and navy, but today's warrior caste is an unprecedented extreme.

The second big problem with this quote is the assertion that fighting these wars has made "the lives of our children better than our own." Independence removed an imperial burden, the Civil War cleared the stage for a vast industrial expansion, but those blessings were accomplished post-war. WWII is a bit anomalous in that it did significantly boost the domestic economy by proving the value of massive Keynesian spending and regulation, traits that we kept for the most universally prosperous decades of our history. On the other hand, all subsequent wars have drained our economy and sapped our resources for virtually no benefit. We haven't been threatened by a foreign power in over 200 years. Virtually everything that has made our lives better results from science and industry and trade, and those are blessings of peace.

As for "troops are the steel in our ship of state," it's hard to imagine a more brazenly imperialist line of crap. If Obama keeps spewing lines like that it's going to be awful hard to argue back when Glenn Beck accuses him of being a fascist.

Of course, what Obama's doing here is probably just pandering. Practically everybody panders to the troops -- probably more than half of the crowd in last night's antiwar meeting are guilty in some sense, even if what they really mean by "support" is that they want to salvage the human beings they presume the troops were before they were shipped off to war. But pandering to the troops isn't about salvaging people: it's about keeping the war machine grinding along. At least when Bush rambled on about "support the troops" you knew he didn't care how many were broken; all he really meant was "support my wars." Maybe what Obama really means by "support the troops" is "don't blame me for my wars." Fair enough, but what I don't see is how he gets to peace without cutting way back on the machinery of war, and the troops are a big part of that -- both because they serve and because they gravitate into cheerleading groups like VFW, which politicians like Obama wind up thinking they have to placate.

Glenn Greenwald: Racial and ethnic exploitation of economic insecurity: Starts with Glenn Beck looking whiter than ever and a packet of Charles Krauthammer lies -- nothing new there. But the following paragraph hit home:

There are few more bitter ironies than watching the Republican Party -- controlled at its core by the very business interests responsible for the country's vast and growing inequality; responsible for massive transfers of wealth to the richest; and which presided over and enabled the economic collapse -- now become the beneficiaries of middle-class and lower-middle-class economic insecurity. But the Democratic Party's failure/refusal/inability to be anything other than the Party of Tim Geithner -- continuing America's endless, draining Wars while plotting to cut Social Security, one of the few remaining guarantors of a humane standard of living -- renders them unable to offer answers to angry, anxious, resentful Americans. As has happened countless times in countless places, those answers are now being provided instead by a group of self-serving, hateful extremist leaders eager to exploit that anger for their own twisted financial and political ends. And it seems to be working.

Seems to be working, but that's partly because the people who are bankrolling the anti-Obama revolt have lots of friendly support from the media, and partly because the Democrats are playing rope-a-dope, certain that no matter how much principle they concede they'll still be viewed come November as the lesser evil.

To put this in perspective, read Jane Mayer's New Yorker piece Covert Operations, on the billionaire Koch brothers. They've been bankrolling libertarian think tanks for decades, but their ideas have never gained much traction, so now they've moved on to mass organizing:

"Ideas don't happen on their own," Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, a Tea Party advocacy group, told me. "Throughout history, ideas need patrons." The Koch brothers, after helping to create Cato and Mercatus, concluded that think tanks alone were not enough to effect change. They needed a mechanism to deliver those ideas to the street, and to attract the public's support. In 1984, David Koch and Richard Fink created yet another organization, and Kibbe joined them. The group, Citizens for a Sound Economy, seemed like a grassroots movement, but according to the Center for Public Integrity it was sponsored principally by the Kochs, who provided $7.9 million between 1986 and 1993. Its mission, Kibbe said, "was to take these heavy ideas and translate them for mass America. . . . We read the same literature Obama did about nonviolent revolutions -- Saul Alinsky, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. We studied the idea of the Boston Tea Party as an example of nonviolent social change. We learned we needed boots on the ground to sell ideas, not candidates." Within a few years, the group had mobilized fifty paid field workers, in twenty-six states, to rally voters behind the Kochs' agenda. David and Charles, according to one participant, were "very controlling, very top down. You can't build an organization with them. They run it."

Of course, getting a lot of moderate income people to rush out into the streets and demand tax breaks for the rich, government services cuts for everyone else, an end to regulating pollution by chronic despoilers like Koch Industries, a never-ending spiral of extortionary health care costs. So the Tea Party talk points don't put it like that -- they appeal to conservative personal virtues, and they spice it up with market-tested fear-mongering, jingoism, and good old fashioned bigotry. While enough people respond to this to form crowds and get pictures taken, they're a declining demographic.

Still, I wonder what would happen if someone tried to organize a counter-movement, a populist uprising for equality and a real program of opportunity: education, health care, infrastructure development, small business loans, antitrust, a non-imperialist foreign policy, wring the money out of elections and drive the lobbyists out of Washington.

Frank Rich: How Fox Betrayed Petraeus: I've had nothing to say about the so-called Ground Zero Mosque for the simplest of reasons: it's really none of my business. In fact, that seems like such an obvious position I don't get why anyone is yapping about it. I suppose I can imagine that the backers of the project might like some publicity for some reason, but they weren't the ones who came up with the button-pushing Ground Zero Mosque banner. But as Rich points out, the project known as Cordoba House (or merely as Park51) was ignored by everyone for the better part of a year until Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. propaganda machine jumped in and stirred everyone up. In the old days that used to be called sensationalism, or simply yellow dog journalism, but these days Murdoch doesn't do much of anything without ulterior political motives. Moreover, Murdoch seems to have really hit the jackpot here, getting virtually everyone to take an embarrassing stand on something virtually no one should even care about. You read a lot of charges that so-and-so hates America and is working to destroy our country, our economy, our freedom, our way of life. Well, that's Rupert Murdoch for you, laughing all the way to the bank as he turns his conveniently adopted country into a cesspool of idiocy and hatred.

The most easily excitable Americans are the conservative masses, and Murdoch has been pushing their buttons for decades. It is easy to dismiss conservatives as stupid because they seem incapable of recognizing a fundamental contradiction in their thinking. On the one hand, they revile government for interfering with the private sector, especially for regulations to prevent the private sector from harming itself or others. On the other hand, they demand that the government butt into anything and everything that in any way annoys them. (Sure, some self-styled libertarians are consistently anti-government, but they're statistically insignificant.) There are two ways conservatives manage to bridge this contradiction: one is that they feel specially entitled, that they alone should decide what should be free and what should be suppressed; and the other is that they simply hate everyone else, so they never have to take an opposing view seriously. And nowadays the world is just jammed packed with people they hate: foreigners, Muslims, colored folk who might as well be one or the other, gays, and pretty much anyone liberal enough not to hate any of the people they hate. Wave a mosque in front of them -- any mosque, anywhere -- and they get riled up; add the "ground zero" insult and they go ballistic. And that's no theory: that's what just happened.

Conservatives are wrong on this issue in so many ways people are tempted to argue them all, which is a waste, even though it is certainly true that most Moslems, especially in America, are harmless, that freedom of religion protects believers more than heretics, that much of what we treasure in America is the result of our diversity and our progressive overcoming of prejudice, and that (as Rich points out in his title) all the public diplomacy money can buy, meant to advance our interests and to protect our troops in the Muslim world, is instantly undone by such displays of anti-Muslim bigotry. Such arguments not only don't register with conservatives, they simply make them hate you more than ever. The only argument that stands a chance of prevailing is the simple one: that it's none of their business. You might even add that if they want to blow off steam making fools of themselves, they have that right, but their tantrums aren't going to get us to abandon the constitutionally protected freedoms this country is based on.

Still, there is one conservative argument here that sticks in my craw: all this 9/11 "hollowed ground" horseshit. What happened was horrible -- you know, I was there at the time and lost a loved one, so it was a lot more real for me than it was for 99% of America sitting at home watching the media cheer on the warmongers -- but it's just plain unhealthy to keep picking at the scab, reveling in victimhood without the slightest consciousness that our lust for revenge -- over a crime that hardly any American had the slightest comprehension of -- has since killed 10 (20?) (50?) (who knows?) times as many of them, and profoundly disrupted and deranged the lives of at least ten times more. With no real end in sight as long as we keep picking at it, feeling entitled to, well, act like conservatives: hating people for not submitting to us, feeling the need to strike back at every offense, locking ourselves in a perpetual war of all against all, when in fact we live in a world where there is plenty of everything except mutual respect. I don't mind an occasional nod to history, but real estate in lower Manhattan can be put to better use than to perpetuate our self-indulgent madness. If we can't break out of this death spiral, we'll turn into Israel, a nation doomed to fight on forever, alone, reviled, for no better reason than that they can't imagine a world of equal rights and mutual respect.

Of course, Murdoch is also blindly helped out by chickenshit liberals -- some seeking compromise, some merely sympathizing with the distraught emotions of bigots and crybabies. Murdoch loves them because they legitimize an issue which actually doesn't deserve to be taken seriously, and because ultimately all they do is feed the fury. On the other hand, if there is a silver lining if all this, it will be for yesterday's liberal hawks to realize that their cause is doomed -- that America itself is so broken that there is no way it can fix anything else.

There are lots of real, important, and difficult issues facing the nation. This isn't one of them. Enough already.

Alex Pareene: Poll: Americans not actually that worried about the deficit: I don't put much stock in polls, which can always be jiggered in all sorts of ways, but this one does help point out that deficit hysteria is a big issue only because it's been chatted up by a couple of special interest groups with hidden agendas: the finance industry, who now that they got theirs don't see any need for further government largess, at leat in favor of anyone else, and the Republicans, who are committed to this idea that if you make government miserly and unresponsive to people needs the masses will give up on the notion that they can use their votes to defend and advance their, and the public's, interest, and will settle for the party that best feeds their prejudices and exploits their fears. Yet for all their frenzied hand-wringing over the issue, they never bother to point out the obvious: that deficits can easily be fixed by raising taxes, that the rich are currently taxed at rates way below historic norms, and that taxing the rich (unlike consumption taxes which hit everybody) wouldn't drag the economy further down -- they're productively investing virtually no money now; indeed, they're mostly parking it in government bonds (even at record low rates) because that's the safest bet they can make (which shows you how little they are really worried about the deficits.

What makes this poll significant isn't the paltry 7% obsessed with the federal deficit. It's the contrasting 58% who say "the most important problem facing the country is either the economy or unemployment." Again, that's a problem that translates into a straightforward solution: the government can pick up the slack by pumping money into the economy, creating jobs directly and indirectly by contracting for services, multiplying as the cash flows throughout the economy. There are smart ways of doing this, and not-so-smart ways, and it can be financed through deficits and/or taxes and/or inflating the money supply. But the argument that you can't fix the unemployment problem because we can't in any case raise taxes or suffer even moderate inflation or cope with long-term deficits comes down to the 7% telling the 58% to forget it: to live with chronic unemployment and underemployment, suppressed wages, greater insecurity, and a persistent unraveling of the social fabric because rich people might be inconvenienced contributing back to a nation that has actually treated them very generously.

That ratio -- 7% to 58% -- actually seems to explain a lot of what's going on in this country. There are a lot of issues that if fairly discussed and evaluated would break down into ratios like that. A well connected but tiny minority -- 7% is probably too generous here -- managed to keep a single-payer health care away from serious consideration, even though it consistently polls at close to 50%. (Actually, among people all around the world who actually have such systems it polls much higher, as indeed it does in the US when we discuss Medicare.) Foreign wars, and defense spending in general, is another matter where a tiny percentage of well connected interested parties has been able to keep fair discussion from every happening.

One has to wonder why right now there is so much loose talk going around about the urgent need to preemptively attack Iran in hopes of halting or significantly delaying their nuclear program. The US war in Iraq is clearly winding down, with US forces withdrawing to their luxury bases and forces being moved out of country. Afghanistan is in worse shape, but Obama is certainly hoping for a similar result there: the key, as in Iraq, is to tone down the conflict, to improve security and improve the functionality of the Karzai government. On the other hand, Israel's real problem is the international backlash against the occupation, especially the cruel siege on Gaza. Meanwhile, Iran has been locked in its own internal political crisis, doing pretty much nothing else. So why all the war hysteria over Iran?

The centerpiece is Jeffrey Goldberg's broadside in The Atlantic, titled The Point of No Return, or as it's touted on the magazine's front cover: "Israel Is Getting Ready to Bomb Iran: How, Why- and What It Means." Some reactions: Glenn Greenwald discusses "how propagandists function," pointing out how Goldberg himself has changed his story according to whatever line he wants to push. Stephen Walt points out that the main thing Goldberg is doing is getting us accustomed to talking about war; he calls this "mainstreaming war with Iran." Paul Woodward focuses on the gamesmanship between Israel and the US here: the Israelis are saying that if you don't do it they will try, but it's really beyond their capabilities to do it right, so if the US wants to save Israel from fucking it up, better for the Americans to throw their greater firepower at it. Tony Karon explores the question, "Why do people talk to Jeffrey Goldberg?". Gary Sick pooh-poohs the entire proposition, mostly by looking at Iranian reality.

Then there's Trita Parsi: A campaign for war with Iran begins, which adds much more than reaction to the debate. In particular:

Two days after President Obama's election victory in November 2008, then-Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni expressed her categorical opposition to U.S. engagement with Iran. "We live in a neighborhood in which sometimes dialogue -- in a situation where you have brought sanctions, and you then shift to dialogue -- is liable to be interpreted as weakness," Livni told Israel Radio. Asked if she supported any U.S. dialogue with Iran, Livni replied in no uncertain terms: "The answer is no."

A big part of the problem with Israel and/or the US bombing Iran is that doing so will almost certainly make the problem worse in the future. A show of force would only harden opinion against Israel and the US, and redouble Iran's efforts to develop better defenses and a deterrent against future attacks. So what would reduce or end the threat? The very thing that Obama's election promised, the one thing that Livni was so emphatic about preventing: diplomatic talks. The only possible conclusion is that Israel is against what might work and in favor of what surely will not. Such disinterest in solving the problem makes one wonder whether Israel even considers Iranian nukes to be a real problem.

Indeed, this is hinted at by quotes in Goldberg's article; e.g., where Ehud Barak admits that the problem he sees is demographic: that Jews would be less likely to immigrate to Israel, and more likely to emigrate from. Of course, a much more sensible answer would be for Israel to agree to one of many reasonable solutions to the Palestinian conflict, which would let the hot air out of anti-Israeli passions and reduce Israel to being a normal state. But that's the problem they really don't want to solve.

PS: This has been heating up for a while. Back in July Steven Simon and Ray Takeyh published an op-ed, characterized by Tony Karon as "a how-to-bomb Iran manual, adding that "The idea that you can bomb a country and then 'make sure the confrontation does not escalate out of control' is, quite simply, bizarre." Of course, people need reassurances to keep from thinking these things through -- like, for instance, how Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq would cost no more than $20 billion and how its reconstruction would be "self-financed."

Karon starts his piece off with a photo of Iraq War-enabler Peter Beinart chatting with Hillary Clinton, and titles his piece "On Iran, Liberals Are Enabling Another Disastrous War." Glenn Greenwald has a follow-up today which starts off with Goldberg's own track record of promoting war with Iraq: his piece is called "Does the past record of jouralists matter?" -- he's responding to James Fallows defending Goldberg's "journalism." The one interesting thing about Fallows's post is the paragraph summing up a 2004 piece on the same recurrent threat:

And then there was the previous Atlantic cover story about bombing Iran, which I did back in 2004. It was based on a mock war-game exercise to see what, in practical terms, it would mean to "take out" Iran's nuclear facilities. The conclusion was that, even then, Iran's facilities were too dispersed to eliminate by an aerial attack; that an attack would likely unify and motivate Iranians behind their government and the drive to become a nuclear power; that even if Israel attacked on its own, the United States would still be blamed; and that even the most "successful" attack would exchange a temporary tactical advantage (temporary delay in Iran's plans) for a major strategic setback, namely lasting complications and vulnerabilities for the U.S. around the world. Last year Anthony Cordesman, of CSIS, laid out a similar analysis of an Israeli strike, which came to similar cautionary conclusions.

Fallows goes on to quote Goldberg doubting that bombing Iran would do any good (and then waffling), a neat little bit of deniability in case it all blows up. Does make me wonder why we even stop to take such fantasies seriously, but Greenwald has an answer:

I'm now finishing up a long article for Harper's about America's War Culture: why war advocacy has been and continues to be the reflexive, required perspective of the nation's foreign policy elite. I don't want to say too much about the piece, but one central reason for this is that those who were most spectacularly wrong in cheering for the attack on Iraq have not only faced no accountability, but have thrived, been rewarded, have seen their positions of influence elevated. Conversely, those who were right continue to be marginalized. That's due in part to the ethos implicit in Fallows' defense of Goldberg: it's so unfair to have their prior behavior affect their current status and credibility. As a result, our war policies -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and now Iran -- are all being shaped by the very same war-hungry political and media elites who performed so disgracefully in 2002 and 2003.

I have to admit I share that frustration, but the core reason is certainly simpler. Any time Israel needs to deflect attention from its own deeds and wants to bolster support from Washington, it drums up its bogeyman, which has been Iran since the fall of Iraq and the Soviet Union. So, Israel taps its usual mouthpieces, like Jeffery Goldberg. That he was wrong on Iraq in 2003 is your opinion; as far as his employers are concerned, his record is spotless, because he's always said what he was supposed to say.

Maria Glod: Burning trash led to illnesses: Relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, but worth quoting:

Hundreds of military service members and contractor employees have fallen ill with cancer or severe breathing problems after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they say they were poisoned by thick black smoke produced by the burning of tons of trash generated on U.S. bases.

In a lawsuit in federal court in Maryland, 241 people from 42 states are suing Houston-based contractor Kellogg Brown & Root, which has operated more than two dozen so-called burn pits in the two countries. The burn pits were used to dispose of plastic water bottles, Styrofoam food containers, mangled bits of metal, paint, solvent, medical waste, even dead animals. The garbage was tossed in, doused with fuel and set on fire.

The military personnel and civilian workers say they inhaled a toxic haze from the pits that caused severe illnesses. Six with leukemia have died, and five others are being treated for the disease, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. At night, more than a dozen rely on machines to help them breathe or to monitor their breathing; others use inhalers.

"You'd cough up black stuff, and you couldn't seem to catch your breath. And your eyes were burning," said Anthony Roles, 33, a father and Air Force retiree from Little Rock who was diagnosed with a blood disorder shortly after returning from Iraq in 2004. "I can still smell it to this very day."

Roles said there was a nickname for the symptoms: "Iraqi crud."

Back around 1950, my father built a brick furnace in the far corner of the backyard. He buried organic garbage, recycling it into a large vegetable garden, and he burned trash -- mostly paper and cardboard, probably a little plastic. (Metal was reused: small tin cans washed out and filled with screws or buttons, large coffee cans cut apart and flattened. Glass milk bottles were returned to the deliveryman.) The city banned trash burning in the early 1960s. They were probably more worried about amateur firebugs than toxic fumes, although they were lucky on the latter count. Hardly anyone burns trash in America any more, and when they do they use large, intense incinerators, not open pits doused with gasoline. We know better now, and won't stand for such irresponsible behavior in our own country. We even chastise campers who don't pack all of their trash to dispose of it properly when they get home. Yet when we spend billions of dollars to invade someone else's country, we revert to savagery.

And, of course, we make excuses:

Where and how to get rid of garbage is a difficult problem in wartime. Military officials say open burning was often the best -- if not the only -- option for getting rid of huge amounts of trash. No trash-removal system existed, incinerators are expensive and take time to install, and the military lacked the time and space to build landfills on bases. The burn pits often are close to where soldiers live and work because it's too dangerous to put them far from base.

"Although disposing of certain substances in burn pits may not be ideal from a health standpoint, on an installation in a hostile environment in wartime, there may not be any other viable options," Postlewaite said in court papers.

Well, they could have thought of that before they started the wars. They did, after all, think of all the "comforts of home" they wanted to bring along. I recently read Ann Jones's piece on being "embedded" with US forces in Afghanistan, In Bed with the U.S. Army, and she was especially struck by all the stuff the Army takes to war:

The frontline FOB where I landed and its soldiers, by contrast, are spic-and-span. Credit for this goes largely to the remarkably inexpensive labor of crews of Filipinos, Indians, Croatians, and others lured from distant lands by American for-profit private contractors responsible for making our troops feel at home away from home. The base's streets are laid out on a grid. Tents in tidy rows are banked with standard sand bags and their super-sized cousins, towering Hescos filled with rocks and rubble.

The tents are cooled by roaring tornados of air conditioning, thanks to equipment fueled by gasoline that costs the Army about $400 per gallon to import. It takes fuelers three to four hours every day to refill all the giant generators that keep the cold air coming, so I felt guilty when, to prevent shivering in my sleep, I stuffed my towel into the ducts suspended from the ceiling of my tent.

More permanent buildings are going up and some, already built by Afghans and deemed not good enough for American habitation, are scheduled for reconstruction. Even in distant FOBs like this one, the building boom is prodigious. There's a big gym with the latest body-building equipment, and a morale-boosting center equipped with telephones and banks of computers connected to the Internet that are almost always in use. A 24/7 chow hall serves barbequed ribs, steak, and lobster tails, though everything is cooked beyond recognition by those underpaid laborers to whom this cuisine is utterly foreign.

There's a remarkably speedy laundry and, as for the toilets and showers -- I can speak only for those few designated "Female" -- they were the best I'd seen anywhere in Afghanistan. A sign politely suggested limiting your shower to five minutes, a nod to the expense of paying for-profit contractors to hire truckers to haul in the necessary water, and then haul out to undisclosed locations the copious effluence of American latrines. (At Bagram, that effluence goes into a conveniently nearby river, a water source for countless Afghans.) The other detritus from this expanding FOB is dumped into a pit and burned, including a staggering, but undisclosed, number of plastic water bottles. All this helps explain the annual cost of maintaining a single American soldier in Afghanistan, currently estimated at one million dollars.

Repeat: all that stuff comes packaged, and all that packaging gets "dumped into a pit and burned." As more soldiers get sick and die from the fumes, the military is under increasing pressure to come up with better solutions -- which means expensive incinerators, since backing down is just not in their genes, but spending more money is.

What the article omits is that most of the contractors doing the burning -- the ones presumably most exposed to the fumes -- are foreign contractors, which leaves them out of the lawsuit. Moreover, virtually all of the "toxic haze" settles in the neighboring areas -- the people we claim to want to help are in fact people we unwittingly poison. Of course, they are also the people we unwittingly bomb, shoot, kidnap, torture -- things that get more press because they're more dramatic. And more commonly, they're people we just tick off with our arrogance and sense of entitlement. We're good at excusing all these things as inevitable consequences of war, but where are they factored into the calculus of war? Has Bill Kristol ever worried that when he wanted to bring freedom to some besotten people he'd also be responsible for a big cancer spike (both there and here)?

And the FOB description above is a relatively sanitary one. I'm reminded of a paragraph in Evan Wright's Generation Kill when he's describing the actual invasion of Iraq, before we built all those world-class latrines:

There are nearly 10,000 Marines parked on the road, as well as a sprinkling of British troops who appear to be lost. Everyone defecates and pisses out in the open beside the highway. Taking a shit is always a big production in a war zone. There's the MOPP suit [protecting against chemical weapons] to contend with, and no one wants to walk too far from the road for fear of stepping on a land mine, since these are known to be scattered haphazardly beside Iraqi highways. In the civilian world, of course, utmost care is taken to perform bodily functions in private. Public defecation is an act of shame, or even insanity. In a war zone, it's the opposite. You don't want to wander off by yourself. You could get shot by enemy snipers, or by Marines when you're coming back into friendly lines. So everyone just squats in the open a few meters from the road, often perching on empty wooden grenade crates used as portable "shitters." Trash from thousands of discarded MRE [meals ready to eat] packs litters the area. With everyone lounging around, eating, sleeping, sunning, pooping, it looks like some weird combat version of an outdoor rock festival.

At least that's what it looks like to Wright, who's no doubt been to outdoor rock festival in the US. To Iraqis it must look like something far more horrific. Our chronic inability to see, or even to hazily imagine, what other people see dooms us.

Much more worth reading lately about Afghanistan, especially in the wake of the WikiLeaks dump. Anyone who claims that they reveal "nothing new" is doing nothing more than showing utter disdain for the actual details of war. That such people are concentrated high in the war's administration and their cheering section in the media points out how little they care about facts, at least in comparison to their treasured ideas.

If Obama persists in prosecuting the leakers you might as well conclude that he's abandoned the reality-based side and gone over to the imperial fantasists. He should be handing out medals to the leakers; prosecuting them is unforgivable.

But rather than dwell on the folly in Afghanistan, look at Glenn Greenwald: What collapsing empire looks like. Just a few vignettes, like states shuttering schools and libraries for lack of budgets, and paved roads reverting to gravel. Hits a false note toward the end:

Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights -- or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State -- that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability?

Makes it sound like the imperialists might have second thoughts and decide that in order to save their cherished empire they might realize that yes, indeed, we do need schools and roads to keep it all functioning. Personally, I don't see anyone who actually wants to keep an empire going. Rather, I see a lot of right-wing psychopaths who hate most of the people in this country, who can't abide any government that in theory represents them, and who want to bring the whole thing crashing down. For such people, militarism and imperialism is a means toward hollowing out and discrediting the state, and it's working pretty well for just that purpose. For such people unwinnable, self-perpetuating wars are the best of all worlds, draining resources that otherwise might possibly be put to some constructive end, making political leaders look like fools. (You have to wonder whether the real point of impeaching Clinton wasn't to coax him into bombing Iraq. And if draft-dodging Clinton could be turned into an imperial mobster in eight years, well, you saw what happened with Bush, and are seeing the same thing happen with Obama.)

Asking Americans to do the right thing in Afghanistan or Iraq (or even in Louisiana) clearly doesn't compute, but at some point you'd think a survival instinct would start to kick in. Soldiers should realize that even relatively pampered wars are hazardous to their health. Officers should realize that actions bound to fail aren't worth their efforts. Politicians should realize that foreign wars bring little but heartbreak and misery. The rich should realize that living in a country where everything is crumbling from rot will eventually impoverish even themselves. And even the right-wingers should realize that making everyone else miserable won't make themselves happy. But they're playing this game awfully close to the vest, making it seem that the only way anyone can learn lessons is the hard way -- and that evidently the finance meltdown of 2008, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Katrina, the oil spill in the Gulf, and (at least to date) global warming just haven't been hard enough. Scary to imagine just what it will take.

Mitchell LaFortune: Learning From WikiLeaks: Hallucinating uncontrollably is more like it. Credentials: "LaFortune, a former Army sergeant, was an intelligence analyst with the 82nd Airborne Division from 2006 to 2010." Hard to find a better example of someone stuck in a mental rut because his livelihood give him no better options. Still, he thinks reform is possible:

If we need a model, we should think about what Afghanistan was like in the 1970s. The country functioned relatively well with a weak central government, strong local leadership and a marginalized religious class. The resistance to the Soviet occupation, steeped in radical Islam, overturned that traditional power structure. By the time the Soviets left, the village mullah had a higher social standing than the tribal leader or local political representative. It was not hard to foresee the rise of the Taliban.

But no one in the 1970s would have described Afghanistan as functioning "relatively well": it only achieved that status in comparison to the 30 years of war that followed the US decision to try to roll back a Soviet Union advance that occured because the "weak central government" was prone to coups and ultimately split between two communist party factions. The rise of the mullahs was the direct result of US patronage, the purpose of which was to destroy any secular-progressive political forces in the country, because we would much prefer medieval theocracy over modernity if the latter showed any hint of socialism -- not that we actually gave a shit what anyone on Afghanistan actually wanted. Still, it's pretty quaint to think that all the answer takes is to forget the last 30-40 years. And even if you do think that the past is the answer, isn't that the Taliban's solution?

LaFortune makes a series of astonishing proposals to turn the war around:

The key to turning around the war will be to change that dynamic. In fact, we must clamp down on the three things the Taliban do particularly well: manipulating the news media, intimidating the rural population and providing shadow governance.

Let's take these one at a time:

The Taliban's media machine runs circles around our public information operations in Afghanistan. Using newspapers, radio broadcasts, the Internet and word of mouth, it puts out messages far faster than we can, exaggerating the effectiveness of its attacks, creating the illusion of a unified insurgency and criticizing the (real and imagined) failings of the Kabul government. To undermine support for United States troops, the Taliban insistently remind the people that America has committed to a withdrawal beginning next summer, they jump on any announcement of our Western allies pulling out troops and they publicize polls that show declining domestic American support for the war.

To counter the spin, we need to add the Taliban's top propagandists to the high-value-target list and direct military operations at the insurgents' media nerve centers. A major reason that people in rural areas are so reluctant to help us is that Taliban propaganda and intimidation have created an atmosphere of fear.

This is pretty incredible. Back in early-2001 at the peak of their power, the last thing you'd ever imagine hearing about is how savvy the Taliban's PR operation was. They seemed to be singularly inept and dysfunctional at everything they did. In particular, the Afghan people were utterly dependent on foreign NGOs as the government itself could be bothered with social services -- they were preoccupied with banning soccer and music, and blowing up ancient Buddhas. On the other hand, the US pumps billions of dollars into PR, hiring hordes of talent, saturating every conceivable media. So how did the Taliban get to be so much better, not just compared to their old selves but compared even to the reigning world champions?

I think you have to entertain three theories. One is that most US propaganda efforts are targeted at Americans, partly because we're all we know and care about, but largely because of the perception -- one of the few "lessons learned" from Vietnam -- that the only force that actually threatens the war effort is the disapproval of the American people. That's still a tough sell, but it wouldn't even be taken seriously if not for the huge PR push to keep us upbeat (or terrified or whatever) on the war.

The second is that the facts don't offer a level playing field. Everybody spins, but it's a lot easier to spin an air strike killing dozens at a wedding against the US than for the US. A US-built school or hospital or road should be easy to spin the other way, but when the money's funneled back to US contractors or siphoned off by Afghan cronies and what's left doesn't make much difference anyway, your PR opportunity wastes away -- and besides, what are those infidels teaching in those schools anyway?

The third is that we're just using PR as an excuse for losses elsewhere. We're a bunch of foreigners who invaded their country on a mission of pure revenge; we kill a lot of people, blow a lot of shit up, snatch people and torture them, bribe people and turn them against their community, then can't understand why they don't like us -- why some even go so far as to fight back against us. So we think up rationalizations to comfort ourselves for losing -- hey, better than introspection! Still, it strains credulity to think that our problems are largely the result of the PR gap. For one thing, how many Afghans -- especially in the rural areas where the Taliban is so successful -- plug in to any kind of media?

Another indication that this PR gap is just scapegoating is LaFortune's quick fix: hey, they're better than we are so let's just kill them! Such a prototypically American solution, I have to wonder why nobody thought of that before the problem got out of hand. LaFortune continues:

A second initiative is to bring back the traditional rural power structure. We have to restore the power of the tribal leader, the khan. Afghans are fond of saying that the thing they do best is politics; we must let them do it. This means moving toward a far weaker concept of central government and encouraging local solutions to local problems. American aid should go directly to rural communities rather than to the Karzai government. And we must identify key tribal leaders and local politicians and give them around-the-clock protection with American troops. It's astonishing how much credibility a village leader can gain simply by not being assassinated.

But it's also remarkable how much credibility a village leader loses by being surrounded by American troops, especially when they act like American troops and get a little trigger-happy (or drunk or abusive or sacrilegious). I don't doubt that it would have been better to build up local governments around local leaders -- for one thing it allows each ethnic group its own domain, for another it boxes in the losses due to corruption -- but the US didn't do so because they didn't trust local leaders. They preferred instead to deal through an agent like Karzai and a few trusted warlords, and their attendant sinkhole of corruption. Moreover, the US army hasn't been bashful about bypassing the Karzai government -- every commander has a slush fund for dealing with locals. The problem is more that every occupier has tried to govern through bribed local leaders and the result is that those leaders have steadily lost credibility.

Last, we must destroy the credibility of the Taliban's religious authority. The insurgents' concept of Islam is objectionable to most Afghans, but there is little alternative, as most clerics who rejected the Taliban have been killed or have fled. While creating a network of more enlightened religious figures to compete with the hard-liners will take time, we could jump-start progress by creating a group of "mobile mullahs" -- well-protected clerics who can travel through rural areas and settle land disputes and other issues. These men should come from the general areas in which they will be performing their duties and be approved by community leaders.

When the US decided to overthrow the popular democratic government of Iran in 1953, the first thing the CIA did was to bribe a bunch of imams. When the US invaded Iraq in 2003 we brought along our own pet ayatollah (who was killed practically on sight). In between we watched the Saudi royal family requisition fatwas for whatever political purpose suited them, not least our anti-Soviet mujahideen project in Afghanistan. So there's nothing surprising about the assumption that all we have to do is pay a few tolls to get Allah on our side. Still, the assumption that there's this vast reserve of credible mullahs (and other local leaders) eager to do our bidding if only we can provide them with a phalanx of bodyguards is, well, suspect. Also suspect is the idea that you can bolster the credibility of a mullah by surrounding him with armed infidels. And when all's said and done, a mullah is nothing more than his credibility.

We really don't know whether the Afghan people like or dislike the Taliban ulema, largely because there's no framework where one can speak an honest opinion, but partly because you just can't tell. But if you wanted to reduce the power of the Taliban mullahs, a better solution would be to provide secular alternatives -- civil law, personal rights, honest democracy, something to look forward to, maybe even something to fight for. This idea that the Afghans will follow us if we just line up the right mullahs and village elders to lead them back to the placid 1970s is, well, nonsense doesn't begin to cover it -- it's embarrassing. Shameful. I mean, no wonder the US is losing. Pogo understood: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Glenn Greenwald: The heroism of Shirley Sherrod: I was forced offline for the last half of last week, so missed this story as it unrolled. Sherrod is black, married to a well known civil rights leader, works for the Agriculture Dept. She gave a speech. Someone named Andrew Breitbart extracted a line from its context, turned on its head, and splattered it across the nation's fickle consciousness as an example of the Obama government's anti-white racism. Obama and Ag. Sec. Tom Vilsack took Fox News at its word, didn't bother to check the facts, and fired Sherrod -- the latest example in fascist politico-world's zero-tolerance clampdown on politically incorrect speech. As it turns out, this one was such a total crock that Vilsack and Obama wound up back-pedalling, offering Sherrod her job back. One reason was that the "white farmer" she referred to was plum thankful that she had saved his farm. Another embarrassment for Obama, once again caused by his willingness to concede the issue space to the right. The charge itself should have been a tip-off: few problems in America are more inconsequential than anti-white racism, and virtually the only people who worry about it mostly worry because they expect some retribution for their own racism.

Ryan McNeely: Texas Fried Conservatism: Of all the things that Obama has or hasn't done since the 2008 election, the one that annoys me most -- partly because it's so obvious, so consistent with his mandate, and so much within his power to act -- is his failure to put a stake into what little was left of George W. Bush's political reputation. Back then Bush's approval ratings were stuck in the 20% range, and even that most likely owed much to presidential deference. Virtually everything Bush did in his eight years in office was wrong -- more often than not, deeply, profoundly, mind-bogglingly wrong; so wrong one's tempted to call it evil, except that he poisoned that well too. Moreover, Bush's policies and acts were not just wrong in principle and in practice; they left a vast legacy of problems that would overwhelm and threaten to capsize his own term. He needed to drive home the fact that those problems were Bush problems, not just to buy time to work them through but to make sure that the American people understood what they were facing and why.

He could have done that three ways. One was to go out and talk about what happened and why, to constantly reinforce the message about Bush's malfeasances. Another, which would flow out of the first, is that he could have pushed for thorough investigations of the Bush administration, especially of conflicts of interest and more/less legal influence peddling. (At the very least, this would have alerted him to the MMS cronyism that was exposed only after BP's deepwater oil well blew up.) Finally, he could have routinely broke from Bush administration policies, especially in the security and injustice sector. Instead, he's so routinely continued Bush's policies that they've often become pinned on him.

Now, we're seeing the first efforts at not just rehabilitating but canonizing Bush's presidency -- something that should have been rendered impossible by exposing what actually happened. It may even work: after all, they've had plenty of practice dusting off and spiffing up Ronald Reagan's criminal regime. (Back in the day I frequently quipped that America's only growth industry is fraud -- not just because of the unseemly number of apparatchiks who got caught but because the whole "greed is good" ethos soaked into the culture, breeding in the soon-bankrupted S&Ls, the leveraged buyout craze, and well beyond, all the way to George W. Bush.) The old adage about those who forget history are bound to repeat it takes on extra urgency here. By failing to make the Bush history unforgettable, Obama does worse than run the risk of yet another return; he may even slip unconsciously into the Bush form, repeating it himself.

Paul Krugman: Redo That Voodoo: Taxes and deficits are a case in point. At least back in Reagan's time they bothered to concoct a hare-brained theory to argue that cutting taxes would increase tax revenues, as if their aim was to grow government. That failed, but nothing they couldn't mythologize around. Bush's tax cuts and war spending did exactly what Reagan's did: mushroom the federal deficit, leading to cries for slashing public services and special favors for the rich. Now, of course, the insatiable rich want even more -- not just for themselves, but they'd like to see everyone else pinched by more austerity too, so even if they can't make more at least they'll feel better about it. One thing you should recall is that one of Obama's campaign promises was to repeal the Bush tax cuts -- one that he hasn't lifted a finger to accomplish. The political calculus now is to let them quietly expire, but in doing so he misses a golden opportunity to pin the deficits on the main cause: Bush.

Paul Woodward: A one-state solution from the Israeli right: Every now and then someone from the Israeli right admits a willingness to grant Israeli citizenship to a lot more Palestinians in order to secure the entire West Bank as permanent Israeli territory. (What happens to Gaza is never made clear, but it is already viewed as a wasteland, so presumably would be sloughed off.) All sorts of bad things could be rolled into such a "solution": the return of any Palestinian refugees would be ruled out; even with "citizenship" much of the West Bank could remain under military rule for decades (as happened within the Green Line from 1948-67), curtailing the legal rights of "citizenship"; social and economic discrimination is likely to persist indefinitely; moreover, the right is likely to use the influx of Palestinian "citizens" as an excuse to chip away at the rights that "Palestinian citizens of Israel" already have. Gaza would be orphaned, perhaps still under siege, subject to controls and periodic mass punishment. Lebanon and Syria would still be viewed as hostile states, with Israel holding the Golan Heights and continuing to hold large numbers of Lebanese prisoners while Israel seeks to back Hezbollah down by threatening the whole country. In short, a right-wing "one state solution" is likely to look a lot like the status quo.

This raises a real question. Anyone can think of lots of ways to sort out the conflict, but the only way that is going to happen is one that Israel itself decides upon -- i.e., a settlement that that not only favors Israel over the Palestinians but that indulges Israeli fears and fantasies. So the question is: what's the worst possible settlement that both sides are likely to accept? It's a tough question, mostly because Israel's politicos and security honchos don't really want any solution -- they're quite happy to fight on indefinitely, and in any case would be hard pressed to agree on just what they are fighting for. But it's also tough for the Palestinians, who on the one hand have already conceded an awful lot, and on the other are basing their claims on justice, which sets some minimal standards for what they can accept.

I've made several sketches of how this can be resolved, and they've all been unwelcome. For instance, knowing that Jerusalem is a particularly emotional issue for most Israelis, I outlined a scheme whereby Israel could legitimately annex Jerusalem, leaving Gaza and the rest of the West Bank for an independent Palestinian state. (The key here would be for the Palestinians in East Jerusalem to ratify the annexation, which would only happen if Israel assumed its best behavior toward them -- a win-win scenario as far as I'm concerned, although before any such thing happened you'd hear a lot about "the third holiest city in Islam" and all that.)

As I was reading Kai Bird's Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978, I flashed on another even more indulgent scheme. Bird makes a big point about how the conflict would have been reduced had the Palestinians succeeded in deposing King Hussein and turning Jordan into the Palestinian state -- he sees this as a major missed opportunity, given that before 1967 and even after Jordan had a Palestinian majority and that the Hashemite monarchy was nothing more than a British invention later subsidized by the CIA. Lots of prominent Israelis had toyed with the Jordan = New Palestine idea, although they usually wanted it both ways -- a nominal Palestinian state still ruled by trusty old King Hussein. But one reason they never went through with this scheme is that deep down Israel can't abide the existence of a Palestinian state: any such state would memorialize the original sin of Israel's creation. So how about this: Israel turns Gaza over to Egypt as an UN mandate; Egypt assumes responsibility for security and holds the international pursestrings to rebuild Gaza, but otherwise allows Gaza to be run as an autonomous UN-certified democracy; Gaza would in the future (say, ten years) have the option of an independence referendum, but in the meantime Egypt also offers Gazans (including Palestinian refugees) citizenship, freedom to resettle in Egypt, and all such rights as Egyptian citizens have (such as they are). Egypt isn't obligated to become more democratic, although that would be a welcome direction. This way Israel relinquishes its occupation without establishing a Palestinian state. Same thing with Jordan and the West Bank, although it's less clear where Israel draws the borderline -- what is clear is that it will be Israel drawing the border -- perhaps along its notorious "security fence."

So would that be acceptable? Israel would gain a small amount of critical territory, and would get rid of a large number of Palestinians. The resulting Israel could be more equitable and less beligerent, or not. Israel wouldn't be assured of immediate recognition as with the Saudi/Arab League Green Line proposal, but would be in a better position to work those out. Israel already has working security relationships with both Egypt and Jordan, and Egypt has a proven track record of helping Israel to pen up Gaza. One would have to insist that any Palestinians living on land that Israel kept be given full and meaningful citizenship rights. Also that the refugees be given compensation, since they are otherwise screwed -- not that they aren't now anyway. Maybe you could insist on some protocols for dealing with border incidents and acts of terrorism -- which must, by the way, include Israel's assassination networks. Something should be done about Lebanon and Syria. The former is easily resolved by returning Shaba Farms and the Lebanese prisoners Israel holds hostage; the latter involves a more substantial piece of real estate and its watershed. (Perhaps the answer there is for Israel to purchase most of the land and water; Syria would obtain a lot of badly needed cash and get off of America's shit list.)

Or maybe Israel's right insists on keeping all of the West Bank, in which case an acceptable deal would have to safeguard Palestinian rights within a democratic Israel. This is tougher because it gets deeper into Israel's knitting, but there has to be some quid pro quo to get everyone to agree that we have a solution, and that international recognition -- basically the removal of Israel's pariah state stain -- is what Israel stands to gain. For instance, with the Palestinians satisfied, the conflict with Iran -- its alleged nuclear threat, the thing that Israel is supposedly so dreadfully worried over -- goes away.

I can't pretend that these proposals are any better than lots of other proposals. Were I a Zionist, I'm pretty sure that I'd think that the Arab League two-state proposal would be a damn good deal: in particular, there's no need to quibble and no chance of ill feelings if you simply accept the other side's offer. It would allow Israel to go right on being the paranoid racist state it has become yet would extricate itself from a state of perpetual debilitating conflict. Not being a Zionist, and being committed to justice, I'm inclined to be more generous: I'd prefer a secular, multicultural state providing generous support for resettling as many refugees as want to return. And if I were an Arab, I'd support a Law of Return, which inside Israel is a symbol of national discrimination, but outside of Israel undercuts the logic and imputed necessity of an exclusive Jewish national homeland. But the fact is I'd settle for almost anything that reduces conflict and allows all parties to live with respect and dignity.

The best solutions are based on things that at least in principle we can all agree on: equality, human rights, dignity, freedom. The more you carve out special exceptions to universal rights, the more trouble you cause, the more people you leave behind, the more resentment builds. Agreements may be dictated by relative power, but effective agreements are built on mutual respect. If Israel wanted to solve its conflict it would take pains to make its offer as generous as possible, to bind in as much consensus as possible. That hasn't happened for reasons deeply embedded in its national psyche -- Israel has trained itself to trust only its own power, so it sees any compromise as debilitating, and therefore they never offer any solution. Still, everyone else in the world needs to see this conflict come to some sort of resolution. (The Palestinians have offered all kinds of proposals, adjusting them as they grow weary and find force to be useless, but they are never deemed acceptable because they refuse to compromise on the basic issue of dignity; they are left with the one thing Israel cannot take from them, the ability to refuse surrender.) So we're left here, mulling over not just solutions that would do right but all sorts of hackneyed notions that while distasteful might ultimately be considered not so intolerable.

Israel's right has successfully managed to derail the common "two-state solution" that Americans (including Clinton, Obama, and even Bush) fancy, so when they do float a conceivable idea -- anything involving full citizen rights is at least conceivably workable -- it's worth taking seriously, probably not as a coherent proposal but at least as opening a door that until now has remained rigidly shut.

Paul Woodward: One state/two states: rethinking Israel and Palestine: Another vector moving in this same direction, quoting Abu-Zayda on his thinking why the "two states" dogma has become counterproductive. One irony is that it was only a year or two ago when Alan Dershowitz declared that any talk about "one state" should axiomatically be discarded as a non-starter; now we find several scattered instances of people arguing the exact opposite: that "two state" talk is nothing more than a formula for extending the conflict endlessly. (Which, by the way, does seem to be Dershowitz's agenda.)

I've collected a good selection of quotes from Kai Bird's Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978 (2010, Scribners) on the book page. It's a rather idiosyncratic book in several respects: the personal interest breaks with the usual sense of balance, although the final third synthesizes balance in a rather unique way; the time frame essentially ignores the last 30 years -- the wars in Lebanon, the Intifada, the Oslo Accords, Ariel Sharon -- which by now is most of what you know about the conflict. (The PFLP hijackings in the 1970s are prominently featured in the book, but compared to the suicide bombings of the Al-Aqsa Intifada seem almost quaint.) On the other hand one tends to forget how tenaciously belligerent Ben-Gurion was, or how poorly King Hussein served the Palestinian cause that he occasionally gave lip service to. Even in working in his wife's family's holocaust stories, Bird sticks with the particulars and avoids generalizations.

Jason Ditz: US-Backed Jundallah Bombs Iran Mosque, Killing at Least 27: When Obama took office 18 months ago, it seemed like burying the hatchet with Iran would be a relatively straightforward thing to do. But Netanyahu responded to Obama's feint toward the more intransigent Israel-Palestine conflict with alarmist threats against Iran, which Obama thought he could only bottle up by taking a more aggressive diplomatic course. Then there was the Iranian elections and a long period of unrest following, where Iran's conservatives and clerics clamped down on reformers -- many of whom felt themselves to be more in tune with the 1979 Revolution than were the established powers -- so that, too, backed Obama off, putting even more emphasis on his sterile program of sanctions. Now, Netanyahu is feeling cocky enough to push his belligerent tactics through American military channels -- cheered on by Likudnik-inspired neocons like the newly formed Emergency Committee for Israel. The idea of "preemptively" attacking Iran is as criminally stupid now as it ever was. One cannot imagine all of the ways such a misadventure could go wrong: it would dramatically reinforce Iranian resolve to be able to defend themselves with nuclear weapons, while at most inflicting a temporary setback; it would destroy whatever credibility Obama still has in the world's diplomatic circles. Iran would have an impeccable case to take to the UN -- subject to a US veto, of course, another embarrassment. If Iran chose to fight back, they could virtually stop oil tankers from the Persian Gulf region, triggering another runup of world oil prices. They could make life very uncomfortable for US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The one threat they can't make is to Israel, which is already itching for another fight with Hezbollah (and/or Hamas). It is easy to see why Israel sees such an attack as win-win: the one guaranteed result is that it will keep Israel away from the peace table for years to come. Best of all, it would make the US as much a pariah as Israel has already become.

What Jundallah has to do with this is sheer stupidity. Back in 1979 the Iranian Revolution embarrassed the Carter Administration and, more importantly, the CIA that had put the Shah in power back in 1953, opening up a period when the US was delighted to sell advanced weapons and nuclear power plants to Iran. Ever since then there have been agitators in the backwaters of the US security system trying to irritate Iran -- Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech back in 2003 was a high point in their crusade. One of their pet schemes has always been to incite minorities to rebel against the Tehran government, and the Balochi nationalist Jundallah group has been a beneficiary of such scheming. Never mind that they're nothing more than a terrorist group. Never mind that they also attack our ally Pakistan. We're so consumed with hatred for Iran that we're happy doing unto them what we'd never stand for them doing unto us. But don't you think Obama should find this really embarrassing? On the one hand, it shows how selective out "war on terrorism" really is. On the other, it shows that however high-minded our fears of Iran's nuclear program may be, deep down all we really want to do is drag the Iranian people into chaos and destruction.

Helena Cobban: Is an attack on Iran really more 'do-able' now? and More on America's pro-Israeli warmongers: Some background info for the above. Joe Klein claims: "Israel has been brought into the [U.S.] planning process, I'm told, because U.S. officials are frightened by the possibility that the right-wing Netanyahu government might go rogue and try to whack the Iranians on its own." The fact remains that Israel would have to fly over US-controled airspace to get to Iran and would probably need US airbases to land at, so it's hard to see how they could "go rogue" without US acquiescence. On the other hand, one of the peculiar effects of Israel's handling of the Gaza flotilla is that while it had been a public relations disaster in the world at large, Israel has managed to stiffen up American political support, making a new round of aggression possible.

Paul Woodward: Petraeus: mission will be accomplished: I think it was Wolfgang Pauli who once dismissed a fellow physicist's theory by declaring that it was not even false, suggesting there are whole dimensions of mind-boggling nonsense that are based on nothing substantial enough to even be disproved. I felt the same way a couple days ago when I saw a front page Wichita Eagle article that quoted Petraeus: "We are in this to win. That is our clear objective." Nothing can be less clear, since the problem isn't so much how to "win" as what the hell does "winning" even mean in this context? I have no idea, and not just because I've repeatedly argued in the past that war itself is failure, that the moment you go to war the only question remaining is how much you will lose before you can extricate yourself from it.

See if another Petraeus quote helps: "We're engaged in a contest of wills. Our enemies are doing all that they can to undermine the confidence of the Afghan people." For starters, this ignores a very central fact of the war, which is that "our enemies" are in fact a substantial fraction of "the Afghan people"; even more importantly, that we are not "the Afghan people" in any sense. For us to "win" a lot of Afghans have to lose, so who is it who's really trying to "undermine the confidence of the Afghan people"? Then there is the matter of will, one of our central political conceits, the notion that all it takes to bend other people is assertion of our magic will, or more to the point, that all we need for our will to work is endless faith in the force of our magic, thereby reducing the world to nothing more than a reflection of our psyche. Sounds like a clinical definition of insanity.

Even if will worked, you have to ask whose will is Petraeus trying to rally? The self-serving careerist military? The fickle politicians? The vast washed, coddled, attention-deficit masses whose idea of winning is constantly trivialized by "reality" TV? Ultimately it doesn't matter, because all it takes to disable the peculiar magic of will is the inevitable unbeliever -- the future scapegoat for failure because, well, who's going to doubt the general's will? That the bullshit is so transparent should mean that the end is near. But what it certainly means is that the war party wants to make sure we don't learn any lessons from the debacle.

Ann Jones: Strategies for "Success" in Afghanistan: Second title: "Counterinsurgency Down for the Count in Afghanistan . . . But the War Machine Grinds On and On and On." Points out that COIN in theory is "a tricky, even schizophrenic, balancing act"; in practice it's even harder, but since we're obsessed with "success" how about some shortcuts?

The part of the lethal activity that often goes awry is supposed to be counterbalanced by the "sorry" part, which may be as simple as dispatching U.S. officers to drink humble tea with local "key leaders." Often enough, though, it comes in the form of large, unsustainable gifts. The formula, which is basic COIN, goes something like this: kill some civilians in the hunt for the bad guys and you have to make up for it by building a road. This trade-off explains why, as you travel parts of the country, interminable (and often empty) strips of black asphalt now traverse Afghanistan's vast expanses of sand and rock, but it doesn't explain why Afghans, thus compensated, are angrier than ever.

Many Afghans, of course, are angry because they haven't been compensated at all, not even with a road to nowhere. Worse yet, more often than not, they've been promised things that never materialize. (If you were to summarize the history of the country as a whole in these last years, it might go like this: big men -- both Afghan and American -- make out like the Beltway Bandits many of them are, while ordinary Afghans in the countryside still wish their kids had shoes.) [ . . . ]

I could go on. If you spend time in Afghanistan, evidence of failure is all around you, including those millions of American taxpayer dollars that are paid to Afghan security contractors (and Karzai relatives) and then handed over to insurgents to buy protection for U.S. supply convoys traveling on U.S. built, but Taliban-controlled, roads. Strategy doesn't get much worse than that: financing both sides, and every brigand in between, in hopes of a happier ending someday.

Maybe things would work better if we had a politically connected shoe company to get in on the graft, but Halliburton doesn't make shoes.

Brian Katulis: Restrepo: Ann Jones wrote her article after a recent stretched embedded with US forces in Afghanistan. She talks about what she saw, but the recent documentary Restrepo gives you a chance to see some of this yourself. I haven't seen -- or for that matter the Iraq documentaries Gunner Palace and The War Tapes Katulis refers to -- and can't vouch for the movie, other than to point out the obvious that in focusing on American soldiers you'll have to work hard to try to reconstruct an Afghan view of their invasion, and will inevitably miss a big part of the big picture.

Laura Tillem had a letter in the Wichita Eagle Friday, under the title "War not answer":

CIA Director Leon Panetta suggested no one predicted the trouble the U.S. military would have in Afghanistan. President Obama said he doesn't have a crystal ball.

Well, I have a crystal ball, and it is called history. And many others consulted this crystal ball and saw exactly what would happen, which is exactly what has happened: More people have died, more money has been wasted, more land has been despoiled, more hatred of the United States has been created, more corruption has been funded, more prisoners have been taken, more profiteering corporations have gotten contracts, and more mindless fantasies of success have been spun.

Now more than ever, war is not the answer. War leads only to more war.

People should recall that the first thing that happened after 9/11, even before the CIA-led revenge fantasy in Afghanistan got off the ground, was that damn near everyone in politics and the media started attacking pacifists and war/empire skeptics. Panetta's "no one" is the result of pretending that anyone the least bit doubtful that the only recourse was to plunge into war and occupation of a country which over the previous 22 years had done nothing but fight wars to frustrate every possibility of legitimate government. Silencing anyone not on the war bandwagon was the quickest way to get the war on, and the powers that be were very effective at doing that.

So effective, in fact, that Obama has always taken great pains to prove that he's no pacifist. He couldn't criticize the war in Iraq without offering Afghanistan as "the right war," and that's why he's trapped there. Long time ago Noam Chomsky explained how the bipartisan foreign policy wonks "manufacture consent," but nowadays they don't even bother. They just ignore dissent, dismiss critics out of hand, pretend they can't even hear any criticism, then act surprised when their own pet wars run aground.

Gail Collins: General McChrystal's Twitters. Satire, presumably, but rings true, especially in the casual dismissal of the writer: "In Paris with my Kabul posse -- Bluto, Otter, Boon, Pinto, Flounder. Plus some newbie. Guys call him Scribbles." "Team America is partying! Bluto's doing his impression of Joe Biden. Scribbles taped the whole thing -- get ready for laughs when we get home." "Scribbles wants to come, too. Told him only if he buys the next two cases."

Ray McGovern: Obama Misses the Afghan Exit Ramp. Opening lines: "Has it occurred to President Barack Obama that Gen. Stanley McChrystal might actually have wanted to be fired -- and, thus, rescued from the current march of folly in Afghanistan, a mess much of his own making?" I can't say as it occurred to me -- seems to me that McChrystal's nature is more like the one Gail Collins painted above, one that didn't take a Rolling Stone reporter seriously until the ink dried. If you want clandestine motives, it seems just as likely that Obama or someone close to him wanted McChrystal out of the way and told him it'd be good PR to plant an in-depth profile in a hip magazine. We'll know more when McChrystal, relieved of his command and now on his way to a comfy early retirement, writes his inevitable book. If he stays in character, he'll be whining about how folks back in Washington backstabbed him on the verge of success. On the other hand, he could write something actually interesting: about how clear the answers seemed back when he was scheming in the Pentagon, yet how impossible they turned out in the real Afghanistan.

The article has some other gaffes -- like speculation that Petraeus and/or Clinton might run against Obama if he falters as a hawk -- but the title is spot on, pointing out that Obama could have used this moment to start untangling us from Afghanistan, but instead used it to reiterate his failed policies and dashed hopes:

The likely results of the White House shuffle of generals are, in fact, dangerous. The change makes the prospects dimmer for Obama executing a rapid -- or even a measured -- withdrawal from Afghanistan beginning in July 2011, as some in his administration had hoped. And the president may not yet realize how scandalized his political base has been at his penchant for Bush-like policies, rather than change anyone can still believe in.

We've seen this already in how the huzzahs for Obama's embrace of Petraeus have almost invariably been accompanied by pleas to forget about the July 2011 withdrawal "start." Indeed, if he misses the next exit ramp, it seems likely that Obama will be running for reëlection in 2012, campaigning exclusively at VFW conventions and military bases, hounded by protesters kept at a safe distance -- pretty much a rerun of Bush in 2004, or LBJ in 1968.

Gareth Porter: Why Petraeus won't salvage this war. Well, because it's unsalvageable -- even Petraeus knows that, even if he can't say as much. Porter argues that Petraeus isn't inflexibly wedded to any strategy, and was willing to pull the plug on the Iraq Surge until he figured he could bluff his way politically. Also that he remains committed to one goal: salvaging his own reputation.

Andrew J Bacevich: Endless war, a recipe for four-star arrogance. Recalls America's traditional antipathy to standing armies and their corrosive effects on democracy, something which had seen axiomatic from George Washington to George Marshall. Yet now we have one, increasingly estranged from most of America:

For a time, the creation of this so-called all-volunteer force, only tenuously linked to American society, appeared to be a master stroke. Washington got superbly trained soldiers and Republicans and Democrats took turns putting them to work. The result, once the Cold War ended, was greater willingness to intervene abroad. As Americans followed news reports of U.S. troops going into action everywhere from the Persian Gulf to the Balkans, from the Caribbean to the Horn of Africa, they found little to complain about: The costs appeared negligible. Their role was simply to cheer.

This happy arrangement now shows signs of unraveling, a victim of what the Pentagon has all too appropriately been calling its Long War.

The Long War is not America's war. It belongs exclusively to "the troops," lashed to a treadmill that finds soldiers and Marines either serving in a combat zone or preparing to deploy.

To be an American soldier today is to serve a people who find nothing amiss in the prospect of armed conflict without end. Once begun, wars continue, persisting regardless of whether they receive public support. President Obama's insistence to the contrary notwithstanding, this nation is not even remotely "at" war. In explaining his decision to change commanders without changing course in Afghanistan, the president offered this rhetorical flourish: "Americans don't flinch in the face of difficult truths." In fact, when it comes to war, the American people avert their eyes from difficult truths. Largely unaffected by events in Afghanistan and Iraq and preoccupied with problems much closer to home, they have demonstrated a fine ability to tune out war. Soldiers (and their families) are left holding the bag.

Throughout history, circumstances such as these have bred praetorianism, warriors becoming enamored with their moral superiority and impatient with the failings of those they are charged to defend. The smug disdain for high-ranking civilians casually expressed by McChrystal and his chief lieutenants -- along with the conviction that "Team America," as these officers style themselves, was bravely holding out against a sea of stupidity and corruption -- suggests that the officer corps of the United States is not immune to this affliction.

To imagine that replacing McChrystal with Gen. David H. Petraeus will fix the problem is wishful thinking. [ . . . ] The day the McChrystal story broke, an active-duty soldier who has served multiple combat tours offered me his perspective on the unfolding spectacle. The dismissive attitude expressed by Team America, he wrote, "has really become a pandemic in the Army." Among his peers, a belief that "it is OK to condescend to civilian leaders" has become common, ranking officers permitting or even endorsing "a culture of contempt" for those not in uniform. Once the previously forbidden becomes acceptable, it soon becomes the norm.

Of course, it's not just the military. There's a huge posse of self-serving experts and flacks dedicated to keeping the money flowing, and politicians find them irresistible, even when they march headlong into a foolish fiasco like Afghanistan. For years and years now we've debated how to "save" Afghanistan, when the only thing the military cult really wanted to save in Afghanistan is their own raison d'être -- 9/11 raised the question of why do we spend $500 billion a year on a military that utterly failed to defend us, but rather than answer that question we've let them con us into $1 trillion a year. Start cutting back there and who knows where it might lead? You might find that cutting back to nothing solves everything, not least this praetorian cult that has eaten away our democracy and left us hopeless, confused, and stupid.

If Porter is right, Petraeus (and with his cover Obama) will try to extricate us from Afghanistan, mostly to try to salvage an army that is being proven worse than useless there. Bacevich wants to go further and unwind the military cult that got us there in the first place.

Bill Phillips posted a link to my Exit McChrystal post, and got the following comment from his nephew, a captain in the US Army:

In all candor, I am not in a position to refute any other part of Mr. Hull's article. The following however is beneath contempt: "most are simply pursuing limited career opportunities, and the rest have a simple craving to blow shit up". Really uncle, would you honestly put me in that category? If so, you do me a terrible disservice. And in my 16 years in uniform, I can probably count those I've met that actually fit that bill on my fingers and have some to spare. Mr. Hull can analyze a strategy, but he is completely ignorant about the character and professional excellence of those in military service.

Any generalization is bound to produce some exceptions, even the commonplace ones that claim that US military personnel are dedicated, principled, public-spirited, competent, or just plain decent. Back when the draft board was so eager to ship me off to Vietnam, and earlier when my father, his brothers, and numerous relatives were swept up in WWII, the military was an unremarkable cross-section of America, but since the Army went pro in the late 1970s it has largely separated from the rest of the country and turned into a self-promoting cult where "professional excellence in military service" is repeated so often you'd think it's their trademark. We're usually more skeptical of PR hype, but various powerful political and business forces find it useful to pander to the military, and they've managed to wrap the military in the flag so securely that others just shy away for fear of appearing unpatriotic.

I have doubts about the entire enterprise. In 1948 the Truman administration decided to rebuild the military and launch an aggressive worldwide defense not of the American people but of capitalists everywhere. Imperialism, depression, fascism, and war had done much to discredit capital and foment revolution around the world. Businesses were eager for more war profits, and with nuclear weapons it was easy to terrify the public, especially to back a "cold war" strategy that didn't require much of a personal commitment -- Korea and especially Vietnam proved to be unpopular exceptions. In doing so they created a permanent war state, an empire of self-importance that survived the collapse of the Soviet Union to find ever more desperate enemies. This permanent war has haunted the sixty years of my life and shows no signs of abating, even as the costs pile up to unsustainable levels and the returns aren't even negligible -- more like sad, pathetic, tragic.

I don't blame the soldiers for this, but I don't feel like flattering them either. When I was growing up, we had a slogan: "suppose they gave a war and nobody came." I took it to heart and did everything I could to avoid the draft and steer clear of a war machine that I regarded as unjust and unwise, so at some level I don't see why anyone else can't do the same -- especially now that the draft is gone and the consequences of not joining are benign. Back in the 1990s joining the military may have seemed like a riskless, harmless career move, but since 9/11 it has enabled a series of wars that have wreaked havoc around the world while in no way making us safer or a better country. I offered two reasons above why they did so. You might nominate some others -- misguided patriotism, family tradition, boredom, not sure what else.

I'm not in a position to run a survey, but the two reasons I gave certainly loom large in the promo pitch. The career angle shows up in almost every profile of enlisted personnel, as it has for twenty-some years. It's common enough you have to wonder if one reason conservatives have tried to squeeze college support is to drive people through the military. As for "blowing shit up" that may be a glib way of putting it, but I run across that repeatedly in soldier profiles -- Evan Wright's Generation Kill is about one company full of it, and Thomas Ricks's Fiasco covers the same story and mores at the level of upper brass selected for their aggressiveness, even when it mostly yields blowback. My post was occasioned by Gen. McChrystal, who is himself a prime example, yet much of the piece is about soldiers in Afghanistan complaining that McChrystal has set the rules of engagement too restrictively to, as one soldier puts it, "get their gun on."

These two traits are not just prevalent in the US military. They practically define it: the careerism leads to extreme risk aversion, which the aggression masks with bursts of "shock and awe" firepower. The two traits merge perfectly in the ever-increasing use of drones -- riskless slaughter.

Examples of these things abound. For instance, today's New York Times has an article by James Dao, "Gone for a Soldier," profiling a number of soldiers on their way to an Afghanistan deployment. The first one's reasoning is plainly economic:

The youngest of three sisters, Sergeant Sullivan, 31, was raised by a grandmother in Casey, S.C., after her father killed her mother and then killed himself. She graduated from a local college and worked for a year as a substitute teacher. But school loans weighed heavily on her, and in 2002 she enlisted. [ . . . ] She wants to serve 20 years and make retirement, with a good pension and health care benefits.

The next is a gunner. It may not be fair to dismiss him as someone who just wants to blow shit up, but he prides himself on knowing he won't freeze up under fire:

Private Stevenson [ . . . ] grew up in Port Arthur, Tex., never knowing his father. His mother, a corrections officer, died of complications related to aIDS when he was 15. He became homeless, quitting school and selling crack cocaine to survive, barely avoiding arrest. [ . . . ] Joining the Army seemed the next best step in setting his life straight.

These two happen to come from painfully broken homes. I doubt that that is the rule, but it does seem to happen much more often with military families than with the peaceniks I know. There are some things about the military that I find admirable, including their ability to occasionally pick up broken people and give them hope and purpose, although it seems like the military breaks many more people than they fix. They run a good health care system, and their camaraderie provides more social support at a time when conservatives (and liberals) are dismantling safety nets for everyone else. Still, there are ways to do all of those things without elevating a warrior caste -- ways that are far less wasteful and damaging. And if (much to my surprise) the military turns out to be a bastion of "professional excellence," wouldn't it be nice to apply those skills to something constructive?