"I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor."

It's Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and given the recent and familiar saber-rattling we've been hearing, this time agitating for a war with Iran, it seems like a good time to visit King's speech, "Beyond Vietnam." He delivered it at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, a year before he was assassinated. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute has the text and audio, and it's nice to listen to his sonorous cadences. King took a significant risk in pushing back against concerns about political caution and instead spoke his conscience. Some of the references are very much tied to the era, but others remain all too timely.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything on a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath— America will be!

Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.” It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that “America will be” are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

Digby has featured this speech before, emphasizing other good passages – it's full of them. And The New Yorker has a good piece from 2017 giving more background on crafting the speech and the political costs King knew it would incur. (It also covers John Lewis' memories of the speech.)

I appreciate that King linked war, and basically imperialism, to issues of class, race and lost opportunities in America. He received backlash for the speech, even though some passages of it are simpatico with that noted political radical, Dwight Eisenhower, who in 1953 asserted that "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." King emphasized race much more, of course, which surely made some of his white audience uncomfortable. And many of his points unfortunately remain all too pertinent.

In the questions for this election cycle's primary debates and in political chatter in general, we're essentially told that war, and all military spending, is free. According to conservatives, tax cuts and other giveaways to the rich and powerful are free as well or otherwise a national boon, and such largess will theoretically trickle down to we the peons. Apparently, it's only health care, and other domestic programs that could benefit the overwhelming majority of Americans, that cost money and need to be interrogated. Perhaps some wars are indeed necessary, yet the same people most likely to recklessly agitate for them typically argue against even the possibility of new or better social programs domestically. "I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor," said King. He wasn't fully appreciated in his lifetime, and his willingness to link the civil rights struggle to challenging other pervasive, oppressive notions is still not fully acknowledged now. As Cornel West put it, we should resist the "Santa Claus-ification" of King; it would be vanity to suppose we've already learned all he has to teach us.

Getting Over It

Dahlia Lithwick, who's written great pieces on the Supreme Court and legal matters for a long time, has penned a thoughtful, sobering piece called "Why I Haven’t Gone Back to SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh." It's worth reading in its entirely for her recap of the disgraceful confirmation process, the continuing, dreadful treatment of Christine Blasey Ford, and Lithwick's personal experiences. Lithwick takes aim at sexism and misogyny, but also delivers a more expansive critique of power and its abuses:

That is the problem with power: It incentivizes forgiveness and forgetting. It’s why the dozens of ethics complaints filed after the Kavanaugh hearings complaining about the judge’s behavior have been easily buried in a bottomless file of appeasement, on the grounds that he’s been seated and it’s too late. The problem with power is that there is no speaking truth to it when it holds all the cards. And now, given a lifetime appointment to a position that is checked by no one, Washington, the clerkship machinery, the cocktail party circuit, the elite academy all have a vested interest in getting over it and the public performance of getting over it. And a year perhaps seems a reasonable time stamp for that to begin.

The problem with power is that Brett Kavanaugh now has a monopoly on normalization, letting bygones be bygones, and turning the page. American women also have to decide whether to get over it or to invite more recriminations. That is, for those keeping track, the very definition of an abusive relationship. You stick around hoping that he’s changed, or that he didn’t mean it, or that if you don’t anger him again, maybe it’ll all be fine when the court hears the game-changing abortion appeal this year. . . .

It is not my job to decide if Brett Kavanaugh is guilty. It’s impossible for me to do so with incomplete information, and with no process for testing competing facts. But it’s certainly not my job to exonerate him because it’s good for his career, or for mine, or for the future of an independent judiciary. Picking up an oar to help America get over its sins without allowing for truth, apology, or reconciliation has not generally been good for the pursuit of justice. Our attempts to get over CIA torture policies or the Iraq war or anything else don’t bring us closer to truth and reconciliation. They just make it feel better—until they do not. And we have all spent far too much of the past three years trying to tell ourselves that everything is OK when it most certainly is not normal, not OK, and not worth getting over.

The Beltway gang – or the Village, as Digby's sometimes called it – generally doesn't like accountability for their own, regardless of political party. The powerful rarely learn the error of their ways unless they are held to account. And when they're not held responsible, it also sends the message to other powerful people that they can get away with misdeeds as well. Even if no one served jail time for lying the U.S. into the Iraq War or the Bush administration's torture regime, at least we still could have a truth and reconciliation commission or something similar. But even that would go way too far for Beltway insiders like Peggy Noonan, who in 2009 said in reference to the torture regime:

Some things in life need to be mysterious. Sometimes you need to just keep walking. . . . It’s hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that.

Noonan, of course, was concerned with "good" coming to people in her social circle, of her class, not about justice for torture victims or all the other harm caused by the torture program. Nor was she concerned about ordinary U.S. citizens who might be bothered by abuses of power and might suffer the effects, later on if not immediately. She needn't have worried; no one was held accountable, and indeed no good came of it, if not the way she meant. Similarly, nothing good ultimately came of Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon. Nothing good came of George H. W. Bush pardoning Iran-Contra conspirators. (So are they all, all honourable men.) Nothing good came of barely holding anyone responsible for the financial industry's malfeasance in creating the economic crash of 2008. Likewise, nothing good will come of the current human rights abuses on the border and grotesque and flagrant abuses of power by conservatives throughout government. This is not the time for politeness or gutless pleas for civility. A true "armistice" is impossible without remembrance, investigation and accountability.

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo.)

The War to End All Wars

Today, 11/11/18, marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, the Great War, the supposed War to End All Wars that unfortunately didn't. I've always been struck by how eager nations were to go to war at the start and how horrific the reality often was. By the end, by most estimates, about 8.5 million soldiers were dead and the total casualty count was about 37.5 million. Add in a couple million civilian deaths from fighting and several million more indirectly from disease and hunger, and the toll is just staggering. The death count would be exceeded in World War II, but it's hard to overstate how devastating the "Great War" was to the world, especially Europe.

The Imperial War Museums (a set of five museums in Britain) has posted an excellent collection of first-hand British accounts on the armistice 100 years ago. Follow the link for the audio, but I've copied some key accounts below. Not everyone got the news about the armistice, and even for those who did, the final hours could be tense:

The news travelled at different speeds, and was delayed in getting to some places. George Jameson’s unit read about it.

When the war actually ended, we didn't even know about it. We knew that things were getting pretty critical, we knew that we were doing well and nobody wanted to cop out on one when the war might be ending tomorrow, sort of thing. It was the wrong time to get wounded or hit or anything, you see! So we were pretty careful. But we were moving forward with the idea of taking another position when one of the drivers shouted up to somebody, ‘There's a sign on that,’ it was an entrance to some house. He said, ‘There's a sign on that thing marking somebody’s headquarters and it says the wars over.’ Don’t believe it. Nobody would believe it. The war couldn't be over; it had been on for years, nobody would believe it could finish! It’s a fact; it says there the war was over. So somebody rode back and read this thing that said, as from 11 o'clock this morning, hostilities have ceased. And we then realised the war was over.

Fighting continued in some places as the news made its way along the Western Front, and men still lost their lives on the final day of the war. Jim Fox of the Durham Light Infantry remembered one such incident.

Of course, when the armistice was to be signed at 11 o'clock on the 11th of November, as from 6 o'clock that morning there was only the occasional shell that was sent either by us over the German lines or the German over at our lines. Maybe there was one an hour. And then, about 10am, one came down and killed a sergeant of ours who'd been out since 1915. He was killed with shrapnel, you know. Thought that was very unlucky. To think he’d served since 1915, three years until 1918, nearly four years and then to be killed within an hour of armistice…

William Collins clearly remembered conditions on the morning of the 11 November, and noted the significance of where he was that day.

On armistice morning, I remember the fog was – it was a Monday morning, November the 11th. The fog was so thick that visibility was down to 10 yards. And as we moved and moved on, we found ourselves at about 10 o'clock that morning we were up with the infantry patrols. And of course, when we found out that they were the closest to the Germans, we stopped and we stood in that place until… must have been oh, half past 12, one o'clock before the order was given to retire. A silence came over the whole place that you could almost feel, you know, after four and a half years of war, not a shot was being fired, not a sound was heard because the fog blanketed everything, you see, and hung really thickly over… We were north-east of Mons, whereas I'd started the battle four and a half years before, south-east of Mons. So there I was, back where the war started after nearly four and a half years of it.

For an exhibit, the Imperial War Museum in London recreated "the last few minutes of World War I when the guns finally fell silent at the River Moselle on the American Front" using WWI seismic data that the Smithsonian explains well. Take a listen:



(It seems the birds were added as an artistic choice, and I think they come in too early and too loudly, but it's still a fascinating piece.)

( Paris.)
In the field, some soldiers celebrated the armistice with gusto, while others were simply exhausted:

Charles Wilson of the Gloucestershire Regiment was delighted when he heard of the armistice.

Well of course there was tremendous jubilation, I can remember. We had just come out of this battle and the armistice was on the 11th of November. We were doing battalion drill back in some village in France when we formed up and the commanding officer made the announcement: an armistice was signed at 11 o'clock today. Of course there was a swell of excitement amongst the men and our only interest then was to find something to drink to celebrate it and there was nothing to be had, not a bottle of wine or anything else! However we soon put that right…

But Clifford Lane was just too physically and mentally shattered to celebrate.

Then as far as the armistice itself was concerned, it was an anti-climax. We were too far gone, too exhausted, really to enjoy it. All we could do was just go back to our billets; there was no cheering, no singing, we had no alcohol – that particular day we had no alcohol at all – and we simply celebrated the armistice in silence and thankfulness that it was all over. And I believe that happened quite a lot in France. There was such a sense of anti-climax; there was such a… We were drained of all emotion really – that’s what it amounted to, you see. Then it was a question of when we were going to get home…

( Trafalgar Square, London.)
More reactions:

Mary Lees, who worked for the Air Ministry, was caught up in the scenes of jubilation that day.

But of course, I mean, Armistice Day was fantastic. You see, you visualise every single office in Kingsway pouring down the Strand. I should think there must have been about 10,000 people. There was no traffic of course. It was solid, like that. And you see, when they got to the end of the Strand of course it opened up, like that, into Trafalgar Square. And still Trafalgar Square was packed. Well, we didn’t get back to the office, to our work, till about half past three, four. And, when I came to get my bus back in the evening, the people had been careering all round London on the buses. But nobody would go inside because they all wanted to go on top and cheer. I forget how many it was in the papers the next morning, fifty or sixty buses had all their railings broken, going up the stairs on the top.

For many, the moment of the armistice was a time to reflect on all the lives that had been lost during the war. Ruby Ord was serving in France with the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps.

I think it was a bit of an anti-climax. Suddenly you thought about, you see, all the people you had known who were killed, etc. They were just in the war zone, and they could come home in your imagination. But the Armistice brought the realisation to you that they weren’t coming back, that it was the end. I think that it was not such a time of rejoicing as it might have been. You were glad the fighting was over and that not more men would be killed. But I do think it was dampened down very much, in France. I think they had all the enthusiasm probably in England, but I think we were too near reality to feel that way. I didn’t, certainly. I did not go out of camp on Armistice Day.

This remembrance seems the best to end on:

After the long years of hardship, suffering and loss, it was no surprise that the news the war had finally ended was received with such a mixture of emotions by those who were immediately affected by it. From shock and disbelief, to relief and jubilation, men and women around the world had their own reactions to the armistice. Basil Farrer served on the Western Front during the war. He was in Nottingham on 11 November 1918 but found he couldn't join the cheering crowds in the city that day.

I remember Armistice Day and I didn't know at the time but in every city, everybody went mad. In London, they were dancing in the streets, the crowds, in all the cities, in Paris and in Nottingham too. In Market Square, it was one mass of people dancing and singing. I did not go there. I do remember – for some reason or other – inexplicable, especially in so young a chap as myself, I felt sad. I did – I had a feeling of sadness. And I did remember all those chaps who'd never come back, because there was quite a lot, nearly a million – not quite a million. As a matter of fact, in Paris I remember the Prince of Wales inaugurating a plaque in the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris to the million dead of Great Britain and the British Empire. And I did have a feeling of sadness that day.

Tyne Cot Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery and Memorial to the Missing, Belgium.)

(Notre Dame de Lorette, also known as Ablain St.-Nazaire French Military Cemetery, France.)

(Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, France.)
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(Poppy on a Canadian grave.)

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Blowing Things Up

Today is Memorial Day, which is meant for remembering those who died in military service. It's also a good day to reflect on war in general.

Back in May 2017, John Quiggin of Crooked Timber made a good observation about Trump bombing Syria and the pundits this impressed. Quiggin:

Blowing things and people up is seen as a demonstration of clarity and resolve, unless someone is doing it to us, in which case it's correctly recognised as cowardly and evil. The most striking recent example (on "our" side) was the instant and near-universal approval of Trump's bombing of an airfield in Syria, which had no effect at all on events there.

Last month, Quiggin wrote a follow-up about "another round of bombing from Trump, and yet more instant applause." These dynamics aren't limited to Trump, of course; they have a long history in the U.S. and other nations.

Some wars may be necessary. Others definitely aren't. In theory, every pundit or government official and most citizens should have heard the saying that "war is hell" and should know the truth behind it, thanks to schooling, listening to veterans, and all the good documentaries, feature films and books on the subject. Anyone who wants a war is an idiot or a scoundrel. Yet even when military action is pretty clearly a bad idea or at least pointless, some people who should know better will still cheer it. They'll hail it as a sign of leadership or being decisive or tough or manly, while virtues like wisdom and careful thought are ignored if not vilified. (And many in this crowd will try to claim patriotism while they do it.) Surely one of the points of Memorial Day is that we shouldn't add to the numbers of the dead unnecessarily. But our national political discourse, on matters of war as with most everything else, is too heavily influenced by idiots and scoundrels.

It makes sense for Memorial Day to be a day of reflection or getting together with friends. But maybe it can also spur some civil engagement later in the year, whether it's working for veterans or food banks or some other worthy cause, such as registering people to vote and getting them to the polls. It's relatively easy to blow something up, and generally both harder and more worthwhile to build and sustain something positive with others.

People talk about Iwo Jima as the most glorious amphibious operation in history. I've had Iwo veterans tell me it was more similar to Peleliu than any other battle they read about. What in the hell was glorious about it?...

My parents taught me the value of history. Both my grandfathers were in the Confederate Army. They didn't talk about the glory of war. They talked about how terrible it was.
– WWII veteran E.B. "Sledgehammer" Sledge (1923–2001)

The Battle of the Somme

The eleventh of November is primarily known as Veterans Day in the United States, but it's also known as Remembrance Day and Armistice Day. These holidays typically dovetail well, but Armistice Day, commemorating the end of the "Great War," is the part I've been pondering most. Veterans Day honors military veterans, which is only right, but Armistice Day seems to ask us to reflect on war and peace.

Americans tend to remember the Second World War much better that the First, and the Second is far more heavily featured in American feature films, TV shows, books and documentaries. The U.S. entered the First World War fairly late, we weren't directly involved in some of its most horrific events, plus the Second had more moral clarity; we can feel like the good guys. (Stud Terkel's great oral history of that war is called "The Good War" in quotation marks because although many of the interviewees justifiably feel proud of their service, no war is truly "good.") I do wish as a country we considered more aspects of the First World War, including the lessons of the Battle of the Somme, which started a little over one hundred and one years ago. As the BBC explains:

The Battle of the Somme, fought in northern France, was one of the bloodiest of World War One. For five months the British and French armies fought the Germans in a brutal battle of attrition on a 15-mile front. The aims of the battle were to relieve the French Army fighting at Verdun and to weaken the German Army. However, the Allies were unable to break through German lines. In total, there were over one million dead and wounded on all sides.

The battle is much more strongly etched into British memories because its start on July 1st, 1916, entailed the highest single-day death count of British soldiers in history. British decisions were criticized at the time (by Winston Churchill, among others) and are still discussed. The British had initiated a massive military recruitment effort, led by Secretary of State of War Lord Kitchener, but because of British losses, the "Kitchener divisions" were rushed to battle with relatively little training and often short on equipment. For the Battle of the Somme, the British plan was basically for artillery to destroy German barbed wire so that British soldiers could advance from their trenches to take over the German ones. British military historian John Keegan sets the scene in his 1976 book, The Face of Battle:

French small-unit tactics, perfected painfully over two years of warfare, laid emphasis on the advance of small groups by rushes, one meanwhile supporting another by fire – the sort of tactics which were to become commonplace in the Second World War. This sophistication of traditional 'fire and movement' was known to the British but was thought by the staff to be too difficult to be taught to the Kitchener divisions. They may well have been right. But the alternative tactical order they laid down for them was over-simplified: divisions were to attack on front of about a mile, generally with two brigades 'up' and one in reserve. What this meant, in terms of soldiers on the ground, was that two battalions each of a thousand men, forming the leading wave of the brigade, would leave their front trenches, using scaling-ladders to climb the parapet, extend their soldiers in four lines, a company to each, the men two to three yards apart, the lines about fifty to a hundred yards behind each other, and advance to the German wire. This they would expect to find flat, or at least widely gapped, and, passing through, they would then jump down into the German trenches, shoot, bomb or bayonet any who opposed them, and take possession. Later the reserve waves would pass through and advance to capture the German second position by similar methods.

The manoeuvre was to be done slowly and deliberately, for the men were to be laden with about sixty pounds of equipment, their re-supply with food and ammunition during the battle being one of the thing the staff could not guarantee. In the circumstances, it did indeed seem that success would depend upon what the artillery could do for the infantry, both before the advance and once it was under way.
p. 230 (1988 edition)

If there's an image associated with the First World War, it's trench warfare. If there's a specific weapon, it might be mustard gas, but more likely the machine gun, used on a greater scale than ever before. As Keegan explains:

The machine-gun was to be described by Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, one of the great enragés of military theory produced by the war, as 'concentrated essence of infantry,' by which he meant his readers to grasp that its invention put into the hands of one man the fire-power formerly wielded by forty. Given that a good rifleman could fire only fifteen shots a minute, to a machine-gunner's 600, the point is well made. But, as Fuller would have no doubt conceded if taxed, a machine-gun team did not simply represent the equivalent of so many infantrymen compressed into a small compass. Infantrymen, however well-trained and well-armed, however resolute, however ready to kill, remain erratic agents of death. Unless centrally directed, they will choose, perhaps badly, their own targets, will open and cease fire individually, will be put off their aim by the enemy's return of fire, will be distracted by wounding of those near them, will yield to excitement, will fire high, low or wide. It was to overcome influences and tendencies of this sort – as well as to avert the danger of accident in closely packed ranks – that seventeeth- and eighteenth-century armies had put such effort into perfecting volley by square, line and column. . . .

The machine-gunner is best thought of, in short, as a sort of machine-minder, whose principal task was to feed ammunition belt into the breech, something which could be done while the gun was in full operation, top up the fluid in the cooling jacket, and traverse the gun from left to right and back again within the limits set by its firing platform. Traversing was achieved by a technique known, in the British Army, as the 'two inch tap': by constant practice, the machine-gunner learned to hit the side of the breech with the palm of his hand just hard enough to move the muzzle exactly two inches against the resistance of the traversing screw. A succession of 'two-inch taps' first on one side of the breech until the stop was reached, then on the other, would keep in the air a stream of bullets so dense that no one could walk upright across the front of the machine-gunner's position without being hit – given, of course, that the gunner had set his machine to fire low and that the ground as devoid of cover. The appearance of the machine-gun, therefore, had not so much disciplined the act of killing – which was what seventeenth-century drill had done – as mechanized or industrialized it.
pp. 232–234

On the first day of battle, July 1st, 1916, the British artillery started its job, and the British soldiers, many of them relatively untrained, advanced:

Most soldiers were encountering heavy fire within seconds of leaving the trenches. The 10th West Yorks, attacking towards the ruined village of Fricourt in the little valley of the River Ancre, had its two follow-up companies caught in the open by German machine-gunners who emerged from their dug-outs after the leading waves has passed over the top and onward. They were 'practically annihilated and lay shot down in waves'. In the neighbouring 34th Division, the 5th and 16th Royal Scots, two Edinburgh Pals' Battalions contained a high proportion of Mancunians, were caught in flank by machine-gun firing from the ruins of La Boiselle and lost several hundred men in a few minutes, thought the survivors marched on to enter German lines. Their neighbouring battalions, the 10th Lincolns and 11th Suffolks (the Grimsby Chums and the Cambridge Battalion) were caught by the same flanking fire; of those who pressed on to the German trenches, some, to quote the official history 'were burnt to death by flame throwers as [they] reached the [German] parapet'; others were caught again by machine-gun fire as they entered the German position. An artillery officer who walked across later came on 'line after line of dead men lying where they had fallen'. Behind the Edinburghs, the four Tyneside Irish battalions of the 103rd Brigade underwent a bizarre and pointless massacre. The 34th Division's commander had decided to move all twelve of his battalions simultaneously towards the German front, the 101st and 102nd Brigades from the front trench, the 103rd from the support line (called the Tara-Usna Line, in a little re-entrant know to the brigade as the Avoca Valley – all three names allusions to Irish beauty spots celebrated by Yeats and the Irish literary nationalists). This decision gave the last brigade a mile of open ground to cover before it reached its own front line, a safe enough passage if the enemy's machine-guns had been extinguished, otherwise a funeral march. A sergeant of the 3rd Tyneside Irish (26th Northumberland Fusiliers) describes how it was: 'I could see, away to my left and right, long lines of men. Then I heard the "patter, patter" of machine-guns in the distance. By the time I'd gone another ten yards there seemed to be only a few men left around me; by the time I had gone twenty yards, I seemed to be on my own. Then I was hit myself.' Not all went down so soon. A few heroic souls pressed on to the British front line, crossed no-man's-land and entered the German trenches. But the brigade was destroyed; one of its battalions had lost over 600 men killed or wounded, another, 500; the brigadier and two battalions commanders had been hit, a third lay dead. Militarily, the advance had achieved nothing. Most of the bodies lay on the territory British before the battle had begun.
pp. 248–249

As for the overall results:

The first day of the Somme had not been a complete military failure. But it had been a human tragedy. The Germans, with about sixty battalions on the British Somme front, though about forty in the line, say about 35,000 soldiers, had had killed or wounded 6,000. Bad enough; but it was in the enormous disparity between their losses and the British that the weight of the tragedy lies: the German 180th Regiment lost 280 men on 1 July out of about 3,000; attacking it, the British had lost 5,121 out of 12,000. In all the British had lost about 60,000, of whom 21,000 had been killed, most in the first hour of the attack, perhaps the first minutes. 'The trenches,' wrote Robert Kee fifty years later, 'were the concentration camps of the First World War'; and though the analogy is what an academic reviewer would call unhistorical, there is something Treblinka-like about almost all accounts of 1 July, about those long docile lines of young men, shoddily uniformed, heavily burdened, numbered across their necks, plodding forward across a featureless landscape to their own extermination inside the barbed wire. Accounts of the Somme produce in readers and audiences much the same range of emotions as do descriptions of the running of Auschwitz – guilty fascination, incredulity, horror, disgust, pity and anger – and not just from the pacific and tender-hearted; not only from the military historian, on whom, as he recounts the extinction of this brave effort or that, falls an awful lethargy, his typewriter keys tapping leadenly on the paper to drive the lines of print, like the waves of a Kitchener battalion failing to take its objective, more and more slowly towards the foot of the page; but also from professional soldiers. Anger is the response which the story of the Somme most commonly evokes among professionals. Why did the commanders not do something about it? Why did they let the attack go on? Why did they not stop one battalion following in the wake of another to join it in death?
pp. 259–260

It's a striking account of senseless, unnecessary death. (It's stuck with me since I first read it ages ago.) The battle grew to be criticized, but it took a while for the public to get a fuller picture. The newpaper Times of London, published by Lord Northcliffe, consistently painted a rosy view of the British soldier's life. As Paul Fussell recounts in The Great War and Modern Memory:

It is no surprise to find Northcliffe's Times on July 3, 1916, reporting the first day's attack on the Somme with an airy confidence which could not help but deepen the division between those on the spot and those at home, "[Commander] Sir Douglas Haig telephoned last night," says the Times, "that the general situation was favorable," and the account goes on to speak of "effective progress," nay, "substantial progress." It soon ascends to the rhetoric of heroic romance: "There is a fair field and no favor, and [at the Somme] we have elected to fight out our quarrel with the Germans and to give them as much battle as they want." In short, "everything has gone well"; "we got our first thrust well home, and there is every reason to be sanguine as to the result." No wonder communication failed between the troops and those who could credit prose like that as factual testimony.
p. 106 (in the Illustrated Edition)

Fussell presents another familiar story – a government that doesn't want the public to know what happened in a war (and at least one media outlet happy to play along). Some Americans might be reminded of U.S. government efforts to suppress the news about the Vietnam War and Walter Cronkite's 1968 public commentary that the war was a stalemate and the U.S should negotiate an end. But similar dynamics play out with many wars.

It makes perfect sense that the Battle of the Somme remains a more powerful event for the British than for Americans, or even the French or Germans; it's one of many events that shape my personal thoughts on Armistice Day, but that mix will be different for everyone. But if contemplating Armistice Day entails any lessons, for me they're fairly straightforward: some wars may be necessary. Others definitely aren't. The same goes for battles; military history is full of disastrous decisions. If you must go to war, prepare well. Going to war should require a high threshold; it shouldn't be done capriciously. Distrust anyone who wants to go to war. Challenge anyone who tries bully others to go to war and attacks their patriotism or lies or offers frequently shifting rationales. Discuss matters of war and peace honestly and openly as a democracy. Obtain as much accurate information as possible and question suspect accounts (and certainly challenge outright propaganda). Treat veterans well, especially when it comes to physical and mental health. Listen to their stories. Remember that the best way to support current military personnel is to avoid sending them into an unnecessary war or sending them into a pointless battle or poorly preparing them. Challenge anyone who tries to pretend that either skepticism about going to war or questioning a specific war-related decision shows a lack of "support for the troops." Resist authoritarian bullying.

In our current day, it's worth remembering that although some veterans go on to become fine public servants, others become political hacks. Generals may serve as wise counsel for presidents, or may agitate for nuclear war, as Curtis LeMay did to President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As political figures, generals may act as a sobering influences, but they can also be authoritarian bullies who lie and slander for attempted political gain, and misunderstand or disdain democracy. They have a voice, but undue deference to them can be dangerous.

Thanks to all who has served on this Veterans Day. As for Remembrance Day and Armistice Day, in 1959, Pogo creator Walt Kelly wrote:

The eleventh day of the eleventh month has always seemed to me to be special. Even if the reason for it fell apart as the years went on, it was a symbol of something close to the high part of the heart. Perhaps a life that stretches through two or three wars takes its first war rather seriously, but I still think we should have kept the name "Armistice Day." Its implications were a little more profound, a little more hopeful.

Memorial Day 2016

Memorial Day is meant for remembering those who died in military service (a worthy commemoration). It's also a holiday that naturally spurs thoughts of civilians killed in war, of living veterans and how they're treated, and how war is discussed in our country. It's only right to pause and remember the dead. And perhaps the best way to honor them the other days of the year is by challenging the belligerati who believe that casually and aggressively endorsing war or torture somehow makes them tough or makes the nation safer. Requiring a high threshold for war shouldn't be a political calculation; it's the position of basic sanity. Unfortunately, saber-rattling insanity is both fashionable and profitable in some circles, and rarely seems to draw the same condemnations that wiser, less bellicose positions do.

This weekend, PBS broadcast a short documentary about The Telling Project, which uses theater to help military veterans talk through their experiences, from losing a limb, to being raped, to PTSD, to contemplating suicide. One of the veterans remarked that 'there's no bigger pacifist than a deployed serviceman.' Rather than letting our national discussions of war be hijacked by the braggadocio of the insecure, the cruel, the calculating and the delusional, we'd benefit from considering the harsh realities of war instead. Rather than letting tough guy (and tough gal) fantasies reign, we should seek out true stories. Rather than letting another bombastic speech from an irresponsible ignoramus dictate the terms of discourse, we should give time to veterans and civilians affected by war, and quietly listen.

Sense and Insensibility

On Armistice Day (or Veterans Day, or Remembrance Day), it’s an especially good time to pause and reflect. Those most eager for war are rarely the ones who will fight or pay the costs. Requiring a high threshold for war is the position of basic sanity; it’s common sense. Yet saber-rattling and posturing bravado always sell well to certain crowds, and blithe imperialism will eternally be fashionable among a particular vacuous and powerful set. What’s ignored is the human experience and the inevitable suffering of people a step or two (or many) removed.

World War I, the Great War, which sadly proved not to be “the war to end all wars,” was raging 100 years ago. One of the war’s best poets was Wilfred Owen, who tragically died shortly before the war’s end. I’ve featured his poetry before, including this piece, but was reminded of it again recently:

Insensibility
By Wilfred Owen

I
Happy are men who yet before they are killed
Can let their veins run cold.
Whom no compassion fleers
Or makes their feet
Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.
The front line withers. 
But they are troops who fade, not flowers, 
For poets’ tearful fooling:
Men, gaps for filling:
Losses, who might have fought
Longer; but no one bothers.

II
And some cease feeling
Even themselves or for themselves.
Dullness best solves
The tease and doubt of shelling,
And Chance’s strange arithmetic
Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.
They keep no check on armies’ decimation.

III
Happy are these who lose imagination:
They have enough to carry with ammunition.
Their spirit drags no pack.
Their old wounds, save with cold, can not more ache.
Having seen all things red,
Their eyes are rid
Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.
And terror’s first constriction over,
Their hearts remain small-drawn.
Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle
Now long since ironed,
Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.

IV
Happy the soldier home, with not a notion
How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,
And many sighs are drained.
Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:
His days are worth forgetting more than not.
He sings along the march
Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,
The long, forlorn, relentless trend
From larger day to huger night.

V
We wise, who with a thought besmirch
Blood over all our soul,
How should we see our task
But through his blunt and lashless eyes?
Alive, he is not vital overmuch;
Dying, not mortal overmuch;
Nor sad, nor proud,
Nor curious at all.
He cannot tell
Old men’s placidity from his.

VI
But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,
That they should be as stones.
Wretched are they, and mean
With paucity that never was simplicity.
By choice they made themselves immune
To pity and whatever moans in man
Before the last sea and the hapless stars;
Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;
Whatever shares
The eternal reciprocity of tears.

These are old and recurring themes, and this poem resonates across eras. It spoke to World War II veteran Eugene Sledge, who wrote the war memoir With the Old Breed (part of the basis for the series The Pacific and also used in the Ken Burns documentary, The War). Sledge recommended the piece to Studs Turkel during his interview for Turkel’s great, ironically titled oral history, The Good War. Remarking on the poem’s speaker, Sledge observed, "This is the only way he can cope with it mentally... and he hates to see his buddies killed."  (It’s fascinating to listen to the discussions between Sledge and Turkel because Sledge is so candid and reflective, and Turkel is so genuinely interested in other human beings.)

“Insensibility” covers a great deal of ground in a short space – it expresses a sardonic wit, explores numbness (whether voluntary or involuntary) as a survival mechanism, and ponders “Chance’s strange arithmetic,” an apt phrase for a perennial wartime fear. Insensibility isn’t the only possible response – Sophocles explored rage and madness in his 5th century BCE play, Ajax, a piece that still resonates with modern audiences, particularly those who have experienced combat. How does someone deal with such experiences? It’s not easy, and sometimes the response may indeed be post-traumatic stress disorder (the “shell shock” of an earlier era), or numbness, or rage, or depression, or fatigue, or some mix, or something else altogether.

This is an old story, but not one our country has grappled with well, especially as it plays out against actual human beings. Obviously not every veteran is a powder keg, and that’s definitely not the point of discussing this – the issue is whether we’re offering adequate help to those who need it. A set of 2014 studies bolsters past findings on PTSD and its prevalence. It can be treated, but there’s still a heavy and unfortunate stigma attached. Anthony Pike of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) observed that “An estimated 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are diagnosed with PTSD or depression, and most civilians are unaware that 22 veterans take their own lives each day.”

Reportedly, the military has gotten better at addressing PTSD and similar issues over the years. But for perspective, military spending by the U.S. has often exceeded 600 billion a year in the past decade or so, and that trend looks to continue when everything is tallied. Given all that money, perhaps more could be diverted to the general mental health and well-being of servicemen and women. Perhaps more effort could be made at addressing attitudes that PTSD or other problems are due to a lack of character (or, as we’ve explored in previous posts, a lack of religious faith).

Wars of choice are unconscionable (and we’ve explored that in depth in other pieces), but especially if one supports such a war (or really any war), it’s inexcusable not to take care of that war’s veterans. That means not serving up hollow slogans or flag-waving or jingoistic platitudes and instead providing actual help, from physical health care, to mental health care, to jobs programs. (Honestly, all of that would a good idea for the whole country, too.) The vacuous, the rabid, and the dullards might not want to discuss such things – or any of the negative consequences of war – but addressing them remains a matter of basic decency and common sense.

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo.)

The Courage to Make Others Suffer

On the eve of war in Washington, journalists and others gathered at a cocktail party at the home of Philip Taubman, the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times. . . . Judy Miller was one of several Times reporters there, and she seemed excited. Another journalist present asked if she was planning to head over to Iraq to cover the invasion. Miller, according to the other guest, could barely contain herself. "Are you kidding?" she asked. "I've been waiting for this war for ten years. I wouldn't miss it for the world!"

– Hubris, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn (via Jon Schwarz).

“I must say, I’m a little envious,” Bush said. “If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed.”

“It must be exciting for you . . . in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks,” Bush said.

– A 2008 videoconference between Bush and U.S. military and civilian personnel.

In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic.

– Richard Cohen, looking back on the Iraq War in 2006.

There's a breed of pedigreed dolt endemic to Washington, D.C. They determine their opinions socially, not empirically; what "everybody knows" trumps facts any old day. Their notion of tough, hard-nosed realism invariably entails that other people should suffer, from the blithe imperialism that cheers on unnecessary wars to the 'sensible centrism' that insists that unnecessary cuts to the social safety net are absolutely imperative. (The occasional safely contrarian view offers some novelty and the gloss of independence without truly challenging the establishment framework.) They remain cheerfully cloistered from the effects of their pronouncements about what the less privileged should be doing (and should be having done to them).

Among this crowd, going to war – or rather, sending others to war – is not a matter of careful deliberation; it is a matter of fashion.

Supporting and opposing war are not automatically respectable and equally valid positions; requiring a high threshold for war is the position of basic sanity, akin to a doctor making sure that amputating a limb is actually necessary before proceeding. A truly unavoidable conflict can be argued for with evidence and reason. If instead a war advocate lies, or constantly shifts rationales, or routinely exaggerates and fear-mongers, or slanders the patriotism of skeptics, or seems eager for war… it's cause for grave concern. Human beings will die in a war; death cannot be undone. Inevitably, not only supposed villains will suffer. Someone who can't be bothered even to pretend to treat war with the appropriate weight should not be trusted.

With a new presidential election cycle starting, we've seen many politicians, pundits and supposed journalists make revisionist claims about how the Iraq War started. It's crucial to remember that it wasn't an honest mistake nor was the case for war honestly made. Fighting against memory hole efforts are Digby, Paul Krugman (one and two), James Fallows, Josh Marshall, Greg Sargent, driftglass (one, two and three), Steve Benen, David Corn, Duncan Black, Matt Taibbi, the Columbia Journalism Review and The Daily Show, Balloon Juice, and I'm sure many more I've missed. (It's worth noting that the revisionism started almost immediately, and generally went unchallenged.)

Some war advocates had reservations; far more were largely uncritical of the Bush administration's case for war. There was a disturbing (if sadly unsurprising) trend of treating war skeptics as unpatriotic or even traitors. The key problem with belligerently cheerleading war (at its worst, gleeful bullying), wasn't that such people were socially obnoxious, although they were – it's that they helped create a climate where authority wasn't questioned, and skepticism was pilloried. They increased the chances of an unnecessary war. They increased the chances of unnecessary death and destruction. Avoiding those consequences – requiring a high threshold for armed conflict – is the entire point of war skepticism. It's not a game. Likewise, the reason to point out that the Iraq War was sold dishonestly, and that war advocates were wrong (or dishonest), is not for social bragging rights, but to prevent unnecessary wars in the future.

All of this should be completely obvious, but among the political class, it isn't. Far too many war advocates then and now treat such decisions as an issue of status and face, an abstract, intellectual game or "a low-stakes cocktail party argument" (to borrow a phrase from Jamelle Bouie). A few former war advocates have learned something profound, but for most of them, a true self-accounting would be too painful (and deep reflection has never been their nature anyway). Cloistered dolts rarely suffer for their careless decisions. And for many advocates, whether delusional or coldly clear-eyed, war was and is profitable. In Greek and Shakespearean tragedies, the instigator often suffers the effects of his own hubris, and it can lead to reflection, redemption, or at least recognition – for the audience if not the character. In politics and warmongering, hubris characteristically entails that someone else pay the costs.

(For more, see a 2013 post, "The Dogs of War.")

Hello Again and Again to All That

1914 marks the centennial of the start of World War I, and Armistice Day (or Remembrance Day, or Veterans Day) originally commemorated the Great War's end. Back in January, William Kristol, a zealous and unrepentant warmonger's warmonger, wrote a piece commenting on one of the great war poems, Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est." The results were illuminating – not of the poem, or Owen himself, or World War I, or war in general – but of Kristol and those of like mind.

It's worth rereading the poem itself first:

Dulce et Decorum Est
By Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

As the British website War Poetry explains:

DULCE ET DECORUM EST – the first words of a Latin saying (taken from an ode by Horace). The words were widely understood and often quoted at the start of the First World War. They mean "It is sweet and right." The full saying ends the poem: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - it is sweet and right to die for your country. In other words, it is a wonderful and great honour to fight and die for your country.

(Christopher Eccleston, Kenneth Branagh and Ben Whishaw perform good renditions of the poem.)

Owen's view of war isn't rare among those who served in WWI; similar views can be found in the poems of his friend Siegfried Sassoon, or in Robert Graves' bitingly satirical memoir, Good-Bye to All That. WWII vet Eugene Sledge, among many others, admired Owen's ability to capture the experience of war. It's a disturbing but honest perspective, and should not be surprising.

In a January post, William Kristol quotes a 1997 David Frum piece that touches on Owen's poem and the loss of respect for authority. Kristol comments that:

As Frum pointed out, Horace’s line is one “that any educated Englishman of the last century would have learned in school.” Those pre-War Englishmen would, on the whole, have understood the line earnestly and quoted it respectfully. Not after the War. Living in the shadow of Wilfred Owen rather than Horace, the earnestness yielded to bitterness, the respect to disgust. As Frum puts it, “Scoffing at those words represented more than a rejection of war. It meant a rejection of the schools, the whole society, that had sent Owen to war.”

This year, a century later, the commemorations of 1914 will tend to take that rejection of piety and patriotism for granted. Or could this year mark a moment of questioning, even of reversal?

Today, after all, we see the full consequences of that rejection in a way Owen and his contemporaries could not. Can’t we acknowledge the meaning, recognize the power, and learn the lessons of 1914 without succumbing to an apparently inexorable gravitational pull toward a posture of ironic passivity or fatalistic regret in the face of civilizational decline? No sensitive person can fail to be moved by Owen’s powerful lament, and no intelligent person can ignore his chastening rebuke. But perhaps a century of increasingly unthinking bitter disgust with our heritage is enough.

(Kristol goes on to recommend the "The Star-Spangled Banner" instead of Owen's poem, remarking that "[T]he greater work of art is not always the better guide to life.")

In a post at Crooked Timber titled "Some Desperate Glory," John Holbo marvels:

Amazing. Bill Kristol is hoping that, after a full century of unwillingness to go to war, because Wilfred Owen, this might be the year we consider – maybe! – going to some war. For the glory of it! Wouldn’t a war be glorious? If we could only have one? "Play up, play up, and play the game!" For the game is glorious!

Why have we been so unthinkingly unwilling to consider going to war for an entire century? Doesn’t that seem like a long time to go without a war?

Couldn’t we have just one?

Indeed, Kristol's column is awfully odd in that it ignores that the world has seen plenty of war since 1914, but more pointedly because it ignores that William Kristol himself has not only fervently pushed for numerous wars – he's gotten many of them. There's also the matter of the assumptions he glosses over in his argument. Kristol likely defines "piety" and "patriotism" far differently than I would, but he nonetheless doesn't bother to provide evidence of their "rejection." Likewise, he doesn't provide any proof of "a posture of ironic passivity or fatalistic regret," let alone "civilizational decline." As CT commentator bt puts it, "I love the part where Bill Kristol links Civilizational Decline with our regrettable lack of enthusiasm for a glorious War." It's really an Orwellian marvel by Kristol. (The rest of the CT comments are well worth reading, too.) Besides that central gem, it's darkly hilarious how Kristol claims that opposition to war is "unthinking." Requiring a high threshold for war is the mark of basic sanity and maturity, and questioning those eager for war is both a moral necessity and a simple act of bullshit detection.

Without recounting all of Bill Kristol's sweetest, most glorious hits, it's worth noting that he advocated invading Iraq in the 90s (and has rarely met a war he hasn't liked). He was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Iraq War. In 2003, he dismissively claimed that Iraq had "always been very secular" and that concerns about religious or sectarian conflicts were overblown. He was, of course, disastrously wrong, yet despite his remarkable knack for being wrong about almost everything, he has a long history of "falling upward" and being a permanent fixture on the pundit circuit. Nor has Kristol shown any noticeable sign of contrition; this year, he's urged the U.S. to send the military back into Iraq, and recycled many of his arguments from 2002. (For Iraq War advocates, the operating rule seems to be that any positive situation in Iraq, no matter how many years later, somehow serves as retroactive vindication; moreover, the goal is not merely to be right, but to have been right.)

Perhaps Kristol is sincere and simply consistently, horribly wrong about matters of grave importance. However, it's notable that he also played a key role derailing health care reform in 1994, and for political reasons. Similarly, he was one of the most enthusiastic boosters for Sarah Palin becoming John McCain's vice presidential running mate – and it wasn't for her command of policy. (He was still singing her praises earlier this year.) Not that being a true believer is an excuse for consistently terrible judgment, but the evidence suggests he's at least as much a hack as he is an ideologue.

It's worthwhile to recall the bullying atmosphere leading up to and extending past the start of the Iraq War – it did not invite the 'thinking' and 'questioning' Kristol supposedly values. For instance, there was Ari Fleischer's "watch what they do and what they say," Richard Cohen's "fool – or possibly a Frenchman," combat-hardened Megan McArdle's two-by-four to pacifists, Ann Coulter's call to "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," Andrew Sullivan's "decadent Left" as a "fifth column" and Tom Friedman's eminently mature macho posturing, "Suck. On. This." (The era yielded many other lovely moments in thoughtful discourse, overwhelmingly from Kristol's side of the aisle.)

One of the striking aspects about the Iraq War turning 10 last year was the lack of introspection. (James Fallows covered this very well.) This dynamic stretches beyond a rejection of reflection – there's still a rejection of basic facts. To quote a 2013 post:

It also isn't rare, even today, to hear conservative pundits insist (often angrily) that the Bush administration didn't lie in making the case for war, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary (and plenty of misleading, dishonorable rhetoric besides). Sure, one can quibble in some cases whether those many misleading false statements were technically lies versus bullshitting versus the product of egregious self-delusion, but in no universe were they responsible. Meanwhile, it's disappointing but not surprising that the corporate media, who were largely unskeptical cheerleaders for the war and prone to squelching critical voices, would be reluctant to revisit one of their greatest failures in living memory (let alone doing so unflinchingly).

It's worth revisiting one of Kristol's most sneering statements, right before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (emphasis mine):

We are tempted to comment, in these last days before the war, on the U.N., and the French, and the Democrats. But the war itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. It will reveal the aspirations of the people of Iraq, and expose the truth about Saddam's regime. It will produce whatever effects it will produce on neighboring countries and on the broader war on terror. We would note now that even the threat of war against Saddam seems to be encouraging stirrings toward political reform in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and a measure of cooperation in the war against al Qaeda from other governments in the region. It turns out it really is better to be respected and feared than to be thought to share, with exquisite sensitivity, other people's pain. History and reality are about to weigh in, and we are inclined simply to let them render their verdicts.

These are the words of someone who wasn't merely disastrously wrong, but also was an immature asshole (and who knew full well he wouldn't be the one to suffer the consequences of his positions). Advocacy for war should necessitate more seriousness. And Kristol has been too cowardly to acknowledge who was clearly wrong about weapons of mass destruction and political reform, and too dishonest to face history and reality's verdicts. Estimates of deaths caused by the Iraq War vary significantly, but it's a true – if terribly impolite – point that thousands of people are unnecessarily dead because of a position Bill Kristol zealously pushed, and continues to support. It's not that war can never be advocated for, but it is not something that should advocated lightly or cavalierly. Perhaps the weight of such a significant decision – and such a monumental error – should be felt; perhaps some acknowledgement is in order; perhaps those who have been unrepentantly, disastrously wrong should be shunned from public commentary rather than allowed to continually peddle the same old deadly crap "with such high zest." This smug belligerence is why, in more polite company, Kristol has been denounced as an armchair warrior, and called far worse in other venues.

To be fair, Kristol is far from the only warmongering pundit, and the blithe imperialist faction in the political establishment spans both major political parties. Seemingly, no Beltway pundit has ever gone hungry or lost credibility for agitating for war, no matter how farcically unnecessarily it may be. In one sense, Kristol's continued prominence, even on supposedly legitimate media platforms, is an indictment of the mores of Beltway culture. In (the somewhat tongue-in-cheek) stupid-evil-crazy terms, Kristol is mostly evil, in that he knows (or damn well should know) the all-too-likely consequences of his positions. But his a perfectly respectable evil in certain high circles, as is advocating for torture or opining that the poor should suffer. Alas, although the precise stench may vary, Kristol's rot is far from uncommon. (That said, it would be wrong to minimize Kristol's signature, despicable awfulness.)

It would nice to think that no one could ignore or deflect what "Dulce et Decorum Est" or the many phenomenal art works, memoirs and histories say about the costs of war, but trusty ol' Bill Kristol has shown himself up to the challenge. He can't plausibly deny outright the power of Wilfred Owen's work, so he has to make a planned concession and then pivot to his undying cause – glorious, glorious wars. Great art and good history have a knack of surviving misappropriation, but as with our nominal democracy – which in theory, is a bulwark against unnecessary wars – they still need their champions. Kristol's signature, despicable awfulness.)

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo.)

The Dogs of War

A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use
And dreadful objects so familiar
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter'd with the hands of war;
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds:
And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.

– Mark Antony in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, 3.1, 264–277.

Tragically, it's easier to start a war than to end one. And it's easier, in national "debates" on war, for the wiser voices to be drowned out by the foolish, the vain, the frightened, the posturing, the political ambitious, and the greedy. Earlier this year marked the 10-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But with the exception of James Fallows and few other journalists and outlets, there wasn't much reflection, certainly not when it came to lessons learned. As many a blogger has noted over the years, those who were right on Iraq have rarely been lauded and have even been punished professionally, while those were wrong have suffered few consequences, and in some cases have even been rewarded. Sober voices are not heeded, but any dog or cur howling for war can earn a buck – and worse yet, can be held in seemingly perpetual esteem.

These dynamics must be addressed if wars of choice and convenience are ever to be stopped. Armistice Day, 11/11 (or Remembrance Day or Veterans Day), is about honoring both living veterans and the dead, but surely also for reflecting on the grave costs of war and striving to prevent unnecessary conflicts. It's not for ennobling transparently bad or self-serving decisions. It honors service; it does not absolve political sins.

James Fallows wrote a series of excellent articles reflecting on the Iraq War, notably "As We Near the 10th Anniversary of the Iraq War." (His 2006 book, Blind Into Baghdad, compiles several prescient prewar articles and later pieces on the Iraq War.) As Fallows notes, accountability for being wrong has been scant. Meanwhile, the supposedly wise men who urged war with Iraq have given similar advice on Syria. In "Invading Iraq: What We Were Told at the Time," Fallows revisits the absurdly low prewar estimates (such as 1.7 billion) from the Bush administration and its supporters on the costs of invading Iraq. (It's hard to believe grotesquely bad faith or self-delusion wasn't involved.)

In the end, what did it really cost? Matthew Duss and Peter Juul of CAP have a summary. Among the elements: the direct cost of the war was about $800 billion, compared with the "shocking" estimate by Lawrence Lindsay of $100 billion to $200 billion. The cost of veterans' care and disabilities would be another $400 billion to $700 billion. And Iraqi reconstruction, which [Andrew] Natsios and [Paul] Wolfowitz had said would be essentially self-financing? This is how it compared not simply with Natsios's "one-point-seven billion dollars" but also, in inflation-adjusted dollars, with outlays for the Marshall Plan and other recovery efforts after World War II.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Powell, Feith, Tenet, Blair, their "conservative hawk" and "liberal hawk" allies in the press, and the rest: these are the costs they incurred. There is no undoing that decision. At least we can recognize what took place.

And of course this cost, as Duss and Juul note:

Those costs don't include the massive lost opportunities for other budget expenditures or the price the Iraq War incurred on American prestige and the resulting harm to international dealings. (Back in 2008, Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes predicted the Iraq War could eventually cost three trillion dollars; Bilmes now thinks the ultimate figure will be closer to four trillion.) War always inflicts a cost, and it's dishonest to downplay that.

As early as 2005, a slight majority of Americans thought invading Iraq was a mistake and that withdrawal was the right course of action. By 2007, that was a solid majority (despite some variation in the precise questions asked). Yet somehow, withdrawal was rarely seriously discussed on the national level, and the voices in favor of it still tended to be marginalized. It was less uncommon for a war supporter to give lip service to the idea of withdrawal, but at some unspecified future date, under unspecified future conditions. It was a rhetorical stalling device, not a serious policy option. In theory, Congress declares war and reflects the will of the people, but the democratic principle doesn't appear to work when it comes to ending wars. The ruling class and their courtiers are habitually much more pro-war than the country as a whole.

It also isn't rare, even today, to hear conservative pundits insist (often angrily) that the Bush administration didn't lie in making the case for war, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary (and plenty of misleading, dishonorable rhetoric besides). Sure, one can quibble in some cases whether those many misleading false statements were technically lies versus bullshitting versus the product of egregious self-delusion, but in no universe were they responsible. Meanwhile, it's disappointing but not surprising that the corporate media, who were largely unskeptical cheerleaders for the war and prone to squelching critical voices, would be reluctant to revisit one of their greatest failures in living memory (let alone doing so unflinchingly).

To be clear, I'm not targeting everyone who supported the Iraq War, especially members of the general public who understandably (but unwisely) trusted that those in power would not grossly misrepresent such a serious matter as war in selling it. But I'm greatly concerned that important and obvious lessons continue to be ignored. Meanwhile, a fair accounting of the more fervent and belligerent war supporters must necessarily be less forgiving.

This list will be far from exhaustive, but it's worth revisiting the quality of the arguments and people supporting war. Let's start with then-President George W. Bush himself.

Back in 2008, Bush described fighting in a war (in Afghanistan) as romantic:

In a videoconference, Bush heard from U.S. military and civilian personnel [in Afghanistan] about the challenges ranging from fighting local government and police corruption to persuading farmers to abandon a lucrative poppy drug trade for other crops...

“I must say, I’m a little envious,” Bush said. “If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed.”

“It must be exciting for you . . . in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks,” Bush said.

Steve Benen remarked at the time:

It’s likely that Bush thinks these kinds of remarks are good for troop morale. If the commander in chief wishes he could fight on the front lines personally, they must be part of a worthwhile mission.

But seeing these remarks, more than once, simply reminds me that when Bush had a chance to serve, he chose not to do his duty.

Back in 2004, Bush was full of even more macho bluster, according to Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez' book, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story:

"'Kick ass!' [Bush] said, echoing Colin Powell's tough talk. 'If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal.

"There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!'"

As Tom Engelhardt commented:

Keep in mind that the bloodlusty rhetoric of this "pep talk" wasn't meant to rev up Marines heading into battle. These were the President's well-embunkered top advisors in a strategy session on the eve of major military offensives in Iraq. Evidently, however, the President was intent on imitating George C. Scott playing General George Patton – or perhaps even inadvertently channeling one of the evil villains of his onscreen childhood.

(Also see Jon Schwarz' piece, "George W. Bush's Ass-Based Foreign Policy.")

It would be nice to believe that America's leaders would not be so childish and immature as to treat something as solemn as war as a game, but sadly, reality has proven otherwise. Nor has Bush ever been alone in his deficiencies; unfortunately, he has plenty of company, even if the failings come in different flavors.

Anonymous Liberal rounded up some choice passages from conservative Bill Kristol, who's never met a war he didn't like, and rarely misses a chance to be smug. From March 17th, 2003:

We are tempted to comment, in these last days before the war, on the U.N., and the French, and the Democrats. But the war itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. It will reveal the aspirations of the people of Iraq, and expose the truth about Saddam's regime. It will produce whatever effects it will produce on neighboring countries and on the broader war on terror. We would note now that even the threat of war against Saddam seems to be encouraging stirrings toward political reform in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and a measure of cooperation in the war against al Qaeda from other governments in the region. It turns out it really is better to be respected and feared than to be thought to share, with exquisite sensitivity, other people's pain. History and reality are about to weigh in, and we are inclined simply to let them render their verdicts.

From April 1st, 2003, on NPR's Fresh Air:

There's been a certain amount of, frankly, Terry, a kind of pop sociology in America that somehow the Shia can't get along with the Sunni, and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular.

It's worth listening to the audio of this one (it comes around 9:15 in); Al Franken used to play it all the time on his radio program. It's not just that Kristol was spectacularly, disastrously wrong, it's that he was (and remains) so smug and dismissive.

Let's move on to rich and supposedly liberal columnist Tom Friedman. In 2011, Belén Fernández documented Friedman's attempt to deny Friedman's long support for the Iraq War and his many contradictory statements:

In April 2003 Friedman said that Arab journalists who talked about the US ‘occupation’ of Iraq were guilty of ‘Saddamism’. In August 2003 Friedman wrote: ‘This is an occupation.’

In 2007 he surmised that Iraqis ‘hate each other more than they love their own kids’. In 2009 he hoped that they’d learned from America’s ‘million acts of kindness’ and ‘profound example of how much people of different backgrounds can accomplish when they work together’.

In 2005 Friedman argued: ‘We have to have a proper election in Iraq so we can have a proper civil war there.’ Earlier this year, he wrote: ‘For all of the murderous efforts by al-Qaida to trigger a full-scale civil war in Iraq, it never happened.’ Never mind that in 2006 he said: ‘It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war.’

This comes via Atrios, who's written much more on Friedman, and helped bring attention to Friedman's childish, idiotic declaration of manhood-by-proxy, "Suck. On. This."

Next up, we have Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon, two establishment political analysts who pushed for war initially, continued to push for it (plus escalation) later, yet misrepresented their early support when it became unfashionable. Somehow, they and many more of their ilk have never truly been called to account, nor have they been quietly dropped from the pundit circuit. They're still considered respectable, even when they peddle the same crap as always. As John Cole remarked back in 2009:

I have nothing but bad feelings about the addition of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Watching Michael O’Hanlon on the evening news was like a punch to the gut – we’ve been down this road before.

At what point are O’Hanlon and Pollack every going to be discredited enough that their expert advice is no longer solicited? Why are they even on TV anymore? How long before they have an op-ed in the NY Times pushing for more troops, more money, more of their favorite wars?

It's not as if they ever change their positions. In August 2013, Pollack was shamelessly pushing for a re-invasion of Iraq as a good idea – one that the U.S. was too scared to implement:

In an alternative universe, the United States might re-intervene in Iraq, redeploying tens of thousands of soldiers to restore everyone’s sense of safety and allowing the political process to heal again. In this universe, the United States is never going to intervene in Iraq again, nor will the Maliki government ever request that we do so.

I suspect Pollack isn't merely an idiot or soulless, he's trying to rehabilitate his past positions. (I don't know why he bothers except for pride, since being repeatedly, disastrously wrong hasn't hurt his job prospects much.) Pollack would likely claim any eventual "success" in Iraq, no matter how far down the road or tenuous, as retroactive vindication of his horrendous judgment. A passage I wrote about his buddy Michael O'Hanlon in a 2008 piece, "Day of Shame," applies to Pollack as well (emphasis added):

Let me spell it out, using O'Hanlon as an example. Had he been wise, he never would have held the views he did in the first place. Had he any intellectual integrity, he would have acknowledged his colossal error long ago. Had he any empathy, he would have had many sleepless nights, thinking of all those people dead, displaced or otherwise made miserable by his policies and positions. Had he any shame, he'd have left the public stage long ago, or at least shut up about how he's being picked on for getting such a clear moral issue as a war of choice so monumentally wrong (more on this in a later post). Sometimes it takes an awfully expensive education to make a man such a fucking moron. But I guarantee most Iraqi civilians, even before the invasion, wouldn't make O'Hanlon's mistake, not with the memory of the devastating Iran-Iraq war so fresh. I'm pretty sure more than a few junior high school students who have never experienced war directly wouldn't make the same mistake, either. The problem with O'Hanlon is, he'll keep on going, because he feels his reputation is at stake, which depends on him having been right, not on actually being right. It's nothing more than vanity, but more people could die as a result.

Lastly, there's Richard Cohen, a supposedly liberal columnist for The Washington Post. (He's more accurately an establishment pundit, given his atrocious record.) In 2003, when Colin Powell presented the Bush administration's shoddy case for war at the United Nations, Cohen responded to reputation and the mood of his social crowd, not substance. This lead to his infamous, braying, smug pronouncement:

This is where Colin Powell brought us all yesterday. The evidence he presented to the United Nations – some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail – had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool – or possibly a Frenchman – could conclude otherwise.

When Cohen looked back in 2006 on the invasion on Iraq, not only was he largely unchastened, he actually wrote that "In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic."

. . . In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic. . . .

Every time I read that line – despite having read it more times than I can count – it stops me cold. His statement captures an immature, fearful spite, a soullessness, a selfishness that is just transfixing. A few points for honesty, I guess, but the full monstrousness of Cohen's statement didn't seem to occur to him then and hasn't since. By the standards of his morally syphilitic circle, he has done nothing terribly wrong, being blithe about unnecessary death and destruction passes for sophistication, and no deeper reflection – let alone atonement – is required.

(If you'd like to add some female warmongers, Megan McArdle and Ann Coulter round out the pack.)

Some of these people have offered half-assed apologies, but for the most part, they've just sought to further justify themselves, and have insisted that they were right for the wrong reasons while those who opposed the war were right for the wrong reasons. Both contentions are utter bullshit, infuriatingly counterfactual, and self-serving. They ignore that a general opposition to war – having a high threshold for it – is not an accidentally moral viewpoint, but the position of basic sanity.

For the sake of argument, let's suppose that all these people have some redeeming quality elsewhere in their lives. Regardless, when it comes to their pronouncements on the Iraq War and armed conflict in general, they have demonstrated terrible, deadly judgment. Whether that judgement was fueled by foolishness, vanity, fear, posturing, political ambition, or greed, it's resulted in completely preventable suffering and the unnecessary loss of human life. Surely Kenneth Pollack does not think of himself as a horrible human being, nor do any of the others (so are they all, honourable men and women), but in this field, they are indeed horrible human beings.

Hilzoy's polite, restrained admonition to Richard Cohen after his monstrous "therapeutic" remark in 2006 applies to the entire unrepentant warmonger set:

Richard Cohen: resign. Resign right now. You may, for all I know, have a talent for laying pipe or landscaping that might yet allow you to make a contribution to the world. Admittedly, no amount of carefully laid pipe or expertly transplanted salvias could come close to compensating for your part in enabling this administration and its ill-considered wars, but frankly, you're in no position to be picky. Moreover, I would think that someone who had assumed a public position as a Wise Person Worth Listening To without, apparently, any sense of the responsibilities that that entails might benefit from the attempt to make tiny, concrete, unpublicized improvements to the world, of the sort monks strove for when they tried to perform the most mundane and inglorious daily tasks in such a way that they could be offered up to God without shame. Laying pipe very carefully and very well would do, as would trying very hard to keep the root balls of shrubs intact during transplantation. Even if you don't have any such talent, taking up a new career flipping burgers at McDonalds would at least minimize the damage you can inflict on the world, while allowing you ample time to reflect on those personal failings that allowed you to think of war as therapy, and to try to think of some small and unknown contribution that you might yet make to the world.

But don't take my word for it. Go visit the families of soldiers who have fallen in the interests of what you considered "therapeutic", or the families of any of the of thousands of people who have been kidnapped off the streets of Iraq for no reason, tortured with electric drills, and then found dead behind some abandoned building or floating in the Tigris. Ask them whether they think that the war in Iraq has been "therapeutic". Then ask yourself whether you shouldn't just turn in your license to practice national psychotherapy, and go off and lay pipe instead.

Needless to say, Richard Cohen has not resigned in the seven years since he offered his "deep" thought, and has gone on to write many other appalling columns. (Once in rare while he'll pen a decent or genuinely good one. Perhaps his latest dreadful columns on race will finally force his retirement.)

And here's the thing. The national discourse will never be lacking in Richard Cohens and Megan McArdles eager to sacrifice other people's lives because they feel scared. It will never be lacking Tom Friedmans hungry to have others fight in a war to prove their own toughness. It will never lack Ann Coulters filled with rage and driven to prove their dominance, or George Bushes and Bill Kristols enthusiastic to taunt their political foes and live out macho fantasies. It will never lack highly pedigreed but foolish pundits such as Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon, who try to sell (to themselves and others) blithe imperialism as sober-minded realism. That leaves it to the rest of us to oppose these fuckers and build mechanisms so they can't start more unnecessary wars, not so easily. And that will be the work of sustained effort over many years.

If there's any hope, it's that people who don't peddle bullshit for a living are capable of acknowledging reality, reflecting, feeling regret, and changing their minds. Some Iraq mea culpas have been sincere, mature, and even soul-searching. The one I respect and admire most comes from John Cole in 2008 (and since rerun):

Lot of Iraq War retrospectives going on this week as we enter the tenth anniversary of the start of hostilities. I’ve just been laying low, for obvious reasons, and figure I will just repost what I wrote for the 5 year anniversary, because it will always be relevant:

I see that Andrew Sullivan was asked to list what he got wrong about Iraq for the five year anniversary of the invasion, and since I was as big a war booster as anyone, I thought I would list what I got wrong:

Everything.

And I don’t say that to provide people with an easy way to beat up on me, but I do sort of have to face facts. I was wrong about everything.

I was wrong about the Doctrine of Pre-emptive warfare.
I was wrong about Iraq possessing WMD.
I was wrong about Scott Ritter and the inspections.
I was wrong about the UN involvement in weapons inspections.
I was wrong about the containment sanctions.
I was wrong about the broader impact of the war on the Middle East.
I was wrong about this making us more safe.
I was wrong about the number of troops needed to stabilize Iraq.
I was wrong when I stated this administration had a clear plan for the aftermath.
I was wrong about securing the ammunition dumps.
I was wrong about the ease of bringing democracy to the Middle East.
I was wrong about dissolving the Iraqi army.
I was wrong about the looting being unimportant.
I was wrong that Bush/Cheney were competent.
I was wrong that we would be greeted as liberators.
I was wrong to make fun of the anti-war protestors.
I was wrong not to trust the dirty smelly hippies.

I mean, I could go down the list and continue on, but you get the point. I was wrong about EVERY. GOD. DAMNED. THING. It is amazing I could tie my shoes in 2001–2004. If you took all the wrongness I generated, put it together and compacted it and processed it, there would be enough concentrated stupid to fuel three hundred years of Weekly Standard journals. I am not sure how I snapped out of it, but I think Abu Ghraib and the negative impact of the insurgency did sober me up a bit.

War should always be an absolute last resort, not just another option. I will never make the same mistakes again. . . .

My gut instinct from now on regarding the use of force will be to say no. NO. You can tell me I’m just as doctrinaire as when I was a wingnut, just on the other side, but I don’t care. I’ll need to see CNN copy of Chinese troops on the coast of California before I ever support another war.

To date, none of the dogs or curs of war featured above have shown even a quarter of John Cole's humility, regret, and reflection. If there's hope and wisdom to be found, it's in trusting those with a sense of humanity over the inhumane posturing as wise.

(This was intended for 11/11, but posting was delayed by an Internet connection outage.)