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My 9 year-old son is currently fascinated with World War II planes, and as we recently experienced at an airshow at the old USAAF air base in Duxford, England, it’s hard not to admire the sheer flying beauty of many of the World War II warplanes. The Spitfire and the P-38 Lightning are particularly beautiful craft, and to have them fly aerobatics over your head is to experience a particular sort of awe and elation.


Yet as my father-in-law, a retired Brigadier General from the USAF Reserve, is fond of reminding my son, we should never glorify war, for there is nothing more horrid; and World War II was the most horrid of all: slaughter in every quarter, and a world of hurt that still rings loud. Yet I find it hard not to admire the resilience of both the people who fought the war and some of the machines they built. I’m not quite sure how to square the horror and the admiration.

- David Dobbs in “The Toughest Plane Ever Built? Take a Look”
“
We had seen other ruined towns, but none like this. The towns of Lorraine were blown up, burnt down, deliberately erased from the earth. At worst they are like stone-yards, at best like Pompeii. But Ypres has been bombarded to death, and the outer walls of its houses are still standing, so that it presents the distant semblance of a living city, while near by it is seen to be a disembowelled corpse. Every window-pane is smashed, nearly every building unroofed, and some house-fronts are sliced clean off, with the different stories exposed, as if for the stage-setting of a farce. In these exposed interiors the poor little household gods shiver and blink like owls surprised in a hollow tree. A hundred signs of intimate and humble tastes, of humdrum pursuits, of family association, cling to the unmasked walls. Whiskered photographs fade on morning-glory wallpapers, plaster saints pine under glass bells, antimacassars droop from plush sofas, yellowing diplomas display their seals on office walls. It was all so still and familiar that it seemed as if the people for whom these things had a meaning might at any moment come back and take up their daily business. And then—crash! the guns began, slamming out volley after volley all along the English lines, and the poor frail web of things that had made up the lives of a vanished city-full hung dangling before us in that deathly blast.

- Edith Wharton in Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort, a collection of her WWI dispatches for Scribner’s magazine.

Free, legal audiobook here. Free, legal text here.

I learned it existed a few days ago and finished it yesterday, so I don’t trust myself to write much without sliding into sloppy superlatives. Let me stick to saying this: Never once during this book did I wish that Hemingway or Didion or Orwell or Herr or Filkins or Finkel could just take over and show this Age of Innocence lady how to do it properly.

She’s vivid:

Five times, while I was dressing, the thunder shook my windows, and the air was filled with a noise that may be compared—if the human imagination can stand the strain—to the simultaneous closing of all the iron shop-shutters in the world.

A town’s  ruins “seem to have been simultaneously vomited up from the depths and hurled down from the skies, as though she had perished in some monstrous clash of earthquake and tornado.”

She is literally in the trenches:

It is hard to guess the distance one covers in creeping through an unlit passage with different levels and countless turnings; but we must have descended the hillside for at least a mile before we came out into a half-ruined farmhouse. This building, which had kept nothing but its outer walls and one or two partitions between the rooms, had been transformed into an observation post. In each of its corners a ladder led up to a little shelf on the level of what was once the second story, and on the shelf sat a dragoon at his peep-hole. Below, in the dilapidated rooms, the usual life of a camp was going on. Some of the soldiers were playing cards at a kitchen table, others mending their clothes, or writing letters or chuckling together (not too loud) over a comic newspaper. It might have been a scene anywhere along the second-line trenches but for the lowered voices, the suddenness with which I was drawn back from a slit in the wall through which I had incautiously peered, and the presence of these helmeted watchers overhead.

Back in Paris, among the arriving refugees, she gives us the “men and women with sordid bundles on their backs, shuffling along hesitatingly in their tattered shoes, children dragging at their hands and tired-out babies pressed against their shoulders.” She strives to convey the bewilderment and dislocation of people “whose knowledge of the world’s affairs is measured by the shadow of their village steeple”:

They were ploughing and sowing, spinning and weaving and minding their business, when suddenly a great darkness full of fire and blood came down on them. And now they are here, in a strange country, among unfamiliar faces and new ways, with nothing left to them in the world but the memory of burning homes and massacred children and young men dragged to slavery, of infants torn from their mothers, old men trampled by drunken heels and priests slain while they prayed beside the dying. These are the people who stand in hundreds every day outside the doors of the shelters improvised to rescue them, and who receive, in return for the loss of everything that makes life sweet, or intelligible, or at least endurable, a cot in a dormitory, a meal-ticket—and perhaps, on lucky days, a pair of shoes …

OK. Enough. Time to stop. Thanks for indulging me.

“
What you think of gun-running likely depends on how badly you think you need guns. To the people of Misurata, the hastily assembled fleet has been a savior. Its crews have shuttled not just weapons and ammunition, but all manner of supplies — baby formula, antibacterial surgical robes, bottled water and the sorts of medicines that can be woefully hard to acquire in a siege, such as chemotherapy drugs for patients whose treatment was suspended by the onset of war.
- the NYT’s C.J. Chivers
(this post was reblogged from cjchivers)

about those Osama-hunting crows

Professor John Marzluff’s recent words about his Pentagon-funded research have yielded multilingual tweets and gobsmacking headlines like NBC’s “US planned crow ‘spy network’ to find bin Laden.”

Crow spies struck me as either too good to be true or too bad to be true. So I emailed Marzluff. He’s been doing research out in Texas this week, but he wrote me back from the field:

If I did say (I don’t think I did) that the army asked me to train crows to find bin laden I should not have said that. What I hope I said was that I was asked to increase my research into the face recognition abilities of crows by the army for a variety of reasons, including searching for people of interest (and yes that might include bin laden and many others), but especially missing soldiers …

Marzluff’s clarification will have to compete with some irresistibly Hitchcockian notions of his research that have been loose in the wild for days. Spanish-speaking Twitter users are mentioning Marzluff by name and linking to a story headlined “El Ejército de EEUU utilizó cuervos entrenados para encontrar a Bin Laden en Afganistán (The U.S. Army used trained crows to find Bin Laden in Afghanistan).” The alumni association at Marzluff’s own University of Washington tweeted: “Based on UW Biologist John Marzluff’s research, the U.S. was planning on using crows as spies to find bin Laden.” The Seattle Weekly’s blog invoked “the image of America’s greatest enemy being pecked to death by highly-trained birds.”

The hype has its roots in an exchange between Marzluff and radio host Steve Scher at the very beginning of a May 4 broadcast on Seattle’s KUOW:

SCHER: John, you told me this, so I have to bring this story up. Because everything has to do with bin Laden.

MARZLUFF: Obviously.

SCHER: What’s the connection between ravens, crows, and Osama bin Laden?

MARZLUFF: Well, there was interest in trying to hunt him down, obviously, over the last decade. … And one of the experimental branches of research that was used to try to find him was to have crows or ravens of the local area trained to identify his face based upon some of the work we had done here to identify individual people. The crows are able to do that. The military thought, well, maybe ravens or crows in Afghanistan could do the same and find bin Laden.

When Scher asked “Did the ravens or crows help track down bin Laden in Pakistan?” Marzluff answered with “We don’t know. They might have played a role.”

But when he answered my email Thursday, Marzluff wrote that he doubts crows were part of the manhunt:

You would have to catch local crows while wearing a likeness of the person of interest and then monitor the crows to see when they reacted to seeing that person in the future.  I am sure the crows could do it, but if you have to monitor crows, why not just (monitor) the person of interest, the area, etc.(?)

I decided to phone the Pentagon. If you crave the experience of hearing the suppressed chuckles of a polite person who suspects you might be insane, I wholeheartedly recommend cold-calling the public affairs office at the United States Department of Defense and explaining that you’d like to get an official comment on whether the military deployed crows to search for bin Laden. The guy who fielded my call put me on hold for several minutes, picked back up, said nothing, and transferred me to what turned out to be the voicemail of Lt. Col. Elizabeth Robbins.

Robbins called back. She wanted to confirm that I really meant crows, like the birds. I asked her to Google “spy crows.” She did.

After digesting the Google results, Robbins said she couldn’t confirm the existence of spy crows or deny the existence of spy crows because the Pentagon isn’t commenting on any “operational details” surrounding the bin Laden raid.

“It’s a classified op, and we’re not going to share how we did stuff,” Robbins said.

University of Washington records show that Marzluff got $184,000 in 2007 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to investigate “individual recognition of people by American crows.”

One of the charms of this strand of Marzluff’s research is how accessible and concrete it seems. It’s not $1 billion to devise an airborne, solar-powered, crow-sized functional MRI machine. It’s $184,000, and it involves people catching crows while wearing rubber masks.

You get the exuberant feeling that ambitious, curious teenagers might be able to pull it off for a science fair. You get the deluded feeling that even we might be able to do it: Here, put on this caveman mask and go hassle those crows. Now go walk past the crows without the mask and see if they freak out. Now put the mask back on. Whoa! Now I’ll wear the mask. Whoa!!! OK, now put on this Dick Cheney mask.

Marzluff’s team really did use a Dick Cheney mask. It was one of their so-called “neutral” masks — a mask that nobody ever wore for catching crows.

I don’t know what Marzluff’s radio appearance and the headlines and the tweets will add up to. Marzluff himself worries there could be repercussions for the birds he studies. When I suggested that Taliban or al Qaeda fugitives might hear about his research and start exterminating every crow in sight, Marzluff wrote back “I am indeed worried about crows elsewhere.”

But if Ayman al-Zawahiri studies Marzluff’s published work, he will see that there’s probably a much less destructive way to evade detection by hypothetical spy crows: Wear a Dick Cheney mask any time he steps outside.

photographsonthebrain: (via War Dog - An FP Photo Essay By Rebecca Frankel | Foreign Policy) ================= If you look at just one more of these photos, make it this one by Christophe Simon. - David Quigg, 5/6/2011 Click for high-res photo

photographsonthebrain:

(via War Dog - An FP Photo Essay By Rebecca Frankel | Foreign Policy)

=================

If you look at just one more of these photos, make it this one by Christophe Simon.

- David Quigg, 5/6/2011

(this post was reblogged from photographsonthebrain)
“
The greatest feat, though, was performed by what were called “mercy dogs” in the First World War. These dogs walked among the troops on a battlefield, after the fighting had simmered down, carrying saddlebags of first-aid supplies. Wounded soldiers could call the dogs over and then help themselves whatever they needed. Those who were more gravely wounded could call the dogs over so they could embrace them and have their company while they died. A dog can do that, and would do that, with all its heart, and with tender patience.
- Susan Orlean
I saw this Hemingway quote several times today: “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” At first, given this week’s MLK quote that wasn’t an MLK quote, I wondered if the Hemingway quote was authentic. It is. So that’s a start. How about the context? (And yes, I’m fixated on context today.) I can’t find what Hemingway wrote in its entirety. This passage from the introduction to Hemingway on War has some ellipses, but it lifts us far beyond the bumper-stickerized excerpt that’s making the rounds: Hemingway was back in Cuba at the Finca Vigía, his farmhouse just outside San Francisco de Paula, when World War II finally came to an end with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He wrote down his thoughts on the advent of atomic warfare, which were published as the foreword to a book entitled Treasury for the Free World: We have waged war in the most ferocious and ruthless way that it has ever been waged. We waged it against fierce and ruthless enemies that it was necessary to destroy. Now we have destroyed one of our enemies and forced the capitulation of the other. For the moment we are the strongest power in the world. It is very important that we do not become the most hated. … We need to study and understand certain basic problems of our world as they were before Hiroshima to be able to continue, intelligently, to discover how some of them have changed and how they can be settled justly now that a new weapon has become a property of part of the world. We must study them more carefully than ever now and remember that no weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. … An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and the dead. Now that’s Hemingway. The war-is-a-crime quote isn’t even the most potent bumper sticker in the bunch. How about “no weapon has ever settled a moral problem” or “we are the strongest power in the world. It is very important that we do not become the most hated”? As a side note, I’m glad that the quote getting tweeted and retweeted is actually something Hemingway wrote as Hemingway. It would have made me queasy to see the words attributed to “Ernest Hemingway” if they had been, say, something the fictional Pilar said in For Whom The Bell Tolls. Click for high-res photo

I saw this Hemingway quote several times today: “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

At first, given this week’s MLK quote that wasn’t an MLK quote, I wondered if the Hemingway quote was authentic. It is. So that’s a start.

How about the context? (And yes, I’m fixated on context today.)

I can’t find what Hemingway wrote in its entirety. This passage from the introduction to Hemingway on War has some ellipses, but it lifts us far beyond the bumper-stickerized excerpt that’s making the rounds:

Hemingway was back in Cuba at the Finca Vigía, his farmhouse just outside San Francisco de Paula, when World War II finally came to an end with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He wrote down his thoughts on the advent of atomic warfare, which were published as the foreword to a book entitled Treasury for the Free World:

We have waged war in the most ferocious and ruthless way that it has ever been waged. We waged it against fierce and ruthless enemies that it was necessary to destroy. Now we have destroyed one of our enemies and forced the capitulation of the other. For the moment we are the strongest power in the world. It is very important that we do not become the most hated. … We need to study and understand certain basic problems of our world as they were before Hiroshima to be able to continue, intelligently, to discover how some of them have changed and how they can be settled justly now that a new weapon has become a property of part of the world. We must study them more carefully than ever now and remember that no weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. … An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and the dead.

Now that’s Hemingway. The war-is-a-crime quote isn’t even the most potent bumper sticker in the bunch. How about “no weapon has ever settled a moral problem” or “we are the strongest power in the world. It is very important that we do not become the most hated”?

As a side note, I’m glad that the quote getting tweeted and retweeted is actually something Hemingway wrote as Hemingway. It would have made me queasy to see the words attributed to “Ernest Hemingway” if they had been, say, something the fictional Pilar said in For Whom The Bell Tolls.

“

But watching the spontaneous celebrations outside the White House and ground zero, we were struck by the paradox inherent in the cheering crowds. People, mostly in their 20s and 30s — the same age as our friends who have died and been forever injured — were cheering, “We got him!”

We.

For nearly a decade of war, it hasn’t felt much like “we.” During this, the longest war in our nation’s history, a war fought by less than 1 percent of the population, the rest of the country has seemed mostly to ignore those of us in the military community, tuning in only for our scandals or deaths. And so “we,” in the context of victory, most accurately applies only to the very small number of men and women who have given more than any of us had a right to ask.

- Rebekah Sanderlin

via @maddow

“

The raid that killed him lasted just 40 minutes. …

Only U.S. personnel were involved in the raid, and Obama’s decision to launch it wasn’t shared with any other country, including Pakistan, whose most powerful intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, has long been suspected by U.S. officials of maintaining links to extremist groups close to al Qaida.

- from McClatchy’s “Bin Laden raid years in the making, minutes in execution”

Contrast the 40 minutes of the raid with America’s longest-ever war, nearly ten years in Afghanistan. Note that U.S. forces didn’t kill bin Laden in Afghanistan; they killed him in Pakistan.

There’s bipartisan dogma that goes like this: We had no choice but to invade Afghanistan after 9/11.

The next time terrorists strike I hope we will notice that we always have a choice. We can choose to remember that invading a country turns out to be an especially clumsy way to catch or kill fugitives. We can choose patience. We can choose restraint. We can choose the quiet ruthlessness of stealth and preparation. We can choose “the raid that killed him lasted just 40 minutes” over stalemate and nation-building and “I don’t know where he is.”

You can’t even watch half of Restrepo in 40 minutes.

pardon me, madam/sir

Gosh, you sure look distinguished. Are you a judge for the the upcoming National Magazine Awards?

If not, carry on. Enjoy your day.

If so, please read my 3/1/11 post, which I could rename “Why it’s a travesty that Michael Hastings is even nominated for a National Magazine Award.”

“

When America finds itself in wars where it can accidentally kill nine children gathering firewood, it seems somewhat abstract to talk uncritically of America’s moral superiority. And when America has also crossed the line into legalized torture, and refuses to acknowledge or account for it, let alone hold the war criminals responsible, it has lost the moral standing to dictate human rights to the rest of the world.

Obama had a chance to turn this around.

- Andrew Sullivan in “Exceptional And Unexceptional America”
rollingstone: “The Kill Team,” a Rolling Stone Special Report, traces the grim story of the U.S. soldiers who murdered innocent civilians in Afghanistan for sport—and how their officers failed to stop them. Warning: This feature contains graphic, NSFW images. ================= From the Rolling Stone report: As Morlock bragged about the killing, word of the murder spread back home to families and friends. Soldiers e-mailed photos to their buddies and talked about the killing during visits home. On February 14th, three months before the Army launched its investigation, Spc. Adam Winfield sent a Facebook message to his father, Chris, back in Cape Coral, Florida. A skinny, bookish 21-year-old, Winfield was pissed off at being disciplined by Gibbs. “There are people in my platoon that have gotten away with murder,” he told his father. “Everyone pretty much knows it was staged… . They all don’t care.” Winfield added that the victim was “some innocent guy about my age, just farming.” During Facebook chats, Winfield continued to keep his father in the loop. “Adam told me that he heard the group was planning on another murder involving an innocent Afghanistan man,” Chris Winfield, himself a veteran, later told investigators. “They were going to kill him and drop an AK-47 on him to make it look like he was the bad guy.” Alarmed, the elder Winfield called the command center at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and told the sergeant on duty what was going on. But according to Winfield, the sergeant simply shrugged it off, telling him that “stuff like that happens” and that “it would be sorted out when Adam got home.” Tragically, commanders at the base did nothing to follow up on the report. From Susan Sontag’s “Regarding The Torture Of Others” in the NYT Magazine, which I read tonight for the first time thanks to Andrew Greene: The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, however, reflect a shift in the use made of pictures — less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated. A digital camera is a common possession among soldiers. Where once photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are all photographers — recording their war, their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities — and swapping images among themselves and e-mailing them around the globe. … And even if our leaders choose not to look at them, there will be thousands more snapshots and videos. Unstoppable. Below is part of a September 2004 memo I drafted and think I e-mailed to an advisor of John Kerry’s presidential campaign. This was more than three years before I wrote my first blog post. The memo’s inflated rhetoric, its occasional Agnewesque alliteration, and its “many of us learned in Vietnam” reference are because I fancied these words could end up in a Kerry speech (i.e. as would stay true for several more years, I was both despondent about my country’s sprint away from the sane center of American politics and bat-shit delusional about the role my words might play in fixing things.) Anyway, from the memo, which I quote here not because it was visionary but precisely because it wasn’t visionary, precisely because it shows that the truth was — and is — so obvious that it could be typed out by a sleepy stay-at-home dad after he put his infant and toddler to bed: Anyone planning a war needs to know — either from personal combat experience or from military history — that the vast, vast, vast majority of soldiers will carry out their mission with awe-inspiring honor and valor. But a war-planner must also assume that any military force – of any nation, at any time, in any combat zone – will include some bad apples, some bullies, and even a few good people who will snap in the face of the ghastly stress of combat. And any responsible war-planner must ask himself whether the benefits of military action outweigh the sum of all the risks, including the risk that America’s good name may be soiled by the miniscule fraction of freaks who hide out in the ranks. Don’t misunderstand. Factoring in the risk of bad publicity is no excuse for the paralysis of perpetual pacifism. Obviously, the fear that American guards might mistreat prisoners in some Tokyo prison some day would have been no excuse for simply turning the other cheek after Pearl Harbor. Nor would fear of wrongdoing by troops have justified letting Osama bin Laden continue to have the run of Afghanistan after 9/11. But Iraq was not World War II-era Japan. Iraq was not even Al Qaeda’s Afghanistan. In Iraq, as never before, our national security has everything to do with our international reputation. As we are learning, the shaky evidence of Saddam Hussein’s supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction was not a compelling enough reason to gamble America’s good name. Because of the president’s miscalculations, this war is looking more and more like a gift to the murderers who recruit new terrorists. Anyone who ever served in combat should have been able to warn the president that our invasion and occupation would give America’s enemies fresh propaganda. The harsh truth is we are lucky to be dealing ONLY with this prison scandal. So many of us learned in Vietnam that one sudden ghastly experience in combat can cause a group of good, decent, professional soldiers to mutate momentarily into something ugly, scared, lethal, and indiscriminate. President Bush was naïve if he imagined we could get in and out of Iraq without handing our enemies some shameful scandal they’ll be able to exploit for years. That risk should have been tallied in the administration’s list of reasons not to go to war in Iraq. But I get the sense they weren’t keeping a list like that. Today, this same risk should be on Obama’s list of reasons not to escalate in Libya. He damn well better have a list like that. - David Quigg, 3/31/2011

rollingstone:

“The Kill Team,” a Rolling Stone Special Report, traces the grim story of the U.S. soldiers who murdered innocent civilians in Afghanistan for sport—and how their officers failed to stop them.

Warning: This feature contains graphic, NSFW images.

=================

From the Rolling Stone report:

As Morlock bragged about the killing, word of the murder spread back home to families and friends. Soldiers e-mailed photos to their buddies and talked about the killing during visits home. On February 14th, three months before the Army launched its investigation, Spc. Adam Winfield sent a Facebook message to his father, Chris, back in Cape Coral, Florida. A skinny, bookish 21-year-old, Winfield was pissed off at being disciplined by Gibbs. “There are people in my platoon that have gotten away with murder,” he told his father. “Everyone pretty much knows it was staged… . They all don’t care.” Winfield added that the victim was “some innocent guy about my age, just farming.”

During Facebook chats, Winfield continued to keep his father in the loop. “Adam told me that he heard the group was planning on another murder involving an innocent Afghanistan man,” Chris Winfield, himself a veteran, later told investigators. “They were going to kill him and drop an AK-47 on him to make it look like he was the bad guy.” Alarmed, the elder Winfield called the command center at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and told the sergeant on duty what was going on. But according to Winfield, the sergeant simply shrugged it off, telling him that “stuff like that happens” and that “it would be sorted out when Adam got home.” Tragically, commanders at the base did nothing to follow up on the report.

From Susan Sontag’s “Regarding The Torture Of Others” in the NYT Magazine, which I read tonight for the first time thanks to Andrew Greene:

The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, however, reflect a shift in the use made of pictures — less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated. A digital camera is a common possession among soldiers. Where once photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are all photographers — recording their war, their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities — and swapping images among themselves and e-mailing them around the globe.

… And even if our leaders choose not to look at them, there will be thousands more snapshots and videos. Unstoppable.

Below is part of a September 2004 memo I drafted and think I e-mailed to an advisor of John Kerry’s presidential campaign. This was more than three years before I wrote my first blog post. The memo’s inflated rhetoric, its occasional Agnewesque alliteration, and its “many of us learned in Vietnam” reference are because I fancied these words could end up in a Kerry speech (i.e. as would stay true for several more years, I was both despondent about my country’s sprint away from the sane center of American politics and bat-shit delusional about the role my words might play in fixing things.) Anyway, from the memo, which I quote here not because it was visionary but precisely because it wasn’t visionary, precisely because it shows that the truth was — and is — so obvious that it could be typed out by a sleepy stay-at-home dad after he put his infant and toddler to bed:

Anyone planning a war needs to know — either from personal combat experience or from military history — that the vast, vast, vast majority of soldiers will carry out their mission with awe-inspiring honor and valor. But a war-planner must also assume that any military force – of any nation, at any time, in any combat zone – will include some bad apples, some bullies, and even a few good people who will snap in the face of the ghastly stress of combat. And any responsible war-planner must ask himself whether the benefits of military action outweigh the sum of all the risks, including the risk that America’s good name may be soiled by the miniscule fraction of freaks who hide out in the ranks.

Don’t misunderstand. Factoring in the risk of bad publicity is no excuse for the paralysis of perpetual pacifism. Obviously, the fear that American guards might mistreat prisoners in some Tokyo prison some day would have been no excuse for simply turning the other cheek after Pearl Harbor. Nor would fear of wrongdoing by troops have justified letting Osama bin Laden continue to have the run of Afghanistan after 9/11.

But Iraq was not World War II-era Japan. Iraq was not even Al Qaeda’s Afghanistan. In Iraq, as never before, our national security has everything to do with our international reputation.

As we are learning, the shaky evidence of Saddam Hussein’s supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction was not a compelling enough reason to gamble America’s good name. Because of the president’s miscalculations, this war is looking more and more like a gift to the murderers who recruit new terrorists.

Anyone who ever served in combat should have been able to warn the president that our invasion and occupation would give America’s enemies fresh propaganda. The harsh truth is we are lucky to be dealing ONLY with this prison scandal. So many of us learned in Vietnam that one sudden ghastly experience in combat can cause a group of good, decent, professional soldiers to mutate momentarily into something ugly, scared, lethal, and indiscriminate.

President Bush was naïve if he imagined we could get in and out of Iraq without handing our enemies some shameful scandal they’ll be able to exploit for years. That risk should have been tallied in the administration’s list of reasons not to go to war in Iraq. But I get the sense they weren’t keeping a list like that.

Today, this same risk should be on Obama’s list of reasons not to escalate in Libya. He damn well better have a list like that.

- David Quigg, 3/31/2011

(this post was reblogged from rollingstone)