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Retired Lieutenant Colonel with multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. I've written non-fiction for professional journals. It drives me nuts when people think Jethro Tull is just a person in the band.Contact me at [email protected]
Thursday, April 16th 2015
Posted Thu Apr 16 2015 13:40
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"Vox is wrong about X" is a new genre of political commentary that has sprouted within the last year. It was probably inevitable given the internet site's stated mission to be the place "where you go to understand the news and the world around you." Here's Breitbart's list of 49 times Vox got it wrong in 2014, adding on to a Deadspin article which listed 46 instances.
I don't care about most of those stories - the date of the longest night on earth is an interesting but ultimately useless piece of information - but yesterday Vox stepped out of line in a much more egregious way.
The headline reads "Blackwater's Baghdad massacre is a reminder of how the US became what it hated in Iraq." No burying the lede there. The rest of the piece attempts to support this thesis in a shockingly myopic way. The author, Amanda Taub, identifies herself as "Senior Sadness Correspondent" and a "Former human rights lawyer, now covering foreign policy, human rights, and shetland ponies."
No word on whether the shetland ponies have ever been to Iraq, but it's clear Ms. Taub has not been, nor has she studied or thought about the Iraq War in any kind of systematic manner. She has a conclusion, and an incorrect one at that - Americans were the problem in Iraq, not part of the solution - and attempts to shoehorn the atrocity in Nisour Square to fit that conclusion.
The first clue that something is awry with the analysis is her omission of religion. The words "Sunni" and "Shia" appear only once (the word Kurd, never) in reference to armed militias, but Ms. Taub has no interest in analyzing that dynamic.Her thoughts are simplistic and binary, saying for example that for Iraqis Nisour Square was "a reason not to trust their government to protect them."
Once Malaki was elected prime minister the Sunnis in Iraq had plenty of reasons not to trust their government to protect them. The Shia, following decades of brutal Sunni rule, had reasons not to trust any Sunnis remaining in government positions. And the Kurds didn't trust either Sunni or Shia and sequestered themselves in the north as much as possible.
If incidents like Abu Ghraib or Haditha had given Iraqis reason not to trust US forces, by the time the Surge rolled around in 2007 most Iraqis had spent enough time around US forces to know that they could trust us more than they could trust rival ethnic or religious groups. I asked every Iraqi who came to see me at my Joint Security Station the same question - why me? - and they all gave me a variation of the same answer. They didn't know who else to trust.
The heart of Taub's analysis is the idea that the US was "a powerful group that refused to be constrained by the very rule of law it was trying to build." Were Taub speaking of Iraq circa 2004 she might be correct, but post-Surge Iraq saw US forces very much constrained by the rule of law wewere trying to build.
During my final tour in 2009, we had very good intelligence telling us that a bomb maker was in a specific area of Kirkuk. We raided the house, found who we thought wewere looking for but found no other evidence - no weapons or explosives. We turned that gentleman over to Iraqi authorities who kept him about24 hours before releasing him without being charged. The rule of law had begun to take hold.
I've written about Nisour Square and military contractorspreviously in this space. I have no love for Blackwater and I'm on record as saying the jury reached the correct verdict at the trial. Ms. Taub tries to equate this rogue contracted outfit with the rest of the soldiers serving in Iraq in 2007, but she can't do it. She doesn't even try to support the assertion, she just assumes the reader will know it's true.
But even the Iraqi she quotes at the beginning of the piece can tell the difference. She notes that Mohammed Hafedh Abdulrazzaq Kinani testified at the sentencing hearing that "Blackwater was perceived as so powerful that its employees could kill anyone and get away with it." Notice the specificity. Blackwater was the culprit, not the US Army, US Military, US forces, etc.
The people of Baghdad knew what a Blackwater truck looked like, and they were quite capable of distinguishing it from US military vehicles. The Iraqi Brigade commander I worked with, and who was on the scene at Nisour Square that day, understood very well how different Blackwater was and how unrepresentative of US troops they were.
Blackwater was an aberration, not the rule Ms. Taub needs you to think they were. Only by making Blackwater's atrocity in 2007 somehow representative of all US forces in Iraq does her case become plausible.
But if her thesis were plausible - if the US really did "become what it hated in Iraq" - then other things should also have happened.
The Sunni tribes, for example, should have remained loyal to Al Qaeda. That they chose to work with US and Iraqi Shia forces clearly indicates that they trusted us (they could not have foreseen that Obama would later abandon them so completely).
The Surge should have failed. We put thousands of troops into small outposts scattered throughout the country and they interacted more closely with Iraqis then they ever had before. If we were undermining the rule of law then Iraqis would have rejected our presence. The opposite happened, they embraced us to a much greater extent.
If the US had become what we hated in Iraq, we would not have left the country in a state of relative peace in 2011. And if Blackwater was somehow representative of all US forces in Iraq, we would have seen a lot more footage of atrocities like Nisour Square.
Taub isn't just wrong, her conclusion is precisely the opposite of what the facts on the ground suggest. Vox can screw up can screw up the number of toilets in the city of Boulder and we'll all have a laugh about it, but Iraq remains a serious foreign policy issue which deserves a more rigorous analysis than she offers.
Monday, February 16th 2015
The SPLC only sees hate if it comes from the Right (or what they think is the Right).
Posted Mon Feb 16 2015 15:50
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On April 24, 2009, Joshua Cartwright was laid off from his job. He had a history of domestic violence, having been arrested on the charge in late 2008 and ordered to attend anger management counseling. His wife would later say he failed to attend these classes.
Early the next morning, Cartwright woke up his wife and started a fight with her because "he could not find the 'Clearasil' in the bathroom." After an extended argument which saw her on the receiving end of both verbal and physical abuse, she was able to extricate herself from the apartment and call 911.
Sheriff's deputies found Joshua Cartwright later that day at a shooting range and attempted to apprehend him. Cartwright shot and killed both officers. Minutes later Cartwright himself, attempting to flee the scene, was killed by law enforcement.
The police report details, in three single-spaced pages, the fight between Cartwright and his wife that morning and the subsequent actions which led to the murder of the two police officers. At the end of the ordeal, almost as an afterthought, Cartwright's distraught wife, having just learned of his death, tells officers that "her husband believed that the US Government was conspiring against him," and that he "had been severely disturbed that Barack Obama had been elected President."
This, the Southern Poverty and Law Center would have you believe, is an example of radical "Right-wing Extremism."
Cartwright's case is detailed in a new special report from the organization titled "Age of the Wolf: A Study of the Rise of Lone Wolf and Leaderless Resistance Terrorism." For those not familiar with the SPLC, it helpfully describes itself as a "non-profit organization that combats hate, intolerance and discrimination through education and litigation." Those more familiar with the SPLC will instantly recognize its signature left-wing propaganda.
That this report was issued just a day after a fan of the SPLC gunned down three Muslims in Raleigh, NC is an irony likely lost on the group, which has yet to acknowledge the motivation of Floyd Lee Corkins. He is the manwho used the SPLC's website to research his attack on the Family Research Council in 2012. The SPLC to this day does not list that attack as a "hate incident" and appears to find some solace in the fact that, while they did target the group,they never published the FRC's street address.
The language of their latest report is ominous. "No matter the source," concludes the executive summary in what is written to sound like non-partisan language, "we simply cannot afford to ignore the ongoing carnage."
What carnage? The SPLC helpfully details the deaths of 79 people during a six year period from 2009-2015, a number which includes16 assailants. The SPLC, to its credit, does document the four people killed by the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston, as well as Tamerlan himself, and the thirteen people killed by Major Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood, Texas.However, it also includes, curiously, the 6 people killed by Elliot Rodger in California last year before he shot himself.
For those of you keeping score at home, that's 28 deaths (including the three attributed to Joshua Cartwright) out of the total of 79 that have nothing to do with the right side of the political spectrum, or just over 35% of the "carnage."
"Analyzing terrorism," the SPLC wants you to know, "comes fraught with pitfalls....What if the attack has a political dimension, but is carried out by someone who is clearly mentally ill?" Ryan Lenz, the principal author of the report, tries to make the reader believe he has wrung his hands in worry over the thought of mischaracterizing an attack,but what the reportinstead demonstrates is the SPLC's rabidly left-wing worldview.
Neo-Nazi groups are characterized as "right-wing." While this characterization may be common in the media, it makes no logical sense. If the original Nazis werethemselves a product of the left, as Jonah Goldberg has definitively demonstrated, how is it possible that a new group of Nazis find themselves on the right edge of the political spectrum? If the defining characteristic of a Neo-Nazi is a hatred of Jews, then they find some ideological common ground with many Muslims and college activists involved with the BDS movement.
The SPLC report attributes a total of 8 deaths to Neo-Nazis in thereport, which, again, covers a period of 6 years. Without diminishing the seriousness of the hatred inherent in Neo-Nazi ideology, I'll simply point out that more children (a total of 12) drowned "inside the home in a bucket/container or trash basket that was being used for cleaning" in a five year period between 2005-2009.
If you're looking for carnage, which the SPLC says we cannot afford to ignore but fails to deliver, then you might want to check out the number of gang-related homicidesin the US. There were 2,363 in 2012 alone (with only 80% of jurisdictions reporting data)and theaverage number of homicides was nearly 2,000 per year from 2007 through 2012.
Or if you're looking for hate crimes, the Anti-Defamation League reported a total of 927 anti-Semitic incidents in 2012. And although they did not, like the SPLC, attempt to attribute an over-arching political motive to the attacks, one wonders how many of those incidents were perpetrated by Muslims.
But if you're looking for right-wing terror - or anything that can, like the case of Joshua Cartwright, be tied, plausibly or not, to conservatives - look no further than the Southern Poverty and Law Center. That is the only kind of terror they see.
Saturday, February 7th 2015
Posted Sat Feb 7 2015 08:23
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The simple act of sitting in a helicopter in combat can be a significant emotional event for those who don't do it every day.
I'd ridden in helicopters dozens of times before deploying to Iraq, but my first flight on a UH-60 Blackhawk in Baghdad came only days after one had been shot down north of the city, killing all on board. I was heading in generally the same direction, to FOB Taji north of Baghdad, so as I boarded the aircraft I was a little on edge.
About twenty minutes into the flight I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a blinding flash of bright white light. For a split second I thought, "This is it. We're going to get shot down." But when the light quickly trailed down and away behind us, I realized it was simply a flare from a pod on the side of the aircraft.
In Afghanistan I had a couple rough flights due to turbulence at altitude. There may be no atheists in foxholes but there definitely aren't any aboard a shuddering Chinook navigating a remote snow covered mountain pass.
I've never been shot at while riding in a helicopter, nor have we been forced to land because of small arms or rocket fire that hit the aircraft. That would be, for me, something north of a significant emotional event.
So I'm quite skeptical of Brian Williams' claim that he "conflated" his experience of inspecting the aircraft that was hit and forced to land with the experience of actually being on the aircraft as it was hit. The fog of war doesn't create new memories, but perhaps someone with a desire to overstate his own role in an event can.
A couple things strike me about this whole episode that lend at least a little bit of credibility to Williams' apology.
First of all, he didn't wait to issue an apology until the media coverage had reached a critical mass. He apologized after some Facebook comments and a report from Stars and Stripes. In his apology, he writes:
I spent much of the weekend thinking I'd gone crazy. I feel terrible about making this mistake, especially since I found my OWN WRITING about the incident from back in '08, and I was indeed on the Chinook behind the bird that took the RPG in the tail housing just above the ramp.
The last sentence, as many others have pointed out, is a bit misleading. He was "behind the bird that took the RPG," but he was an hour behind that bird, an eternity in combat. He still deserves some credit for apologizing at all, something a different network news anchor has refused to do for a decade after filing a false story and losing his job as a result.
We just passed the 10th anniversary of the controversy which torpedoed the career of Dan Rather. He and his producer, Mary Mapes, still stand by their bogus report on former President Bush's service in the National Guard during the Vietnam War. The guys at Powerline take a retrospective look at this insanity.
The second piece of evidence that might lend some credence to Williams' assertion that he conflated events 12 years ago is recent research that suggests "innocent adult participants can be convinced, over the course of a few hours, that they had perpetrated crimes as serious as assault with a weapon in their teenage years."
The researchers conclude that "inherently fallible and reconstructive memory processes can quite readily generate false recollections with astonishing realism. In these sessions we had some participants recalling incredibly vivid details and re-enacting crimes they never committed."
The conditions of the study are of course quite different from those which Williams' experienced, but the point is that memory is a fungible thing. If someone is told, authoritatively, that he or she did something the brain will work to create some rationalization of that act. It is not a stretch to think that someone, like Williams, who wanted to be 'in on the action' of the Iraq War might, over time, assemble a vivid narrative in his head of what riding in a helicopter that had been forced to land after being shot felt like. If Williams really did have a moment this weekend where he thought he'd "gone crazy," this could be the explanation.
I think it is much more likely, however, that Williams just didn't think he'd get caught. Stars and Stripes documents the shifting details in his story from 2003 to the present. By the time he appeared on Letterman in 2013 the transformation from reporter to participant was complete and nobody spoke up to challenge his account.
Or did they? Recent reports have suggested that NBC executives warned Williams to stop telling his war story and at least one of the soldiers with Williams and his NBC News crew in 2003 has been trying to point out his fabrications for years.
We'll likely never know whether or not Williams knew he was lying. It seems inconceivable that he will at some point in the future issue a tearful Lance Armstrong-esque apology in an interview with Oprah, for example.
It's also likely that we've not seen the last shoe drop. NBC is setting up a "Truth Squad" to comb through other suspicious, high-profile tales Williams has told, and CNN is suggesting that the original audio of the 2003 report was manipulated in order to overstate the amount of danger the news crew was in.
Get out the popcorn, the next week or two could get interesting.
UPDATE: This Megyn Kelly interview (~10 mins) really gets to the heart of Williams' story, but could overstate the case a bit. To the crew of the aircraft Williams was riding in - military professionals - the facts are clear, but to a civilian riding in the back of a Chinook those same facts might be somewhat less than clear.
A Chinook is loud, if you don't have a headset on you have to wear earplugs. The windows are small, behind your head, and it is hard to maneuver around to see out of them if you're strapped tightly into the extremely uncomfortable seats and wearing a helmet and body armor (I would sometimes unbuckle myself so I could look out the window). Depending on visibility you may or may not be able to actually see anything around you, including other aircraft. You have no idea where you are unless you are familiar with the landmarks around you or have a GPS and a map. And if you're not wearing a headset you have no idea what's actually going on in the aircraft or any of the other aircraft around you.
Could Williams have believed in 2003 that he was "following" the aircraft that got hit? Maybe. It depends on what the Chinook crew told him. They clearly knew they were never in any danger, but was that fact communicated to a civilian reporter way out of his element with little to no military experience? I don't know.
The getting shot down part is clearly bullshit, but let us not be too quick to attribute to malice what could easily be attributed to ignorance.
Thursday, January 29th 2015
Posted Thu Jan 29 2015 15:59
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Throughout all of the controversy surrounding American Sniper, one perspective has been conspicuously absent. Dozens if not hundreds of commentators on the left and the right (including myself) have written about the movie without bothering to ask the Iraqis - the very people racist Chris Kyle supposedly dehumanized - what they thought.
The film was shown at the Mansour Mall in downtown Baghdad for a week and the reviews are in:
"Some people watching were just concentrating, but others were screaming '[expletive], shoot him! He has an IED, don't wait for permission!'" said moviegoer Gaith Mohammed, the Global Post reported Wednesday. "I love watching war movies because especially now they give me the strength to face [the Islamic State]."
Here is the best quote from the article:
Mr. Mohammed, asked by the newspaper if he agreed with some Western reviews that labeled the movie racist, replied, "No, why? The sniper was killing terrorists, the only thing that bothered me was when he said he didn't know anything about the Koran!"
Couple things. Mr. Mohammed is more than likely Shia, given his determination to face ISIS. It is not surprising that he would identify with a movie in which Chris Kyle mainly fights Sunni insurgents in Anbar province. (Side note: Kyle's antagonist, the sniper named Mustafa, is a Sunni from Syria and it is extremely implausible that he would have been, as the climax of the film portrays, freely operating in Sadr City, home of the Shia militia.)
A week's worth of screenings does not a consensus make, but it does illustrate how quick some people on the left are to throw out accusations of racism or Islamophobia without bothering to check with the very people purported to have been injured. Lots of Iraqis lost their lives at the hands of the evil Chris Kyle valiantly attempted to stop. Many of the survivors appreciate his sacrifice and don't consider him racist in the slightest. At least no more than they are.
Tuesday, January 27th 2015
Posted Tue Jan 27 2015 19:25
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In a transparently obvious bid to shame me, this Chinese woman with cerebral palsy has nearly finished a fiction novel typing only with the toes of her left foot. In what could qualify as the understatement of this young year, her father is quoted as describing her as "incredibly determined."
Digging even deeper into her story, the Daily Mail reports that even in the enlightened Communist state she was not afforded the opportunity to attend school. She taught herself to read and write by watching subtitled television.
She was also, somehow, able to overcome the myriad micro-aggressions that debilitate so many otherwise healthy people here in the West. Perhaps the secret to that is contained somewhere within the 60,000 words she's written to date.
Congratulations Hu Huiyuan. I'll definitely check out the novel if it becomes available in English. (Old joke: what do you call someone who knows two languages? Bilingual. What do you call someone who knows one language? An American.)
Sunday, January 25th 2015
Posted Sun Jan 25 2015 15:58
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PJ Media posted my latest piece on American Sniper a couple days ago, and the movie had another incredible weekend and is now over the $200 million mark domestically. Because it was released in 2014, boxofficemojo.com still tracks it for that calendar year and it will likely be, before it's run is complete, one of the top-10 movies of last year.
The left is apoplectic. It is an article of faith among the true believers that not only was the Iraq War the worst foreign policy decision of all time, but that America did absolutely nothing good in the years our soldiers were in Iraq. It stands to reason then that a film which graphically depicts an American soldier trying to save both Americans and Iraqis from horrible atrocities and genuine evil at the hands of some brown-skinned Iraqis would be, to them, anathema.
The interesting part, for me, is that the hit pieces on the film completely ignore those atrocities and evil. But I haven't read any to date that rivalthis piece in Salon by a graduate student named Zaid Jilani, who appears to ignore the entire movie. "[Chris] Kyle's life story," he writes, "is designed to glamorize military life during the post-9/11 era, to make it seem exciting, morally unambiguous and sexy. It is about as far away as you can get from showing the very real horrors our military men and women have endured during 14 years of war."
These two sentences are about as far from the truth of American Sniper as one can get.
I saw American Sniper in a sold-out theater in Southern Pines, NC. No one made a peep during the movie and I would venture to guess that most people were, like me, surreptitiously wiping their eyes as they quickly made their way to the bathroom afterwards. No one cheered. Not one high-five was exchanged.
Absolutely nothing about Chris Kyle's life as portrayed on that screen was glamorous. At one point during a mission he relieves himself on the floor next to him then wallows in it until he is relieved of his post. Perhaps Mr. Jilani missed that particular part of the film.
The movie's opening scene presents Kyle with a morally ambiguous challenge - a woman and child are approaching a group of Marines with a particularly lethal grenade. Throughout the movie Kyle is presented with moral dilemmas both in Iraq and at home. He meets someone he saved in Fallujah who lost part of his leg. He spends time in group therapy sessions with soldiers who lost multiple limbs. He's killed by a veteran likely suffering from PTSD. This film, at one point or another, shows most of the horrors our military men and women have endured during 14 years of war.
The film also shows, in graphic detail, the evil we were fighting in Iraq, something Mr. Jilani refuses to acknowledge. He doesn't mention the torture room, or the drill, or the innocent civilians gunned down in cold blood. He wants America to "take a good, hard look" at what we did in Iraq, but refuses to demand the same introspection from Iraqis. In my PJ Media piece I argue that this is racist. We want to judge people by the content of their character, after all, not the color of their skin. Right?
UPDATE: Here's another column about American Sniper from someone on the left who hasn't seen the movie. I'm pretty sure Elias Isquith will never see the film because he doesn't want to be confronted with the question I ask at PJ Media. He wants - no, needs - to craft a narrative making the popularity of the film evidence of a deep sickness in our country, when in reality it is the opposite.
On a side note - has any movie in history ever generated this much commentary from people who have not seen, and have no intention of seeing, the film? This should tell you just how dangerous the movie is to the narrative Isquith and others have for years been crafting.
Saturday, January 17th 2015
Posted Sat Jan 17 2015 15:25
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PJ Lifestyle has just posted my latest piece, a response to James Fallows' cover story this month in The Atlantic.
Fallows makes a long argument and although my response is also pretty long there are a couple points I wasn't able to get to.
One of the things Fallows laments is that producers of television and movies "lack the comfortable closeness with the military that would allow them to question its competence as it would any other institution."
While there may be something to that argument - has any actor at any point in the last 30 years ever worn a beret correctly on screen? - it also begs a number of other questions. What other institutions are being questioned in popular culture?
I don't recall too many movies or television shows criticizing or poking fun at the EPA (aside from Ghostbusters). What about the Department of Education? Did I miss the last big-budget IRS movie?
We lack a "comfortable closeness," of the kind Fallows describes, with any number of our government institutions and some of them - the TSA for example - we'd rather see more hands-off.
The other point I didn't address in my piece is the notion that the "professional military's leadership and judgement" hasn't been subject to criticism since 9/11. To support this idea he quotes Tom Ricks, who says "hundreds of Army generals were deployed to the field, and the available evidence indicates that not one was relieved by the military brass for combat ineffectiveness."
This sounds a lot like an argument. Not a single general was relieved for combat ineffectiveness - although some were relieved for other misconduct - so there must be something fishy going on. But when you delve into Ricks' argument a bit moreyou'll find that, aside from General Tommy Franks and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, he can't find any generals he thinks should have been relieved. And the evidence for relieving those two is, perhaps, based mostly on hindsight.
Ricks' analysis also puts the lie to Fallows' claim that our military in the post-9/11 era has been immune to criticism. Ricks' entire raison d'etre is to criticize the military, and in his writings and at his blogyou find no shortage of others willing to do the same. He is infamous in the military for writing things that either get people fired or get them in trouble. And I have a much longer story about his performance at a press symposium during my year at Command and General Staff College that I'll write about another day.
Fallows is a great writer, and his essay has inspired a lot of thoughtful analysis in the weeks since it was posted. But there is so much about the military he just gets plain wrong. No doubt that is in part due to the fact that he, as Audie Cockings recently wrote, has no cred.
I encourage you to read Fallows' argument and mine and make up your own mind.
Saturday, January 10th 2015
Posted Sat Jan 10 2015 12:25
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Like many of you, I've been transfixed by the news coming out of France this week which began with the brutal slaughter of the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo and ended three days later with near simultaneous police raids and many more dead.
Almost immediately following the Charlie Hebdo attack, the slogan "Je suis Charlie" went viral both online and in solidarity marches in France.
We've been debating the "War on Terror" and Islamic extremism in earnest since 9/11, but I think the Paris attacks this week have brought into focus one of the biggest points of friction between Muslim and western culture - freedom of speech - in a way that the murder of Theo van Goghand the fatwa against Salman Rushdie did not.
Cable news - which in large part I've stopped watching - rarely gets to the heart of a controversy like this in a way that gives viewers a sense of the stakes. But leaked emails from Al Jazeera English published in National Review yesterday do capture the essence of the Charlie Hebdo attack.
The exchange starts with a note from executive producer Salah-Aldeen Khadr intending to "make our coverage the best that it can be." He lists several points he wants the network to raise in their coverage of the events in Paris, some of which are valid:
"This was a targeted attack, not a broad attack on the french [sic] population a la Twin towers or 7/7 style."
"Does an attack by 2-3 guys on a controversial magazine equate to a civilizational attack on European values..? Really?"
"Also worth stating that we still don't know much about the motivations of the attackers outside the few words overheard on the video."
Some of his points are - from a liberal Western perspective - not so valid:
"'I am Charlie' as an alienating slogan - with us or against us type of statement - one can be anti-CH's [Charlie Hebdo] racism and ALSO against murdering people."
"You don't actually stick it to the terrorists by insulting the majority of Muslims by reproducing more cartoons - you actually entrench the very animosity and divisions these guys seek to sow."
"Danger in making this a free speech aka 'European Values' under attack binary is that is once again constructs European identity in opposition to Islam (sacred depictions) and cements the notion of a European identity under threat from an Islamic retrograde culture of which the attackers are merely the violent tip of the iceberg."
"This is a clash of extremist fringes..."
Khadr appears to be trying to thread a very tight needle here - he has to report on the attack but he wants to do so in a way that will not alienate his (one would assume) mostly Muslim viewers. But it's not this original note which is instructive, but the subsequent exchange between Al Jazeera correspondents.
In response, Tom Ackerman sent out this quote from Ross Douhat's piece in the New York Times:
If a large enough group of someone is willing to kill you for saying something, then it's something that almost certainly needs to be said, because otherwise the violent have veto power over liberal civilization, and when that scenario obtains it isn't really a liberal civilization any more...liberalism doesn't depend on everyone offending everyone else all the time, and it's ok to prefer a society where offense for its own sake is limited rather than persuasive. But when offenses are policed by murder, that's when we need more of them, not less, because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.
Nearly everyone raised in a liberal Western democracy will read this paragraph and think to themselves - that's about right. They may have some second thoughts about actually doing anything to provoke those who police offenses by murder, but they will at least agree in principle that the best - indeed the only - solution for bad or offensive speech is more speech.
No so for correspondent Mohamed Vall Salem, who writes in response:
I guess if you insult 1.5 billion people chances are one or two of them will kill you...And I guess if you encourage people to go on insulting 1.5 billion people about their most sacred icons then you just want more killings because as I said in 1.5 billion there will remain some fools who don't abide by the laws or know about free speech...respect breeds respect, insult can degenerate into something worse than just insult, depending who's at the receiving end...Last, if you no longer have anything that you hold sacred (the death of religion and the death of God, etc...) there [are] 1.5 billion who still have [sic]...don't ignore their values in the name of yours."
Salem's final sentence gets to the heart of the debate - when two values fundamentally clash people have to make a choice. Either they hold dear the Western value of freedom of speech or they prefer the Muslim value of reverence to their prophet. There can be no middle ground.
The original email from Khadr was on target in this respect - "Je suis Charlie" is an alienating slogan. It has to be. The people who insist that we can find some middle ground in this freedom of speech debate are fooling themselves, there is none to be had.
Ross Douhat has it absolutely correct, "when offenses are policed by murder, that's when we need more of them, not less, because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed."
And in that vein let me perpetuate some of that offense. The murderer's strategy will not succeed if I have anything to say about it.
Wednesday, December 31st 2014
Posted Wed Dec 31 2014 12:31
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Audie - I was thrilled to see you mention Soldier's Angels in your last post. It is one of the truly wonderful organizations helping serve our troops overseas. I worked closely with them during my deployment to Iraq in 2009 and at one point my mail room was nearly overwhelmed by all of the packages they sent.
When I mentioned to them in an email that I was working closely with people from a Kurdish village who had one doctor that visited sporadically and limited medical supplies, I was greeted a couple weeks later with half a dozen large boxes of various over the counter supplies donated from a pharmaceutical supplier of some sort.
Yesterday I was walking through Barnes and Noble when I saw this magazine cover near the checkout line:
The cover so pissed me off I read the article when I got back, and stayed pissed off. One of the arguments James Fallows repeats throughout this polemical attack on our armed forces is that the American people are increasingly disconnected from the people who defend our country.
People like you, and groups like Soldier's Angels put the lie to this line of argument.
I'll have more to say about Fallow's shallow argument in the coming days at PJ Media where, coincidentally, my article discussing how progressive Hollywood was in 2014 was just published.
Monday, December 22nd 2014
Posted Mon Dec 22 2014 07:50
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In the summer of 2010 I took a trip to Dallas with about a dozen other wounded warriors from Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio at the invitation of the Dallas Cowboys. The team sponsored a scramble at their golf club (Did you know the team has it's own course complete with the iconic star in the middle of one fairway? I didn't.) and took us on a tour of their - at the time - brand new stadium.
(Amusing sidenote - if you think navigating airport security is difficult under normal circumstances, trying getting through when almost everyone in your party has a prosthetic limb or is in a wheelchair or has metal of some sort in their body.)
The night before the golf scramble (I found a recap of the event here - you can see a bad picture of me at the very end) we ate dinner at the "man cave" of one of the backers of the event. At dinner - amazing Texas barbecue - I was seated across the table from an older gentleman whose name escapes me four years on. At some point during the meal he was talking with a gentleman at another table and happened to mention that he "saw the President on the golf course that morning."
The President he alluded to, of course, was George W. Bush, who retired to Dallas after he left office. Once the man returned his attention to our table I asked him if he knew Bush. Oh yes, he said, he'd known Bush since before his days with the Texas Rangers.
My follow up question was based on things I'd heard from Bush staffers and people who had worked around him during his years in the White House. They told me he did a lot of things behind the scenes that the beltway press seldom, if ever, reported. I asked the seated across from me if he thought Bush was a good man.
His demeanor changed slightly. He put down his fork and leaned in closer to me before he said, solemnly, "He is the best man I've ever known."
I didn't ask another question. I didn't need to. I didn't grow up in Texas but I'd lived there long enough to grasp the full meaning of his statement.
So when I read, years later, articles like this in the Daily Mail, it doesn't surprise me. It is also not surprising that a British publication picked up the story and not The New York Times or The Washington Post. In this age of conscious uncoupling they can't report anything which distracts from their Bush=Hitler narrative.
I may not have agreed with him politically on any number of things, but President George W. Bush is a good man. That's all that needs to be said.
I hope you and yours have a Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season this year.