Opposing The War But Supporting The Troops?

William Arkin, a national security/military affairs blogger for the Washington Post kicked of a regular firestorm with a January 31 column taking American soldiers to task for complaining about domestic opposition to the Iraq war. After quoting three soldiers who in various ways argued that you can not oppose the war and still claim to support the troops, Arkin unloaded:

These soldiers should be grateful that the American public, which by all polls overwhelmingly disapproves of the Iraq war and the President's handling of it, do still offer their support to them, and their respect.

Through every Abu Ghraib and Haditha, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform, accepting that the incidents were the product of bad apples or even of some administration or command order. . . .

So, we pay the soldiers a decent wage, take care of their families, provide them with housing and medical care and vast social support systems and ship obscene amenities into the war zone for them, we support them in every possible way, and their attitude is that we should in addition roll over and play dead, defer to the military and the generals and let them fight their war, and give up our rights and responsibilities to speak up because they are above society?

That wasn't the worst part. The line that gained the most attention was this one:

[This complaining by the troops] is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary - oops sorry, volunteer - force that thinks it is doing the dirty work.

The response to this was swift and ugly and personal and overwhelming. After two more columns one attacking his critics and another defending himself and half apologizing, Arkin finally threw in the towel with an embarrassingly maudlin effort, in his words, "to make sense of the worldview of those who have responded."

There were well over 3,000 "comments" posted on the first three of these columns; yet this was just the tip of the iceberg of e-mail and blog reactions that the columns generated. The Post had finally had enough, as Arkin acknowledged in his final post:

On the advice of my editors, this is the last column I will post for awhile on this subject. My impulse would be to continue to fight back and answer the critics, but I see the wisdom in their observation that nothing new is being said here and the Internet frenzy is adding nothing to the debate or our understanding of our world. I also see that I cannot continue to write about humanity and difficult questions if indeed what I wish is to vanquish those who attack me.

But that was not quite enough. Yesterday, in a self-confessed effort to insulate the Post itself from the "Blast Damage" caused by Arkin, the Post's ombudsman published what amounted to a public rejection of its own columnist:

The fact that The Post and washingtonpost.com are interlocking yet separate is lost on most readers, who do not care that the two are miles apart physically and under different management. A great example is the recent firestorm over a column that never appeared in The Post -- but for which The Post was blamed. . . . Did one online column irreparably damage Post national security journalism? No. But it does show that an online column rubs off on the newspaper. . . .

What's the difference between opinion writing for the newspaper and for washingtonpost.com? The writing can be similar, but the editing is more intense at the newspaper. More experienced eyes see a story or a column before it goes into the paper; The Post has several levels of rigorous editing. There is "less of an editing process" for blogs at the more immediacy-oriented Web site, Brady said. . . .

Arkin's column did not meet Post standards, but then, newspaper editing isn't perfect, either. But "mercenary" surely is live ammo; such an incendiary word should have popped out in flames to Post editors.

I am not about to defend Arkin's language or the entirely unwarranted anger it seems to betray. But I do think there are a couple of important issues buried in all of this.

Is it possible to support the troops but oppose the mission? At one level, the answer is an obvious "yes." I can certainly oppose the war and yet have and manifest pride in our troops, their efforts, and how they go about the job they have been assigned. In fact, in some ways, the more important it is to me to support the troops, then the more urgently I need to oppose the war since it is the war that is killing them.

But at another level, I guess I can see what the "support the troops, support the mission" crowd means. These guys and girls have left family and friends, homes and jobs, comfort and safety and are over in a hell hole the scope of which we cannot even imagine, and they are fighting and in some cases dying. How can I say I "support" them if I also say that their sacrifices are meaningless if not reprehensible. I know if I were doing something that entailed that amount of risk and suffering I would have mixed emotions about people who claimed to be proud of me but who thought what I was doing was a crime or worse. If you want the troops to believe that you are proud of them, you almost have to tell them that what they are risking their lives for is worth it. I think it is worth it, for now at least, but that is a story for another time.

The other question Arkin raises is even more difficult and certainly more important. How does a democratic society relate to an all-volunteer army? Do soldiers who volunteered give up the right to bitch about how they are used? Do they give up the right to complain about those who don't cheer for them? Do they have any right to anything more than what they were promised as an inducement to sign up?

And, what do we civilians owe to such an army? Aren't they just the "the hired help?" Do we owe them any more (or less) respect, any greater pay, benefits and support, than we do policemen, or firemen, or any of the other people we have hired to protect us from what we see as dangerous? Do we owe these men and women the same type of support we gave the GIs in WWII?

I think the answer is no. But I'm not sure. And, if the answer is "no," I'm even less sure what the right answer is.

Omerta and Haditha

In yesterday's post on the Haditha killings, I asserted, without much evidence, that "the amazing, truly amazing thing, is how rarely [military discipline] beaks down in a big way." In a comment to that post, Billy Bob, my only correspondent with anything close to real-world experience in this area, agreed:

We have people in harm's way all the time, and their actions are governed by strict rules of engagement and escalation of force procedures (ROE and EOF). I obviously can't elaborate on specifics, but I will say that every time I hear of an engagement, the reports say that our soldiers followed the ROE and EOF precisely. This is no small feat. These are soldiers on strange roads in a strange country in a strange war. That there aren't more incidents at this level says a lot to me about the character of these soldiers.

There will always be flukes, but the little things being done right every day say more about the soldiers. These are good people doing difficult things very well. That's why I do what I do.

I have no doubt that Billy Bob is right that there are many, many "little things being done right every day" by our armed forces and that soldiers are overwhelmingly "good people doing difficult things very well." But I am less certain today than I was yesterday that this means the apparent rarity of events like Haditha and My Lai is a true picture of what is actually going on.

What I didn't know yesterday is that, according to a report in Saturday's LA Times, the marines had an investigation team on-site taking pictures very shortly after the "incident," that the pictures indicated "execution-style" killings of the victims, but that, according to Time reports, no formal investigation was commenced until Time confronted the Marines with a videotape two months later. What I also didn't know was that the conclusion of this initial investigation was that "Marines, not a bomb, killed the civilians but that the deaths were the result of 'collateral damage.' " When combined with the LA Times article, the following account of the history of the investigation (from the Time article linked above) is troubling:

The military's initial report stated that Terrazas and 15 civilians were killed in a roadside blast and that shortly afterward, the Marines came under attack and returned fire, killing eight insurgents. . . .

The day after the killings, an Iraqi journalism student videotaped the scene at a local morgue and the homes where the shootings had occurred. "You could tell they were enraged," the student, Taher Thabet, said last week. "They not only killed people, they smashed furniture, tore down wall hangings, and when they took prisoners, they treated them very roughly. This was not a precise military operation." A delegation of angry village elders complained to senior Marines in Haditha about the killings but were rebuffed with the excuse that the raid had been a mistake. TIME learned about the Haditha action in January, when it obtained a copy of Thabet's videotape from an Iraqi human-rights group. But a Marine spokesman brushed off any inquiries. "To be honest," Marine Captain Jeff Pool e-mailed McGirk, "I cannot believe you're buying any of this. This falls into the same category of AQI (al-Qaeda in Iraq) propaganda." In late January, TIME gave a copy of the videotape to Colonel Barry Johnson, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. After reviewing it, he recommended a formal investigation. The ensuing probe, conducted by a colonel, concluded that Marines, not a bomb, killed the civilians but that the deaths were the result of "collateral damage," not deliberate homicide. Nevertheless, after reviewing the initial probe, senior military officials launched a criminal investigation.

What I also did not know is that, as the LA Times reports today, both of the ranking members of the Senate Armed Services Committee (Republican John Warner and Democrat John Murtha) say they have "direct evidence of top officers trying to suppress information."

In short, but for the media, we might never even have heard of Haditha. This inevitably makes one wonder how many more incidents there are like this that never come to light simply becuase the media itself never hears about them. Is it true, as General Pace assured us over the weekened, that such events are rare? Or are they are just rarely discovered by the media? Are the military's after-action reports saying "that our soldiers followed the ROE and EOF precisely" accurate or are they more frequently than anyone realizes just self-serving BS?

I take some comfort in this thought: in a world of ubiquitous cameras, sooner or later everything comes to light. Thus, the relative rarity of reports on events such as this may still be a reflection of their actual frequency. But I must admit to some doubt on this score. At a minimum, these types of reports call into question the military's willingness to police itself. And, if the military is only willing to come to grips with such incidents when forced to by media reports, the credibility of assurances such as General Pace's is significantly undermined.

It would be sad to learn (as we did in Viet Nam) that what we hear about is actually just the tip of the ice berg.


Update(5/31) : A New York Times article today, sheds a somewhat more favorable light on the investigation. See my mea culpa above.

We Must Condemn This. But Still . . .

The LA Times had today -- Memorial Day, of all days -- the first article I have seen that places some context around the Marine shooting in Haditha, Iraq (a city I suspect is likely to become as familiar to us all as My Lai): Bloody Scenes Haunt a Marine .

I reserve judgment on the facts. The marine interviewed in the story was not a witness to the killing of Iraqi civilians. He just helped clean up the mess. So, it is premature, perhaps, to say what exactly happened and why. There may yet (hope, hope) be a defensible explanation. But, the likelihood of that seems small. There is such an overwhelming incentive to keep this type of stuff "under wraps" that once a story like this hits the public media -- out of DOD's own mouth -- one has some justification to conclude that something truly horrible -- out of control -- probably happened.

I am sorry Truman Capote is dead. If this is as bad as it seems likely to be, the best outcome for the long term -- for the good of ourselves and our armed forces -- would be for a great journalist/documentarian to get behind the sorts of facts that are presented in investigations and trials and to get inside the minds and histories of the people and the effect of the circumstances of the event on those minds. If it happened, the only really important question is WHY? And we need something considerably more sophisticated than a trial transcript to answer than question.

You can get the barest hint of the context from the article linked above:

Shortly after 7 a.m. on Nov. 19, Briones, who received a Purple Heart during a previous tour in Iraq that included fierce fighting in Fallouja, said his team of five men was called to respond to a roadside bomb explosion about 300 yards outside Kilo Company's Firm Base Sparta, located in an abandoned school.

When they arrived about 10 minutes later at the smoky, chaotic scene in a residential neighborhood, he said he saw the remains of his best friend, Lance Cpl. Miguel "T.J." Terrazas, his body split in half, resting in the destroyed Humvee in which he had been riding.

"He had a giant hole in his chin. His eyes were rolled back up in his skull," Briones recalled of the 20-year-old Texan. Briones said he draped a poncho over the body of his drinking buddy and workout partner and said a short prayer over his body: "Rest in peace. You are my brother by another mother. I love you, man."

The attachments that men-in-arms make with each other is the stuff of legend. Everyone who ever wrote on or thought about the subject will tell you that men fight not for country, not for the cause, not for such abstractions as freedom or democracy -- not for anything we thank them for on Memorial Day. They fight and are willing to risk death for only one thing: each other. The only thing that keeps a man in line in the face of terror none of us can even imagine is a sense that he is responsibile to and for of his "buddies." With very few exceptions, the ONLY thing soldiers are willing to risk dying for is the other men (and women) in their units.

So, when one of those buddies gets cleaved in half by something as random as a roadside bomb, after months and months of trying to fight so faceless an enemy, it is not hard to understand why they would go slightly or even totally insane. And, in that moment, the only thing they will want is revenge.

It is a real conundrum for the armed services. To make an effective fighting force, they need to instill a sense of "unit" that borders on family. Yet they have to also train them, when a member of their "family" is destroyed by a faceless enemy, to act with restraint and reason and something akin to a presumption of innocence.

That's a very, very hard thing to do, and the amazing, truly amazing thing, is how rarely that training beaks down in a big way.

In case anyone was wondering, I do not condone or excuse what happened (assuming it did). This is something we must condemn, and, if they did it, the perpetrators deserve little sympathy and no mercy. But, as the man said, "before you criticize someone, walk a mile in his shoes."