I would post about Baltimore, but I already put something up on
Facebook and I don't feel like repeating myself. I will say, however,
that this article nails what I think pretty well.
I am blogging instead, because something I want to dig a little deeper into a passing thought. My experiences in Iraq have turned me off the political parties (and the echo chamber of television news) pretty bad.
I like to call myself an independent. I believe I'm focused more on solutions...in public affairs we discussed evidence-based public policy, and I'm all for that. I turned away from the political parties because I think they are so caught up in their rhetoric, their worldview, and promoting certain ideologies that they've lost touch with the real world and no longer represent the average American.
I can go into long explanations on the reasons why, but that would take too long and I don't have any good solutions to offer.
I could discuss this with almost any topic, but this is about my experiences in Iraq, so I'll stick with that.
It felt like both parties were trying to make Iraq a Vietnam II. The same rhetoric, the same competing world views. "Stay the course". "Why keep losing American lives needlessly?" "Violence begets violence, you can never win if you resort to violence" "We have to fight terrorists with overwhelming force"
Each statement is packed with all sorts of assumptions and beliefs. Again, it would take too long to address them all. Let me start with a few:
"Stay the course" - this goes back to the belief that we won every single battle in Vietnam but lost the war. Why? Because the American people lost the will to keep fighting. If we had just stuck with it, we could have won.
From what I've read, there is *some* evidence for this. The North Vietnamese lost a lot of people in the Tet Offensive. But I don't think we lost because we 'were betrayed at home'. We lost because of bad leadership. We lost because our leaders lost credibility. The American people did not believe there was a viable plan, they felt we were stuck in a quagmire, and there was no real counterargument. To bring this back to Iraq - "Stay the course" was a stupid leadership strategy. Especially when any soldier over there could see that we were playing 'whack a mole', losing areas as soon as we left. The Iraq forces were a joke, and the great plan involved ignoring their weaknesses in order to prop them up and get the hell out. The surge, as well as the changes in strategy, all constituted changes that should have been done even earlier. And I think could have, if leadership wasn't stuck in a bubble and unwilling to consider alternatives.
"Violence begets violence, and never wins" - this was something I used to agree with, actually. It made sense - you hit me, I get angry and hit you back. We wind up starting a personal feud. Heck, maybe it even grows to be a family feud. Or a tribal one. Or even national. But I heard so many people use that argument to claim that the situation in Iraq was hopeless. That there was nothing we could do. That we should just cut our losses and leave. Now, this may be hard to convince people of when we're back in Iraq again...but that is BS. Let's start at a macro level. If violence didn't appear to work, people would have stopped fighting millenia ago. Don't get me wrong - I think it's sad to lose any culture, I think every different culture offers new insights into what it means to be human. New ideas to play with. I think it's sad for any culture to really die out. But the modern world was created, in part, by the violence of the past. Tribal migrations that displaced others. These things are so far in the past, now, that it's hard to relate to the losses involved...but do you think the Duke of Normandy, if he knew what the history of England would be, would think invading England was a bad idea? This world view is the kind of thing that appeals to people who already believe, and will be completely ignored by the ones who don't.
I think what sticks in my craw, here, is the belief that violence never wins. On a personal level, I still kind of agree...but I didn't think the situation in Iraq was hopeless. I do think there are situations where an army, with good strategy and good leadership, can make a difference. I feel like pretending that isn't so actually makes it harder to be effective, because your refusal to understand and learn about warfare leaves you vulnerable to the ones who don't. The issue, to me, was not that we were doomed to failure. It was that the horrible decisions made by people who were supposed to know better had very real, and deadly, consequences.
Even worse...we had invaded a country, disrupted the established order, let loose chaos and violence...and then the people who believed this felt that the only answer was to abandon everything. I find myself struggling to explain why this was so horrifying to me, so here's another way of putting it -
One of the articles I read discussed the viewpoints of Iraqis in a town that US forces repeatedly had cleared. To them, the real crime was when we came in, cleared out the bad guys and then left. Why? Because the bad guys came back, and they killed anyone they thought collaborated with us. And the next time we came around, there was no reason to believe we were there to stay, or that they wouldn't face threats from the bad guys as soon as we left again.
And these were bad guys. This wasn't some nice little insurgency where the Iraqis were all working together to oust the evil imperialists. The Iraqis were not rejoicing when we left, and welcoming back the insurgents with open arms. (Or not everywhere, at least. Obviously they had supporters and bases.) This was Iraqis who were terrified of what the insurgents would do to them if they didn't go along.
I don't know if I could have morally supported us in Iraq, if we had been facing the Iraqi equivalent of a George Washington. But all too often the ones we were fighting acted more like gangs.
Which brings me to Baltimore. Since this has gotten long, I'll go into that in Part II.
I am blogging instead, because something I want to dig a little deeper into a passing thought. My experiences in Iraq have turned me off the political parties (and the echo chamber of television news) pretty bad.
I like to call myself an independent. I believe I'm focused more on solutions...in public affairs we discussed evidence-based public policy, and I'm all for that. I turned away from the political parties because I think they are so caught up in their rhetoric, their worldview, and promoting certain ideologies that they've lost touch with the real world and no longer represent the average American.
I can go into long explanations on the reasons why, but that would take too long and I don't have any good solutions to offer.
I could discuss this with almost any topic, but this is about my experiences in Iraq, so I'll stick with that.
It felt like both parties were trying to make Iraq a Vietnam II. The same rhetoric, the same competing world views. "Stay the course". "Why keep losing American lives needlessly?" "Violence begets violence, you can never win if you resort to violence" "We have to fight terrorists with overwhelming force"
Each statement is packed with all sorts of assumptions and beliefs. Again, it would take too long to address them all. Let me start with a few:
"Stay the course" - this goes back to the belief that we won every single battle in Vietnam but lost the war. Why? Because the American people lost the will to keep fighting. If we had just stuck with it, we could have won.
From what I've read, there is *some* evidence for this. The North Vietnamese lost a lot of people in the Tet Offensive. But I don't think we lost because we 'were betrayed at home'. We lost because of bad leadership. We lost because our leaders lost credibility. The American people did not believe there was a viable plan, they felt we were stuck in a quagmire, and there was no real counterargument. To bring this back to Iraq - "Stay the course" was a stupid leadership strategy. Especially when any soldier over there could see that we were playing 'whack a mole', losing areas as soon as we left. The Iraq forces were a joke, and the great plan involved ignoring their weaknesses in order to prop them up and get the hell out. The surge, as well as the changes in strategy, all constituted changes that should have been done even earlier. And I think could have, if leadership wasn't stuck in a bubble and unwilling to consider alternatives.
"Violence begets violence, and never wins" - this was something I used to agree with, actually. It made sense - you hit me, I get angry and hit you back. We wind up starting a personal feud. Heck, maybe it even grows to be a family feud. Or a tribal one. Or even national. But I heard so many people use that argument to claim that the situation in Iraq was hopeless. That there was nothing we could do. That we should just cut our losses and leave. Now, this may be hard to convince people of when we're back in Iraq again...but that is BS. Let's start at a macro level. If violence didn't appear to work, people would have stopped fighting millenia ago. Don't get me wrong - I think it's sad to lose any culture, I think every different culture offers new insights into what it means to be human. New ideas to play with. I think it's sad for any culture to really die out. But the modern world was created, in part, by the violence of the past. Tribal migrations that displaced others. These things are so far in the past, now, that it's hard to relate to the losses involved...but do you think the Duke of Normandy, if he knew what the history of England would be, would think invading England was a bad idea? This world view is the kind of thing that appeals to people who already believe, and will be completely ignored by the ones who don't.
I think what sticks in my craw, here, is the belief that violence never wins. On a personal level, I still kind of agree...but I didn't think the situation in Iraq was hopeless. I do think there are situations where an army, with good strategy and good leadership, can make a difference. I feel like pretending that isn't so actually makes it harder to be effective, because your refusal to understand and learn about warfare leaves you vulnerable to the ones who don't. The issue, to me, was not that we were doomed to failure. It was that the horrible decisions made by people who were supposed to know better had very real, and deadly, consequences.
Even worse...we had invaded a country, disrupted the established order, let loose chaos and violence...and then the people who believed this felt that the only answer was to abandon everything. I find myself struggling to explain why this was so horrifying to me, so here's another way of putting it -
One of the articles I read discussed the viewpoints of Iraqis in a town that US forces repeatedly had cleared. To them, the real crime was when we came in, cleared out the bad guys and then left. Why? Because the bad guys came back, and they killed anyone they thought collaborated with us. And the next time we came around, there was no reason to believe we were there to stay, or that they wouldn't face threats from the bad guys as soon as we left again.
And these were bad guys. This wasn't some nice little insurgency where the Iraqis were all working together to oust the evil imperialists. The Iraqis were not rejoicing when we left, and welcoming back the insurgents with open arms. (Or not everywhere, at least. Obviously they had supporters and bases.) This was Iraqis who were terrified of what the insurgents would do to them if they didn't go along.
I don't know if I could have morally supported us in Iraq, if we had been facing the Iraqi equivalent of a George Washington. But all too often the ones we were fighting acted more like gangs.
Which brings me to Baltimore. Since this has gotten long, I'll go into that in Part II.
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