With controversy swirling around the veracity of The New Republic's "Baghdad Diarist" accounts, it's hard to know very much for certain. But this can be said:
If the accounts of embedded journalist/bloggers like Michael Yon, Michael Totten, and Bill Roggio are to be believed and taken as representative, Coalition forces are taking on difficult, dangerous, and stressful tasks. While they screw up, sometimes badly, the moral core of the great majority of soldiers is holding up.
I even got this sense from the interviews by fervently "anti-Occupation" journalists Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian in The Nation. (The names Hedges and al-Arian will both be quite familiar to many readers. For a scathing review of their article, see Greyhawk at Mudville Gazette.)
In his dispatches from Baghdad, Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp has painted an entirely different picture. He portrays the unit he serves with as having lost its moral compass. If this is true, it should matter a great deal to those of us at home. If it is a misrepresentation that speaks only to Beauchamp's psychological issues, political stance, or literary ambitions: we should know that, too.
The extended entry reprints an email from a sergeant in Beauchamp's unit.
[UPDATE 8:30 pm on Jul 29, 2007 -- I cut the text of the email, at the request of its recipient--AMac]
To review, in his third dispatch, Shock Troops, Beauchamp offers three anecdotes. These are:
- Beauchamp and a buddy loudly mock and curse an IED-disfigured woman in FOB Falcon's crowded chow hall. The many soldiers who overhear find this behavior unremarkable. None object.
- At a gravesite described as "a Saddam-era dumping grounds of some sort," one of Beauchamp's fellow privates prances about with a child's skull as a crown. His capering provokes laughter, not disgust. He wears a piece of skull with rotting flesh under his helmet, through the day and night, and on a mission. No witness to these actions reprimands the soldier, or reports him.
- Another private uses the Bradley Fighting Vehicle he drives to smash buildings and market stalls, and to run over dogs. He tallies his kills and reports them over the unit's radio net. No one objects. The many soldiers who hear the report of a dog-slicing escapade over the radio roll with laughter.
Beauchamp uses these stories to shine a light on the behavior and beliefs of the soldiers he serves with.
The choices are few.
- These events might have happened much as Beauchamp describes (although Milbloggers have assailed his account on a slew of details).
- Some events might have happened somewhat in the way that Beauchamp related, but with literary license used to alter important details. For instance, if Beauchamp and a buddy had insulted an injured woman, danced about with children’s' skulls, and killed dogs in secret, we would view the account with very different eyes. If Beauchamp turned out to be reworking urban legends and campfire tales into a gripping first-person account, that would, likewise, influence our perceptions.
On Beauchamp's outing (or self-exposure), I made the unremarkable prediction that other voices from Alpha Company, 1/18 Infantry, 2nd BCT, 1ID would soon be heard.
Blogger (and retired Sgt.) Cheryl McElroy posted on July 27 that she had emailed the 1st Sergeant in Beauchamp's unit. She vouches for the authenticity of the reply she received:
[UPDATE 8:30 pm on Jul 29, 2007 -- I removed this message at the request of its recipient. The one-paragraph email claimed overall honorable conduct on the part of the company's soldiers.--AMac]
(Hat tip: commenter mesablue at Confederate Yankee.)
I think it's likely that other individuals from Beauchamp's unit will enter the fray. (In that regard, this is reminiscent of the Civil War, when private soldiers corresponded often and at length about their experiences, good and bad.) Insights from additional accounts should help us to judge whether depravity has become the norm in that unit, or whether Beauchamp is some mixture of fabulist and headcase.
I've no doubt that soldiers engage in a certain amount of black humor while on the job. But joking about a disfigured woman from your own unit to her face?
No sir, I'm not buying.
Was the woman from their own unit, or a contractor, or what? "Unrecognizable tan uniform".
Somebody that he thought everybody else was ignoring.
I don't see much to choose here. Of course a 1st sergeant is going to stick up for his troops. That's reliable. No information there.
The idea that soldiers wouldn't do such things is comforting, but people have been warning that the army is within a year or so of breaking. When it starts breaking this is what it will look like.
Some of the Beauchamp's technical details sound implausible. People who should know say that you never change a tire in the open, they're designed to run flat and so you'd ride a flat tire home and get it changed there. That sounds plausible, so if he says somebody changed a tire in the field it sounds implausible. But I've noticed that it doesn't usually work for me to say "X is standard practice, therefore Y never happens.".
At any rate, we can expect that reports like Beauchamp's will be less likely in the future. When the abu graib guys were putting torture photos up as screensavers and sending them home to friends and relatives in the US, and then it turned into a giant FUBAR, everybody learned to be careful what they used as screensavers or sent home. Not that what you'd send home would be bad, but you're going to look at it real carefully in case it looks bad. Beauchamp is going to be in big big trouble for this, and everybody who might write something out of the ordinary is going to be careful as a result. Unless they don't notice.
Good post. Thanks for addressing this.
J Thomas,
There is a debater's term for "saying something without quite saying it." Wish I could remember what it is. Sometimes illustrated by the tale of how LBJ got his opponent to deny the charge of pigf****ing, without (libelously) actually making the charge.
Whether Beauchamp thought "the woman" was being ignored is immaterial. The anecdote illustrates the moral depravity of his unit.
The obviously false idea that "soldiers wouldn't do such things" would indeed be comforting. Unless you show otherwise, it's irrelevant to this discussion.
As a person who rejects the postmodern, literary-criticism approach to history, the important question is, what really happened? What's the truth? We can use historians' tools like documentary evidence, eyewitness accounts, plausibility, and logic. Certainty is unattainable, but we can use Popper's idea of falsifiability. We shouldn't look at competing narratives and say, "I'll choose to believe the one that fits my preconceived narrative, as any of them are equally possible."
"a 1st sergeant is going to stick up for his troops. That's reliable. No information there."
How about, "a lefty creative writer is going to smear his fellow troops. That's reliable. No information there."
Equally true, and equally useless. There is no "of course" in either case. For both speakers, statements can have consequences. The character and reliability of Hatley and Beauchamp, respectively, should figure in to how we evaluate them.
We know that to the extent one of them is telling the truth, the other one is lying or misleading. We just don't know for certain which is which--yet.
The key is to identify the parts of Beauchamp's account that are both important and falsifiable, then to examine the relevant evidence. If "Baghdad Diarist" had written that soldiers mock women, or play with human bones, or kill dogs, there would be no uproar. We already know that such things occur. Rather, Beauchamp stuctured his essay to drive home to the reader that the moral standards of most or all ofl the soldiers he serves with are degraded to the point of depravity. To make his point, Beauchamp must deliver a narrative in which the depraved acts are witnessed. So he did. This gives his readers the chance to inquire into a falsifiable claim. What, if anything, do these "witnesses" have to add to the story?
"reports like Beauchamp's will be less likely in the future... Beauchamp is going to be in big big trouble for this"
True -- but these words hold two very different meanings:
People looking for the truth of Beauchamp's assertions about the morals and conduct of his fellow soldiers should not jump to the first of these dueling interpretations before we discover more about the falsifiable portions of his account.
I think the preponderance of the evidence currently on display points to Beauchamp being a fabulist with an agenda of smearing the military. But I'm trying to keep an open mind. By definition, as-yet-unknown evidence may add to one side, or to the other. Time will tell.
The amazing thing about this is that people are defending Scott on the basis "You Righties aren't supporting the troops now!"
What? Did 'we' support the morons stacking naked people?
Scott's narrative has two main possibilities for outcomes:
1) He watched (minor) war crimes, and failed to do anything useful about it.
or
2) He intentionally defamed and attempted to demoralize our troops.
In neither case do I support him! At all! In case #1 -> cashiered, unless something more vicious turns up. Number two, however, is really pushing it.
(He'll weasel out of all of it though, all he has to do is say 'I was reporting anecdotes' and the whole "Fake but accurate" media will buy it.)
Beauchamp's stuff is a Rorschach test. If you believe that you are morally, socially, and status superior to middle/working class men in the military, of course you will believe every word of what Beauchamp wrote because it conforms to your beliefs. It tells you exactly what you want to hear: you are special, different, "better" than people who put their lives on the line every day.
If on the other hand you think that you are not any different from those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, that you and they are much alike, you will disbelieve everything Beauchamp writes because it does not conform to yourself and the people you know.
What we have here, to paraphrase Strother Martin, is a cultural war over the idea of a hereditary, class-based elite that holds all political, social, and economic power, or the view that everyone is due an equal share of political power and no elite holds a monopoly on morality and status.
Feudal nobility vs. Jacksonian populism in other words.
There is a YouTube video showing a soldier teasing a bunch of Iraqi children with a bottle of water. The soldier is being filmed as he taunts the kids to run after his speeding Humvee with the promise of a bottle of water. The film goes on for minutes until finally all the kids give up but one, then the soldier tosses the bottle out just when a bunch of kids hanging out on the street are there to fight the kid running after the Humvee for the water bottle. All the time the soldiers are laughing and making fun of the kids.
So yeah Beauchamps reports are true to life.
Or at least truthy to life. Humans are capable of a lot of things.
By the way, ken, I'm still looking forward to hearing from you via email, as per my request some time back. As I said then, it's not to give you a hard time, it's so there's some sort of backchannel when or if metadiscussion starts to dominate a thread.
AMac:
Was the expression you were looking for "rhetoric of insinuation" or "innuendo"? Am I close?
Yep. And unfortunately, that question almost always hinges on "Who[m] do you trust, and on what basis?" People who trust their snap interpretations of events have it really easy. If there's even one video out there of someone being mean to someone, then anyone who reminds me of that is going to be mean, too -- right? It's all "true to life" because someone living once did something that reminds me of that other thing.
Sigh
Is Beauchamps Dan Rather's love child?
AJL,
> War is an opportunity for heroism. But bad things happen in war, and not just combat deaths.
Yes.
You bring up some large questions. The paradox is that we can only make sense of the small items (Beauchamp's reports, in this case) by placing them in the proper, broader context. At the same time, that wider perspective is a mosaic that is in part composed of these sorts of discrete pieces. So how we interpret them influences as well as is influenced by that larger view.
Pose a reasonable question (Negotiate or fight? Pre-emption or delay? Utilitarianism or sanctity of the person?) and history will give an answer as to what's right. Too many answers, unfortunately.
Look at the Western Front in World War II. A clear-cut example of good versus evil, Democracy's fight to survive the onslaught of Fascist Totalitarianism. To catalog the awful things worth resisting, I could give you a long list of terrible, inhuman actions committed on their enemies by... The Western Allies.
Meaning what? What should our Big Picture View be?
As you say, lots of bad things always happen in war.
Meanwhile, at the level of details, there are competing narratives in this case. As with the other cases mentioned up-thread. Different parties have already started commenting--sometimes to show how context or expert opinion or logic weighs on the evaluation (helpful), sometimes to root for the home team, right or wrong.
Too often, when the narrative favored by the "push media" looks weak, articles will appear to tilt the scales, by comission or (more often) by omission.
"Shock Troops" should stand or fall on its own merits, not because you or I find it pleasing or displeasing to the narratives dancing in our heads." So far, author Beauchamp and editor Foer are flunking. But we don't yet have enough information. There may yet be rebuttals to the holes that milbloggers seem to have punched in the story. Since Beauchamp and TNR structured the piece to be a revelation of unit-wide depravity, the voices of the soldiers who witnessed these events are especially important. We haven't heard those, yet.
If "Baghdad Diarist" had written that soldiers mock women, or play with human bones, or kill dogs, there would be no uproar. We already know that such things occur. Rather, Beauchamp stuctured his essay to drive home to the reader that the moral standards of most or all ofl the soldiers he serves with are degraded to the point of depravity.
So, you're saying the specific incidents he describes aren't the issue. The issue is really his tone, which has far-reaching implications.
This gives his readers the chance to inquire into a falsifiable claim. What, if anything, do these "witnesses" have to add to the story?
Unfortunately, this is not a two-tailed test. If his fellow soldiers also report that pretty much the whole unit is morally depraved, and they are duly punished for it, that will tend to say it's true. But if the witnesses don't back him up at all, is it because he was lying and they're telling the truth? Or is it that he was telling the truth and they, being morally depraved, see no benefit to them from going down with him for telling the truth?
So if some large fraction of the witnesses agree with him, that has a lot of weight to say he's right. But if none of them agree with him it doesn't say much one way or the other -- it's predictable that they'd say the same thing in either case.
That's why I say his sergeant's report gives no information. Of course the sergeant is going to stand up for his men. How could he do otherwise and have any self respect? If he announced to the world "Yes, some of my men enjoy killing dogs and cats and people, and they think it's funny to mock cripples, and there's nothing wrong with that!" then it would say the story is true. But surely he'd know that he'd be getting himself and his whole unit in trouble, and by saying something like that he'd be letting the Army down. It would be extremely unusual for him to say that, whether it's true or false. So when he instead does the predictable thing it doesn't tell us anything new.
And the bigger story is hard to prove or disprove. It might be possible to settle the question about killing dogs or to find the disfigured contractor. But I agree those details don't address the bigger question whether his unit or the army in general is losing its moral compass. That's a big question that a few specific details won't settle.
I can answer that question a little bit. Beauchamp himself appears to be a bit morally depraved, and he writes like he wants to recover his balance and he hasn't done so. And this indicates the army is beginning to deteriorate. If he was this bad when he first enlisted, the army would have washed him out before he got the chance to make a big scandal. But they're having retention problems. They let people join they'd have weeded out before. They keep people they'd have gotten rid of before. People like Beauchamp, and people with a variety of other flaws.
There's talk that the continued occupation by large numbers of US troops "breaking" the army. If they're right, this is one of the early signs.
"reports like Beauchamp's will be less likely in the future... Beauchamp is going to be in big big trouble for this"
_True -- but these words hold two very different meanings:
* Honest first-person accounts like Beauchamp's will be less likely... Beauchamp is going to be in big trouble for letting readers back home know the ugly truth of this war.
* Fabricated accounts like Beauchamp's will be less likely... Beauchamp will be in big trouble for the slanderous lies he has spread.
People looking for the truth of Beauchamp's assertions about the morals and conduct of his fellow soldiers should not jump to the first of these dueling interpretations before we discover more about the falsifiable portions of his account._
Of course not. My point is that this incident is going to get soldiers to be more careful either way. Any little thing they say might get interpreted by the blogosphere in ways that get them in trouble. It's of course worse if they display attitudes that conservative blogger don't like, but even if they describe some incident that offends conservative bloggers then all of a sudden tens of thousands of people might be re-reading their every word and arguing about it. "Trash cans in iraq aren't shaped like that! He's lying!" "He said he was using a 72B! They don't even make 72Bs anymore, it's all 72BGs!" "Nobody in iraq would ever do such an unsafe thing, they'd get hit by an IED! Anywhere you go in iraq if you do that you'll always get blown up!" "Don't worry, whether he's lying or not the UCMJ will get him!" And that last is true. Anybody who stirs up a lot of bloggers has by definition made the army look bad. He will be punished.
The take-home lesson from this for soldiers is be careful what bloggers hear from you. They're dangerous.
Telling them things that upset them is dangerous, whether it's truth or lies.
J Thomas,
Thanks for two good comments. I don't entirely agree, obviously, but you've given me and other readers food for thought.
Three short responses.
In discussing the problem of falsifiability, you show how your perspective renders Beauchamp unfalsifiable. No matter what other Alpha Company voices may say, they'll support the truth of "Shock Troops."
Wait! While his account is mostly unfalsifiable, it's also mostly unverifiable. (I'm ready to assume that no one will step forth to confirm for him.) If it's nonfalsifiable that doesn't in any way say it's true.
I guess i'll belabor the point in case it does some good in other contexts. Suppose somebody said that a hundred million years ago some dinosaurs invented a high technology and they sent expeditions to the moon, and if you looked in the right places you could find dinosaur bones in spacesuits on the moon. I'd consider that nonfalsifiable. We aren't going to search the moon any time soon well enough to show there aren't any dinosaur bones on it. There's no particular reason to believe it and no particular reason to disbelieve it. I might like to read a science fiction story about it but apart from that I see no reason for anybody to make the assertion or to deny it either one.
Now suppose that somebody claims that some ducks know how to teleport, and if you search the moon carefully you'll find the dessicated remains of some mallards that teleported there by mistake. This is also nonfalsifiable for the same reasons. But I'd consider it far less likely than the dinosaurs. We have no reason to think that ducks can teleport, or that anything can. Particularly not ducks. I'd believe that yetis can teleport easier than ducks because I don't know anything about yetis. I've pulled birdshot out of ducks that didn't teleport at the right time. So while it isn't falsifiable, I'd tend not to believe it because it doesn't fit my preconceptions about teleportation and it doesn't fit my experience about ducks.
I consider Beauchamp's story closer to the duck one than the dinosaur one. I have some reason to disbelieve it. However, negative testimony from other soldiers does not increase my disbelief. He's getting into a lot of trouble. It's predictable that nobody wants to get in trouble with him, for nothing. So -- while his story wasn't very convincing in the first place -- the other soldiers doing what's good for them doesn't make it less convincing than before.
"So, you're saying the specific incidents he describes aren't the issue. The issue is really his tone, which has far-reaching implications."
Either I wasn't being clear, or you're being obtuse.
Sorry. We could get reports of the same sorts of things without the attitude, and we wouldn't be shocked. Killing stray dogs isn't controversial, there have been reports of standing orders to kill stray dogs. There wasa report from I think 2004 of a soldier who adopted a dog who tried very hard to bring it home so it wouldn't get shot, who couldn't. Clowning around with body parts is at least harmless, though people may get upset about it. And there are always a few crass bullies around, and they can often go a fairly long run before they get called down. The specifics aren't that big a deal.
What makes it a big deal is his story about it, which makes it look like he's depraved and his whole unit is depraved. Stuck in a different story they wouldn't matter much.
If it was true, I'd expect it to be in a low-morale unit. (The abu ghraib thing was a low-morale reserve group. They didn't get supplies they needed, and their food was bad. Their base commander was apathetic and higher officers acted like they weren't important.) I'd figure these guys wouldn't be at an important site where they got much combat, but would be stuck in a peaceful area where they could mess up and not face consequences from the enemy. Beauchamp was there because it was a unit where it looked like he wouldn't do much harm.
So even if it was true (beyond the individual incidents which aren't such a big deal except for his attitude about them) it wouldn't be representative of the whole army. It would reflect the most mediocre units.
My concern is whether the average is falling given the long occupation, the people who have to keep going back again, the general lack of progress and visibility of deterioration, etc.
OT/Meta: A friend of mine looking over the keyboard nearly gave me a bath with the tea he was drinking. His comment, through laughter: "Best. Sigline. Ever."
So you've made a new friend. :)
Carry on...
"...some dinosaurs invented a high technology and they sent expeditions to the moon...There's no particular reason to believe it and no particular reason to disbelieve it."
I think I see your problem.
Beauchamp's stuff is a Rorschach test. If you believe that you are morally, socially, and status superior to middle/working class men in the military, of course you will believe every word of what Beauchamp wrote because it conforms to your beliefs. It tells you exactly what you want to hear: you are special, different, "better" than people who put their lives on the line every day.
I disagree. I think "Shock Troops" has traction because a significant number of people believe that it is almost impossible for most human beings who:- who are psychologically capable of killing another human being and
- operate in a massively high stress environment where you are expected to treat people who could kill you at any given moment in a friendly civilized fashion
to not turn into monsters over the long term. For some on the anti-war side, it then becomes essentially immoral to place human beings into such an environment for any other reason than imminent, deadly peril, for which Iraq most certainly doesn't qualify (at least on the imminent side).AMac:
Please delete the e-mail from 1SG Hatley, at his request. The letter is genuine, but he has expressed concerns over privacy issues. Until this matter with Beauchamp is resolved, he needs to be able to conduct the investigation without too much distraction. I deleted his contact info from my site as well.
Sincerely,
SFC MAC
[I have cut the email from the body of the post, on the basis of this request.--AMac]
That Beauchamp has himself as the principal in the mockery story, and an onlooker in the skull-as-headcap story tells me that he is the slimeball, and not the brave reporter of truth he wants to appear to be.
Since the subject has changed to ducks, let's get some ducks in a row, here.
1. It is not acceptable journalistic practice to relate apocryphal stories as the truth, to condense disparate details into a single incident, to claim to have witnessed things you only heard about, or to otherwise MAKE SHIT UP. The fact that some people find you credible is no excuse; the fact that the final result conveys some sort of concise or meaningful picture that is not supported by bare facts is doubly no excuse.
2. A journalist is not entitled to the benefit of the doubt. Anything published in TNR is supposed to go through a rigorous pre-publication process involving many people, not just the writer and an editor. Carelessness with detail is not acceptable; changing a Ford to a Chevy is not acceptable. Journalists are supposed to follow a higher standard than the politicians who just accuse anyone who points out their mistakes of being politically motivated.
3. Making stuff up to beat a deadline or because your editor lets you get away with it is one thing. Making up hateful things that do real harm to real people is something else. That's the difference between Stephen Glass and Julius Streicher.
No one wanted to believe My Lai at first either. But it happened. But it also really was something of an aberration, and while there may have been other similar instances that didn't get reported (I'm being deliberately vague because I just can't remember what got reported and what was just anecdotal stuff that made the rounds), My Lai seemed to crystalise a perception that something had gone badly wrong in that war. Partly from shame of what we were inflicting on the civilian population in Vietnam--but also from concern over what we were turning American soldiers into. And while it's usually true enough that one can say "Well, bad things happen in wartime", because it is true, there are times when the incident in question does seem to transcend that truth.
Is one of those times? Probably not. If this guy turns out to be a yarnspinner, then he'll be reviled and discredited, TNR will look stupid again, and we'll move on. Even if what he says turns out to be true--and with the decline in recruitment standards over the past two years it's at least plausible--I bet we still find a way to move on. As a general comment, I rarely see any discussion anywhere on how many Timothy McVeigh's we may be in the process of creating in this war. But I suspect that one of the reasons we react so negatively to the prospect of Beauchamp's stories being true--especially those of us who are veterans--is that we don't really know how to respond if what he says really is true. Because we know that it's at least possible, and under what conditions that possibility can become a probability.
As an aside, one of the interesting things about the whole Abu Graib situation, from the standpoint of an American living in London, but who was spending a lot of time in the US that year, was that the US popular response was relative indifference compared to that of much of the rest of the world--and the rest of the world noticed this. Ditto Guantanamo. Frankly, this sort of thing (Beauchamp, if true) barely registers outside the US anymore. "US troops Islamophobic and murderous!"--to much of the world, this isn't necessarily news. I'm not saying this is true, by the way--just that it might now be a general perception. The Nation's article with US troop interviews was reported on in most of the UK media, for example. And it might account for why 70% of Iraqis wanted US troops out within a year--and this was last September. (Then again, it might not--maybe it's that no electricity thing.) Of course, we know from incidents over the past decade that Canadian and Dutch and French troops can be equally phobic and indifferent and potentially murderous, yet somehow the world doesn't generalize the same way about Canada and The Netherlands and France.
So how to fix that perception? Well, aside from not invading countries that haven't attacked you, I have no idea. Maybe observing the Geneva Conventions might be a good start, though.
Glen Wishard--
sorry, this is somewhat off point, but I can't resist:
after reading this, I stumbled across this.
Fair enough that this is something journalists shouldn't do--and bloggers in particular need to be careful here. How about governments?
If an allegedly faulty TSA report excuses journalistic misconduct, then there are plenty of things which in turn excuse the TSA. Such as the Clinton administration's repeated misrepresentations of the mission in Bosnia, for example, which was not supposed to include fighting the Croat Army, or handing Bosnian Muslims over to the tender mercies of Saudi Wahhabist "charities".
The soldiers who obey the lawful authority of their civilian leaders are not responsible for the mistakes of those leaders, and using them as pawns in a petty political hate-war - carried out by small-minded people who have the historical memory of a May Fly - is beneath contempt.
The following was found at Op-For:
'I’m active Army & an Iraq vet.
I just pulled up “Scott Thomas Beauchamp” on the secure “Army Knowledge Online” website. It lists his current rank as “PV2″. (That data is kept accurate via pay records on that website.)
In his Sep 06 blog post he listed his rank as “Private First Class”. That indicates that without a doubt he was busted at least one rank as part of Article 15 proceedings under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and he likely has a strong ax to grind with his chain of command.'
URL: http://op-for.com/2007/07/scott_thomas_exposed.html
(That Beauchamp currently identifies himself as 'Private', vice 'Private First Class' or 'PFC' would seem to support the above statement found at Op-For.)
Glen Wishard--
1. The TSA thing was supposed to be, you know, ironic. Maybe irony doesn't do well here.
2. Why don't you tell that to the guy who invaded Haiti and the Balkans, and tell his wife, too?
And this bears on the current discussion exactly how? Funny how often Clinton gets dragged in on these things--"Well, Clinton did it too, so there!" Unless I missed something, Clinton was not responsible for leading the US into a politically-destabilizing land war in the middle east that has proved difficult to see a positive resolution to. More importantly, for purposes of the subject at hand, Clinton did not create a situation where US land forces are so stretched, including Reserves and National Guard units, that recruitment standards have had to weakened to the extent that 12% of Army enlistees this past year are there on moral waivers.
And wasn't there an invasion of Haiti more recently as well? Hmmm, when was that, exactly? 2004? That sound about right?
3. The soldiers who obey the lawful authority of their civilian leaders are not responsible for the mistakes of those leaders
Absolutely. The issue here, I thought, was whether US soldiers, in obeying the lawful authority of their civilian leaders, had violated in some way other moral or legal norms, how we would know whether or not that was the case, if so, how commonplace was it, and whether or not we should lose any sleep over it. Obviously, people think this is an issue worth discussing--hence, this thread. Or would you prefer that this whole issue remain outside the bounds of discussion?
In war a lot of morally indefensible things happen, but it does not stop the war. The guilty are brought to justice or should be and the war goes on.
The issue is not what happened but Beauchamp's reporting accuracy. If, for whatever reason, he is found to be fabricating stories or 'enhancing' stories then he should be held accountable. We do not need that kind of 'journalism' in a war zone. If what he said is true then those involved need, based on concrete evidence, to be held accountable.
Another big problem with this is that there are large number of vociferous people who want whatever Beauchamp has written to be true. Because they want it to be true for political reasons then they, with little evidence other than the man's word, fiercely defend Beauchamp and what he wrote. This muddies the water considerably. Without war politics being involved it is a simple he said/she said story.
wufnik #23 --
You bring up a fascinating point. It turns out to be subtle. Which are more important, the facts as they ultimately become established, or the consensus perceptions of the issue as they are framed, contemporaneously, by opinion-leaders? How the issue might be addressed depends in large measure on how it should be defined. (The movements of reactionares, Qutbists, Gramscians, and the like clearly have no such doubts, or qualms.)
By chance, "Tigerhawk" was discussing this issue recently. Link via Wretchard, at "The Belmont Club."
_If an allegedly faulty TSA report excuses journalistic misconduct, then there are plenty of things which in turn excuse the TSA. Such as the Clinton administration's repeated _
Glen, it took me a long time to figure out what you were saying here. I finally figured out that you were using GOP logic and GOP morality.
I'll try to say this simply. I never liked having Clinton as president. I thought he did a pretty bad job. It bothered me that off all his bad actions the one they tried to impeach him on was a sideshow that didn't actually get him out of office.
Saying that the bad things Clinton did somehow excuse the bad things somebody else did? This does not make sense at all to me. If Dillinger robbed banks does that mean it's OK for me to rob banks? If Bush Senior had embezzled a couple of billion dollars from the Treasury, would that be a good excuse for Clinton to take a billion or three? It just does not make sense.
So then we have the TSA making up stories, putting varied stories together into one, etc -- all the things you said it wasn't OK for journalists to do. He asks whether it's OK for governments to tell these kinds of lies, that he agrees are not OK for journalists.
And you somehow think he's saying that when the government does it, that makes it OK for journalists to do it? Why would you even imagine he's saying that? He's saying it isn't OK for governments to do it any more than it's OK for journalists to do it.
You say that Clinton did it so it's OK for the TSA to do it so it's OK for journalists to do it? But no. It isn't OK for journalists, it isn't OK for Bush's TSA, and it wasn't OK for Clinton.
The response from real honest-to-goodness citizens when they find out about government corruption isn't "Clinton did it too.". Actual citizens respond "Clean it up now.". It's corrupt pundits who say "We don't need to clean it up Tweedle Dee because Tweedle Dum is just as bad.". It's enemies of the USA who say that.
At the moment the enemies of the USA who say that are Republicans, because they're the ones who've had the power to do the corruption. Democrats haven't been doing much corruption lately because Republicans had so much control they didn't need to share. In a few years it might be Democrats doing all the bad stuff because the GOP is out. That's no excuse for anybody. We need to clean up today's corruption today and tomorrow's corruption tomorrow. And maybe look for ways to prevent tomorrow's corruption.
If you want to start criminal trials for Bill Clinton's misdeeds I won't mind at all. It might do some good. Rather too late, but what the hill. If we can stop some of Bush's misdeeds today that's better, though I won't mind criminal trials after it's too late too. And we'll need to work on stopping the misdeeds of whatever democrat comes after Bush.
None of that has anything to do with arguing that any of it is justified by the bad things somebody else did. Blaming current evil decisions on Clinton is republican logic. It isn't very effective any more.
We need more viable political parties. If you were buying toothpaste and there were only two alternatives they'd call it a duopoly and that's almost as bad as monopoly. I think it would help if we had IRV voting. If you could vote Libertarian or Green first and not lose your vote, I tend to doubt the GOP or the Democrats would stay on top very long.
Another big problem with this is that there are large number of vociferous people who want whatever Beauchamp has written to be true. Because they want it to be true for political reasons then they, with little evidence other than the man's word, fiercely defend Beauchamp and what he wrote.
I haven't seen any of that. I must be associating with a higher class of people or something.
All I've seen is people who vociferously want it to not be true, who insist that he suffer UCMJ for it. And if he was telling the truth, and people do get punished, it will be like random bad luck. Punished for killing stray dogs? Where I live they have animal control officers who're on salary to do that.
I've seen people who say they don't know, and people who say it can't be true, and that's all. The liberals I've seen seemed to be pretty bemused by it. They don't consider The New Republic to be a liberal magazine. It was one a long time ago, and then it turned into something else. They don't read it, and they heard about the whole thing from watching the redstate guys go crazy over it.
They shake their heads and shrug about that, but they're far more interested in discussing Pat Tillman. They say he was a liberal who was outspokena against Bush, and he got shot 3 times in the forehead from 30 feet by a US weapon, and his diary was burned, there was a cover-up and maybe another cover-up after that, and Bush has declared executive privilege to avoid releasing any further records. They're interested in the question whether it was a friendly-fire accident that got covered up for PR, or whether it was a fragging. They can't decide. They just aren't very interested in Beauchamp.
Geez, I guess wufnik was right. Irony really doesn't fly here.
No, Thomas, I am not saying that two wrongs make a right. What I am saying, though, is that if "Never invade countries" is a principle of morality or statecraft, then it applies to President A as well as President B.
If it is held to apply only to President B, then it is either a very new moral discovery, or those applying it are engaging in political hypocrisy. Since very many Democrats are currently engaging in such hypocrisy, calling it "GOP logic and morality" is a somewhat incomplete description, isn't it?
wufnik:Yes, it's true. In 2004, 180 million American dollars invaded Haiti, followed by 150 million more in 2005.There was no other US invasion of Haiti in 2004, nor was Haiti invaded by Canada or by France, as Aristide has also claimed. But you go right ahead and believe whatever you want to believe.
My own inclination is to try and stay focused on the subject at hand--or at least to recognize that the analogies that resonate for me are unlikely to do so with people who don't already agree with me, more or less. Somewhat the same thing with moving from the specific to the very broad-stroke view.
But then again, it's mixing up diverse POVs that makes a discussion interesting, and even fruitful from time to time. So have at it, but recognize that these frustrations are likely to be mutual.
Now onwards to breaking that guideline. There was this piece carried by AP yesterday. The 18-year-old private who was with Tillman when he was killed says he didn't say what the report says he said. This interview makes it sound more like friendly fire/cover-up than like fragging/cover-up.
J Thomas, plenty of TNR subscribers over at The Plank might qualify as "vociferous people who want whatever Beauchamp has written to be true." You might think that affiliation disqualifies them as liberals, but they might disagree. Vociferosly.
Thank you.
Thank you, Glenn. I agree, if one of them shouldn't do it the other shouldn't either.
We might of course quibble about the details. Like, we might say "Never invade countries unless the UN agrees at the time" or various other quibbles. But really I don't like Clinton. I think it's more important that whatever rule we agree on gets applied to the next president than the current president and the last one, where in both cases it's already too late. (Though I really hope Bush doesn't invade Iran.)
But then, Johnson didn't want to just start a war so he created the Tonkin Gulf incident. There are rumors that FDR caused Pearl Harbor to start WWII. I doubt it. I think he didn't know where the attack would happen, he thought they'd take Manila instead. I doubt it really helps us not to start wars if we try to make sure we get attacked instead.
I don't see how to keep a US president from starting a war if he really wants to.
(I said something on the blacklist, and I don't know what it was, so I'll misspell one word at a time until I get it.)
(I'd have quit by now except I'm getting real curious what it is.)
(I found it. It appears the exclamation point is on the blacklist. Maybe you can use it sometime, but I know you can't use it after Thank You.)
[You're a sport, JT, and Thank You!! for the spamcatcher tip. For the record: quobble, quobbles, currant, Johnsen, Tankin, FER, manala, blacklost. -- AMac]
Incidentally, I want to recommend John Barnes as a science fiction writer.
I have read essentially all of John Barnes's fiction, and seen his point of view on various other things. He accepts basicly leftist goals -- he tends to want good things for people independent of who those people are. He accepts basicly realist approaches to reality and to knowledge about reality. He writes stories that smart people would tend to like regardless of their politics.
Here's an example. Early in Patton's Spaceship, a sociology professor starts an explanation about ethnic criminal gangs and terrorist groups. It's straight leftist stuff, people go into professional crime groups like the mafia and the vietnamese mafia etc when they feel like they're cut out of the regular routes to good jobs and wealth and all. In a generation or two they find out how to get the good jobs and they phase out their criminal gangs and somebody else replaces them. He does it fast as part of the plotline and he makes it sound right. But the usual way this argument goes is for crime control and gun control and such. Get everybody good enough jobs and they won't do crime. Get rid of guns, we don't need them. Instead within a few pages his sociology professor has pulled out a futuristic gun and is blasting big holes in things and shooting hundreds of bad guys.
Fantastic but plausible weapons. Reasonable tactics to go with the weapons. Plausible wars given the whole context. Great characters, some of them nasty, some professional, some clueless, and the clueless ones get in the professionals' way, and nobody's planning works as expected,
Spoilers
In Patton's Spaceship, John Barnes looks at the alternate-history idea of just what would it take for the nazis to win WWII. They didn't have enough men or enough resources, so the only reasonable way he can make it happen is, aliens from a very high-tech alternate world come in and give them high-tech weapons and such.
And so by the early 1960's. the USA has fallen and is occupied. Most of the resistance in the US west coast is organised out of Berkeley, by beat poets. Remnants of the US military are in southeast asia, allied with the southeast asians. Patton is good friends with Giap. JF Kennedy is captain of a great big submarine that occasionally shells the american coast to raise morale. Edward teller knows how to make nukes but he can't get enough enriched uranium. The bad guys are preparing a giant attack on southeast asia to take out the last remaining nations that resist them. They've been slow because these people are not much of a threat and not a giant priority.
And now our hero comes in from another alternate world, ours. He brings the free world one (1) laptop computer, and one (1) tremendously-hi-tech handgun from yet another alternate world, plus whatever he can remember about twenty-first century technology. Transistors? H-bombs? Antibiotics? Lasers? If you wanted to tell somebody how to make such things, how much do you really know?
How can this be enough to turn the tide of battle?
J Thomas --
Re: Barnes, reminiscent perhaps of the genre of Axis of Time Trilogy and Guns of the South. If the Time Travel plot device forbids bringing along a DVD-ROM of Wikipedia (& player), consider printing Caveman Chemistry in very small type and shoving it in your socks (fascinating reading).
On the Conspiracy View of Pearl Harbor -- argh. Yeah, of course, on the InterBlog Where Nobody Knows You're A Dog, one can find superficially plausible ideas about anything. That particular conspiracy, like +/- 98% of them, just doesn't stand up to examination. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and the proof had gone poof even before "At Dawn We Slept" made it to print.
AMac, about Pearl Harbor, it was quite predictable that japan would attack, and under the circumstances when they went a few days hiding and the US forces didn't know where they were, it was a pretty good sign they were about to attack somebody.
It was quite plausible they were about to attack manila. While we held the philippines we could move fleets there and attack from there. It was predictable they'd take it. Maybe surprising they'd raid hawaii where they couldn't actually get lasting results.
We'd pushed them to the point it was predictable they'd attack. They were about to attack somebody. It shouldn't have been a surprise that they'd attack us around that day. Whether FDR knew the attack would be on pearl harbor instead of something else is what's missing, and I don't see that it matters so much.
For purposes of entering WWII, a mostly-failed attack on pearl harbor would have been just as good. If they attacked and we made a good show of defending, if they lost a significant number of planes and only sank a few of our ships, we'd still be in the war. It would succeed unless the japanese felt so threatened they called off the attack entirely.
The detailed conspiracy theory doesn't fit together. And the evidence is weak. The geralised conspiracy theory doesn't quite fit either. There was strong reason to expect an attack somewhere. Maybe it just didn't seem real. We weren't ready at pearl harbor and we weren't ready at corregidor. But what benefit was it to FDR for manila to fall sooner rather than later? What would he lose if the US forces were closer to ready and the attack wasn't so one-sided? I don't see the motive not to warn the troops. The story is he wanted the war started, not that he wanted to lose.
Glen Wishart--
Actually, I will. Which is that the US deliberately undermined the Aristide regime (starting with cutting aid in 2001) to the extent that it could no longer function, thus ensuring that Haiti collapsed in anarchy, and allowing the US and France to play UN peacekeepers. And that US marines did in fact kidnap Aristide and force him to leave the country. The Bush folks tell a different story, of course, but their credibility on anything at this point, frankly, is a bit suspect. But I cheerfully accept that there are wildly divergent views on this, and it's pretty much irrelevant for the current debate anyway. I'm perfectly happy to remain a conspiracy theorist on this, though, as with much else relating to this administration--as far as I'm concerned, with these guys, you can't be paranoid enough.
AMac--
Thanks for the link. Well, given what I've just said above, it seems clear that my view would favor the latter. The list of situations relating to Iraq where reality has diverged from "consensus" is at this point nearly too long to even bother compiling, but it will need to be done. This is often the case in war, as Philip Knightly long ago observed in The First Casualty. My favorite examples here remain the German public during both WWI and WWII--in both, consensus management ensured that there was never any inkling that things were not going well, and therefore the shock of not winning the first one, and the scope of defeat in the second, was something the German public was totally unprepared for. At the end of WWII, german soldiers wandering around Berlin looking to surrender to Allied troops were actually hung from lamp-posts by their fellow citizen who, even with Russian troops on their way, still refused to countenance any alternative to victory. Consensus management didn't work very well in these instances.
Somehow, it often seems to be the case with other actions of this administration as well. It's the consensus, not the facts, that generally governs the next step, no? Global Warming comes perhaps too easily to mind, but the active hostility of this administration and its appointees to science, especially when it conflicts with the administrations's belief systems and political agenda, has been a wonder to behold. And since the media have long since given up any pretence to providing us with facts, where in fact do we find out whether the "consensus" actually reflects reality, or is an attempt to displace it? No easy answers here, but worth pondering in any event.
_The facts as they ultimately become established_is a useful bucket for historians and long-term policy planners--for day-to-day policy making, there's often just too much noise. And it gets difficult to topple established myths--for how long did the Gulf of Tonkin incident remain part of the "consensus"? This entire war has been, at one level, an exercise in ongoing consensus management, from WMD and yellowcake to Mission Accomplished and Jessica Lynch to Iranian sourcing of IEDs. But isn't that usually the case in wars? Well, yes, so the fact that it exists should not be a surprise. The difference here may turn out to be that "consensus" has rarely been so divorced from "facts", which may be why the "consensus" has had to be reconfigured to freqently--starting with the rationale for the whole endeavor, for example. The jury is still out, obviously--maybe those darn WMDs will turn up in Syria after all--but the track record so far has't exactly been comforting.
As a theoretical point, would it be fair to say that "the consensus perceptions of the issue as they are framed, contemporaneously, by opinion-leaders" is the same as, or different from, "propoganda"? Or does it only become the latter when someone else is doing it?
J Thomas--*Mother of Storms* was pretty good too.
sorry--I really do need to use your formatting tags better! A couple of them didn't take in the above post. Should be decipherable, though.
J Thomas #38 --
Your shifting and, um, idiosyncratic views of WW2 may seem alluring to folks who like the notion of learning history from blog comment threads. At this point in the discussion, I'll simply point out that the public library has useful resources.
wufnik #39 --
This comment brings to mind N.M.'s rhetoric of insinuation contribution from #9. I gather that people whose perspectives differ from yours on the issues of the day are akin to propaganda-blinded civilians of Nazi Germany, among others.
Because information was so tightly controlled then, just as it is today.
Hmmm.
On the subject of Beauchamp's writing, we will see where things stand at the end of the week.
Amac--
Hmmm yourself. I can't imagine how you got to there from what I said, but I probably was much too wordy, which is usually the case. That's one of the fun things about these threads, and why I like to wander by from time to time--I always learn something, and it's fun seeing how long it takes for someone to get to some sort of J'accuse moment.
Let me simplify in terms of your original comment, which I was responding to. Facts usually come out over the long run, and in the long run are more important in terms of "what happened". But in the long run, as Keynes said, we're all dead. Usually, all we have to go on in the short term is consensus perceptions, and we modify them as we go along. Often our ability to do that is very limited, sometimes it's not. But it's important to note this, because this is how we can explain "why it happened".
This is not new, nor particularly insightful--but it is worth reminding ourselves of this from time to time, especially in the context of a conflict where the "consensus" as developed by "opinion-leaders" has been disproven by facts so frequently.
We all have our own individual view of the world, which we modify (or not) as facts come along. More generally, even when we get facts, we interpret them differently, depending on our own individual consensus view of the world. Now, dragging this back to Beauchamp, is there anyone out there whose consensus view of this conflict will be changed one way or the other if the facts in Beauchamp turn out to be true? Or, for that matter, if they turn out not to be true? Probably not, although it's possible that one way or another, this may contribute to someone incrementally modifying their view. Which is how this happens--it's rarely a eureka moment, it's usually a process. And this is probably true from the framework of the broader cultural consensus views (and there are obviously several of them) that now dominate any dialog about this conflict.
So in terms of your original question, both. But in terms of how we think about things on a day to tday basis, how we formulate views on things (such as the legitmacy of a particular war, or the appropriateness of the behavior of a group of soldiers), it's the consensus that's more important in the short term, and how we respond to it and incorporate it (or not) into our own individual worldview. It's usually all we have to go on.
wufnik --
My point above was that few people enjoy being informed that best way for them to understand their benighted view is to consider... the Nazis. Godwin and all that. If skipping that analogy improves the presentation of your ideas, maybe skipping it is a good idea, generally?
Well, no. As you say, it's incremental. A mosaic, in some ways. Most of us want to build pictures out of elements that are truthful, not from ones that are intentionally or recklessly deceptive. Beauchamp the creative writer intentionally constructed a story that told of widespread, general depravity in his unit. He's doing his small part to share a terrible truth about Iraq, or he's intentionally poisoning the public debate with lies (to repeat, the grotesque parts are not the taunts, etc., themselves but the response of his fellow soldiers to them). As someone who read him and believed him, I would like to know which.
Thus the temptation to "game the system" (each of us can supply our own set of illustrative incidents).
AMac--
Hmmm again. It would never have occurred to me that what I was doing was trying to get people to understand their benighted view....
Now I'm thoroughly confused. But thanks for having me!
Dreadfully peripheral to the topic:
I'm in a curmudgeonly mood lately, so I haven't had much substantive to contribute (and thus the cat-and-tongue kindly mentioned by TOC elsewhere). But this tendency (call it consequentialism, Galbraithism, expediency, or what-have-you) is in large measure what politics, and particularly diplomacy, are all about.
There are a lot of biases that come with being human. "Net Present Value" of the truth tends to be pragmatically discounted by proponents (people with something to say), and readers tend to be credulous or dismissive almost by reflex. Then there's the self-deception on both parts. Sometimes I weep for the species.
"We" (Western Civ) tend to teach young kids deontologically (the Kantian some-things-are-just-wrong-full-stop) because it works. Then, by around the age of 6 or so, at the latest, they learn that Adults Don't Know Everything. Anyone else here familiar with the kid studies that seem to show that the most convincing precocious liars are also the "born leaders"? Or the notion that the only difference between a con man and a tycoon is that sometimes the tycoon keeps his promises?
I'm no different, I want to believe "my" liar and discredit the others. The "illustrative incidents" are more available and multispectral now than they were back when you could believe, e.g., that it was just that one friar or abbey that was corrupt, or that one noble who was cruel. God was supposed to sort it all out eventually anyway.
But, pace David Brin, there's still a web of civilization that mostly works. IC chips that I buy usually always function when I plug them in, and most people around here obey traffic signals.
Sorry. Apparently I am either too intoxicated, or not intoxicated enough. /joke