The Wisdom of Soldiers
Among the many intelligent and forceful criticisms of the mere tricious Baker-Hamilton report, THE SCRAPBOOK’s favorites have been from soldiers, ranging from lieutenant colonels to sergeants (THE SCRAPBOOK, a former private first class, has a soft spot for sergeants).
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First, listen to T.F. Boggs, a 24-year-old sergeant in the Army Reserves, back home from his second deployment to Iraq:
Then there were these thoughts emailed to a friend from an active-duty Marine lieutenant colonel now serving in Iraq:
True, they don’t offer 79 recommendations, but we’ll stack the wisdom of these two up against any number of Washington eminences.
Utter Abstractions at Columbia
The December 11 issue of the New Republic contains an essay by Andrew Delbanco, a professor at Columbia University and biographer of Herman Melville, on a recent course he taught on “war.”
Delbanco is a graceful writer, and some of the texts he uses in his class, like Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation” and John Keegan’s The Face of Battle, deserve to be read and studied. But what struck us about Delbanco’s essay was his complaint that most of the students and professors at Columbia, and at our elite universities in general, are insulated from the realities of war: “For the vast majority of students and faculty in places like Columbia–it’s different for support and maintenance staff, who are more likely to have friends or family in the line of fire–war is an utter abstraction rather than an imaginable fact.”
You gotta love the elitism dripping from asides like “it’s different for support and maintenance staff.” Still, though, Delbanco is right. The academy is isolated from war and the warrior culture.
But here’s the thing: Delbanco never mentions in his essay that in Columbia’s case (as with many other elite universities) there is a simpler explanation than social class for the situation he laments. Columbia banned the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) from its campus in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam war. And as recently as May 2005, Columbia’s Senate (an advisory panel of faculty and students) voted 53-10 to keep Morningside Heights pristinely military free.
“Bad Guys Are Winning”
We saw the above headline in the International Herald Tribune last week and reached for our smelling salts: Holy smokes, we thought, they finally realize we’re at war. Then we kept reading: “Spam is back–in our inboxes and on everyone’s minds.”
Oh. Somebody better alert the jihadists not to start sending junk emails–because if they did that, the media might finally roll up their sleeves and join the fight.
Mr. Invisible
James Baker “likes to be the man behind the scenes,” writes Evan Thomas in the December 11 issue of Newsweek. Curiously, the issue features on its cover . . . a full-length exclusive Newsweek photo portrait of Baker and his Iraq Study Group co-chairman, former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, to whom, Thomas writes, Baker is “very deferential,” for example refusing “to be photographed” without Hamilton present.
Last Word on Baker-Hamilton
Among other things called for by the Iraq Study Group, noted columnist James Lileks last week, was this list of desiderata:
* Syria’s full adherence to U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 of August 2006, which provides the framework for Lebanon to regain sovereign control over its territory.
* Syria’s full cooperation with all investigations into political assassinations in Lebanon, especially those of Rafik Hariri and Pierre Gemayel.
* A verifiable cessation of Syrian aid to Hezbollah and the use of Syrian territory for transshipment of Iranian weapons and aid to Hezbollah. (This step would do much to solve Israel’s problem with Hezbollah.)
* Syria’s use of its influence with Hamas and Hezbollah for the release of the captured Israeli Defense Force soldiers.
* A verifiable cessation of Syrian efforts to undermine the democratically elected government of Lebanon.
“All conducted under the watchful eyes of unicorns, of course,” concluded Lileks.
