The War Culture
Glenn Greenwald tears into the Kagan family and their good buddy Bill Kristol, people who deserve the title, "chickenhawk", for attacking Jim Webb's bill to try and relieve some of the stress being endured by US ground troops. The whole thing is well worth the read, but I'll excerpt the last bit.
If troops want more time at home, Kagan says, there is an easy way to achieve that: "win the war we're fighting." Of course, that would not even work, because Kagan and his friends at the Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute have many more wars planned beyond Iraq for other families' sons and daughters to fight. For that reason, Kagan actually had the audacity several months ago to type this:
The president must issue a personal call for young Americans to volunteer to fight in the decisive conflict of this generation.
That's the history of our country for the last six years at least. The Fred Kagans and his dad and his brother and his wife and his best friend Bill Kristol sit back casually demanding more wars, demanding that our troops be denied any relief, demanding that the President call for other families to volunteer to fight in their wars -- all "as an intellectual or emotional exercise," as Webb put it.
That's all revolting enough. But to then watch Fred Kagan sit around opposing Senator Webb's attempts to relieve some of the strain on our troops -- all because it would require too much paperwork to figure out and because they haven't yet won Fred Kagan's war and thus deserve no breaks -- is almost too much to bear. But it is worth forcing oneself to observe it, as unpleasant as it might be, because within this ugly dynamic lies much of the explanation for what has happened to our country since the 9/11 attack, and the personality type that continues to drive it today.
It's hard to come up with anything worse than that, (though this comment I came across this morning about one of the soldiers killed last week who had written in the NY Times a month earlier is rather ugly as well).
It is a weird dynamic where civilian control of the military is one of the founding principles of our form of government, but the US has found itself with civilians in charge who seem to care not at all about the military they are in charge of, destroying it from the inside out while they rail against everyone else for not "supporting the troops".
My guess is that it is because unlike every other war in American history, there has been no sharing of the burden. The suffering has been borne by a fractional portion of the population, and that allows folks like the Kagan clan to keep things at an intellectual distance. A logic puzzle to solve rather than men and women being torn up in a meatgrinder. Bush hasn't even asked Americans for the far less onerous sacrifice of paying enough taxes to pay for the war.
The only way I can think of it is that the US is burning through its national karma at an alarming rate, and restoring balance is going to be a bitch.
