Fort Hood and Political Correctness
This morning, Politico Arena asks:
The Fort Hood tragedy: Why does it matter, or not, what we call it? Is it being politicized?
My response:
If we want to be technical, what we call the Fort Hood massacre matters, and James Taranto got it right in Monday’s Wall Street Journal: It was not a terrorist attack, targeting noncombatants, but an act of guerrilla warfare, carried out by one of our own in apparent contact with the enemy, and hence an act of treason.
But the deeper and far larger problem is why the Army didn’t act sooner against this man and, even more, why it is, as Dorothy Rabinowitz put it in yesterday’s Journal, that “the tide of pronouncements and ruminations pointing to every cause for this event other than the one obvious to everyone in the rational world continues apace.” After all, it is not as if “the Hasan problem,” richly detailed elsewhere, were unknown to the Army. So why was nothing done? We all know why. It was stated simply in an NPR report yesterday: “A key official on a [Walter Reed] review committee reportedly asked how it might look to terminate a key resident who happened to be a Muslim.” If this isn’t ”political correctness,” nothing is.
And it goes beyond the naive analyses that say we can do nothing about these kinds of problems. It infects our very culture, from the newsroom to the college campus and far beyond, crippling sound analysis and judgment. We learn just this morning, for example, again in the Journal, that the FBI may not have briefed the Army, or done so sufficiently (it’s unclear), about Hasan’s intercepted emails with Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Yemeni imam. There may have been intelligence reasons for compartmenting that information. But in other cases it is an obsession with privacy that cripples investigation, itself a species of political correctness. Yet the conflicting “rights” at issue in risk contexts are never more than right claims until they’re delineated by statute or adjudication. Too often, however, that obsession blinds us, including in our legislation and adjudication, to the rights on the other side. After all, the 3,000 who died on 9/11 and the soldiers who died at Fort Hood had rights too.
The Fort Hood massacre cries out for further investigation. But it must be clear-eyed and free from the prejudice that today is rightly called “political correctness.”
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General
Pat Tillman Saw the Iraq War as Folly
Pat Tillman, who gave up a lucrative NFL career to join the Army after 9/11, was a true patriot: he wanted to defend America, not conduct social engineering overseas. That led him to oppose the Iraq war.
According to a new book, Tillman, who was killed by friendly fire in 2004 and hailed as an all-American hero by the former president, was disillusioned by Mr Bush and his administration’s “illegal and unjust” drive to war.
In Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, by Jon Krakauer, the author relates the strong views of Tillman – who gave up his NFL football career to serve his country – and his brother Kevin, who joined the same Rangers unit.
The war “struck them as an imperial folly that was doing long-term damage to US interests,” Krakauer claims.
“The brothers lamented how easy it had been for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld to bully secretary of state Colin Powell, both the houses of Congress, and the majority of the American people into endorsing the invasion of Iraq.”
Tillman was a true citizen soldier. Not only did he leave private life to serve in the military after his nation was attacked, but he believed it was his responsibility to look beyond the self-serving rhetoric of politicians to judge the wisdom of the wars which they initiated. The rest of us should remember his skepticism when confronted with the willingness of politicians of both parties to continue sacrificing American lives in conflicts with little or no relevance to American security.
Bagram, Habeas, and the Rule of Law
Andrew C. McCarthy has an article up at National Review criticizing a recent decision by Obama administration officials to improve the detention procedures in Bagram, Afghanistan.
McCarthy calls the decision an example of pandering to a “despotic” judiciary that is imposing its will on a war that should be run by the political branches. McCarthy’s essay is factually misleading, ignores the history of wartime detention in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, and encourages the President to ignore national security decisions coming out of the federal courts.
More details after the jump.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
George Will Says It’s Time to Leave Afghanistan
Conservative columnist George Will wants out of the war in Afghanistan. And his recommendation is getting some notice. Reports Mike Allen in Politico:
George F. Will, the elite conservative commentator, is calling for U.S. ground troops to leave Afghanistan in his latest column.
“[F]orces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent special forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters,” Will writes.
President Obama ordered a total of 21,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan in February and March, and casualties have mounted as the forces began confronting the Taliban more aggressively. August saw the highest monthly death toll for the U.S. since the invasion in 2001, the second record month in a row.
Will’s prescription – in which he recalls Bismarck’s decision to halt German forces short of Paris in 1870 – seems certain to split Republicans. He is a favorite of fiscal conservatives. The more hawkish right can be expected to attack his conclusion as foolhardy, short-sighted and naïve, potentially making the U.S. more vulnerable to terrorist attack.
The columnist’s startling recommendation surfaced on the same day that Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, sent an assessment up his chain of command recommending what he called “a revised implementation strategy.” In a statement, McChrystal also called for “commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort.”
With a liberal Democrat having become president and made Afghanistan his war, and George Will leading the charge, might conservative Republicans rediscover their inner anti-war feelings?
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