Never expected to see this much good sense in the Washington Post Kaplan Daily. No doubt Kaplan’s latest ombudsperson has already drafted a tear-stained apology to Andrew Breitbart.
Hearts, Minds, and Fingers
I guess my viewing of the excellent Barak Goodman’s American Experience: My Lai documentary was rather timely:
Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret “kill team” that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.
Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians.
In one of the most serious accusations of war crimes to emerge from the Afghan conflict, the killings are alleged to have been carried out by members of a Stryker infantry brigade based in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan.
According to investigators and legal documents, discussion of killing Afghan civilians began after the arrival of Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs at forward operating base Ramrod last November. Other soldiers told the army’s criminal investigation command that Gibbs boasted of the things he got away with while serving in Iraq and said how easy it would be to “toss a grenade at someone and kill them”.
What were they thinking?
With any organization as large as the military, you are going to have some bad eggs. As my drill sergeant was fond of saying when he stressed the importance of securing your wall locker, “There was a thief in your Sunday school class.” And I understand the extraordinary stress these soldiers are under, and don’t know if I would have been able to survive.
Having said that, what I don’t understand is how so many go along with it. We’re not talking about one bad egg here- we’re talking about a group of 12 that is accused of some horrible, heinous crimes. And again, the thing we need to keep in mind is that we are just learning about this, but the Afghan civilians have known about this for a while. Again, the secret war in Laos was not a secret to Lao.
And it goes without saying that even though it is the Army that is making these charges, the 101st Chairborne will spend the next few months claiming liberals are smearing the troops for talking about this.
We Could Probably Use Those Jobs
NY Times is full of great news tonight:
Now, Changsha and two adjacent cities are emerging as a center of clean energy manufacturing. They are churning out solar panels for the American and European markets, developing new equipment to manufacture the panels and branching into turbines that generate electricity from wind. By contrast, clean energy companies in the United States and Europe are struggling. Some have started cutting jobs and moving operations to China in ventures with local partners.
The booming Chinese clean energy sector, now more than a million jobs strong, is quickly coming to dominate the production of technologies essential to slowing global warming and other forms of air pollution. Such technologies are needed to assure adequate energy as the world’s population grows by nearly a third, to nine billion people by the middle of the century, while oil and coal reserves dwindle.
But much of China’s clean energy success lies in aggressive government policies that help this crucial export industry in ways most other governments do not. These measures risk breaking international rules to which China and almost all other nations subscribe, according to some trade experts interviewed by The New York Times.
Can someone explain why we, the United States, feel free to act like a rogue nation in basically every other regard- we torture, we’ll bomb and invade whoever we want, when we don’t ignore the UN we are telling them what to do, etc., but we draw the line here?
Beautiful Ugliness
I’m skeptical, but I trust the source of this piece arguing that Australia’s version of Ben Nelson, Tony Windsor, cast the deciding vote to enable a Labor coalition government because Labor is planning nationwide fiber broadband. That said, according to the AP, the story is a bit more complicated:
The last two independents to agree to support Gillard’s government, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, are former members of the conservative Nationals party, which is part of Abbott’s coalition.
Gillard rewarded the two rural-based lawmakers by promising 10 billion Australian dollars ($9 billion) in new investment for rural schools and hospitals.
She has also offered Oakeshott a Cabinet post, which he had yet to accept.
Oakeshott said on Tuesday that governing with the support of four lawmakers from outside Labor would be “ugly, but it’s going to be beautiful in its ugliness.”
A guy who can spin like that deserves a Cabinet post, at a minimum.
Yo Blair
Apropos of Blair on Amanpour, reader numbskull links to an interesting comment on Open Left (it’s safe to click this link, you won’t be confronted with a 5000 word anti-Obama screed, I promise):
The thing about Britain is that their debate is closer to the real meat and potatoes of what this argument is all about. Ours is frustratingly diverted into “Like or Dislike Obama” or “Is the Tea Party Racist” and other tangential questions.
Britain makes it clear: it’s really about social democracy vs. neoliberalism.
It is important that [Open Left] understand this. This is the debate that is barely allowed to be mentioned on our side of the pond but it’s the crucial distinction.
When Paul Krugman argues for Keynesianism he’s taking the social democratic side of this argument. But he’s not allowed to say so, or at least not willing.
I know what they’re getting at, but I think the Krugman example is a bad one. Krugman wanted a big Keynesian stimulus based on his projections about the economy more than on anything ideological; I understand that believing a big stimulus helps during a recession in general may smack of ideology, but the basis for the belief, in this case, is mostly empirical and even quasi-scientific. I think it would be perfectly possible to be neoliberal in most regards — dismantle the welfare state, privatize everything, free trade, etc. — and still believe that a huge infusion of government spending is a good idea during a terrible recession.
But I too am struck by the relative lack of “who would you rather have a beer with” bullshit in UK politics. What is the cause of this? Is it that there’s royalty to suck up all that personalism?
But it seems to me it’s more than that. UK politicians aren’t accorded the same Russert-on-Cheney cowed respect that we see here. Is it that a more obvious class system breeds distrust of very serious people? Is it that politicians get so beat up on the floor of parliament that it seems silly for journalists to suck up to them in public? Is it just the awesomeness of the BBC?
Atheists and Agnostics in Foxholes
This WSJ piece describing the atheist and agnostic Marine Corps guards of a Navy chaplain is not a sympathetic portrayal of the chaplain, who sounds like a moron:
“Hey, sir, don’t get out of the vehicle until I lay down a sniper screen,” Gunnery Sgt. Mark Shawhan, an agnostic with a suspicion of organized religion, instructed Chaplain Moran before the patrol. “That’s where he’s been getting us, and when you cross the bridge—RUN.”
Lt. Moran wasn’t troubled. “I believe the Lord is going to protect us,” he said. But he wondered aloud whether to finish his Meal, Ready-to-Eat packaged lunch before heading to the armored vehicle.
Gunny Shawhan shook his head in disbelief.
When their turn came, the chaplain and his assistant bolted across the bridge and pivoted into a cornfield, where the minister stood upright. RP2 Chute shouted at Lt. Moran to get down. “Take a knee,” he yelled.
And this:
The chaplain was struck both by RP2 Chute’s command of the Book of Revelation, and his refusal to take it seriously. “He’s familiar with the Christian doctrine, but he chooses not to believe it,” says the chaplain, a slender-faced, soft-spoken man with a fringe of gray in his black hair. “That’s what I find puzzling.”
On a visit to Kilo Co., a Marine asked for a biblical ruling on tattoos. Lt. Moran said the Book of Leviticus bans them. RP2 Chute disagreed. Leviticus, he said, says people shouldn’t get tattoos to mourn the dead.
The article reminds me of a great scene from the HBO miniseries Generation Kill:
Don’t stop til you get enough
I loves me some hot Glenn Greenwald on Jeff Goldberg action. And since everyone’s favorite gonzo Goldberg publicist is back from the DL, this seems like a good time for some more of it (h/t Turbulence):
“I don’t think that just because someone is wrong about something that they should forever have their credibility impaired,” he (Greenwald) told me in a phone interview. “But I think there are two things that distinguish this case. One is the consequentiality of it and the centrality he played. It wasn’t like he was just kind of wrong about something, he was one of the leading people validating the war. The thing that happened in the Iraq War is that obviously the right got behind it because the people on the right — the leaders on the right — were clearly behind it. But in order to make it a majoritarian movement, they had to get centrists and liberals behind it. So they needed liberal validators … There’s probably nobody that you can compare in influence to getting Democrats and liberals to support the war than Jeffrey Goldberg. It wasn’t just that he was for the war, he was using his status as a reporter to feed lies. I mean he didn’t just write one New Yorker piece but a second one too, and he was all over the television with this stuff saying that Saddam had a very active nuclear program and most importantly that Saddam had an enthusiastic alliance with al-Qaeda.”
[…..]“[Goldberg’s responses] are all substance free,” he told me. “It’s funny. It’s almost like his responses are three or four years behind. When I first started writing about criticizing media figures — establishment media figures — that was very much the reaction. It was a very lame sort of not-really-attentive response, just dismissive or plain mockery. Like, ‘I don’t have to respond because in my world he’s nobody and I’m somebody so the most I’m going to do is be derisive about this.’ That’s a journalist/blogger cliché from 2005, and most journalists know they can no longer get away with it. He’s living in a world where he thinks it doesn’t affect his reputation. Among his friends it doesn’t. I’m sure he calls [TIME writer] Joe Klein or whoever else I’ve criticized and he’s like ‘he’s an asshole and a prick, don’t worry about that.’ But I guarantee you that there are a lot more people reading the stuff I write than the stuff he writes, in terms of sheer number. And the level of impact that that kind of level of critique has is infinitely greater than it was three years ago. So I’m sure he tells himself and convinces himself that it doesn’t actually matter but it does. And it’s hurting his credibility.”
Let’s get a few things out in the open to save time. Just as Al Gore is fat, Glenn Greenwald is an asshole. It’s silly to talk about this at all, because the bombing will never happen and it’s also silly to to criticize Jeff Goldberg for saying it will happen. And to quote Wonkette, you are all anti-Semites for even reading this post.