Remember Those Who Fell . . .
and Those Who Were Pushed
2
Will Bunch shares his thoughts on Memorial Day and what it memorializes.
Read it.
There are wars of necessity–wars brought to you–and wars of cynicism–wars you take to others, such as the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq.
We have had a few of the former and too many of the latter.
Those who create wars of cynicism are old men who watch from the comfort of their dens as others die.
They call others amongst the beat of the drums and the skirl of the pipes, while they smoke their cigars, drink their champagne, and collect their checks.
First Son has four times been in harm’s way for the folly of those old men, for he enlisted so as to be able to pay his student loans.
Enough already, enough wars for lies.
May 27, 2013 at 8:04 pm
I re-read Cobra II, a big account of the Iraq war up until shortly after the fall of Baghdad. If you would have been able to ask today who was the general who oversaw the operation as the head of Central Command, how many Americans do you think would know? I bet, at most, 2 in 10. Cobra II is not an easy book to read. it is thick and full of minutia on the planning stage and the drive to Baghdad, which was a lot of chaos in which the US Army and Marines did not -at all- encounter what they assumed they would. They planned to fight the Republican Guard, Saddam’s elite divisions, which they assumed would attack with chemical and biological weapons around Baghdad. But they never did because those elements were all worn down and not in position to fight. Indeed, when Iraqi military men were captured and questioned about gas masks the answer would invariably be that they had them because they had been trained chemical weapons might be used against them. Instead, the US military went up against an irregular army of infiltrators that attacked from all sides, in precursor to what would happen with the insurgency. How many remember Dora Farms, the strategic bombing strike that was aimed at taking out Saddam on the first night? It hit an empty field but I very much recall it made the news with rumors that Saddam had been seen being carried from the rubble. The book is a monument to stupidity, error and hubris. We have the biggest military the world has ever seen and it still thinks the same way. It has no one to fight because all the other big nations gave up on war as a means to world power. So we have to pray we have a president, and future presidents, who will not declare war on pest ant/pariah nations like Syria or Iran or North Korea.
May 27, 2013 at 10:00 pm
When all you have is a hammer . . . .
I’ve read a lot of military history, including most of what Samuel Elliot Morrison wrote. It interests those who want to understand the chess game (and calling it “chess” dignifies it), but it casts no light on how the players come to the game. Truly, all other things being equal, war is a chess game.
But all other things are never equal on the ground or in the trenches, because human beings.
Military history does, however, convince one that war and battles are messy, unpredictable things that often go off in ways no one expected, because, once they start, the players do not act as predicted. It’s as if the chess pieces start moving on their own or develop sudden flaws. The knight no longer moves two forward and one to the side, but one forward and falls over for lack of a supply train.
Military analysts often wonder why, after defeating an enemy, the victor does not pursue and destroy it.
The answer is that, after the battle, both sides are exhausted. One flees, and the other has no energy to follow.
I’m rambling here, but the issue in Iraq was not so much that the military was ill-prepared. It was that the civilians–Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld–thought that they were fighing by Bill Kristol’s rules, and Bill Kristol is always wrong.
I’ll recommend a book. If you read no other book on war, read The Face of Battle.