The Twilight Zone: the episode of the phantom doorbells

The New Neo Posted on by

This morning my doorbell rang at 6:15 AM.

And rang. And rang and rang and rang.

I don’t usually have visitors at that hour of the day, announced or un. I live in a quiet residential neighborhood and it’s rare that my doorbell rings at all, unless it’s an expected guest. Six-fifteen AM is not an hour when I’m usually awake, and if even the phone rings at that time I consider it Bad News.

When I collected myself enough to understand that yes, indeed, my doorbell was in fact actually ringing, and rather insistently at that, I had to decide whether or not to answer it. My front door has one of those peepholes that allow you to view the visitor, but when I looked out there was no one there. So I decided to forget about it.

Ten minutes later it happened again. This time I glanced out an upstairs window to see whether I could ascertain who was standing there at this highly unusual hour. My view was partially obstructed, so I didn’t know for sure, but I wasn’t able to see anyone. I looked through the door peephole again, and saw nothing but the house across the street. So perhaps my visitor was a young child, a dwarf, or a specter that had somehow (as in the movie “Ghost”) managed to bridge the gap between the spirit and material worlds to make a physical impression on the latter.

There’s a deck off my bedroom, and so I went outside to view the early morning street. It was spectacularly lovely; sunny and a bit cool, filled with garden fragrances. In front of my house was a teenaged boy with a heavy backpack, bowed head and loping walk, trudging off to a day of school. Could it have been he, playing some sort of strange prank?

A runner in shorts sped by, full of energy surprising for this time of day. My neighbor, a hyper-fit triathlete and mother of three who looks about eighteen herself, was warming up for her run (or it might have been her bike ride, who knows?). I called out to her from my deck and explained what had been happening. She went into her house to ask her family if they’d seen any suspicious activity, but immediately came out again to say that her doorbell had just started to ring.

And then mine rang again, almost in unison. We laughed, and I told her I sensed a tremor in the force field, and then started humming the “Twilight Zone” theme.

Those of you who’ve only seen the show in reruns can’t begin to understand how wonderful it was, how very mind-blowing (even though that phrase hadn’t yet been invented) to its mostly young fans, including me. From the very first episode it tapped into what Rod Serling called—in his clipped, incisive, quietly riveting voice—“a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.”

Wondrous, indeed; mysterious, and ever-so-slightly—and deliciously—terrifying. The black-and-white cinematography only added to the effect, which was considerable. The show’s formula was to build suspense and then add a twist, one the viewers knew was coming but the details of which (in those more naive days) could almost never be guessed.

Many of the episodes were so memorable that those of us who are of a certain age can refer to them in shorthand and instantly know what we’re talking about. “The Hitchhiker” made quite a few women of that generation think twice about traveling alone cross-country in a car. “The Eye of the Beholder” was an early commentary on plastic surgery and conventional ideas about good looks, with the requisite surprise ending, of course. “The Invaders” managed to work a startling reversal on the classic space-alien-invasion story without using a single word for its entire length. Time travel was a favorite, as was psychology (I can still hear the tinny, gurgling voice of the slot machine seductively warbling “Franklin, Franklin…” to the gambling-obsessed protagonist in “The Fever“).

Maybe nowadays I’d be able to guess the endings; I don’t know, and I’ll never know, because I remember most of the episodes to this day (yes, indeed, the mind is cluttered with irrelevancies and trivia and all that). At the time, however, they were a stunning revelation to that child and then young teenager I was when I first watched them and felt that delicious thrill.

Iraq: will words help?

The New Neo Posted on by

Victor Davis Hanson sums it up admirably:

Either stabilizing Iraq now is felt critical to the United States and the West or it isn’t.

The responsible Left hears the question and answers that it is not critical. The irresponsible Left doesn’t care, because it feels the West itself is a blight on the world and wouldn’t mind that it be defeated and replaced by—well, by some sort of Utopian and impossible dream or other, or perhaps just said Leftists in charge.

Some on the Right also feel the answer is that it is not. I, like Hanson, feel that it is indeed critical—but not necessarily critical in the sense that failure there would be irreparable. I think we are stronger than that, although of course I could be wrong. My opinion is that failure there would increase the cost immensely both for us and for the enemy, and that these new payments could be so bloody that it would make the Iraq War look like a quaint tea party.

The same, of course, was true at Munich. The death of many millions could have been avoided if only—if only. Instead, humble and flawed human beings (of which I am one, as is every prognosticator on the other side and every commenter here) can only do the best they can to look at the situation and try to plot the best course of action for the future, knowing we can never predict it properly.

Hanson, a writer and thinker I admire tremendously, says quite a few other things in his National Review piece that I think are to the point. One involves the intelligence of the enemy and their ability to use our own technological advances against us:

We create sophisticated communications at great cost and investment; the parasitical terrorists simply bore into them and use them at no cost and sometimes with greater effect than do their inventors.

Indeed. And he is also eloquently spot on in describing the terrorists’ knowledge of the general Western mindset and impatience, as well as the sad-but-true fact that it is far easier (always) to destroy than to create, and takes far fewer people.

I disagree, however, with his remedy. Hanson is more optimistic than I about the power of improved communication on our end, and for everyone’s sake I hope he is more correct than I as well. He writes that [my emphasis]:

…unless explained, most Americans will not see a connection between the ideology of the head-drillers and head-loppers we are fighting in Iraq and those who try to do even worse at Fort Dix and the Kennedy airport. The war to remove Saddam was won and is over; the subsequent and very different war in Iraq that followed is for nothing less than the future of the Middle East ”” and now involves everything from global terrorism and nuclear proliferation to the world’s oil supply and the future of Islam in the modern world. We need to confess that the jihadists are not only keen students of insurgency warfare, but good observers of the American psyche….we must start using our vast cultural and media resources to explain what is at stake ”” in a strategic and humanitarian sense ”” and precisely what it is costing America and why it in the long run is worth it…The more brutal honesty, the less euphemism and generalities, the more Americans will accept the challenge.

Funny thing, but I’ve heard those explanations coming from this administration. Perhaps because they were delivered by Bush’s un-eloquent voice, or his much-hated persona, they could not be heard. Perhaps the press coverage wasn’t good enough, or sympathetic enough. Or perhaps too many people weren’t ready to hear the message, especially if the execution of the task wasn’t perfect, swift, and easy.

Perhaps Hanson is right, though. If so, I hope the next administration, be it Republican or Democrat, will be able to convey the message in a way that the American people can finally hear it.

But I think it will take more than a well-articulated message. Possibly that would have been enough earlier, but by now so many people may have turned so far away from hearing what is at stake that I don’t think even a leader such as Churchill could deliver it properly at this point. I think that actions will speak much louder than words, in the end, and unfortunately those actions might be terrible enough to grab our attention and fills us with a “terrible resolve.”

Garden pride

The New Neo Posted on by

This is the time of garden hope and burgeoning garden pride. It’s the honeymoon when everything is going well and the bugs haven’t arrived yet for their tasty meals, nor has the drought browned and crisped the foliage, nor have the weeds taken over and the gardener given up the struggle against them.

To those who don’t garden (and until a few years ago I counted myself among their ranks) this sort of post seems a bit quaint and more than a little dull. My apologies. But to those of us who garden or who like flowers, especially in the short and therefore greatly-appreciated gardening season in the Northeast, it’s a deeply satisfying time of year.

And so, without further ado, I’ll show you what I mean:

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shade2.jpg

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And I think even Van Gogh might be pleased with this one:

100_1681jpeg-irises.jpg

Defending Chavez: enemy of their enemy

The New Neo Posted on by

I was thinking of Hugo Chavez recently because I was at a party Saturday night and his name came up in a rather odd context. I noticed a youngish women carrying a fluffy white dog in her arms. I went over to admire the pooch, a very amiable animal. When I asked its name, her answer was “Hugo Chavez.”

I wondered why the moniker, and the owner said that, although when Chavez came to the UN and called Bush a “devil” he wasn’t exactly exercising good diplomacy, she admired him for telling the truth and she wanted to pay tribute to him in some small way. I’m not so sure naming a small curly-haired dog after Chavez is really a form of homage, but I asked what she thought of Chavez now. Her answer was rather evasive; she said she knew some Venezuelans who liked him and some who didn’t like him.

No doubt. But when I asked her whether they’d changed their minds since the recent closing of the TV station, she said she hadn’t spoken to them since that had happened. But clearly she was predisposed to like and to defend Chavez.

This may seem a small thing. But the incident pointed out to me the ubiquity of the old adage, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Chavez is clearly a dictator who has imperiled the democratic process in Venezuela, and anyone on the right or the Left who truly believes in democracy should have no problem recognizing that. But hey, he called Bush a devil, so he can’t be all that bad, can he?

And then today I read Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club’s post pointing out the fascinating spectacle of figures on the British Left (including some journalists) defending Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s war against the dissenting media in his country.

Hypocrisy and double standards are certainly not the sole province of the Left; I’m well aware that the Right is capable of such things as well. But this seems to be an especially egregious case, as Fernandez points out in a later comment to the thread:

A lot of people in the media argue that “giving the other side a voice” is part of their job. Nor would they concede that a news outlet can be guilty of “abetting” anything until it is proven in court. It seems to me that the closed TV stations have been nowhere convicted — and here is the irony — except in sections of the Western press itself.

And what is so amazing is the sight of people like Pilger justifying a level of media censorship he would never consent to be applied to himself. You have the spectacle of professional journalists cheering the shutdown of large sections of a country’s media industry simply because because it is politically convenient.

Lest you think Pilger’s opinion is irrelevant, please read this for some of the man’s history. Like quite a few of today’s Leftists, he’s been a journalist since the days of Vietnam. If you read the linked article, you’ll notice that back then Pilger was responsible for the meme that US bombing of Cambodia caused the rise of Pol Pot and that therefore America was implicated in the horrific killings that followed. That line of argument is accepted as an article of faith by the Left and even by most liberals today. It’s been exceedingly influential, and yet it rests strongly on the undocumented evidence of the utterly partisan, socialist-leaning, and far-Left Pilger. Thanks to our guarantee of freedom of the press—which I of course support—Pilger is free to say whatever he wishes and would defend his own right to do so as well as Chavez’s right to do the opposite. Go figure.

Read Pilger’s recent love letter to Hugo Chavez. Beauty is certainly in the eye of the beholder, and Pilger is glowing in his praise of this enemy of his enemy:

In the time I spent with Chavez, what struck me was how un-self-consciously he demonstrated his own developing political awareness. I was intrigued to watch a man who is as much an educator as a leader….What he’s clearly doing is building ordinary people’s confidence in themselves. At the same, he’s building his own political confidence and his understanding of the exercise of power.

Well, I certainly have no quarrel with that last sentence. Chavez understands the exercise of power, as does Pilger.

Blog talk radio: dancing and leadership (not necessarily connected)

The New Neo Posted on by

I was a guest of blogger Fausta‘s today on Blog Talk Radio (click here for the audio). You’ll hear a lighter side of neo-neocon, especially the first half of the show, in which ex-ballet student Fausta and I compare notes on our rough days in the tough dance trenches. Really, it was brutal.

In the second half we discuss leadership and how difficult and rare it is to demonstrate that quality these days.

Words matter: calling a terrorist a what?

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was getting my Master’s degree in Marriage and Family Therapy, one of the major messages I learned was that words matter. Not just the words that clients use to each other, but the words the therapist uses in speaking to clients. I had always been somewhat careful in the way I phrased things, but I learned to be ultra-careful in a session, because the way something is phrased could have a surprisingly large effect on the course of the therapy.

One of the tools therapists use is something called the “reframe” (go here and scroll down a little more than halfway to find a discussion of reframing). The reframing therapist re-labels or re-interprets a behavior that has been given a negative spin by the family, in hope of changing the family’s perspective to facilitate a positive change. Reframes aren’t Pollyana-ish lies, however; to be effective, the therapist must believe they represent some form of truth.

Therapy was developed in a framework in which punitive judgments of children and other family members were the norm. Even in my childhood—not so very long ago—parents felt very free to call kids “bad” and to predict a dreadful life for them if they didn’t change their wicked ways. It was a big advance when books such as this one by Chaim Ginott came out, suggesting that parents condemn as “bad” not the child, but the behavior of the child.

A very small switch, and one that, I hasten to add, still left plenty of room for judgment, limit-setting, and the need for the child to take personal responsability and to change. What it left open as well, though, was for the child to not feel demeaned and diminished as a human being, judged incapable of change because of some inherent flaw within him/herself.

Like many things that are initially advances, in time this correction became an overcorrection. In my tiresome cohort, the Baby Boomers, many parents relinquished responsibility to guide children with a firm hand and even to condemn behavior as bad and in need of correction. In an attempt to be liked by their children, many set few limits at all on behavior.

And then the growing self-esteem movement communicated the idea that it was every child’s right to have high self-esteem no matter what his/her behavior might be. Ginott’s book wanted children to retain a certain amount of shame about their behavior rather than their basic selves but to foster a sense of optimism about improvement. But subsequent “advances” in the field jettisoned the whole notion of shame, helping to create a sense of amoral entitlement in some children no matter what their behavior.

The whole movement spread somehow to the print media, who decided it would be helpful to third-world players on the international scene to have their self-esteem raised, as well. Oh, I know the connection between this and what therapists do is tenuous, and that this behavior on the part of the MSM has many causes—especially political correctness and in some cases the idea that it’s actually the US that has the most reason to feel the emotion known as shame. But both phenomena are on the same continuum, a road our society has been traveling now for quite some time.

Thus we have articles such as the following AP story, about the recent killing of Islamist-what-have-you’s in Somali. I say “what-have-you’s” because the words used to identify the dead in the headlines are surprisingly variable.

The AP is a wire service that has grown immensely in influence because most newspapers don’t have the capability to cover stories in the Muslim world and rely on it for much, if not most, of their news on the subject. Each newspaper takes the AP story and edits it at its own discretion. Often the papers just lazily place the text in their pages intact, without changing a word. The headlines tend to have the most variety, and if you Google this particular story you will see that the titles it is given by different newspapers vary.

Often the dead are referred to as “militants” (see this from Canada, for example). Sometimes the headline doesn’t mention them at all (see this from Seattle, which calls them “militants” and “insurgents” in the AP-generated text). But the same AP article in the Houston Chronicle calls them “terrorists” in its headline. It doesn’t seem that these choices are the least bit accidental.

Then take a look at the words of the article itself. In the fifth paragraph it reads: …Vice-President Hassan Dahir Mohamoud said eight foreign militants were killed in the fighting and Somali forces were pursuing five others. But a bit further down we have an actual quote from Mohamoud, who says: We have successfully completed the operation against the terrorists who came here and we are chasing the other five. Then in the very next sentence the AP reporter does another “reframe,” and writes: …he [Mohamoud] said the total number of militants was 13.

Pleaes forgive me if I say I doubt that’s what Mohamoud actually said. Every time the man is quoted directly, he uses the unambiguous word “terrorist” to refer to the people in question.

“Militant” and “fighter” are morally neutral words that simply mean “those who are engaged in fighting.” Interestingly enough, in this Web-based definition of the word it says: Journalists often use militant as a purportedly neutral term for violent actors who do not belong to an established military.

Yes indeed, they do. We wouldn’t want terrorists to have low self-esteem, would we?

Kevorkian free—except for his fee

The New Neo Posted on by

Creepy assisted suicide advocate and practitioner Jack Kevorkian has been released from prison after serving an eight-year term.

Kevorkian earned the nickname “Dr. Death” back in the 1950s, well before he became known for his willingness to help non-terminally ill but suffering patients end their lives. It comes as no real surprise that his medical specialty was pathology, and indications are that he evinced a deep and unusual a fascination with death even for pathologists. His interest in prison predates his own sojourn there, as well; he was asked to leave his medical residency at the University of Michigan back in 1958 for wanting to experiment (consensually) on convicts as they were being executed.

It’s a poorly-kept secret that many doctors help terminal patients along on the road to death by treating their pain and discomfort aggressively with narcotics, drugs that help to fatally suppress lung function in a person whose health is already ultra-fragile. It’s difficult (although not impossible) to argue with this practice, which seems to me to be a benign one. But it differs greatly from what Kevorkian advocated, which appeared, as time went on, to partake of more and more of the ghoulish and less and less of the objective disinterested doctor—if in fact his ministrations could ever have been described in the latter terms.

The controversial area Kevorkian staked out was to help the suicides of patients who were extremely miserable but not necessarily dying. Initially he devised a machine to help those who had physical handicaps do it themselves, but then he got more and more cocky—and perhaps more interested in hands-on experience. The death for which he was convicted was of a man with ALS whose suicide Kevorkian performed himself, making it a clear homicide, and which Kevorkian had the hubris to videotape and sent to “60 Minutes,” after which he challenged the previously reluctant prosecutor to take him to court.

Back when Kevorkian was active, it was abundantly clear that many of his patients were suffering from the depression that so often comes with the burden of serious illness and/or chronic pain. Follow the link and you will find some of the shocking details about the undertreatment of their conditions, as well as Kevorkian’s singular lack of interest in finding alternative help for them before he administered his “assistance.”

I am not making light of the pain and misery that even non-terminal patients can be visited with; in fact, for many, living with that kind of open-ended suffering can be worse than knowing death is imminent. The health care system often fails such patients, exacerbating their hopelessness. But one way in which it sometimes fails them is to fail to properly treat their sometimes-undiagnosed depression, or to give them the more powerful drugs that could successfully combat their pain.

The undertreatment of chronic pain is a sad fact of modern medicine; fear of prosecution causes many practitioners to underprescribe the panoply of drugs that can help the situation. Kevorkian often stepped in way too quickly to remedy affairs with a more permanent solution: that of death. And he did so with a grisly eagerness and an arrogance that was utterly repellent, and for which he’s paid the price of eight years behind bars.

Speaking of price, he is apparently about to go on the lecture circuit, to the tune of up to fifty or a hundred thousand dollars an engagement. Not bad for an ex-con whose achievements as a doctor seem to have been modest. But he’s a raging a success as a publicity hound.

Breaking the big stick: removing the threat of war to achieve peace?

The New Neo Posted on by

Sometimes it’s hard to believe Henry Kissinger is still alive. He seemed so old already back when he was Secretary of State in the 70s to both Nixon and his successor Ford.

Odd to recall Kissinger received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the ill-fated Paris Peace Accords. He is nothing if not controversial, accused of war crimes by Christopher Hitchens and others, and in general resembling (or so I always thought) the blue meanies of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” movie.

That’s to let you know that I’m aware Kissinger isn’t an authority most people cotton to. And yet this op-ed piece of his in today’s LA Times makes some interesting Vietnam/Iraq analogies.

Those who are interested in international law should read this paragraph:

Whether the [Paris Peace] agreement, officially signed in January 1973, could have preserved an independent South Vietnam and avoided the carnage following the fall of Indochina will never be known. We do know that American disunity prevented such an outcome when Congress prohibited the use of military force to maintain the agreement and cut off aid after all U.S. military forces (except a few hundred advisors) had left South Vietnam. American dissociation triggered a massive North Vietnamese invasion, in blatant violation of existing agreements, to which the nations that had endorsed these agreements turned their backs.

So much for Nobel Prizes and peace agreements. The history of Congressional action in that war is—just as Kissinger writes—that after we no longer had fighting forces in Vietnam Congress initiated a step-by-step process that made it impossible to enforce the agreements that had been negotiated, as North Vietnam was well aware.

I detailed that process here, and recently I also wrote about the final reduction of funding to the near-vanishing point for the South Vietnamese. But it’s important to remember that the latter was just the final, pound-foolish act of Congress in the undermining of the South Vietnamese effort; an earlier legislative effort was the Case-Church amendment of 1973 prohibiting any further US military action in Vietnam without the approval of an utterly antiwar Congress, passed about five months after those Paris Peace Accords were signed, and effectively rendering them meaningless and unenforceable.

It was all done for the cause of peace, peace, peace. A worthy goal to be sure—but ironically enough, the means by which it was done made a travesty of the Peace Accords. Whatever the outcome would otherwise have been, such treaties aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on if there is nothing backing them up. What had gotten the North Vietnamese to the table to sign those Accords in the first place was military pressure on them, as Kissinger relates, pressure that was effectively removed by the Case-Church Amendment.

One wonders what Congress actually thought it was doing at the time. I suppose the goal was reining in what it thought of as an out-of-control and warmongering President and Secretary of State (despite that Peace Prize). Preventing unending war and setting up the bitter end, otherwise known as peace.

Peace treaties—unless they are negotiated at the end of a war in which one side is so utterly defeated it cannot soldier on—must have some sort of credible threat of force backing them up. But if that proverbial “big stick” is removed, the enemy knows it has nothing to fear.

Congress is once again intent, I’m afraid, on breaking that stick in half and casting it on the waters of an illusory peace.

“Unending war” and Ferdinand the bull

The New Neo Posted on by

Cal Thomas has written an article at RealClearPolitics entitled “Unending War,” in which he discusses the tendency of Bush’s opponents to ascribe the longevity of the war against Iraq to the President’s warmongering desires. But Thomas rightly points out that the warriors who are really unlikely to give up until decisively defeated are our opponents in this war.

That’s a bit hard to accept, because most of us are not interested in war—although of course war is often interested in us. The old 60s question “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” rests on the assumption that there are fatcat warlords imposing unwanted wars on an otherwise pacifist populace that could simply refuse to fight and all would be well. This is certainly is irrelevant to the situation in which we find ourselves; in which a sizeable, active, and influential minority of Muslims are Islamic jihadis who have internalized the idea of jihad forever—or at least until the entire world is Dar al Islam rather than Dar al Harb.

So, if the jihadis “give a war” and “nobody comes” to stop them, we can answer the question: what will happen is the triumph of Dar al Islam. If you like that sort of thing, by all means don’t fight them. But if it bothers you a bit, you better start showing up for the war,and get ready for a long haul.

This seems so elementary, so very basic, that I find it difficult to understand those who fail to see it. Yes, of course, we can disagree on details. And yes, of course, the war in Iraq may or may not have been considered part of it at the outset. But even if you didn’t consider it a factor earlier in the game, it certainly is now, because the jihadis and al Qaeda are undisputedly there, fighting hard and dirty against both our forces and the Iraqi people.

Some of Pelosi’s supporters who would agree that it’s Bush who’s the eternal warrior are cynical political opportunists. But I have no doubt that many of them are inspired by a sincere desire for an illusory peace against an enemy whose intense lust for war is difficult for them to contemplate and to acknowledge.

I had that desire as well, especially in childhood. In every society, the young are shaped at least partly by the books they read and the tales they are told. Some stories are merely entertaining, but some are clearly didactic, and many have a mixture of both.

When I was very little, for example, I detested the familiar story of The Little Red Hen. Its relentlessly self-reliant dog-eat-dog Protestant-ethic world seemed so chilling. Forget “it takes a village”—this was individualism with a vengeance. And yet, later in life, there were times when I found it necessary to apply its heartless lessons, and to Do It Myself (and she did).

A more benign early childhood book was The Little Engine That Could. This one was about trying, trying again; about having faith in oneself and finally succeeding against huge odds. Being rather little myself, and the youngest in the family, it gave me hope (it’s interesting, also, that the Wiki link mentions the story as being a metaphor for the American Dream; it occurs to me that it could also apply to the jihadi dream).

But a much greater favorite was Ferdinand the Bull. Ah Ferdinand, Ferdinand, he of the fragrant flowers under the cork tree. I didn’t know the word “pacifist” (nor is it mentioned in the book), but the idea of opting out of struggle and strife into a simple life of non-aggression and nature was remarkably appealing.

According to Wikipedia, it turns out that Ferdinand has a bit of a political history. Published around the time of the Spanish Civil War, it was widely seen as a pacifist tract and even banned by many countries. And if you look at the comments at the Amazon listing for the book, you’ll find many people whose lives were quite affected by reading it, citing its “timeless pacifist message.”

I’m not campaigning against the book itself, which I loved. But I wonder how many people never grow past the fairy tale notion that evil will disappear if we would just sit under that cork tree and smell those flowers long enough. As one of the Amazon commenters points out, in a real bullfight Ferdinand’s lack of ferocity would cause him not to be shipped off to pleasant pastures, as in the book, but to be killed–which is the almost invariable fate of bulls in that activity anyway.

Bulllfighting is a blood sport with strict customs and rules. It is about courage and death. In the traditional Spanish sport the bulls are always killed, except for rare occasions when they are allowed to live as a reward for extreme bravery. The activities of the various human players in the arena are designed both to weaken the bull and to goad it into greater ferocity—if, as in the Ferdinand book, the inherently pacifist bull had previously reacted to a beesting by becoming combative, then it is a near-certainty that the ministrations of the bandilleros and matador in an actual bullfight would have the same effect. And a bull who isn’t especially into fighting doesn’t seem to earn a reprieve, he earns the shameful black banderillas (barbs that are usually colorful, and are placed both to weaken and madden the bull at the same time):

If the bull proves to be extraordinarily weak or unwilling to fight, the presidente may order, to the disgrace of the breeder, the use of black banderillas.

Ferdinand is a lovely story, and I wish it well. But it’s not much of a guide to war, I’m afraid—or even to bullfighting.

Post-Memorial Day questions: is the cause honorable, and is it still achievable?

The New Neo Posted on by

This comment by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle on yesterday’s Memorial Day post makes an excellent point that needs to be addressed:

Suppose that a war is commenced, based on incorrect assumptions which at the time of going to war were not understood as incorrect. However, with the progress of the war, it becomes clear that the assumptions were, in fact, incorrect. In such a situation, continuing to “have the will” to prosecute the war isn’t honorable ”” it’s just stubborn. This logic leads to the mindset that more lives need to be sacrificed just so that the lives sacrificed earlier can be justified. As I hope is clear, this leads to an infinite loop and the war becomes never-ending.

Ninja Turtle is using what might be referred to as the John Kerry argument against “staying the course.” In a 1971 statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry famously said of the war in Vietnam (in fact, it may just be the most famous thing he ever said), “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

The argument, then and now, Vietnam or Iraq, hinges on the meaning and definition of that one word, “mistake.”

If you read Kerry’s entire statement you will find a number of assertions that are taken as articles of faith by the Left. I could (and many have) spend a great deal of time attempting to demonstrate that they are in fact, “mistakes”—amassing evidence of errors, evidence that readers could then argue about for the next few decades, as we have for the past thirty or so years.

Suffice to say that Kerry’s statements were primarily based on the testimony of the exceedingly controversial (and probably mostly bogus) Winter Soldier investigations that he conducted, assertions that have enraged many Vietnam vets ever since (see this and this for background on why); that his assertions about the number of war crimes committed by US forces were enormously inflated; that his assertions about the Vietnamese not knowing or caring whether they lived under democracy or communism have been given the lie by the mass exodus known as the boat people; and on and on and on (see this for a more thorough discussion of some of the many myths of Vietnam).

But of course Iraq is not Vietnam, although the arguments used to show it was a “mistake” are sometimes similar. In his/her comment, Ninja Turtle is making the point that the original justification and expectations for the course of the Iraq war were erroneous, and that therefore there’s no reason to keep sacrificing US lives there in order to justify that mistake.

The issues of initial “mistake”(or, at times, “lie”) have been debated ad infinitum and ad nauseum (did Bush lie or was he mistaken? Did Saddam have weapons of mass destruction that were hidden in the long buildup to the war? Would Saddam have had the capacity to reconsitute his weapons program, and was he eager to do so once sanctions were lifted, which they soon would have been? Were the planners of the war too sanguine in their expectations for its aftermath?). We’re not going to solve those issues today, either. What I would prefer to discuss is whether any of this matters now.

Let’s concede for a moment that much of this was error, and that there were no weapons of mass destruction there and that the planners were too optimistic in their projections about the difficulties of reconstruction. This doesn’t obliterate any of the many other arguments for the war: humanitarian, Saddam’s future intent, his violation of UN resolutions and the terms of the earlier ceasefire. And the fact that miscalculations were made in the prosecution of the war and especially its aftermath isn’t a compelling reason for saying the entire endeavor was an error, either. As I’ve reiterated before, mistakes are part and parcel of every war.

The important questions in deciding whether to continue with the sacrifice (for this is the conundrum we now face) are these: is this war being fought for a good purpose, and is it still possible to achieve that purpose?

Those who cry “No blood for oil,” “Imperialism,” and the like believe the answer to the first question is “no.” If that’s true, the answer to the second question is irrelevant, although I’m sure they would answer it the same way: “no.”

I believe the answer to the first question is “yes,” and have discussed the reason for that belief many times. Which brings us to the extremely important second question; I believe the answer to that one is “yes, ” as well (and have written about it at length before)—with the following qualifications: it will be difficult, and it will not be quick. One thing is certain: that purpose cannot possibly be achieved if we lack the will to do so.

That is the context in which I agree with Bush’s words spoken yesterday, Memorial Day, “Our duty is to make sure the war is worth the sacrifice.” If you don’t believe it was worth the sacrifice at the outset, either because the cause was unjust and/or because it was inherently unwinnable, then the sacrifice of more men and women makes no sense, just as Ninja Turtle says. But if you believe the goals to be both just and still achievable—although difficult—then it really doesn’t matter whether mistakes and errors were made, either at the beginning or up until now. Oh, it matters in that we all wish there had been no errors, just as we all wish not a single American life nor a single innocent Iraqi life would have had to have been lost. But none of these are realistic expectations or demands.

Our abandonment of South Vietnam in 1974/1975 was driven by ideas such as Kerry’s that the war there was both a moral error and unwinnable. Note the last paragraph of Kerry’s 1971 statement, in which he imagines that people thirty years into the future might look back on American’s part in the Vietnam War as a “filthy obscene memory,” and that a pullout would be the way to reverse that tide. But one must also remember that when we ultimately did pull out of Vietnam we had no fighting forces left there, and it would have taken just a small sum of money to keep the South Vietnamese army fighting—-money which we denied them, thus sealing their terrible fate. As Melvin Laird has recently written:

”¦during [1973-1975, when US combat forces had withdrawn], South Vietnam held its own courageously and respectably against a better-bankrolled enemy. Peace talks continued between the North and the South until the day in 1975 when Congress cut off U.S. funding. The Communists walked out of the talks and never returned. Without U.S. funding, South Vietnam was quickly overrun. We saved a mere $297 million a year and in the process doomed South Vietnam, which had been ably fighting the war without our troops since 1973”¦.

This guaranteed that the entire sacrifice, both of American and Vietnamese lives, was indeed in vain. And for what? In the end, it came down to saving a sum of money that was miniscule in the grand scheme of things; the cost of further support was small, the stakes high. In that sense, even though the Vietnam War had been going on for a very long time, the final withdrawal was nevertheless premature, penny wise and pound foolish.

Things are different in Iraq. American fighting forces are still involved there and their lives are still being sacrificed; that makes the cost to the US much higher, although the US casualty figures don’t even begin to reach anything like those of the Vietnam era. But the nasty fact (and one that Democrats and other antiwar activists generally fail to confront) is that much is at stake in our participation in Iraq that would be lost by our withdrawal, and not just for the people of Iraq.

Right now there are reasons to believe that the new approach of Petraeus is bearing fruit—for example, the populace seems to be trusting the US soldiers more and informing on terrorists, leading to finds such as this. I submit that any withdrawal in the next few months would be premature by definition,and would guarantee that the previous sacrifices we and the Iraqi people have made there will have been in vain.