Interview with Drowning Pool - UPDATED

[Andi]

At 3:00 EDT, some members of the band Drowning Pool will join us on SpouseBUZZ Talk Radio to discuss their performances for our troops in Iraq, Kuwait and Seoul as part of their USO tour, their "This is for the Soldiers" campaign and their affection for the military. You can call in and ask questions of the band. Details here.

UPDATE: I've just been informed that the entire band will join us at 3:00 (in 25 minutes). You can click here to listen live.

My Favorite New Phrase

[Andi]

"We need a surge of facts." That's good. Really good....

News of Afghanistan - The Return VI (Edition 62)

[Major John]

Taliban hurting and killing kids (gee, that is something new), follow up on the censorship case, banking, food and PRT in Helmand - all here.

Wishful Thinking, and Just Wishes

[Dadmanly]

By now, many have taken in The Washington Post editorial today, describing “wishful thinking” on both sides of the latest debate over our efforts in Iraq. The Post offers helpfully:

If American men and women were dying in July in a clearly futile cause, it would indeed be immoral to wait until September to order their retreat. But given the risks of withdrawal, the calculus cannot be so simple. The generals who have devised a new strategy believe they are making fitful progress in calming Baghdad, training the Iraqi army and encouraging anti-al-Qaeda coalitions. Before Congress begins managing rotation schedules and ordering withdrawals, it should at least give those generals the months they asked for to see whether their strategy can offer some new hope.

TigerHawk, noting the Post’s editorial, suggests an apparent advantage for advocates of retreat:

The advocates of retreat have more supporters because they are asking that we take a risk in return for a certain benefit -- fewer American casualties and lower costs today. The retreatists also have more credibility than the Bush administration, which has made one incorrect prediction after another since before the war began.

The problem, of course, is that retreat also allows for the possibility of genuine catastrophe, not just in Iraq but in the region. That risk has to be weighed against the costs of continuing the fight, which after four years are pretty well-defined. We know that compared to our national income and population, the costs of remaining in Iraq are relatively low. In both human and financial terms, Iraq has been and will probably continue to be an inexpensive war for America to shoulder.1
____________________________________________
1 Total defense spending, including Iraq, remains a much smaller proportion of GDP than it was even during the 1980s, much less the height of the Cold War. Casualties remain low, even including the seriously wounded. Yes, it is "stretching" our military, but only because in the recent reorganization of our military we guessed the next war would look like the Gulf War rather than Vietnam or the Philippines. We could fix that, and should.

In fairness to the rest of TigerHawk’s assessment, he also speculates as to whether supporters of the war were right to entrust the effort to President Bush.

Other voices have joined in expressing similar cautions about a “precipitous withdrawal” from Iraq, or the dire consequences that follow there from, but often from the same set of assumptions that Iraq is a disaster, there’s a native-grown (rather than externally provoked or potential) civil war, and that we have failed in our efforts until recently.

I challenge these assumptions as largely ignorant, political motivated, naïve, or ill-informed. Iraq was never the mess the media made it out to be, we have had stunning successes, even in Iraq politically, and our enemies grow more and more desperate every day. This is all before one takes into account the very significant progress resulting from surge operations and a full fledged assault against Al Qaeda in Iraq.

There’s a kind of backwash of reflection going on in some quarters, where one could otherwise reliably count on to criticism of President Bush, every office and workstation of his administration, or supported public policy. One wonders if all these sober reflections are merely eyewash for a much hoped for “Grand Bargain” whereby the President surrenders his will (and integrity) in some vain hope for a constructive way out of the “mess that is Iraq.”

(More commentary on Jules Crittenden'sstringent critique of AP over at Dadmanly.)

Service and Sacrifice

[Dadmanly]

National Public Radio (NPR) has been running an ongoing series on service, and the latest two installments have touched on mandatory national service, which would include (but not be limited to) a potential draft, and military service at a time of war.

In the latter, NPR’s Morning Edition ran a piece today, annotated as follows:

Army Ranks See Imbalance in Iraq War Sacrifice
Morning Edition, July 12, 2007 • Army Maj. Gen. Mark Hertling, Commander of the 1st Armored Division, which is soon to deploy to Iraq, has two sons who are Army officers and have served in Iraq. Hertling says many in the military are recognizing, if not resenting, a growing imbalance of sacrifice in the war in Iraq.

I guess an “abstract,” if that’s what you’d call this, can’t possibly capture the entirety of a larger whole, but this seems a selective characterization of a quite remarkable interview. You should listen to the whole thing, available at NPR.

Interviewer Steve Inskeep started off his portrait by contrasting the perspective of Hertling’s wife back in 2003 and now, and asked her if she feels any different now versus then. She carefully reflected that it is harder to relate, and shared the example of a conversation about what products to use for lawn care. She remarked that concerns (for a military family) are different.

Inskeep really did an exceptional job in this interview, he drew out of Hertling and his wife an honest and engaging portrait of this family, who together have sacrificed so much, and still have so much at potential risk.

Inskeep used the example of his own fatherly concern for a young daughter, and contrasted that with what Hertling and his wife must experience with his sons, both now commissioned officers, when they deploy to Iraq.

Hertling’s wife has had to endure the deployment of Hertling or either of his two grown sons to Iraq for the all of the past 4 years, with only a 3 month respite. Mrs. Dadmanly described her won version of that experience something like this:

“Soldiers, you know when you’re in danger, and when you’re [relatively] safe. We families don’t know. For us, we worry for the entire time you’re gone. Even when we talk to you on the phone, or email or instant message, if we don’t actually hear the booms, we can hear the stress and concern in you. You can’t hide it that well, at least not all the time.”

(For more commentary on NPR's pieces on sacrifice, and some further thoughts on military service, read more at Dadmanly.)

If the UCMJ Applied to 223 Members of Congress

[ArmyLawyer]

House OKs Plan to Withdraw US Troops

On a related note:

Article 99—Misbehavior before the enemy

Any member of the armed forces who before or in the presence of the enemy—

(1) runs away;
(2) shamefully abandons, surrenders, or delivers up any command, unit, place, or military property which it is his duty to defend;
(3) through disobedience, neglect, or intentional misconduct endangers the safety of any such command, unit, place, or military property;
(4) casts away his arms or ammunition;
(5) is guilty of cowardly conduct;
...
(8) willfully fails to do his utmost to encounter, engage, capture, or destroy any enemy troops, combatants, vessels, aircraft, or any other thing, which it is his duty so to encounter, engage, capture, or destroy;
...
shall be punished by death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct.

Sometimes you gotta wonder about folks that would so willingly consign millions of innocents to a brand of brutality that gives even the most hardened of warriors pause. And to do so when you alone have the power to prevent such medieval viciousness all under the guise of claimed "support" just makes you look askance at such people and ask "Who ARE these people?"

Sometimes you just gotta wonder...

Life in Camp No. 14

[GIKorea]

The International Herald Tribune's Choe Sang-hun has a must read article about the life of a former North Korean political prisoner in the notorious Camp No. 14:

Shin, now 24, was a political prisoner by birth. From the day he was born in 1982 in Camp No. 14 in Kaechon until he escaped in 2005, Shin had known no other life. Guards beat children, tortured grandparents and, in cases like Shin’s, executed family members. But Shin said it did not occur to him to hate the authorities. He assumed everyone lived this way.

He had never heard of Pyongyang, the capital city 90 kilometers, or 55 miles, to the south, or even of Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader.

"I didn’t know about America, or China or the fact that the Korean Peninsula was divided and there was a place called South Korea," he said. "I thought it was natural that I was in the camp because of my ancestors’ crime, though I never even wondered what that crime was. I never thought it was unfair."

Make sure you read the rest of this defector's chilling accounts of pure evil here.