Brad Warthen's Blog

Accountability, USMC style

Peggy Noonan had an excellent column Saturday that I hope you can read (since I'm a subscriber, it's hard for me to tell whether the links I post to the WSJ are subscriber-only or not).

It's about how the U.S. Marine Corps dealt with its own culpability in a tragic plane crash that killed civilians on the ground back in December.

Ms. Noonan's point was to contrast the way the Corps owned up and held its own folks accountable, contrasted to the finger-pointing and blame-shifting that we are used to seeing inside the Beltway, and in the corporate world.

I read it shortly after finishing my Sunday column, in which I decried the tawdry Beltway obsession with the partisan spin-cycle topic of the day, so the contrast was particularly marked in my mind.

Hope you can read the whole thing. At the very least, though, here's an excerpt:

    This wasn't damage control, it was taking honest responsibility. And as such, in any modern American institution, it was stunning.
    The day after the report I heard from a young Naval aviator in predeployment training north of San Diego. He flies a Super Hornet, sister ship to the plane that went down. He said the Marine investigation "kept me up last night" because of how it contrasted with "the buck-passing we see" in the government and on Wall Street. He and his squadron were in range of San Diego television stations when they carried the report's conclusions live. He'd never seen "our entire wardroom crowded around a television" before. They watched "with bated breath." At the end they were impressed with the public nature of the criticism, and its candor: "There are still elements within the government that take personal responsibility seriously." He found himself wondering if the Marines had been "too hard on themselves." "But they are, after all, Marines."

Capt. Smith sits this one out

Ran into James Smith this morning at breakfast, and expressed my surprise that Vincent Sheheen was running for governor and he was not.

He said he just couldn't afford the time away from his family. As you'll recall, he was separated from the wife and four kids for about a year and a half, most of it fighting those folks President Obama calls the Tolly-bon. He said his wife was supportive, but he couldn't stand to miss the time with his kids. He said a Soapbox Derby event over the weekend (or was in Pinewood Derby? I get those mixed up) underlined that for him; if he were to run for gov, he'd miss such events.

On other matters, I mentioned I had thought of him and the other guys of Team Swamp Fox last night, because I've been watching (via Netflix) the HBO series "Generation Kill," based on the book by the same name by a Rolling Stone correspondent embedded with Force Recon Marines on the tip of the spear in the Iraq invasion in '03. The Marines, who were veterans of Afghanistan, talk about that experience a lot, and are sometimes nostalgic because the way they had fought on that front made more sense to them.

Anyway, I need to get together with Rep. Smith sometime and talk at greater length; I haven't had a chance to do that since he got back.

Obama and national security: Pragmatism, continuity

Sorry I haven't posted today -- actually, I DID post something, but it blew up when I hit SAVE, and I'm not about to type it again, so there.

Anyway, I thought I'd put up something that would provide a chance for y'all to discuss Obama's National Security team. I've already expressed my concern about Hillary Clinton, and I don't have a lot to say about the rest. I like that Robert Gates is staying. I've always liked Gates. (See my Nov. 10, 2006, column, "The return of the professional")I thought he was a great pick to rescue our military from the screw-ups of Rumsfeld, and he's generally lived up to that.

But the Gates choice speaks to a larger issue, which is continuity of policy. Obama spoke of his "pragmatism about the use of power and my sense of purpose about America's role as a leader in the world." Which speaks to something I like about him, and appreciate. I hoped it would have been like this, and he's not disappointing me.

Some of y'all who know about my support for our national endeavor in Iraq may have wondered how I could have been so wholehearted about endorsing Obama in the primary last year, given that he stressed so much how he was the one guy who would NOT have gone in there. Well, there's the issue of whether we should have gone in, and the issue of what to do next. And the next president is about what to do next. And I believe Obama will be sensible and pragmatic about what to do next.

Some of his most ardent supporters are likely to be disappointed by the very things that reassure me about Obama and foreign policy. But personally, I don't think Obama's going to blow Iraq just to please them. He's fortunate that the Surge (which he was wrong to oppose) has produced a situation in which an ordered withdrawal of American troops is actually advisable, and no longer reckless. I think he'll be careful to do it in a rational manner, according to conditions on the ground. I think he'll see the things that Tom Friedman sees, and wrote about in his Sunday column:

In the last year, though, the U.S. troop surge and the backlash from moderate Iraqi Sunnis against al-Qaida and Iraqi Shiites against pro-Iranian extremists have brought a new measure of stability to Iraq. There is now, for the first time, a chance — still only a chance — that a reasonably stable democratizing government, though no doubt corrupt in places, can take root in the Iraqi political space.

That is the Iraq that Obama is inheriting. It is an Iraq where we have to begin drawing down our troops — because the occupation has gone on too long and because we have now committed to do so by treaty — but it is also an Iraq that has the potential to eventually tilt the Arab-Muslim world in a different direction.

I’m sure that Obama, whatever he said during the campaign, will play this smart. He has to avoid giving Iraqi leaders the feeling that Bush did — that he’ll wait forever for them to sort out their politics — while also not suggesting that he is leaving tomorrow, so they all start stockpiling weapons.

If he can pull this off, and help that decent Iraq take root, Obama and the Democrats could not only end the Iraq war but salvage something positive from it. Nothing would do more to enhance the Democratic Party’s national security credentials than that.

The really miraculous thing that Friedman notes is a sign that an independent judiciary is emerging in Iraq: The high court came down on a member of parliament for trying to persecute a government official for visiting Israel. This is a startling development, almost miraculous, really. I remember several years back listening to Lindsey Graham talk about how very far Iraq was from developing the institutions that support the rule of law. Graham believed we needed to stay there; I believed we needed to stay there, but contemplating how long it would take for such institutional changes to take hold was extremely discouraging.

Now we're seeing such encouraging signs as this, which is actually as important as the reduction of violence. As Friedman says, "It’s a reminder of the most important reason for the Iraq war: to try to collaborate with Iraqis to build progressive politics and rule of law in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, a region that stands out for its lack of consensual politics and independent judiciaries." That's why Friedman was for the Iraq War, and it's why I was, too. But I didn't think something like this would happen so fast. As you'll recall from what I wrote the week we invaded, I really didn't expect us to be talking realistically about withdrawal this early in the process. But now we can -- as long as we don't screw it up. And keeping Gates at Defense is an important way of maintaining the continuity needed to avoid screwing it up.

I realize that doesn't fit the hopes of those who thought an Obama administration's policies would be as different from the Bush administration's as night and day, and Obama's going to have to do and say some things to keep those people happy, but I suspect he can do that and still chart a wise course. To them, "continuity" is probably a cuss word. But it's the wise course, and it will be respected abroad. More than that, it's what will work.

As David Brooks wrote today, in a column headlined "Continuity We Can Believe In:"

Over the past year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has delivered a series of remarkable speeches echoing and advancing Rice’s themes. “In recent years, the lines separating war, peace, diplomacy and development have become more blurred and no longer fit the neat organizational charts of the 20th century,” he said in Washington in July.

Gates does not talk about spreading democracy, at least in the short run. He talks about using integrated federal agencies to help locals improve the quality and responsiveness of governments in trouble spots around the world.

He has developed a way of talking about security and foreign policy that is now the lingua franca in government and think-tank circles. It owes a lot to the lessons of counterinsurgency and uses phrases like “full spectrum operations” to describe multidisciplinary security and development campaigns....

During the campaign, Barack Obama embraced Gates’s language. During his press conference on Monday, he used all the right code words, speaking of integrating and rebalancing the nation’s foreign policy capacities. He nominated Hillary Clinton and James Jones, who have been champions of this approach, and retained Gates. Their cooperation on an integrated strategy might prevent some of the perennial feuding between the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom and the National Security Council.

Some of you might not be seeing the change you believe in. But I'm already seeing continuity I can believe in.

And here's the change that we WILL see, and that will matter: I think Obama can sell this policies, and make them work, better than Bush did. He was a lousy salesman. As I wrote about the Surge when I first heard about it, it was the right strategy, but Bush was the wrong guy to have selling it.

Obama's the right guy. This is going to be interesting, and I hope gratifying, to watch.

Thomas Smith and the pirates

Among my e-mails today was one calling my attention to an interview (by someone I'm not familiar with, if you'll forgive the dangling preposition) with Columbia's Thomas Smith about the pirates. A sample:

TUSR: Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was stunned by the pirates’ reach. I was taken aback by Mullen’s surprise—the reach has been well-documented in all manner of media, even a lengthy feature in National Geographic this year that somewhat romanticized the pirates. So why is an admiral stunned?
SMITH: Admiral Mullen was ‘stunned’ by the pirate attack taking place so far from the coast, about 450 miles offshore. The attack in fact was a bit surprising. It was bold, very risky for the attackers, and much farther out into the so-called ‘blue water’ than previous attacks we’ve seen by similar bands in recent history.

Now, I’ve since seen a few bloggers and others criticizing the admiral for his remarks – suggesting that no true fighting admiral would say such – and perhaps ‘stunned’ was a less-than-stellar word choice. But the admiral is a professional Naval officer, not a politician. And so I say, it’s easy for those who have never been to war or to sea—and have no frame of reference for an appreciation of just how vast and unforgiving the sea can be—to criticize.

And as long as I'm on the subject, there was a nice piece in the WSJ Saturday drawing some parallels to the Barbary Pirates. I sort of knew the outline of all of that, being a history major who sorta kinda concentrated on that period, but I learned at least one interesting fact from the piece I don't remember having known before:

By the 1790s, the U.S. was depositing an astonishing 20% of its federal income into North African coffers...

We finally decided maybe it would be better to build a Navy, and deal with the problem. Trying to buy off the pirates just encouraged piracy -- which sort of stands to reason, if you think about it.

Anyway, the piece further encouraged a notion I've been kicking around, which might turn into a column: The idea that the Somali pirates actually pose an opportunity to President Obama once he's in office. It's a chance to show the willingness to use force in the defense of international peace and security, with a ready-made multinational coalition to dramatically demonstrate his unBushness:

Of course, the world is a vastly more complicated place than it was two centuries ago and America's role in it, once peripheral, is now preeminent. Still, in the post-9/11 period, America would be ill-advised to act unilaterally against the pirates. The good news is: It does not have to. In contrast to the refusal to unite with America during the Barbary Wars, or more recently the Iraq War, the European states today share America's interest in restoring peace to the seas. Moreover, they have expressed a willingness to cooperate with American military measures against the Somali bandits. Unlike Washington and Jefferson, George W. Bush and Barack Obama need not stand alone.

What to do about the pirates?

Back on this post, bud said:

NEW DELHI (AP) — An Indian naval vessel sank a suspected pirate "mother ship" in the Gulf of Aden and chased two attack boats into the night, officials said Wednesday, as separate bands of brigands seized Thai and Iranian ships in the lawless seas.
-USA Today

Where's the U.S. Navy? We spend 3/4 of $trillion a year on the military and it's the Indian Navy that sinks these thugs. I know we have the capability to defend the shipping lanes. So what gives?

And to think, I was going to post something a couple of days ago about the pirates, but thought y'all wouldn't be interested. Silly me.

As I said to bud (who, if I recall correctly, thought we couldn't succeed in Iraq, which is neither wet nor moving), you think it's a snap for even the world's largest blue-water Navy to prevent small craft from taking UNarmed merchant ships in a section of ocean three times the size of Texas? The supertanker was 450 miles off Mombasa. Look at a map. Think about it.

Folks, the U.S. Navy IS working hard on the piracy problem, along with the Brits, the French, Italy, Canada, Greece and Denmark. And, obviously, the Indians.

You know what would have been the best thing we could do to stop this piracy? Not abandon Somalia to chaos back in 1993 (a retreat on our part that incidentally persuaded Osama bin Laden that it would be easy to take down the U.S.; just inflict a few casualties). Piracy works in the Gulf of Aden because the pirates have a safe place to hide the prizes, since the "government" of Somalia is useless.

And that will continue to be the case as long as we have failed states in East Africa. That's why (ahem) the United States has to employ a full-range policy of forward engagement in the world. (Remember, we stopped the Barbary pirates NOT by playing defense on the high seas, but by sending the Marines ashore to take their haven. Diplomacy also played a significant role, but then the Barbary States were states; there was someone in charge to dicker with.)

I've been watching the latest piracy problem for awhile (I'm into that stuff, being both a Navy brat and a fan of Patrick O'Brian), and the overall story has been one of the U.S. Navy going after the privateers with increasing aggressiveness. This from the NYT on Oct. 30:

As Somalia’s rulers have struggled with an insurgency and political instability that culminated in the resignation of the prime minister on Monday, piracy has flourished off its shores. Experts say that there have been “many more” than the 26 attacks formally reported to the International Piracy Center this year, and new hijackings are reported with unfortunate frequency.

But the latest hijacking came with news that the United States Navy has now entered the fray. A distress call from a Japanese-owned chemical tanker, Golden Mori, found its way to the U.S.S. Porter, an American destroyer, which intercepted and then sank the two skiffs that the pirates used to reach the ship, according to CNN.

Now, the pirates have no obvious exit route, and another American destroyer, the Arleigh Burke is on their tail in Somali waters, which are usually something of a pirate refuge. This time, the American navy received permission to enter from the embattled transitional government....

As you can see, the U.S. and international allies have just started stepping up their response to this growing problem. But to think we'll just snap our fingers and the problem will go away is unrealistic.

Once you have a failed state as a haven for pirates, the only way to prevent the incidents from happening (unless you think ALL international shipping should be escorted by our Navy at taxpayer expense) is for the merchant ships to be prepared to repel boarders. And yeah, they'll probably need to hire private contractors for that, much to Capital A's horror (unless of course you DO think third-nation-flag private ships should be guarded at taxpayer expense). Fighting close battles with small arms at the drop of a hat was a skill the average sailor had 200 years ago, but not today. They'll likely have to hire some guns.

Once the vessel is taken, and the U.S. or other navies respond, what do you propose we do? We're fully equipped to sink them (as you saw above we had no trouble sinking the pirate boats, once they were under our guns), but the sailors who specialize in the skills it would take to RETAKE the vessel intact (which I'm guessing that most of us -- especially the owners of the ships or their cargos -- would prefer), the U.S. Navy Seals, are really, really busy elsewhere these days. (Set Iraq aside; we need all we can train and more in Afghanistan.)

The piracy problem is, of course, closely tied to the terrorism problem. The same sorts of conditions can foster it, and it presents the same challenges to international law (what do we do, for instance, if we catch the pirates -- send them to Guantanamo?).

It's an interesting problem, or rather SET of problems, and one the new president will have on a front-burner, given the escalation in recent days. The supertanker finally grabbed the attention of all of y'all who had NOT been paying attention.

Make that TWO pings, Vasily...

You probably saw that the Supreme Court sided with the U.S. Navy against the whales off Southern California. While I don't have all that much to say about it, I thought it would be of interest to some of y'all to discuss the ruling here.

Whales are great, but I thought what Chief Justice John Roberts wrote made sense:

“The lower courts failed properly to defer to senior Navy officers’ specific, predictive judgments,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., joined by four other justices, wrote for the court in the first decision of the term.

For the environmental groups that sought to limit the exercises, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “the most serious possible injury would be harm to an unknown number of marine mammals that they study and observe.” By contrast, he continued, “forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained antisubmarine force jeopardizes the safety of the fleet.”

Contrasting with that snappy salute to the brass, Justices Ginsburg and Souter luridly dissented:

“Sonar is linked to mass strandings of marine mammals, hemorrhaging around the brain and ears” and acute effects on the central nervous system as well as “lesions in vital organs,” Justice Ginsburg wrote.

And though the Navy has said it can find no previous documented case of sonar-related injury to a marine mammal in such exercises, Justice Ginsburg said the service had predicted that a current set of exercises off the California coast would cause lasting injuries to hundreds of beaked whales, along with vast behavioral disturbances to whales, dolphins and sea lions.

The majority was overturning a ruling by the -- you guessed it -- Ninth Circuit.

And yes, that headline is a reference to Tom Clancy, who, were he an appeals judge, would be more of the Fourth Circuit variety.

The Flame of Alaska?

The things you learn about candidates from reading their books. Despite the length of those columns I wrote after reading Barack Obama's and John McCain's chronicles of their early years, obviously there was much I didn't have room to get into, including a lot of stuff that each candidate's respective detractors like to point to.

Obama had his dope-smoking years, a period of rebellion in which I think he was self-consciously trying to emulate Malcolm X in his wild, self-destructive period -- although being careful not to go too far, of course. (We both read the Autobiography in high school in Hawaii. I found it interesting; Obama saw it briefly as a guide to being a "black man in America," something he had to practice to learn.)

John McCain, having been a Naval Aviator, was less inhibited. He had Marie, the Flame of Florida. And others; that name just stood out. She apparently was an exotic dancer who performed for the fliers at Trader John's, their favorite Pensacola after-hours locale. Ensign McCain dated her for awhile. She was "a remarkably attractive girl with a great sense of humor." He made the mistake once of taking her on an impulse to a party given by a married officer. (The single junior officers seldom socialized with the married couples. There was a good reason for this.) She was "a good sport" about it, but was clearly out of place among the Eastern Establishment-educated wives:

The young wives she was about to meet would be decorously attired and unfailingly genteel. Marie was dressed somewhat flamboyantly that evening, as was her custom.
... Marie sensed that the young wives, while certainly not rude to her, were less than entirely at ease in her presence. So she sat silent, not wishing to impose on anyone or intrude in the conversations going on around her. After a while, she must have become a little bored. So, quietly, she reached into her purse, withdrew a switchblade, popped open the blade, and, with a look of complete indifference, began to clean her fingernails.
... A short time later, recognizing that our presence had perhaps subdued the party, I thanked our hosts for their hospitality, bid goodbye to the others, and took my worldly, lovely Flame of Florida to dinner.

I like that line, "as was her custom..."

Kathleen Parker believes the crusty old sailor who once romanced the Flame of Florida had a similar motivation for choosing Sarah Palin -- another remarkably attractive girl with a great sense of humor -- to go with him to the party those Republican stiffs held up in St. Paul. Only this time, the date was the hit of the party. They particularly liked the part where she took out her switchblade and sliced and diced the Community Organizer with it.

But perhaps we're reading too much into this.

Faith of our Fathers

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
One day in late summer 1970, I was playing tennis on the courts next to the Officer’s Club at Pearl Harbor. I was 16. My opponent, a long-haired boy whose name I now forget, was younger. He was a visitor from the mainland, the little brother of the wife of a junior officer on my Dad’s ship.
    Suddenly, a gnarly bantam rooster of a man rushed onto our court through one of the gates, followed by an entourage of followers who could only be senior naval officers, despite the fact that all were in white shorts, conspicuously devoid of insignia.
    Without pausing in his stride, the first man commanded, “You boys get out of here! I’ve got this court.” Taken aback, we nevertheless immediately moved to obey. I knew active-duty officers had precedence over dependents on Navy courts, and although this man looked old for active duty — at 59, he seemed ancient — we could not doubt his authority. As we moved to collect our gear, he noticed my father — at that time the executive officer of the USS Kawishiwi — sitting on the bench where he had been watching us play. The man went immediately to Dad and spoke to him briefly, then came quickly over to us boys. I was unprepared for what came next — an apology.
    Introducing himself, he explained that he was extremely busy, that he reserved the court for this time and that it was the only recreation he had, so he had been in a hurry to get to it, which explained but did not excuse his brusqueness, and he hoped we would understand.
    No problem, admiral, I said. Don’t mind us. We’re moving. Enjoy your game.
    The man was John S. McCain Jr. Had he been in uniform, he would have worn four stars — the same rank his father had attained in World War II. He was CINCPAC — the Commander In Chief Pacific Command — a title that to a Navy brat had the same ring as the words “the king” would have had to someone in Medieval Europe. Except that no king of old ever had authority over as much military power. He commanded all U.S. forces in and around the Pacific and Indian Oceans, from the U.S. west coast to the Persian Gulf. The American forces fighting the war in Vietnam were only a portion of his responsibility.
    Among the hundreds of thousands of men under his command was a lieutenant commander being held as a prisoner of war in Hanoi. The naval aviator was nearing his third anniversary in captivity, most of that time in solitary confinement in a tiny, stifling cell, his monotony relieved only by brutal interrogations. His body, and at one point even his spirit, broken, he would be there for another two-and-a-half years.
    I didn’t know any of that at the time. Only years after Sen. John McCain had risen to national prominence did I connect him to the admiral I’d met that day. But even among the many who knew about the connection, few ever heard CINCPAC speak of it. Only those closest to him knew about the ritual with which he would mark each Christmas: Every year, he would go to Vietnam and visit troops stationed closest to the DMZ. At some point he would go off by himself to the edge of the base and stare silently northward, in the direction of his son.
    Last week, you read (I hope) a column headlined “Barack Like Me,” in which I explained my sense of identification with elements of Barack Obama’s personal journey of self-definition. If you missed it, I urge you to go to my blog (the address is at the end of this piece) and read it. This column is a companion to it. I wrote the earlier piece after reading Sen. Obama’s autobiography about his youth.
    This past week, I read Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir, by John McCain and Mark Salter. It’s the very different story of a young man who was far less confused about who he was or where he came from. And as much as I felt I understood “Barry” Obama, my commonality with Navy brat McCain is much more direct, and certainly simpler.
    A few months ago, I wrote another column headlined, “Give me that old-time conservatism,” in which I wrote of the values I had learned growing up in a Navy family, “the old-fashioned ones: Traditional moral values. Respect for others. Good stewardship. Plain speaking. And finally, the concept that no passing fancy, no merely political idea, is worth as much as Duty, Honor and Country.” It was written shortly after Sen. McCain won the S.C. primary, at a time when “conservatives” in his party were doing all they could to stop him.
    His autobiography is a 349-page exploration of those values.
    His grandfather was a hard-driving, smoking, drinking, gambling old salt who cried when he read casualty reports. He had less regard for his own welfare, once telling his wife he would not spend a penny on doctors, preferring to lavish all his money “on riotous living.” He commanded the fast carriers of Task Force 38 through one epic battle after another across the Pacific, stood in the front row at the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri, then flew home that day. He dropped dead during the party his wife threw to welcome him home.
    His father was a cigar-chomping submarine commander in the same war, who over the next 25 years worked ceaselessly to live up to his father’s example. As CINCPAC, he unsuccessfully pressed his civilian superiors to let him pursue victory in Vietnam. The B-52 attacks on Hanoi (wildly cheered by his son and fellow prisoners as the bombs fell around them) and mining of Haiphong harbor helped focus the North Vietnamese on an eventual peace agreement in Paris. But Admiral McCain didn’t even get to see the war to that unsatisfactory conclusion before being relieved as CINCPAC. He retired, and lived another nine years, but was never a well man after that. His son believes that he, “like his father before him, sacrificed his life” to the strains of wartime command.
    On the fringes of this presidential campaign, one reads silly e-mails and blogs accusing Barack Obama of being less than American because of the African, Muslim part of his ancestry. Some Democrats weakly respond that John McCain isn’t an American, either, having been born in the Canal Zone in Panama. I have to smile at that, because in my life’s experience, the Zone looms as the very essence of America. During the two-and-a-half years I lived in South America in the 1960s, Panama was the place we occasionally visited to get our booster shot of home, the Land of the Big PX, a place to revel in the miracles of television and drinking water straight from the tap without fear.
    Ironically, Panama means far less to John McCain, since his family left there when he was three months old. It was the start of a routine that I know very well:

As soon as I had begun to settle into a school, my father would be reassigned, and I would find myself again a stranger in new surroundings forced to establish myself quickly in another social order.

    If it sounds like I’m complaining, I’m not. It fostered in McCain and me and thousands like us an independence that’s hard to explain to those who never experienced it. I suspect it contributed greatly to the characteristics that his campaign inadequately, and monotonously, tries to describe with the word “maverick.”
    But there was a constant in our lives. Growing up, I most often heard the United States Navy referred to as “the Service.” It both described what my father did and why he did it. It was the same for the McCains.
    Barack Obama struggled for identity in his formative years largely because of the absence of his father. John McCain and I both experienced the absence of fathers: “We see much less of our fathers than do other children. Our fathers are often at sea, in peace and war.” But unlike Mr. Obama, we understood exactly who our fathers were and why they were gone:

    You are taught to consider their absence not as a deprivation, but as an honor. By your father’s calling, you are born into an exclusive, noble tradition. Its standards require your father to dutifully serve a cause greater than his self-interest, and everyone around you... drafts you to the cause as well. Your father’s life is marked by brave and uncomplaining sacrifice. You are asked only to bear the inconveniences caused by his absence with a little of the same stoic acceptance.

    But as much as our childhoods were alike, John McCain the man is very different. It’s one thing to know “the Service” as a dependent. It’s far different to serve. As I type that, it sounds terribly trite. Yes, we all know John McCain is a war hero, yadda-yadda, right? But I don’t care how much of a cliche it’s become, it’s true. And it sets him apart.
    I can’t write a “McCain Like Me” column because from an early age, he was different. He always knew he would follow his father and grandfather to the Naval Academy. I knew nothing of the kind, and not just because my father graduated from Presbyterian College. There was a brief time in my late 20s when I considered giving up journalism for the Navy; I even took a written test for prospective officer candidates, and did well on it. But my father pointed out to me what I had always known: My chronic asthma would keep me out. So I dropped the idea.
    John McCain, by contrast, rebelled against inevitability, raising hell and breaking rules all the way through his four years at Annapolis, repeatedly stepping to the brink of expulsion, and graduating fifth from the bottom of his class. Even reading about the hazing he experienced as a plebe, when upperclassmen did everything they could think of to break him and cause him to “bilge out” — nothing, compared to what he would suffer as a POW — I thought, Did I ever experience such treatment? Was I ever tested to that extent? And the answer was “no.” Nor, despite all his doubts about himself, his own period of rebellion or his sense of alienation, did Barack Obama have such a formative experience. If so, he doesn’t tell about it.
    The gulf between John McCain and me would exist if he had never been captured. His heroism during those five unimaginable years — a time when he finally learned the full importance of being part of something larger than himself — only turns the gulf into an ocean.
    I say that not to criticize Sen. Obama, or myself. But it’s a fact. We never knew anything like it. Men like John McCain and my friend Jack Van Loan — his fellow prisoner at the Hanoi Hilton — will forever be imbued with an aura that not even The One can claim. Some dismiss the McCain slogan “Country First” as worn-out rhetoric. But I know that for him, perhaps more than for any candidate I’ve ever known, it simply describes who he is and how he’s lived his life.
    That almost certainly is not enough to help him win the election. As I watch him on the verge of failure, that saddens me. He’s had three decades to come to terms with the fact that the war in which he gave so much caused so many of his fellow Americans to lose their faith in their country, and he’s dealt with it admirably.
    Now this. As I watch him drift further from his goal, I can say “Barack Like Me,” but McCain — he’s on a different plane, and always has been. And increasingly, he seems to be there alone.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/

 

9/11 plus seven years

The way we split up duties on the editorial board, Cindi Scoppe handles scheduling. For instance, she maintains "the budget," which has nothing to do with money -- it's newspaperese for a written summary of what you plan to publish in upcoming editions.

A couple of weeks back, Cindi put a bold notice on the budget to this effect: 9/11 ???? Beyond that, she's mentioned it a couple of times. Each time I've sort of grunted. The most recent time was Monday, and I felt compelled to be somewhat more articulate. I explained that I hate marking anniversaries. Such pieces are so artificial. The points one might make 365 days after an event should not differ from what you would say the day before, or the day after -- if you're saying the right things.

Nevertheless, I'm kicking around a column idea, one that I'm not sure will work. If I can pull it together between now and Wednesday morning, we can run it Thursday.

Actually, it's a couple of column ideas. One would simply be a bullet list of things to think about: the movement of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan would be one bullet, another would be Osama bin Laden, another would be the state of the NATO alliance -- or something like that. Something acknowledging that it's tough to isolate One Thing to say on a topic so complex.

The other would be to hark back to the editorial I wrote for the Sunday after 9/11 -- 9/16/01. In it, I set out a vision of how the U.S. needed to engage the world going forward. A key passage:

We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term - military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.

There's nothing profound about it -- it seems as obvious to me as the need to breathe. But America is a long way from embracing the concept holistically. We seem to lack the vocabulary for it, or something.

A couple of months ago, former State staffer Dave Moniz -- who is now a civilian employee of the Air Force with the civilian rank of a brigadier general, operating out of Washington -- brought a couple of Air Force guys to talk broadly about that service and how it's doing these days. In passing, one of them mentioned the concept of DIME (which refers to "Diplomatic," "Information," "Military" and "Economic" as the four main elements of national power), which apparently is widely understood among military officers these days, even though it doesn't enter much into civilian discussions.

We've wasted much of the last seven years arguing about the legitimacy of the exercise of military power, to the exclusion of the other parts. It's sucked up all the oxygen. Occasionally we talk about "soft power," but as some sort of alternative, not as a necessary complement. And as long as our discussions are thus hobbled, it's tough for us ever to get to the point of accomplishing the overall goals of making the world safer for liberal democracies:

    But we are going to have to do far more than simply project military power. We must help the rest of the world be more free, more affluent and more democratic. Advancing global trade is only the start.
    We must cease to regard "nation-building" as a dirty word. If the people of the Mideast didn't live under oligarchs and brutal tyrants, if they enjoyed the same freedoms and rights and broad prosperity that we do - if, in other words, they had all of those things the sponsors of terror hate and fear most about us - they would understand us more and resent us less. And they would, by and large, cease to be such a threat to us, to Israel and to themselves.

With rescue workers still seeking survivors in the smoking rubble of the twin towers, it didn't occur to me that the military part would be such a political barrier. I couldn't see then how quickly political partisanship would reassert itself, or how quickly we would split into a nation of Iraq hawks and the antiwar movement.

I'm encouraged that the surge in Iraq has been successful enough -- Gen. Petraeus was thinking in DIME terms as he suppressed the insurgencies -- that we are prepared to redeploy troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. (Which reminds me of something I often thought over the last few years when antiwar types would talk about "bringing our troops home." I didn't see how anyone would think we could do that, with the battles still to be fought against the Taliban. The most compelling argument those opposed to our involvement in Iraq had was that it consumed resources that should be devoted to Afghanistan. Obviously, as we turn from one we turn more to the other -- not because we want to exhaust our all-volunteer military with multiple deployments, but because until we have a larger military, we have no choice -- no credible person has asserted that Afghanistan is a "war of choice.")

You know what -- I'm just going to copy that whole Sept. 16, 2001, editorial here. Maybe it will inspire y'all to say something that will help me write a meaningful column. Maybe not. But I share it anyway... wait, first I'll make one more point: What the editorial set out was not all that different from the concept of "Forward Engagement" that Al Gore had set out in the 2000 campaign to describe his foreign policy vision -- although after he unveiled it, he hardly mentioned it. Too bad that between his own party's post-Vietnam isolationism and the GOP's aversion to "nation-building," we've had trouble coalescing around anything like this.

Anyway, here's the editorial:

THE STATE
IN THE LONG TERM, U.S. MUST FULLY ENGAGE THE WORLD
Published on: 09/16/2001
Section: EDITORIAL
Edition: FINAL
Page: A8

IF YOU HAD MENTIONED the words "missile defense shield" to the terrorists who took over those planes last Tuesday, they would have laughed so hard they might have missed their targets.
    That's about the only way it might have helped.
    Obviously, America is going to have to rethink the way it relates to the rest of the world in the 21st century. Pulling a high-tech defensive blanket over our heads while wishing the rest of the world would go away and leave us alone simply isn't going to work.
    We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term - military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.
    Essentially, we have wasted a decade.
    After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union crumbled, there was a vacuum in our increasingly interconnected world, a vacuum only the United States could fill. But we weren't interested. After half a century of intense engagement in world affairs, we turned inward. Oh, we assembled and led an extraordinary coalition in the Gulf War - then let it fall apart. We tried to help in Somalia, but backed out when we saw the cost. After much shameful procrastination, we did what we should have done in the Balkans, and continue to do so. We tried to promote peace in the Mideast, then sort of gave up. But by and large, we tended our own little garden, and let the rest of the world drift.
    We twice elected a man whose reading of the national mood was "It's the economy, stupid." Republicans took over Congress and started insisting that America would not be the world's "policeman."
    Beyond overtures to Mexico and establishing a close, personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, President Bush initially showed little interest in foreign affairs.
    Meanwhile, Russia and China worked to expand their own spheres of influence, Europe started looking to its own defenses, and much of the rest of the world seethed over our wealth, power and complacency.
    Well, the rest of the world isn't going to simply leave us alone. We know that now. On Tuesday, we woke up.
    In the short term, our new engagement will be dominated by military action, and diplomacy that is closely related to military aims. It won't just end with the death or apprehension of Osama bin Laden. Secretary of State Colin Powell served notice of what will be required when he said, "When we're through with that network, we will continue with a global assault against terrorism in general." That will likely mean a sustained, broad- front military effort unlike anything this nation has seen since 1945. Congress should get behind that.
    At the moment, much of the world is with us in this effort. Our diplomacy must be aimed at maintaining that support, which will not be easy in many cases.
    Beyond this war, we must continue to maintain the world's most powerful military, and keep it deployed in forward areas. Our borders will be secure only to the extent that the world is secure. We must engage the help of other advanced nations in this effort. We must invest our defense dollars first and foremost in the basics - in keeping our planes in the air, our ships at sea and our soldiers deployed and well supported.
    We must always be prepared to face an advanced foe. Satellite intelligence and, yes, theater missile defenses will play roles. But the greatest threat we currently face is not from advanced nations, but from the kinds of enemies who are so primitive that they don't even have airplanes; they have to steal ours in order to attack us. For that reason, we must beef up our intelligence capabilities. We need spies in every corner of the world, collecting the kind of low-tech information that espiocrats call "humint" - human intelligence. More of that might have prevented what happened last week, in ways that a missile shield never could.
    But we are going to have to do far more than simply project military power. We must help the rest of the world be more free, more affluent and more democratic. Advancing global trade is only the start.
    We must cease to regard "nation-building" as a dirty word. If the people of the Mideast didn't live under oligarchs and brutal tyrants, if they enjoyed the same freedoms and rights and broad prosperity that we do - if, in other words, they had all of those things the sponsors of terror hate and fear most about us - they would understand us more and resent us less. And they would, by and large, cease to be such a threat to us, to Israel and to themselves.
    This may sound like an awful lot to contemplate for a nation digging its dead out of the rubble. But it's the kind of challenge that this nation took on once before, after we had defeated other enemies that had struck us without warning or mercy. Look at Germany and Japan today, and you will see what America can do.
    We must have a vision beyond vengeance, beyond the immediate guilty parties. And we must embrace and fulfill that vision, if we are ever again to enjoy the collective peace of mind that was so completely shattered on Sept. 11, 2001.

American Sardaukar? Best combat picture from Iraq, anyway

Although Susanna seemed to like it, my analogy back on this post -- comparing American troops to the Atreides in Dune -- wasn't quite perfect.

Truth be told, the overwhelmingly superior efficiency, dedication and effectiveness of U.S. troops today is more closely comparable to the Sardaukar. That's not an analogy I like to make, because the Sardaukar were the bad guys -- or at least, allied with the bad guys. They were arrogant, and received their comeuppance from the little-regarded, fanatical desert people they thought they could easily crush. So you can see how I wouldn't like that analogy at this particular point in history. It doesn't fit with my worldview at all.

Probably the best way to put it in Dune terms (if one is to be so frivolous as to draw such analogies) is that the U.S. military has the virtue of the Atreides combined with the competence of the Sardaukar. (And now that I think about it, I seem to recall that the reason the emperor sent the Sardaukar after the Atreides was that the Atreides troops under Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck had been trained to the point that they were almost as tough as the Sardaukar, and the emperor saw that as a threat. So maybe our guys are the Atreides after all -- or what the Atreides might have been. That makes the sci-fi nerd in me feel so much better.)

This brings me, through a leap that probably makes sense only to me, to a photo I grabbed from AP back during the fighting in Fallujah in 2004, and never used. If I had been blogging then, I would have posted it, but I wasn't.

It's the best photo I can remember seeing from the fighting in Iraq. Actually, when you think about it, it was one of the LAST photos of actual fighting I've seen. You don't see pictures of action any more on the wires. You see portraits of soldiers and marines who have died, and pictures of caskets and funerals. You see pictures taken AFTER something happened -- say, the aftermath of an IED. Or you see pictures of soldiers on routine patrol, or aiming their weapons from a fixed defensive position, but not firing them.

What you don't see is American troops inexorably, irresistibly advancing the way they are in this photo. This photo is classic, and illustrates a standard offensive infantry tactic in the act. Maybe some of you with infantry experience will correct me on this, but what I see is one soldier laying down covering fire down a street with his M-240 Bravo (which, as James reminded us Monday, is likely manufactured right here in Columbia SC, at FN) while the other men in the squad cross the street. Another soldier (actually, I'm guessing these are Marines; someone with sharper eyes than mine can probably tell for sure) backs up the machine-gunner, prepared to shoot with aimed fire at any enemy who stick their heads out, using his standard rifle.

The second man to cross the street is another machine-gunner, who will no doubt establish a base of fire from the opposite side of the street in order to allow the first MG operator and the last of the squad to cross.

The squad seems to be operating with a relentless, almost mechanical efficiency that is terrible to behold -- if you are the enemy. In fact, it's probably the unusual perspective of this photo that created the literary (if you can call sci-fi "literary") allusion in my mind: This is probably what it looks like when you are the enemy, and the U.S. Marines are coming to get you -- like the Sardaukar with their "hard faces set in battle frenzy."

As I said, you don't see many pictures like this one. It's impressive. It certainly made an impression on me.