WHAT‘S A WEHRMACHT TO DO?

Bernd von Loringhoven died last week. He was a Baron and he served in the Cold-War Wehrmacht (the good one, our side, etc.) and in that resurrected Wehrmacht he rose to the rank of Lieutenant General. He lived in interesting times.

His most interesting historical experiences might have been those that took place in the Spring of 1945, in Berlin, in a certain bunker. Assigned to the staff of General Guderian, he stayed on when that immensely capable, no-nonsense officer was replaced at the Fuhrer’s order by the less-competent, more ‘loyal’ General Krebs. Thus, as a staff major Loringhoven was in the bunker almost to the end. He left because he told the demented Unitary Leader that he wanted to go and fight at the front (which by then was not much more than a couple-three blocks away), and the Ur/Uber/Haupt-Deciderer was overcome with patriotic and soldierly bonhomie, dismissing him with – may we say? – a blessing. With Russians everywhere, the major was able to surrender to Anglo-British forces by following the undying American adage to Go West. Where would they be without us, those Europeans?

It was how he got into the Army that is of relevance to Us today. In 1933, having studied law, he was confronted with the new Reich requirement that all lawyers be members of the Nazi Party. “I had studied law, but the profession was being taken over by the Nazis. The Wehrmacht seemed an honorable career.”

One’s first impulses upon reading this are sympathy and respect: here’s a man who at the outset of adulthood found himself in a nation that was rapidly sliding into organized barbarity and rather than cooperate by participating, he sought a more rigorous but honorable path: he joined the Army. Where, after all, can the good and upright citizen find a refuge from the ‘filth’ of sleaze and corruption and self-debasement if not in the military? We Americans of all peoples should understand that: who can forget the Reagan-era anointing of the military as not only representing the best that was in the American ethos and character, but actually embodying that ‘best’ in a way that no mere American ‘civilian’ can? Nobody did it like the military: efficient, upright, clear of eye and soul and skin. Midwest farmboys and even the average Mormon teen made great poster-children for the military in those years: crew-cut, blue-eyed, clean-shaven, respectful, obedient, patriotic.

But the ‘Army’ that the decent and estimable Loringhoven joined was a particular one in a particular time and place: the German Wehrmacht of 1933. No matter how well its capable officers and non-coms executed their duties, that army was morally doomed, and doubly so. It served the purposes of a violent, aggressive government debauched by an antihuman ideology and an intransigent moral pride of purpose and utterly removed from the essential Truth of humanity as the West had only recently managed to formulate and achieve that Truth. And on top of that it followed orders that not only made it refrain from ‘defending the defenseless’ (Douglas MacArthur’s clarion phrase to describe the purpose of a Western military) but actually made it assist in the destruction of the defenseless.

It is a truism that after the war that army claimed it ‘was only following orders’, which is what armies do. It is also a truism that in a state run by civilians the army must accede to the orders of the civilians. Of course Germany of that era was not governed by ‘civilians’, nor by its People: it was run by the Party of the Twelve Years, under the rule of its absolute Leader. But that was then and that was there. Here and now there are indeed ‘civilians’ in charge, although the degree of their integrity and maturity is open to question.

But whether or not an army follows its orders, whether or not it is ‘loyal’ to its governmental masters, is not the core reality that We must consider. Rather, We must contemplate the profound consequences flowing from a military that continues to contort itself ‘by any means necessary’ so as to continue following orders. If waging lengthy war, and a not particularly successful war, places stress on a military and its individual members, what further awefullness rushes in when the war is immoral? When the activities required to prosecute the war are immoral? When they create a profound revulsion within the individual soldier? When they don’t?

Worse, when many of the younger troops have been raised in a Flattened ethos where ‘judging’ immorality – except for the ever-handy ‘sex offender’ – is considered inappropriate and even meaningless? The past decades’ of not being ‘judgmental’ and of ‘making room’ for this, that, and the other thing have somehow effectively removed the basis for any boundaries upon the government’s acting evilly. But because there is a ‘soul’ in the human being – regardless of what ‘elite’ and ‘correct’ American thought might otherwise hold nowadays; and because there is a moral frontier on the far side of which no amount of good intention can redeem an evil act - regardless of what many fundamentalistic preachers might think; and because there is a fundamental human-ness within each and all humans – regardless of uniform or ‘orders’ – that cannot be escaped … because of those unspinnable realities (‘Realities- - capital ‘R’, might not be out of place now) our soldiery now bear monstrous burdens.

We look back on a young von Loringhoven, and on hundreds of thousands like him, who in that era and that place, seeking to invest their life in some decent and successful enterprise, turned to the Wehrmacht not only for employment but also for fulfillment. And yet – no matter how faithful and rigorous their efforts, in life or in death – the sum total of their achievement is tainted for the rest of human history by the Cause to whose ‘orders’ they remained obedient.

Could they do otherwise? Not realistically so. But so what? That fact hardly dents the monstrous moral futility of their lives, the moral derangement that could not have simply ‘gone away’ on May 9, 1945 when Germany surrendered. The individuals, and the Wehrmacht as an organization, were not only individually and organizationally maimed, but morally infected and corrupted. Monstrously so.

It was Germany’s blessing – the old French ‘blessure’ might better express it – that she was so thoroughly defeated. Those who sought to acknowledge the massive monstrousness of the Twelve Years in order to repair and redeem the damage could do so with the guarded approval of a common, popular opinion that could not deny what had happened to Germany and – to some extent anyway – what Germany had done.

It is not probable that America will experience such a ‘blessure’ (although it cannot be ruled out). We did not receive such an unmistakable revelation in Vietnam, and as a result the back&forth as to that war’s ‘meaning’ has continued, its only ‘redemption’ being the shallow but brassy Reaganite restoration of public esteem for things military and a spate of cheap action flicks where ‘we win’ (and those ubiquitous black flags). But there can be no doubt that this society will eventually have to re-embrace dozens of thousands of individual soldiers who were caught in the hot, soul-deforming toils of this invasion and its consequences, and that this nation will for a long generation to come be protected by a military officered and led by those who traversed the dark, hot paths of a moral hell. Those are journeys that not even angels make without loss and wound.

The JAGs have come in for more than a drubbing on this site, since their entire operation was fundamentally deformed long before it was then placed in the service of The Twelve Years and the Unitarium. History will hold Us all responsible for the recent comments of one Mr. Dell’Orto, Pentagon spokesman, about the military commissions/tribunals: the rules (inter alia: defense lawyers cannot reveal classified information in their client’s defense until the government/prosecutor approves; suspects will only get summaries of evidence against them – in effect, the government controls the evidence if not also the defense counsel) will “afford all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples” (www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011807R.shtml).

This pious blather, wrapping these monstrous wolfish ‘trials’ in the angelic garb of the best that Western Justice and jurisprudence has laboriously managed to achieve, cannot simply be indulged as public-relations boilerplate. It constitutes treachery – purposeful, conscious treachery against Truth, against Justice, against the very best of the Western and the American traditions. It is also pretty standard military ‘justice’ procedure, and has been for quite a long time. And it’s being done on Our dime and in Our name. Can a people be ‘civilized’ without a soul? What sort of hollow ‘civilization’ might that be?

Doesn’t History even now hold them at arm’s length: all those eager and not-bestial German youth who once marched off to war? All those German citizens who minded their business and just tried to get by? What will history say of Us? The Deciderer, with the self-protecting shrewdness usually seen in profoundly criminal or addictive personalities, has already asserted that only ‘history’ can judge him, that only ‘God’ can judge him, thereby effectively removing his actions from any more immediate consequences (those large and loud beliefs notwithstanding, he nonetheless bent nearer to earth and insured his own legal safety by having many of his actions declared retroactively ‘legal’ in the same Act that established the military commissions).

With ominous accuracy, Col. Dan Smith publishes an article entitled “The Tillman Affair and the Moral Decay of the Army: ‘Have You No Sense of Decency?’” (www.counterpunch.com/smith04042007.html). We can only thank him for it. There appear to be far more virulent, vicious, and destructive ‘indecencies’ going on in this country than the kind that lead on local TV news. He limns in awful detail, with crisp and clear military precision, just what is starting to happen – is indeed well-advanced. We have to hear it, We have to know it. We cannot hide from it. We must help our military recover from the consequences and We must help the world recover from our military. And there is no time to go shopping.

Stephen Greenblatt has a superb article (“Shakespeare and the Uses of Power”, www.nybooks.com/articles/20073) in ‘The New York Review of Books’ (Vol. 54, No. 6, April 12, 2007). Greenblatt deals with the Shakespearian conundrum: all the characters who actively grasp for power are too morally unfit to wield it and all those with a clear ethical vision seek to avoid or unburden themselves of power. It is this awareness, I think, that also informs the Founders almost two centuries later: wielding power is inherently a morally damaging enterprise, and nobody can be trusted to do it and remain ‘pure’; and everybody who wields it has to be checked-and-balanced, and watched carefully. And they were OK with that; the Constitutional government they devised put up enough speed-bumps and its machinery was clanky enough so that no ethically-deformed power-grabber could run away with the whole thing. And that was their practical response to the problem Shakespeare had perceived so acutely.

In a mass democracy this solution to this problem is itself problematical. Too many citizens will seek to shortcut or simplify their daily toils by investing their elected officials with a too-indulgent trust; and the Fundamentalistic soul actually conflates the government leadership with God’s Will itself.

In a technically-complex civilization, even the most alert of citizens cannot be expected to know enough to keep a successful eye on every matter of even major public import.

In a National Security State those government leaders will try to keep as much information as possible hidden; the active, alert, skeptical inquiring adult citizen will not be welcome – rather, the leaders prefer the easily-distracted, under-informed, uncertain, unripe citizen whose energies are squandered on matters not affecting the common weal but rather on matters affecting the textures of one’s comforts and private concerns.

And in a National Krime State, citizens are lulled into thinking that they are doing their bit by responding with approving outrage to any ‘criminal’ the government chooses to haul before them (the media eagerly providing lurid footage or innuendo), and thus the police power of the state, all ‘in a good cause’, is expanded until no private or interior space is safe from the power of the state. (As one Nazi governmental official, Robert Ley, put it in the 1937: When we are finished the only privacy the German citizen will have is when he is asleep.)

Lincoln spoke rightly and wisely when he reminded Congress and the citizens that “we cannot escape History”. I think he meant that in at least two senses: We cannot escape the judgment of History, and we cannot escape the consequences that inevitably flow from whatever actions we take to make or influence History, to respond to or to shape events. We cannot escape judgment and consequences.

What von Loringhoven felt when he realized that his treasured Wehrmacht was not only losing the war but also its soul, its integrity, its character, and that in consequence his entire life’s work was also losing its integrity and its character … what he and who knows how many other German military members felt when they realized THAT … is certainly a fit subject for Our contemplation today.

But unlike the Germans of The Twelve Years, We are still The People and this government – contrary to Cheney and Gonzales and Yoo and all the resurgent Confederate-worshippers and all the Fundamentalist gummint-worshippers and all the neocon empire-worshippers – is of Us and for Us and by Us, and through our faithful administration of our Constitutional principles a great good flows into History and into this world. Republican or Democrat, each of Us needs to shake off the Miasm of The Twelve Years (and in no small way the last thirty-five or so years) and People this Republic through an honest and mature public politics (not a contradiction in terms!).

There is far too much History ahead, and not very far ahead, for Us, to put off this process of public and political maturity any longer. In fact, since We have lost so much of our ‘common weal’ over the past decades, then this is a call to a resurrection of sorts, certainly of ‘a new birth of freedom’, but a ‘freedom’ that can only flow from a serious laying-ahold of Our own responsibilities.

WAR, WOMEN, AND STORY

Well, Sara Corbett has an article originally in “The New York Times Magazine” but also on Truthout (www.truthout.org/docs_2006/031807C.shtml) . Again, it is a story about the war-and-horror stories of women in the war. It’s 19 pages long and I go at this subject again since Corbett has raised some interesting material, and because this entire women-in-mixed-gender units and women-in-war thing is not only wreaking its own damage, but clearly connects with other national issues and problems (the Iraq misadventure among them) by which we are presently bethump’d.

The primary story is about one Suzanne Swift and her mother, a social worker. The mother had originally penned an article dealt with in an earlier Post ("Facts on the Ground" http://chezodysseus.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html). In short: Swift, member of a back-from-Iraq MP unit, age 21, was apprehended by local police while “painting her toenails with her sister” after several months on the lam from her redeploying unit. She was facing charges for AWOL from this Iraq-bound unit when she claimed that she had done it because of the pressures of war and because she had been ‘sexually harassed’ throughout her history of service, as a consequence of which she was suffering, she claimed, from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Corbett defines PTSD as “a highly debilitating condition brought on by an abnormal amount of stress”. Its symptoms, she goes on to note, can include depression, insomnia, or “feeling constantly threatened”, quoting from the current edition of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), the official guide for mental-health professionals in establishing diagnoses.

Various points arise as one proceeds through the text of the article.

This ‘stress’ diagnosis represents a very significant change not only in the practice of psychology in this country but in American society itself. It came about after Vietnam when soldiers experienced ‘flashbacks’ and assorted symptoms prompted by particularly difficult things they had seen, experienced, or – less frequently mentioned – done while in Vietnam. It was a useful diagnosis for a certain extreme reaction to combat, and was seen by professionals at the time of its formal adoption as a modern upgrading of the long-recognized condition of former combat soldiers (“soldier’s heart” it was called after the Civil War).

But things never happen in a vacuum in life or in society. There was in the late-60s a certain approach to psychology, influenced by theorists such as Foucault, that saw medical and psychological diagnosis as a form of societal and hierarchical oppression; in its wilder forms it actually posited that the ‘insane’ were actually the ‘sane’ and vice-versa (in the later 1970s a variant of this approach, still hanging around, would help ‘advocates’ convince state legislators to largely empty the old state mental facilities, turning loose upon the public great numbers of former inmates who – while thus ‘liberated’ and ‘empowered’ – instantly became ‘homeless’).

The ‘empowerment’ of the patient blended as well with the feminist consciousness-raising of ‘sensitivity’ and its emphasis away from the (masculine) objective to the kinder and gentler subjective approach to life: it wasn’t a matter of what ‘is’, it was a matter of what one ‘feels’ (I’m painting with a broad brush here, but you get the idea).

Suddenly, the PTSD diagnosis, born in what was by the mid-1970s a distant past indeed, exploded into public awareness: the newly empowered patients insisted that they, not the doctor (so often in those days a male), had the right to declare when they were in ‘pain’, to say what traumatized them emotionally. And there was a certain logic to it: pain is an almost entirely subjective phenomenon, only rarely traceable on medical imaging equipment (comparatively primitive back then anyway). So who would know better than the patient, the (subjective) sufferer?

This worked as long as the ideal or average patient had a high-enough pain-threshold to report only ‘serious’ emotional pain or pain arising from serious events (‘trauma’ as it once was known). But it quickly came about that there was no way to establish objective criteria for subjective ‘emotional pain’; it also quickly came about that it would be socially and cultural unacceptable (‘insensitive’) for a physician to deny any patient’s report of pain. If a patient said he or she was in great emotional pain, regardless of whether a sufficiently grave causal event could be identified, or if the patient identified as causal an event that really didn’t appear to be sufficient to cause the pain that the patient claimed to be experiencing … you as a professional were to go with the patient’s claim. Before much time had passed in American society, almost all professionals were going along to get along.

With no objective boundaries that could possibly be imposed – indeed with a cultural insistence that any attempt to impose boundaries would be ‘insensitive’ and malpractice and a ‘revictimization’ of the patient – the entire thing metastasized. Not only females – traditionally stereotyped as being more vulnerable to pain – but numerous veterans (not all from combat experience, by any means) began to report ‘pain’ and lots of it, caused by ‘trauma’ – which itself had been defined as whatever-the-patient-felt-s/he-couldn’t-comfortably-tolerate. When we think about what happened when the enforceable boundaries of Truth and objectivity were removed from ‘sex-offender’ matters, and then from government justifications for waging pre-emptive war in the Middle East, we do well to remind ourselves how it all started to take root in our culture and our society, not with a bang but with an empathetic sigh.

So – simply from a conceptual point of view – there was now a ‘diagnosis’ that allowed the patient to essentially declare him-herself thus afflicted, and there was no scientifically possible way to corroborate that claim nor did there remain any cultural ‘permission’ to even attempt to do so, let alone express doubt as to the accuracy or validity of the claim, or – the horror! – doubting the honesty of the claimant. But large amounts of bounty – financial, cultural, psychological – were available to anyone who wished to put him-herself forward. Additionally, designated ‘symptoms’ were phenomena as low-grade as ‘feeling depressed’, ‘feeling threatened’, and so many others similar thereto that so often clutter the lives, minds, and hearts of just about all of us humans.

It would not take a rocket scientist to venture an accurate guess as to what was going to happen.

Swift’s war-induced stress, Corbett relates, was caused by events pretty much endemic to soldiering: having mortar rounds dropped upon one’s position, seeing friends die – even by friendly fire, working sixteen-hour shifts. Further – and here we see the great waves loosed in our culture begin to lap back upon each other – she was propositioned by her squad leader (male) and she “felt coerced” into having a four-month sexual relationship with him. When she finally put an end to it, she was forced to march back and forth across the camp in full pack and gear and she was humiliated in front of the other soldiers. Contacted by the Army investigators, the squad leader denied any sexual contact.

Even in a reasonable world, this type of claim would be difficult. If there were witnesses or physical evidence, or even if the lower-ranking member had a record of adequate or better performance of duties, then one might at least have grounds of some sort to take action. If however the lower-ranked was not a strong performer, or was a poor performer, then such marching tours might thus be accounted for. I don’t know what Swift’s record is. But that’s the point: we have a ‘disease’ which is so functionally ephemeral that helpers are reduced to scrounging for clues in a patient’s discoverable history (not all of which, nowadays, is available or ‘reportable’, let’s recall).

It was the ‘genius’ of the feminist and later the victimist and sex-offense movements and advocates that they realized that he-said/she-said situations are far too fraught with objective weakness to often prevail; you could hardly build a ‘movement’ or a revolution on them. But it was their accomplishment that they solved this problem profoundly: by discrediting ‘fact’ and ‘objectivity’ and skeptical inquiry as modes of public or jurisprudential response to any claim. The only “politically correct” response was ‘sensitivity’ and ‘acceptance’; men were so prone to sex that they were, for all practical purposes, ‘objective enemies’ – enemies by the simple fact of their essence and their existence, on behalf of whom any indulgence would be treason to the Cause and to the masses and against whom all violence necessary was justified. Thus did Lenin come to be one of the foremost makers of modern American praxis. Thus, too, perhaps, the Unitariat came to assume that We would fall for anything if it were emotionally-packaged, and thus We came to prove the Unitariat correct. And thus Ms. Swift chose to sign up for the Army and thus she went off to Iraq.

Corbett, to her credit, acknowledges in the next paragraph that “As it often is with matters involving sex and power, the lines are a little blurry”. Naturally: cut loose from the shaping and boundarying effects of Truth and Objectivity and Reason, a ‘story’ thus untrellised can grow like kudzu. With impressive clarity but with exquisite care Corbett continues: “Swift does not say she was raped exactly, but rather manipulated into having sex repeatedly”. So far, this sounds like one of those monstrously unprovable and intuitively almost impossible things by which, through making us believe them before breakfast for years now, the relevant advocacies have degraded everybody’s ability to distinguish, or even consider it right to try to distinguish, Truth from something else. A fact that was not lost on the Unitariat.

But in the military, it’s possible to take the game to new levels. She had sex because “this soldier was above her in rank and therefore responsible for her health and safety”. As with so many other phenomena that were highly predictable from the get-go, the advocacy has come up with a sassy but mystique-laden term for this type of thing: “command rape”. Although, to be accurate, there is no rape alleged. The idea is apparently that women (even in the all-male Army era you rarely encountered troops claiming that they had submitted to sex with a sergeant because they had – for all practical purposes – mistaken him for their father or their provider) sorta are prone to do stuff like this more than guys; or – as is the preferred spin and usage nowadays – they are more ‘vulnerable’ to it.

But if that’s true, then why oh why oh why did the feminist advocacies browbeat Congress (hardly a forum for displaying the best of American male maturity) into mixed-gender units in the first place? Wouldn’t it have been better for ‘women’ to be spared all the unnecessary ‘vulnerability’ situations by putting them into all-female units? Then they could concentrate on the soldiering or the sailoring. Why are we reading these 19-page compendia of woe at all? Was this thing not entirely predictable and entirely preventable?

A skeptic might claim that the feminists knew from Day One that ‘women’ couldn’t really do the soldiering and sailoring in sufficient quantities to ground their agenda, so they had to ensure that the units were mixed gender – in the field and aboard ship – so that the guys could actually keep the mission going and the ship afloat and underway; the generals and the admirals could certainly see the upside to that. But a gambit that cynical and that massive … you can’t really accept it.

Corbett starts to draw back into the safer and more familiar ground of what she calls “the dominant narrative”: many female troops she interviewed were telling similar stories. The same skeptic could opine that once that “narrative” had become culturally “dominant” – or just widespread, through television and film and sympathetic and selective media coverage – then it would stand to reason that the “narrative” of harassment, like the diagnostic “narrative” of PTSD, would be deployed by ever-larger numbers of persons. For whatever motive and reason each individual might have in doing so.

But who knows? Who is honestly to say? The ‘revolutionary’ goal, masked in the swaddling of advocacy, is not to determine the Truth but rather to ‘make’ the ‘truth’ by eliminating all other possible explanations or even the attempt to examine claims and offer alternative explanations. Sorta like if you ‘make history’ and everyone else has to follow what you do, and you label anybody who tries to examine your ‘truth’ as ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘treasonable’. ‘Insensitive’ is the ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘un-American’ of the Left. The more things change …

Here again appears an odd number that has been appearing recently in these women-in-trouble stories over in Iraq: “So far, more than 160,000 female soldiers have been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq” and “today one of every 10 soldiers in Iraq is female”. The math seems a bit odd. If we are hard-pressed to keep 160,000 troops over there, then how could there possibly be this many females? And if one out of every 10 is female … well, that seems to indicate we have a much larger army then anyone has realized. A skeptic might also observe that if even a fraction of them are making these types of claims or are in this condition … then there are more than a couple of unspoken additional reasons why we are losing the war over there. But that would be incorrect.

It is to her credit that Corbett reports on studies indicating that after the first Gulf War twice as many females as males developed PTSD – which gives food for serious thought. She also reports, but does not examine, the assertion that “women are more likely to be given diagnoses of PTSD, in some cases at twice the rate of men”.

So we are left, in this house of mirrors that the advocacies have constructed, staring at conflicting and distorted images, and no way of telling which is the ‘real’ and which are a reflection cast in a mirror. If we were dealing with ‘objective’ injuries like broken arms, we wouldn’t have this problem. If we had objective criteria for these psychological claims, we wouldn’t have this problem. But all that was jettisoned in the days before the feminist advocacies set their sights on the military, and back when they never imagined that there would ever be sustained ground combat again, let alone the shape-shifting terrors of counter-insurgency warfare in populated areas.

Are women more prone to stress? If so, is it because they are more ‘sensitive’? No matter how ‘positive’ or ‘constructive’ a spin you put on that, it’s a problem – and can armies in sustained (and losing) combat operations be required to put up with that? Bear that burden? Or is it that it’s such a subjective diagnosis to begin with that the whole disparity in numbers may just be chalked up to the doctors being chauvinist pigs who will ‘label’ a woman and not a guy or to doctors who are trying to do ‘the woman’ a favor?

It’s not just a question of which is the correct answer – it’s a life or death matter of whether any of this brouhaha is necessary at all. We are losing a pre-emptive and invasive war that we got into by falling for many of the same gambits played on us by our Unitarium that were imposed upon us by impatient and righteous advocacies in the long ago when we had cash and no real prospects of ever having to fight an old-fashioned war again.

Corbett keeps up the pace. Imagine, she proposes, how many women have been raped in civilian life (and here the reader need only refer to the ‘numbers’ and ‘knowledge’ provided by the feminists’ sub-and-sister advocacy: the sex-offender lobby). We are to imagine that there is now a class of woman-in-trouble suffering “a double whammy”: raped in civilian life and now combat-stressed in the military. I imagine that Corbett had a reason for refraining from taking it to the next level: the triple-whammy of having been raped in civilian life, combat-stressed, and having been raped (or ‘assaulted’ or ‘harassed’) in the military and – fourth level – in the military by someone who outranks them.

I do not doubt the conceptual possibilities that Corbett raises, although I add the usual sex-offense provisos about elastic definitions and unsupported ‘evidence’. Rather, I simply wonder again: Is any of this necessary? Wasn’t it all preventable by – at the very least – the institution of single-gender units?

We see here, I think, an echo of the phenomenon we are experiencing in matters Israeli: by creating from the get-go a situation that is bound to cause insoluble difficulties and then refusing to yield, one can guarantee oneself as the victim of a sempiternal ‘crisis’ on the basis of which endless demands – rendered vivid by reports real or otherwise – may be made. A case might be made, in another of these baroque and hot-irony metaphysical echoes, that decades ago the advocacies adopted the Israeli playbook and as a result the women in the Army in Iraq are now in crisis.

It’s a house of mirrors, our modern American reality, and so often it seems that we are agitatedly wrestling with pillows thrown over our heads by well-meaning but kinda ruthlessly determined advocacies. Yet out there – out where ‘others’ roam and dwell – it’s all very real, all too too real. Our troops are over there, obedient to Our word. If they are facing real bullets for Us, then We should muster the respect to face – and solve – real problems for them.