CAT’S PAW

I had been talking about the ‘migration of concepts’ in recent Posts: that a concept or idea or technique from one area of activity could be picked up and applied in a completely different area of activity, with more or less (or much less) applicability or with entirely different results and – a word that We should start carving in stone – consequences.

In a recent article, the military writer William S. Lind discusses an axiom of military affairs: the illegitimacy of power. This is a concept, he notes, noted by another significant modern military affairs thinker, Martin van Creveld, who calls it “the power of weakness”.

Both thinkers discuss this concept in its relation to Fourth Generation War (4GW): the type of asymmetric conflict where large conventional armies, deploying great quantities of advanced military force in all its manifestations, are opposed by small, dedicated groups – not ‘military forces’ as such. This is the type of military challenge We face in Iraq and Afghanistan now (and which the Israeli military faces in Gaza, not irrelevantly).

He observes, rightly, that “in a Fourth Generation world, legitimacy is the coin of the realm”. The overwhelming power of advanced military force is perceived to be ‘illegitimate’ and that perception then assigns ‘legitimacy’ to those ‘unorganized’ and ‘non-military’ forces that arise to oppose it. This happened in France under the German occupation, where the Resistance had the triple advantage of first, opposing a national invader and occupier, that was (second) cruel and oppressive, and thirdly, assumed the proportions of a Goliath in relation to the Resistance agents who arose to combat the occupiers. The population, even if not adventurous enough to actively participate in ‘resistance’ held the resisters in relatively high-esteem.

This created a significant problem for the German occupation forces, one that only got worse as time went on. Indeed, every ‘success’ they achieved against the Resistance served, perversely, to increase the people’s esteem for the Resistance (and it also increased the Resistance’s dedication and intensified their activity).

This principle also worked wonders in Mao’s struggle against the Chinese Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai Shek (or however it’s spelled nowadays). Even though the Nationalists were also Chinese, they were seen by the people as allies of foreign meddling as well as representatives, somehow, of an old, imperial order.

Whenever resisters stand up against an overwhelming military power, they become ‘heroes’ in the eyes of the majority of the people. There’s something almost primal, certainly fundamental, in this: a human respect for the plucky underdog. It is “the power of weakness”. There is no advanced technology or amount of boots-on-the-ground that can beat it; the more advanced and powerful the aggressive occupier, the higher the burnish of the stalwart resister.

Certainly, the Israelis got along for decades passing themselves off as just such plucky (and righteous) underdogs, defending themselves against the Goliath of the assorted Arab national forces around them. It hasn’t worked so well of late, and the Israelis have found themselves starting to lose that ‘legitimacy’ in the eyes of the world’s peoples and governments (with one well-remunerated exception being the officialdom and elites residing in the Beltway neighborhood of Washington City).

When this dynamic takes hold, the occupier determined to remain becomes mired in a downward spiral that cannot be broken. For the occupier, things will not turn out well. For the resister, secure in the inevitability of this military and strategic principle (as well as in the rightness of the Resistance cause), need only keep on keeping on.

In terms of ‘migration of the concept’, it occurs to me that this principle (not ‘new’, although newly empowered) had been adopted by the government here in domestic affairs.

And the manner of it is on this wise.

After the stunning newsreel footage of Southern police beating up on Civil Rights demonstrators in the mid-‘50s to mid-‘60s, the country largely shifted its attitude to police authority. The World War Two generations, used to a certain amount of regimentation and recognizing their own peers among the returned vets who joined police forces, generally accepted and trusted the use of police power. But for them, and for their Boomer children, watching that footage shifted attitudes.

Granted, when the Southern Civil Rights movement entered its ‘second’ phase, the revolution-minded agitations that arose in the non-Southern cities, a significant fraction of the populace became more concerned for law-and-order against urban crimes feeding synergistically off of the agitation-spirit. But the overall sympathy of the public shifted away from the ‘police’, and the police power; it had become ‘delegitimized’.

This explains, I believe, what happened next – over the course of a decade or two. The government became frustrated and perhaps alarmed by the popular predisposition to see any persons caught up in the criminal justice system as ‘victims’, if not also as ‘good’, or even ‘heroes’. The aura of ‘liberal’ concern for the individual, clearly and rightly deployed in the service of protecting the Civil Rights marchers in that watershed Southern phase, now had extended to ‘cover’ all manner of other activity, even as the Civil Rights activity shifted in the mid-‘60s from the South to the urbanized cultures of the cities.

But ‘liberal’ policy – under the Democrats – also then extended to ‘women’, especially as ‘women’ were defined in the ‘vision’ of gender-feminism: helpless victims of an abiding, primitive, inbred ‘male’ aggressiveness and violence. In this vision, the police and the police power of the government were cast as ‘good’, riding in like the cavalry to rescue the settlers in their wagon-trains and homesteads. (Although, in yet more complication, this image would never have been used, since it was – under the aegis of multicultural ‘respect’ – insensitive and, marvelously, itself too ‘John Wayne’ and too ‘masculine’.)

The fire of a genuine conservative concern for law-and-order and the fire of a gender-feminist near-hysteria for ‘protection’ and ‘vengeance’ and ‘justice’ began to burn toward each other in the national forest.

The fires linked up in the later-1980s in ‘victimism’: the assumption that the police power of the government (and I say this with all respect for hard-working individual police officers) was the ‘good’ and that those persons caught in the toils of the police-power were the ‘bad’. Now it was ‘decent’ folks against ‘criminals’. Although again, since the gender-feminists sought to delegitimize ‘decency’ as an instrument of social stasis and ‘oppression’, the actual term ‘decent’ was rarely used; ‘victims’ were simply that, and their status seemed to exist independent of any characterizing descriptors or any other dynamics. A victim was a victim, thus good and the ‘victimizer’ evil, and that was all that needed to be said.

Let the games begin.

All of this exploded into a firestorm as the Democrats took the White House in the very early 1990s. Almost immediately there was an explosion of laws, changes to long-standing legal principles, and entire new categories of ‘offenders’. Within short order there were divorce-law changes and special courts, ‘domestic violence’ laws and registries, quickly followed by ‘sex offenders’ and the still-burgeoning laws and registries.

Government police-power began to expand, with elite support and an initially high level of popular acceptance; it expanded to levels not seen in a modern democracy. The civil-liberties and jurisprudential consequences of such hastily-enacted initiatives were unremarked and – in the popular media – mostly ignored, though the professional literature was rife with alarms and deep concerns.

With its whole-hog embrace of ‘the victim’, the government police-power had found a way to ‘legitimize’ itself. Although it had expanded hugely and ominously, that power gained ‘legitimacy’ by its almost total ‘dedication’ to helping the ‘little guy’ (although that ‘guy’ was now almost always a female).

With both Democrats and Republicans ‘on board’, the entire process swept the country, its institutions, its laws, its ethos.

And when the Soviet Union collapsed, also in those early 1990s, it did not take long for this concept to ‘migrate’ from domestic to foreign affairs. Foreign policy, especially as defined by the larger and more developed nations, began to speak of a ‘humanitarian responsibility’ to over-ride other nations’ national sovereignty in the interests of bringing ‘justice’ and ‘reform’ to backward, 'oppressed', 'victimized peoples.

This was, clearly, an utter reversal of the Wilsonian principle of ‘national self-determination’; if a government did ‘bad’ things – and what government doesn’t? – in the eyes of a larger and more powerful nation, then its sovereign rights were forfeit and the larger nations, if they chose, would invade or assault, in order to essentially rescue the ‘victims. By 1995 the US was in Bosnia, where – ominously – it still remains, with the UK under the personally sincere and totally convinced Tony Blair bringing up the rear.

The possibilities for grave mischief were rife. Especially in a world where essential resources – oil, grains, even fresh water – are dwindling, the larger and more developed nations have given themselves carte blanche to invade wherever they choose to perceive ‘victimization’ that needs redress, 'oppression' that needs 'liberating'.

And then came 9-11, and then Afghanistan, which was ‘won’ and yet was then ‘lost’ as the government's schemes shifted to Iraq.

‘Victimization’ – and there is enough of it in this Vale of Tears, as God knoweth full well – became a perfect ‘cover’ of ‘legitimacy’ for foreign interventions, invasions and occupations, wherever and whenever the US chose.

Nor, certainly under Bush, did the US choose well.

And here We are.

Nor is Obama going to be able to easily reverse this entire national mind-set and heart-set. ‘Victimism’ and all that supports it, including the manipulative stoking of fear and anxiety and mistrust and vengeance; and the disrespect for established principles of Western and Constitutional justice; and the even more deeply buried disrespect for national sovereignty, is now a well-anchored dynamic in both US domestic affairs (and politics) and in US foreign affairs.

But especially in foreign affairs this game is becoming harder and harder to sustain. Those invaded and occupied do not see themselves as receiving ‘rescue’, and though they most certainly see themselves as being victimized (if not as helpless victims) they ‘see’ clearly that their victimizer is the US.

Nor can their opposition to such a gambit be easily written off as ‘backlash’, as had happened in US domestic affairs.

They are getting shafted, they know it, and they aren’t going to stand still for it.

And the principle of ‘the power of weakness’ will serve to wear down whatever aggressive and advanced military force the US chooses to deploy in the quintessentially American delusion that enough know-how and well-funded weapons research will yield a quick ‘victory’ with minimal (American) casualties and no lasting negative consequences.

It was a lot easier (though hardly more justifiable) for the US government and elites to corrode America’s own Constitutional ethos domestically.

So History is not dead. Although the Constitution is not at all well, and the hostility of both Leftist (not liberal) and Rightist (not conservative) factions in American politics and government does not make for a bright prognosis. Dr. Obama faces a ‘patient’ rapidly enroute to becoming an ER ‘trainwreck’, wounded and injured so complexly and profoundly that any effort to ‘fix’ any one serious problem is going to aggravate several others.

We are cursed with “interesting times” indeed. This is Our rendezvous with destiny. Let Us rise up to meet it.

NOTE

Lind also notes that "Americans, driven by sensation-seeking media, will panic". Yes. Having somehow lost any working sense of Divine Providence or any help from Beyond that helps put up with the slings and arrows of outrageous Life and Fortune, Americans are far more easily spooked, stampeding toward any 'reform' that promises to eradicate pain and suffering in any form from human life.

And having been told for decades (and taught, at 50K a year for college) that 'maturity' and self-mastery and 'seriousness' are all 'male', 'patriarchal', 'oppressive' modes of 'vertical' thinking and must be eradicated ... I can't really see how that has helped.

Additionally, it's not just the sensationalist media. The government and legislators themselves find it a quick and reliable way to garner 'legitimacy', pushing through all sorts of 'reforms' to stop 'pain'. And the national government uses its purse-strings to induce police agencies and cash-strapped State governments to go along.

We are increasingly becoming helpless and panicky - and I don't mean as a nation here, but as a 'people'. And that bodes very ill for The People. And for democracy. And for the Constitution.

Obama has stated that the citizenry needs to start putting more responsibility on itself. One of the primary ways that good advice must be given shape and form is for individual adults to get a grip and not simply panic on cue like the crowds in some mass-disaster movie.

PROTEST YOUTH

Tom Engelhardt reports on his experience at the recent anti-war march (“Demobilizing America: Outsourcing Action in an Imperial World”, (www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032607H.shtml.) and on his site TomDispatch.com.

He mentions the curious fact that of all the blabbering pundits still around who a couple-three years ago told us that war in ze East would be a righteous slam-dunk, almost all of them are still around demanding to be taken seriously, still outshouting the couple of commenters who turned out to have been right then and (presumably) now (he mentions Jonathan Schell and James Carroll).

It is odd. It reminds me: guess who constituted one of the earliest and most vehemently barred groups of Americans who tried to volunteer for service with the military at the outset of Da Good War?

No, not them. Nope, not them either. It was “anti-fascists”. Yes, you read right. If you had gone to Spain a few years before and fought Hitler and Mussolini there then – sorry, pal – the Army didn’t want you in 1940 or 1941. G’wan home, the whole a’yez!

And why? The official reason was – wait for it – “premature antifascism”. And – No, that’s not a sexual or psychosexual disorder. If you had seen that Hitler was a lethal whackjob too early, and had the get-up-and-go to go do something about it, then you weren’t what the US military was looking for.

In other words, if you were independently-minded enough to see a vicious whackjob for what he really was while Henry Ford and a number of Congressmen and senior officers were still impressed with his production figures and his vote-getting and his uniforms, and if you then also had the independence of will to actually change your life by crossing the sea to fight on foreign soil against him and his flunkies … waaaaal, then you probably weren’t soldier-material.

And ya know – I think the Army was maybe mostly right. Too much independence is not what they want at ze front.

Youth … now that’s one of those curious phenomena: seems independent, but really it’s not. Independence isn’t something that comes with youth; being truly ‘free’ and being able to appreciate ‘liberty’ is not something that is very easy for the young to do. It’s not their fault – it’s just that it takes a long time to mature the soul, the spirit, the psyche, the self to the point where ‘otium’ can become ‘schole’, where time-to-burn becomes constructive ‘leisure’. So they don’t call it the ‘infanterie’ for nothing: you want young soldiers because they really haven’t got a handle on how to embody or to live-out their ‘freedom’. Or you want ‘older’ soldiers who never really grew up or who had their hopes dashed out of them and are equally open to becoming pieces of military sculpture.

And yes – you can ‘fight for’ freedom without knowing what it really is or without being able – as they say in the military – to ‘platform’ it. And that’s even before the stress and the awfulness degrades whatever platforming-capacity you brought with you in the first place. You may come back having ‘earned’ your place in society without actually being able to sustain a societal life.

We have evolved or devolved into a curiously skewed society that is simultaneously too old and too young. It doesn't value the gifts of maturity - those same gifts upon which solid democratic praxis is built and by which it is sustained; consequently far too many adults see themselves only as ex-children, and miss it. As if we were nothing but a nation of ex-child stars. We are youth-defined and youth-obsessed (sorta a lot like what is found to be so repulsive in the sex-offenders).

Meanwhile, we are also sorta crazed in the intensity of our seeking to provide them (as if we were the gods) with 'perfect' and 'total' security and perfect childhoods. Perhaps this is an attempt to compensate for the actual God (or gods) recently deconstructed in the service of the assorted revolutions. Perhaps this is a symptom of the Flatness of the modern American 'world', where nothing lasts and nothing exists beyond surfaces and appearances, and so Meaning-hungry folks try to cram that Flat monodimension with as much 'stuff' and 'activity' as they can.

And all the while long lines of the children 'raised' in this foggy, foreshortened, Flattened, gadget-stuffed 'world' are heading off into the brutal clarity of the classroom presided over by Ares Ferox et Atrox.

So that’s why We most certainly now have Our work cut out for us in the matter of returning vets: they’ve seen way too much, done way too much, in this monstrous cauldron of 4th Generation Warfare and a long, losing campaign. They’re coming back much the worse for the wear and it’s on Us because it was Our word – spoken through the reptile lips of the Unitarium – that sent them over into that lethal mess.

Of all the debts We have incurred in the past few years – and their name is Legion – the debt We owe to Our returnees is one of the most significant. Did we think credit cards and mortgages were the only form of debt? Not hardly.

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.

MERCENARY THOUGHTS

Over on Alternet Lorelei Kelly, former Hill staffer, has a piece entitled “Mercenaries are in the military to stay: Get Used To It!” (http://www.alternet.org/story/48241/). Lord, X-wave feminist style hasn’t helped matters at all, even when they’re serious.

The article has a serious chunk to offer. The military – apparently – has been presiding over its own privatization for “years”. This IS interesting. We had sorta gotten used to the idea that they now had civilan cooks and bottlewashers over there in Bosnia, and even that ‘some’ private-security folks were tromping around Baghdad, presumably privately engaged by this or that Iraqi bigwig to man his motorcades and take the kids to school. But now it appears that there are “100,000 contractors … including 25,000 private security contractors”. That’s a lot of motorcades and the school parking lots must look like marshaling yards for an entire Panzer division. And if it’s like that in Baghdad, where our glorious forces are establishing the world’s strongest embassy … ach. As the BBC series “The World At War” pithily put it: “In 1943 in Berlin it was better listening to music than to news.” Cue the Beethoven; hold Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”.

She calls it “a virtual army of largely unregulated individuals working on behalf of U.S. national interests”. I’m not about to grant that. As employees, they are wherever they are in behalf of the interests of whatever entity hired them and pays them. If the interests of the US government happen to coincide, fine and dandy; if not … what then? And if we are talking about the companies providing bad water and bad food to the troops, well then we’re looking at the type of business that was last done on this scale in the Civil War when the early corporations provided rotten tinned meat to the boys in blue at Gettysburg and there was so much paper in the uniforms that they literally dissolved off a soldier’s body in the first rain. Lack of Humvee armor and ineffective body-armor wouldn’t be any surprise to Grant’s and Sherman’s boys. But many of them died, and the corporations that sold the junk to the Union Army went on to long, cash-fat, respectable lives, as did the desk-riding colonels and generals who approved the contracts.

“They are all legitimate businesses” she points out. Welllll … slavery was legitimate for quite a while, of course; it only takes a law to make something ‘legitimate’ and now they’ve got one that has legitimized torture and even one for making legitimate what was feloniously illegitimate when it was committed. The wonders of modern legislation! More recently we have seen more than enough to induce us to consider any private contractor with its jaws clamped tightly into the cash-fat corpus of the Pentagon as ‘suspicious’.

“The military”, she asserts, “has been colonized by corporations.” Willy Tango Foxtrot? The Pentagon isn’t like some remote, fortified Pacific island where the corporations could land like Marines and take the place over after some serious gunplay. If the corporations are in the fort, somebody had to open the gate – from the inside. And if it’s been going on for so long and it’s an established fact, then a lot of generals and admirals must have known about it. So why no alarm? Were they bought off by the corporations? Were they willing to have all these corporations and their mercenaries come in?
Those are unhappy roads, either of them. Save money on troops that you can then quietly divert to buy weapons-systems that can outclass the latest Soviet stuff? Give out contracts so that you can get hired as a consultant after you retire with a DSM? Hold your tongue so you don’t endanger your next promotion or your next assignment? To read Ms. Kelly you get the idea the Pentagon was invaded and taken over. You don’t just go over an “colonize” the Pentagon. Except in the movies. And there is a difference. Still. Isn’t there?

And yet she wants us to just accept this ‘colonization’ as a fact, regardless of how it happened (and she has nothing to say about how it happened). Even if “the billions of dollars disappeared by contractors in Iraq make Abramoff look like Little Bo Peep”. Now that has to be a lot of money; Washington City for the period of the Twelve Years has resembled nothing so much as Rome at its decadent worst. To do worse than the best of the K-Street scummies is to do very bad indeed. And yet we are to accept as a given that these players are somehow now at the table and that’s that? In the matter of national defense, in the matter of turning civilian nationals loose with powerful weapons in a foreign country and in a war zone … we are supposed to just ‘Get used to it’ …? Or to ‘Get over it’ … ? Like this was just some campus dust-up over a woman president or gays on the football squad? And if we keep asking questions, are we simply to be dismissed because we “just don’t get it” … ?

The turkeys of symbolic politics played to the pretensions of a peanut gallery are coming home to roost with a vengeance. The same gummy pudding that passed for ‘serious’ in the dorm cafeteria is supposed to determine how we conduct the matter of lethal violence waged against other peoples on the responsibility of the American government and the American People.

And the bloody tip of this problem is precisely that: lethal force and the responsibility for authorizing it. We can’t even control our uniformed troops as well as we’d like to think (Abu Graib, some of these incidents out in the field) and we are going to let a bunch of mercenaries loose with even bigger and better guns? And they will certainly be taken by the locals as acting with the authority of the United States. With Our authority as The People. Is this what we want? Can a nation even do that? Should it? Is it at all wise?

We apparently have not only mercenary cooks and bottlewashers and vehicle-gassers and barracks-cleaners (and guys to work porta-potty trucks … imagine if one of those takes a direct hit). We also have mercenary combat personnel (and not just guys sitting in limos next to the Client). Is this true? And the Pentagoons are good with this?

So Ms. Kelly reports that a lot of these mercenaries are well-trained (ex-military, many of them, no doubt) and well-intentioned and patriotic. But … they got out. But now they’re back. Pay’s better – no doubt. Still, she’s glad that they’ve been brought under the authority of military justice now (apparently neither she nor they are very familiar with the sausage machine within whose kill zone they have now been chained).

And she urges that this whole thing should really be discussed. Well, no – actually she wants Congress to exercise better oversight. But ‘oversight’ assumes that the mercenaries are there and that their being there is a done deal, may be even a good thing. Maybe.

So the mercenaries are now ‘facts on the ground’ and we just have to ‘deal with it’. Well, we do have to deal with this thing. Whether we have to accept it is another question. We most certainly have to think the thing through from the get-go and take nothing for granted. Maybe we will decide that private security companies are indeed n-o-t “here to stay”. We can do that. It would be ‘legitimate’. We are, after all, The People, and that still counts for something.

FACTS ON THE GROUND

There’s an article on Truthout by Sarah Rich called “Good Order and Discipline” (www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020607L.shtml). Ms. Rich is a social worker; her daughter is Suzanne Swift, a female soldier (an MP) who is presently pursuing some type of sexual harassment charges against the Army while also receiving some form of in-patient mental health care while also awaiting court martial. The alleged harassment (Ms. Rich slides into “molestation” here and there) has led to Ms. Swift’s desire for a discharge, while the commanding officer (a female colonel) of this MP unit seems to be going – as aforenoted - for a court-martial. Ms. Rich is not at all pleased.

Contemplating this scenario one is reminded of the tactical and strategic gambit called “creating facts on the ground”. To the best of my knowledge, the actual phrase was created – and the gambit deployed – by the Zionists in the post-World War 2 era.

The gist of its modus operandi was that this matter (giving “the land of Israel” as a self-governing haven in atonement and compensation for the Holocaust) was far too important to be left up to discussion, hemming and hawing and chin-stroking. Rather, the Zionist strategy should be to move Jews (again, I don’t like this fore-shortened term) onto the land immediately, regardless of the state of discussions; thereby, one creates “facts on the ground” that have to be taken into account no matter what one’s more abstract thoughts and ideas might be (or, more precisely, ‘have been’ before the aforesaid “facts” were suddenly created and injected into the equation).

The matter was actually not one of pure and utter urgency: there was little chance of the Third Reich coming back in 1946 or subsequently. But it was certainly a matter that would allow, indeed would demand, serious reflection and deliberation. After all, to set up such a state in the midst of unfriendly peoples who had been occupying the property and did not recognize the Judeo-Christian scriptures as a basis for this-worldly land-taking … this was a step fraught with long-term consequences.

With shrewdness and chutzpah the Zionists decided to go for an end-run around deliberation, not illogically assuming that a matter this complicated would not be decided for a long time, and quite possibly not in their favor. Better to force the issue by creating those “facts on the ground”, after which point they would sit at the discussion table armed with more than abstractions such as ideas and ideals.

It was a foxy maneuver, but in an eminently good cause, and in this world how much closer to perfection could you reasonably expect to get? In regard to its merits in the long-term nothing here is ventured.

But it cannot escape notice that in the same time-frame when the feminist Revolution (one of those Revolutions of the Identities discussed on this site) was being effected, this strategy of our newly-minted Israeli friends (we had tilted toward them after LBJ pretty much reversed JFK’s policy) was apparently adopted by the shapers of the Revolution.

The shapers themselves were urging numerous immediate and far-reaching changes whose claims to legitimacy were in many ways modest at best and might thus be debated and deliberated endlessly. So it apparently became the strategy – wherever possible – to create their own version of “facts on the ground”, the very existence of which would then give their wielders more leverage in the on-going revolutionary horse-trading to come.

It seems to me that one area where such ‘facts’ were created before the whole thing was carefully thought through was in this matter of placing women in the military. Not that there is no case to be made for it, certainly. Rather, that it was insisted from the very beginning that women were not simply to be given a place in the military, but had to serve in mixed-gender units with males. Which was a whole ‘nother issue altogether, but which was somehow bundled with the general ‘women in the military’ matter; somewhat like the old WW2 war-film gambit of a submarine getting into the enemy’s protected anchorage by hiding under a freighter authorized to pass through the opening in the anti-sub net.

It has been discussed elsewhere on this site (“Sex Offends Military Justice”), but Ms. Rich offers a couple of fresh opportunities for reflection.

The espousal of the facts-on-the-ground strategy is understandable. As said above, the proposed changes were large and deep and their claim to the status of justice and ‘reality’ was hardly adamantine or irrefutable; the discussions and deliberations involved in formal adoption (or quite possibly rejection) of the proposals could have gone on ‘forever’, or reasonably close to it.

But then bundled with the demands that women serve in the military and that they serve in combat, was a third demand that women serve only in mixed gender units, or on mixed-gender ships. There was not only very modest conceptual justification for this third demand, but it was gravid with almost insoluble problems. If supplying ‘feminine products’ – however widely or narrowly defined – was going to be a challenge to the military, then having to supply them to mixed-gender units would pose far more problems than to single-gender units. More importantly, and almost ‘classical’, was the matter of sex.

In the early-‘90s, this problem posed massive enough questions. Sex being almost hard-wired into the male of the species in order to ensure propagation, there were few ‘disciplines’ ever historically imposed upon (male) troops or accepted by troops that fully neutralized the distractions that accompanied even the most tenuous sexual opportunity. Indeed, absent any actual opportunities, imagined and fantasized ‘opportunities’ were substituted, and not infrequently to the point of obsession.

Such distractions always posed a problem for field commanders. You wanted your troops to be as ‘stoked’ as they could be, yet you didn’t want them distracted from the military mission and the ‘stoked’ energies thus wasted. And once troops under pressure encountered females – especially foreign and civilian – in the course of their operations, then all sorts of unlovely situations could arise.

It quickly becomes clear simply on the theoretical level that to mix genders among troops, especially in combat, was going to pose problems pretty much on the level of ‘making a jet fly in reverse’. But those were the salad days: the Soviet Union had just fallen, the U.S. had no peer-enemies and the whole world seemed happy, and the revolutionists might be forgiven for figuring that ‘now’ was as good a time as any to create “facts” which could be finessed later on, the whole thing not standing much chance of incurring its own worst possible consequences.

The brass saw that they were over a barrel. If they claimed the thing couldn’t be done, then ‘the women’ would mock their ‘can-do’ bravado and their assertions that in the U.S. military the impossible will take a few minutes and the difficult will be successfully accomplished immediately. And so, figuring uneasily that they should have some breathing space before ‘reality’ had to be faced out there in the actual world, the brass got on the bandwagon and allowed as how – shucks – this is a doable-do. Of course it is, glared ‘the women’: we would expect nothing less from our valiant generals. Congress was happy to avoid unpleasantness. Things moved along quickly.

Then came the sex-offense craze of the mid-‘90s. Date-rape, violence against women, sexual assault, sexual violence (a term Ms. Rich uses), molestation (ditto), sexual abuse (ditto). Attempting to surf these tricky and even dangerous new waves, the military – having yielded to all three of the major demands – now found itself trying to control sexual encounters in mixed gender units while simultaneously not utterly degrade the fighting spirit of the male troops, but in an environment now where any allegation had to be accepted at face value, and where such alleged encounters might even not-include actual sex.

If the matter has vexed and deformed civilian justice, it has created even more dangerous complications in the military. Not that military justice is any great shakes, but that the nation then entered a period where actual major and sustained ground combat became a reality. Suddenly, the revolutionary plan of exploiting its “facts” for maximum pervasive effect throughout the military while enjoying the leisure afforded by the post-Soviet world order was almost completely undercut.

And it can come as no surprise that there is now a rising chorus of complaint of ‘sex offenses’ in Iraq. It is anybody’s guess how much pressure troops are under in the failing and lethal maelstrom that has become Iraq and the life of the average solider in Iraq. To add that a sexual ‘incident’ can be made out of a look, a comment, or any number of non-material elements short of physical touching or violence … the consequences of this “facts on the ground” strategy, especially in its 3rd-level aspect of mixed-gender units or gender-mixed operating areas, are now home to roost.

If it seems hugely unwise to subject already-pressed troops (male or female) to the distractions of sexual possibility, it seems just about criminal to subject those troops (especially the males) to the classic tropes and slippery roads of the ‘sex offender’ script. They are in a battlezone with no ‘rear areas’, where everywhere is ‘the front’ and the enemy could be anybody out there beyond the wire. And to this we insist on adding the possibility that a look or a comment will subject them to charges? It can hardly be any wonder that combat-and-brass harassed unit commanders are setting the bar of formal action rather higher than the revolution would prefer; there is – as used to be said – a war on.

Ms. Rich exemplifies the problem clearly. In defense of her daughter’s cause she deploys just about every element of the classic civilian sex-offense script: “sexual violence” is not clearly described although variously appears to be untoward comments or a touch (but may be worse – it’s hard to tell); “rape” and “abuse” – vastly distinct on the spectrum are combined into a single phrase; “winks” and “nods” between “battle buddies” (so male) are involved; the damage to her daughter is “devastation”; the military is “an archaic institution” and has no honor and is hypocritical; the male troops are “sexual predators”; her daughter suffers “humiliation” and then in-patient acute psychiatric care; who will enforce the “civil rights” of those who voluntarily enlist; her daughter is only 19. A presentation as ‘classic’ and as familiar as any in Soviet Realism, and ably deployed.

If any of the foregoing recitation appears to tend toward the less-than-serious, I state right now that such is not my intention. I take this all very very seriously.

But I will not permit myself to slough off into the approved and conventional script patterns. It is gravely serious that this whole gambit of women and the military – in mixed gender units and at the front – was undertaken without adequate consideration as to what might happen in actual wartime conditions (as opposed to – say – ‘war’ as it was waged on the flying Marriott concierge-suite that was the USS Enterprise, NCC-1701D back in the day); it is gravely serious that feminists were willing to use young women – many of them needy in so many ways – as pawns to be made into the revolution’s “facts”; it is almost criminally serious that careerist generals and admirals allowed themselves to be stampeded into promising that they could suppress the male-urges of their often young and needy troops through the simple application of good old American military discipline; it is pathetically serious that politicians were happy just to be taken off the hook so that two seemingly irreconcilable ‘interests’ could be simultaneously mollified and pandered-unto without voters being alienated. Phooey.

And as always, who pays? It all flows downhill to the little people at the front, now male and female. They will be further empawned as ‘roles’ in this or that ‘script’ – the predatory rape-happy male, the helpless victimized female, the sleazy and insensitive and uncaring unit commander – while the hell that is a day in Iraq engulfs them all.

Like so much else in Iraq, and like so much that has happened within this country and this culture, that is now fraying under the pressure of Iraq, this sex-offense-Script-meets- War is an outmoded strategy that should have been reworked long before now.

The real travails of Ms. Rich and her daughter offer Us an opportunity how We might best arrange matters so that the lives of our staggering troops are not further burdened. To be a set of “boots on the ground” is task enough. The ploy of “facts on the ground” will have to wait.

CHICKEN HAWKS

The world never spent much time in 1946, listening to the assorted Nazi bigwigs still around explain how things happened the way they did. The Nazi project was so reprehensible that nobody was interested in spending any more time on them once the war was over. Assorted generals and field-marshals wrote memoirs, and later Albert Speer – the brilliant young architect who wound up running Nazi war production – did a bravura turn as the brilliant but too-trusting subordinate who had served his 20 years in Spandau and was now on the lecture-and-book circuit.

The January “Vanity Fair” has an illuminating article by David Rose entitled “Neo Culpa”. (http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/01/neocons200701). The author goes around interviewing assorted major players among the neocon war-urgers. The overall impression is that they are not only looking to avoid some American version of Spandau, but are actually looking to keep up their creds for the policy-making and talking-head circuit.

None of them have demonstrated the truly impressive skill that Speer deployed in actual hands-on management of crucial affairs in the service of the nation. They ‘think’, mostly at self-serving think-tanks but occasionally on the faculty of ‘reputable’ institutions of higher thinking and learning.

Their pleadings are various. It was a good plan but the Bush Administration really screwed it up, beyond any reasonable thinker’s ability to imagine such a colossal “Schweinerei” (as the Germans might say). Ach ja. The Leader was an incompetent monomaniac who presided over a rigged planning-process staffed by fawning toadies and too-clever-by-half apparatchiks who thought they could handle him. Who knew? Who could imagine that such things could have gone on in our modern and enlightened world? Surely we wouldn’t blame the thinkers. And they’re sorry now.

Well, no, they’re not. To say they were sorry would be to make Nixon’s mistake of admitting one had screwed up. And look where that got him. No, mistakes were made, and good thoughts were pigged-up by lesser beings elsewhere on the food-chain. Would we care to engage a lecture on the topic? The fees, alas, must reflect the tremendous stresses and strains of maturely sitting by and watching one’s visions trampled by kine and swine, lower down or even “at the center”.

Apparently these honchos were simultaneously movers-and-shakers and yet not so close to “the center” that they could reasonably be held accountable. In the British series “World At War”, made in the early ‘70s, Speer cannot – even after 20 years’ imprisonment for his sins – shake his pride of place: “Everyone else had to go through Bormann to see Hitler. Except me. I had the right of direct access to Hitler.” Ach, such power. Look upon me, ye mighty, and despair.

Things have gone terribly wrong, but was one expected to be “delphic”? Can one be held accountable because one is not a god?

And were we not seeking merely to use our power as a force for good in the world? Didn’t we at least try? That’s more than the wussies with their morality and ethics and international laws would do. Don’t we get credit for trying? Is it our fault that such a noble and beneficial plan was poorly executed? And after all, you may take our word for it that at the outset the war was “a doable do”; they love to strut the man-stuff, these neocons.

We wasted “thousands of hours” before the war, confides one Player, “searching for middle-ground which most of the time will not exist”. The logical gap between relating what actually happened and then suddenly shifting to the ungrounded assertion begs for further ‘unpacking’, as they say. But this is not to blame the interviewer: these characters didn’t allow themselves to be interviewed in order to humbly do their bit in shedding light on the Truth; they are all trying to ‘position’ themselves to survive the wreck of Iraq. Eating regularly in Georgetown can get expensive real quick if you aren’t on a number of dinner-party guest lists or ‘cleared’ for the White House Mess (again, the irony …).

After all, given the moral and manhood failures of the U.N. and everybody else, it was only “American armed might” (if they do say so themselves) that was left able to ensure “a world at peace, a world governed by law; a world in which all peoples are free to find their own destinies”. That their efforts have been effected through war and the violation of laws international and national, they do not appear to notice. That their programme has resulted in a ‘freeing’ of the Iraqis “to find their own destinies” comparable to the ‘liberation’ of the Cherokee to do likewise on the Trail of Tears can be attributed to the brutal fog of war, which not even the most competent and realistic planners can totally disperse. Now people … people can be dispersed, and divided, and hung and drawn and quartered, but realistically, the fog of war and events is just one of those things. It happens. Anybody who really knows what the score is knows that.

But while “a huge strategic defeat” is almost inevitable, not to worry. “The best news is that the United States remains a healthy, vibrant, vigorous society. So in a real pinch we can still pull ourselves together.” That’s encouraging, if it’s as true as is going to be necessary. We’ve taken some serious hits in the ‘capability’ department since the end of the ‘60s and even since the (remember it?) fall of the Soviet Union. Theory has flattened our world, the government is happily presiding over a nation of victims, adequate jobs for those who seek them are in short supply, and for lack of anything better Congress has been channeling its predecessor of the Gilded Age and the last Weimar Reichstag. But perhaps a war with Iran will give us all the opportunity to stick-it-out and find ourselves.

Those of Us who can’t keep up on this glorious March or Griff, or doubt the wisdom of it … well, we obviously aren’t worthy of our birthright. And perhaps God will arrive at the last minute and Rapture all the good ones and toast everybody else. So what’s the diff? Why do your homework if the world will end before final exams? That thought had been proposed by more than one enterprising school-child the night JFK announced the blockade of Cuba; the tests went on after sunrise nonetheless.

Photographs accompany the article. In the practice of journalistic photography these days, the portrayed is allowed to control the mise-en-scene. They have all been shot in sober black-and-white, much after the style of Karsh, the great portrait photographer of World War Two, whose camera captured Churchill and … whoever. Well-coiffed, expensively suited, perhaps chin in hand pensively “pondering the imponderables of war” (in Shelby Foote’s acute description of General Halleck).

Except for one Mr. Professor Doctor Cohen, who stands sideways to the camera, head turned to look sharply at you over a raised nose and chin, eyebrow raised as if alert to the exigencies of those imponderables, hair just a tad mussed, one hand decisively flat on his lap, the other arm half-stretched forward with the hand half-curled in tensive thoughtfulness; he seems to be going for either Lincoln or Grant, but he’s careful not to let you see his arm resting on the classic Civil War-era half-column prop, so it looks like he might have just had a stroke.

A woman, an ‘expert’ at one of those think-tanks, in unadorned simple black, was apparently trying to go for decisive arms-folded, but instead looks like she’s hugging herself, whether out of habit or fear of still-pending consequences, it is not clear.

Another is bearded, looking either thoughtfully or shiftily off to his left, perhaps eyeing the arrival of those same consequences; the expertly trimmed beard makes it look like a simple change of collar and type of tie would make him one of the Kaiser’s advisers, or one of Franz Joseph’s – and considering the sorta Central European dynastic froth out of which the neocon agenda of empire stems, that’s not so off the mark.

Our accounts have not been managed well. And our managers appear far less impressive than the troops who remain obedient to their word. We should do something about that.