I think Kevin Williamson is asking the wrong question in his post musing over whether Americans are willing to bear the cost of defeating the Islamic State:
The candidates are incoherent and their strategies are implausible because they are seeking the support of an electorate with incoherent demands, who demand victory, if they think about victory at all, at an implausible price. Haider al-Abadi may go looking for insight in Foreign Policy, but he should re-up his subscription to Sotheby’s International Realty, too, if he does not already have a retirement chalet secured. No sane man bets his head — literally — on the assurances of Joe Biden.
The question he should be asking is one of value. What is the value of our defeating DAESH? We are not the Saud family or Israel or even the Iranians for whom the Islamic State may pose an existential threat. We are not France, Italy, or Germany who are threatened also, both by their own radicalized populations and immigrants or refugees (or, in some cases, “refugees”). IMO the risks we face may be mitigated by measures short of war.
Note, too, his implication that Americans demand victory. I think that Americans are more right about this than he; they don’t care much about what happens in the Middle East. The president was half right about that. We aren’t willing to place American “boots on the ground” to oppose forces that don’t really pose much of a threat to us.
But he was half wrong, too. Committing U. S. air power to oppose DAESH and stating that their mission was to “degrade and destroy” placed us on a slippery slope to increasing military commitment. That he will undoubtedly want to weasel out of further commitments by pointing to the Iraqis’ unwillingness and even inability to fight does not salvage our prestige and prestige is an import component of the psy-ops of deterrence.
Flipping around the dial on the car radio yesterday I caught a couple of minutes of Sean Hannity’s show. he’s probably my least favorite guy on talk radio, but his audience is huge.
Hannity was discussing the sacrifices military personnel make for the country, and not just the ultimate one, but obviously that’s the one that weighs most heavily.
He was wondering if, post-Vietnam & post-Iraq, the nation really has the right to ask the military for that sacrifice anymore. His point was that people gave all, won every battle they were asked to win, and then watched the politicians piss it all away.
Obviously he has a partisan slant on this, but I had the feeling he wasn’t too pleased with his own party either, and certainly not with the politicians. (On a separate issue he was highly critical of McConnell & Boehner, essentially for political cowardice.)
I found that an interesting turning point for one of the most hawkish members of the chattering class.
I think everyone but McCain and the pro-Israel lobby are worn out by all the interventions. After all, if we can’t fix Baltimore or Chicago, how are we going to fix Baghdad or Moscow?
I’m not so sure we don’t have a bigger domestic problem with ISIS than you suppose. How many Muslim refugees have we let into the country since 9/11? How many before that? How many Muslim immigrants otherwise, both legal & illegal both before & after 9/11? How many more of them are going to go all Tsarnaev brother on their new nation?
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A couple of notes related to immigration. Jorge Ramos of Univision has called for unlimited immigration to the US, without restriction. He did so for Mexican immigrants specifically, but how is that fair to everyone else in the Third World. I’ve heard other pro-immigration voices calling for the same thing recently. How many people live in countries crappier than ours? Not to mention how many are their going to be in the not so distant future? (The UN is now projecting the population of Africa to soar to over four billion people by the end of the century, for example.)
The pro-immigration forces really do want to turn the US into a Third World nation, with all that entails.
Also, am I really supposed to believe that the number of illegal aliens in the country has fallen in the last ten years? I keep hearing we only have 11 million of them now, when the number used to be 12 million back in the Bush amnesty days. There was some small outflow for a couple of years, but that was brief and has been swamped by events since.
I’m not saying there is no threat only that there are other ways of mitigating the risks to us than war. For example, changes to how student visas are issued and overseen could mitigate whatever risks that they pose. If refugees pose a problem, changing how we issue and oversee visas issued to them is the solution rather than bombing their homelands. And so on.
Okay, those are proper points.
I listed three movies about the WW2 Pacific Campaign, and I doubt many people would accept that number of casualties today. I suspect that very few people actually know those numbers anymore. (Marines do.)
I doubt anybody would accept the level of WW2 rationing. I suspect Sean Hannity would be in that group, and he would not be alone.
I do not have a problem with people not serving or wanting to serve in the military with two caveats. One, keep your social experiments to your social clubs, and two, stay out of the Marine Corps. Yes, we do have the best uniforms, but you are going to earn it. If you are not looking to be the hardest, enlist in another branch.
The enlisted men have the best dress uniforms. The officers’s dress uniforms are a little drab by comparison. The stripes & hash marks just make it more impressive, especially if there’s a lot of both.
TB, have you read Sledge’s books, “With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinaw” and “China Marines”? (I have trouble imagining that you haven’t.) I remember Sledge awaiting deployment on some island watching a bunch of soldiers march by, and he wondered how the Army could take pride in itself when they all looked so bad in the uniforms.
@Icepick
I have never read them. It is weird, but I do not get into movies or books about actual Marine Corps battles. A lot of times they are not telling the worst of it, but it looks like he may have. I might get them.
I once told my sister about something in Somalia, and she looked at me like I had three heads. Until I wound up at the Vet Center, that was the first and last time I ever talked about anything I had ever seen or experienced.
I do not get tucking your trousers into your boots or using those tie things. For blousing your trousers, you use blousing bands. (Use shirt-sock suspenders to keep your socks up and your shirt tucked, but the secret is to wrap them around your leg.)
The Marine Corps is a throwback to an era that never really existed except in the mind of the Marine Corps, but it exists because the Marine Corps instills it in every Marine.
I’d recommend Sledge’s books. He fought through those battles as a Marine private. His story is something along this line:
A son of a prominent Southern family, he was destined to go into the family business of being a doctor. However, he dropped out of college during WWII feeling a moral obligation to serve and fight. However, despite being eligible for officer training, he didn’t feel he had what it took to lead men to their deaths, so he opted for the enlisted ranks. I think he may have finally been promoted to Corporal by the time he was discharged, but he never sought to lead. He also (apparently) never shirked combat duties, and fought in the two campaigns listed in the first book’s title. (China Marine is about his time in occupied China immediately after the war.)
He had the “keen eye for detail” and wasn’t afraid to talk about the dirtiest parts of combat. (I had never considered the implications of long stretches of combat regarding bodily functions.) I think you’d appreciate the first, and would find the second (which doesn’t deal with combat but rather with a little known part of the war’s history) interesting. They also have the benefit of being short works.
@Icepick
I might have to get them.
Nobody ever talks about having to take a dump in a MOPP suit on open terrain after engaging an Iraqi mechanized brigade.
First, do you go in the front of the vehicle or the back (enemy to the front or grunts to the rear)?
Second, how much time do you have (word to move could come at any time)?
Third, after six months of shitting in a hole, you have learned the physics of not dropping a turd into your cargo pocket, but a MOPP suit is something entirely different. You have no idea how long this thing is going to last, and you do not want to spend the next week or two smelling like shit.
Fourth, in the desert you are usually not hydrated enough and MRE’s are dehydrated somewhat, this leads to things being dry and sometimes hard to pass, but after 48 hours in a MOPP suit and running on adrenaline, things are drier than normal. (On the upside, there is little paperwork.)
There are a lot of things that people never think about. While we were hanging out in the desert, I used to write to several children and classes, and I would describe what it was like. I would tone them down, and there was no cussing or filth. (The perfumed “Dear Marine” letters were gone by the time they got to the front lines. We got the ones written in crayon or from Mrs. Smith’s 2nd Grade Class.)
The letters must have been fairly good because I got a request to have them published in a literary magazine. There was a nun who was a family friend of a little girl I was writing to, and the num had read all of them. She wrote to me right before we went into Kuwait, but after everything, I stopped caring. Other than some horses we came across, there was not much for a little girl.
I could not figure out a delicate way to explain how a TOW missile can open an APC like a sardine can and instantly vaporize everybody inside. Nor does an eight year old girl need to know that Iraqi soldiers are total pieces of shit that will walk over or around their wounded buddies, and they will leave them to die. The list of what she did not need to know grew larger than what I could tell her, and I just left it.
An eight year old girl should not be exposed to somebody who has tasted a forbidden fruit (unfettered chaos, not killing or explosions).
The solution to taking a dump on islands like Peleliu was to just shit your pants. These guys were exposed to combat 24/7 due to the nature of the Japanese defenses, so they really didn’t have many options. At least according to Sledge. His reasoning was enough to convince me he was correct for at least a large number of the combatants involved.