Like, then, Scott says, "Yeah, well, so's your mother!"

I'm a bit jealous - first Mustang23 and now Jack Army get flamed like mad and I don't get any hate mail. I try and try to piss people off, and it gets me nowhere . . .

I did notice one bitchy comment on my blog, though - and I only noticed it because SMSgt Mac rose to my defense. His comment made it to my email inbox - where, according to blogger.com, all new comments should come - and I went back and looked at the new comments to what was a fairly old post. (I haven't figured out how blogger decides to send a comment via email - all the comments that do make it there are by people who have a blogger account, but not all comments from blogger accounts do make it. Maybe there's a random number generator involved?)

Scott, apparently deeply scarred by Vietnam, says:

No offense to whoever you are, but you clearly don't understand political reality. Or reality of any sort, as far as that goes.

If you're going to comment on how we're winning the hearts & minds of farmers in Afghanistan by bombing the hell out of them, you ought to start off by addressing the question of why we're bombing the hell out of Afghanistan and Iraq instead of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Seeing as how Iraq (at least) never posed a threat to the US, while Pakistan and Saudi Arabia do (as we've always known) it seems a pertinent question.

I'm amazed that anyone in the military can come out in support of our current military madness. At least in Vietnam the grunts in field knew they were fucked. Translate this whole anecdote into the Vietnam war and it's hard to imagine some grunt posting it to his weblog as "proof" that the war was righteous and smart.

I work in DC, and I come in contact with a fair number of officers in the course of my work. I don't discuss the war with all of them, but those that I have talked with hold a pretty consistent position: We've done some amazing things, but the military was sold a bill of goods and is in some deep shit. The ones that have had command positions are particularly troubled to be throwing away lives with little publicity or fanfare for objectives that cannot be met and will have no lasting impact upon our national security.

I doubt that he'll see this, since I suspect Scott is a drive-by troll, but I thought I'd respond anyway, for the benefit of anyone else who read the comment:

Hey, Scott, first of all, this isn't largely a political site or a strategic history of the War on Terror. I might talk about political issues (especially military related ones) from time to time, but the blog is mostly a memoir. I have strong political opinions on a lot of issues, but if I don't have what I think is a unique insight, or a personal reaction that sets the issue apart for me, I probably won't comment.

So no, I shouldn't "ought to" address the question of Saudi Arabia vs. Afghanistan as a target. (Although you really should actually read the post - where it discusses just that.) This blog is a place for me to tell war stories. It's more or less a get-together with people who want to come here, maybe a little more disconnected, but not that much different than a conversation over a few beers. Sometimes I'll talk about politics, or TV, or the weather, but mostly I'll tell war stories (Everybody does know the difference between a war story and a fairy tale, right?) Blogging is a perfect medium for me, since I can monopolize the conversation without appearing to be rude. So, if you like the tales, keep reading. If you want a steady diet of political analysis, there are a number of better suited blogs.

Also, I don't know that my opinions on the political or strategic execution of the GWOT matter a lot when I'm talking about what I was doing as the "sheriff of Paktika province." When I got activated, there wasn't a form I had to fill out indicating my political support for the GWOT, or for George Bush, before I was allowed to go to war. I volunteered to be a soldier because I thought that supporting this nation's interests and freedoms was important - and in doing so, I explicitly ceded the right to make the decision about whether or not I went to war to the political leaders of this country. I did that because I thought it was important to step up and do my part - and because I thought (and still think) that this country generally does the right thing, and is usually on the side of good, even if mistakes get made from time to time.

I probably try to game the system more than I should, and I know that I complain about the army and everything involved with it more than is reasonable for someone who keeps signing up to stay in, but, at the end of the day, I'm a soldier. And, as a soldier, I go where I'm sent and I do what I'm told. Part of the sacrifice the soldier makes is in the going, but part of the sacrifice also is giving up the decision whether to go or not to go in the first place. The reward for that sacrifice is a sense of satisfaction from performing the mission well, a sense that I'm contributing to something that's important to the country and to the world, and a paycheck that's less than half of what I make as a civilian.

And I suspect many, if not most, Vietnam combat veterans feel the same way. I don't have the faintest idea whether Papa Ray thinks that the political goals in Vietnam were worth the cost. I'd bet, though, that either way he's proud of his service and what he did there. And I bet he takes a great deal of pride in having been a LRRP, even if most people don't have a clue what that means.

But as a citizen, I do have political opinions. And, as a citizen, I find your analysis to be unpersuasive. Whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or not, it was a threat. It was a key player in destabilizing the ME, it provided funding to terrorist organizations, and it required constant diplomatic, economic and military attention to keep it under control. Fighting AQ while Iraq was part of the landscape was like trying to tame a lion with a hungry tiger in the cage.

And we could certainly justify going in there under almost any framework you wanted to choose, from Augustine and Aquinas's "just war" theory, to the casus belli of classical interpretations of international law. I think that a lot of the angst and whining emerging from the political classes over the Iraq invasion comes from Bush's emphasis of a more muscular "some people just need killin' " justification for the campaign over emphasizing the more traditional reasons for going to war. On the other hand, that's one of the reasons I admire the man.

With that said, was it the smartest thing we could have done? Would we have been better off by waiting for Iran to jump bad, or hitting Syria next, or going into the tribal areas of Pakistan instead? Hell, I don't know - I can start an argument in the military history department of almost any college in the world by asking if invading Italy in WWII was the right thing to do. In a lot of them, I can start an argument by asking whether Lee would have been better off letting Longstreet try to turn the Union Army's left flank at Gettysburg. All I can say is that it seems that the Iraqis look like they've gone a long way towards building a civil society that could prove to be turning point, culturally and politically, for the ME. Y'know, I have a lot of respect for Arab culture - it's just a shame the Seljuk Turks screwed it up so bad starting about a thousand years ago. If Iraq can be a model for its reconstruction, than it was worth the blood and treasure. If it all falls apart around our ears, then GW was a fool in over his head. That's why he gets paid the big bucks. Nothing to do now but wait for the judgment of history - but I don't agree that our objectives in Iraq can't be met, or that meeting them won't have a lasting impact on our security. I think that going into Iraq was an audacious gamble with the odds in our favor, and, ultimately, well worth the attempt.

I also think we've done the right thing -as frustrating as it was sometimes hearing about the Taliban operating openly in Miram Shah - in letting Musharef take care of the tribal areas. Short of complete occupation of PK, there's nothing we can do there that won't make the situation worse. As long as we have the option of letting the Pakis clean house on their own, we should do it. If it looks like the Islamonuts or the ISI are about to get ahold of the nukes, then, yeah, we have to invade. Until then, it seems like a good idea to support the moderates, and let them root out the extremists on their own. Insurgencies are sometimes generational wars - look at Northern Ireland - and barging in with conventional military solutions isn't always the right way to handle it ( but sometimes . . .) That's the difference between PK and Afghanistan, where the government wasn't willing to play ball, and was actively and openly supporting AQ forces and offering them sanctuary. We couldn't get them to clean up their own mess, so we had to do it for them.

Ditto for Saudi Arabia - for a long time, the Kingdom of Saud has controlled internal opposition by exporting dissent. And it's true that they made a deal with the devil in their support of the Wahabi Muslims, and that Wahabi set the stage for a lot of the problems we're facing right now. But I think that was blowback, and not malicious intent on their part. We've had the same problem - were the benefits of getting rid of Mossadeq worth Khomeini twenty five years later? As long as the Saudis can be dragged, kicking and screaming, into internal reform and action, are they really the first "enemy" to contemplate military action against?

And the military wasn't sold a bill of goods - they were told what to do and they did it. That's how it works - the military is not a coequal partner in setting policy. We fight and win the nation's wars - we don't decide what they are. And, I don't know what officers you've talked to that feel like they're throwing away lives, but most of the senior officers I've talked to feel like we're doing God's work over there, even if they wouldn't put it that way publicly (well, except maybe for General Boykin.) The military is a big organization, and, as much as some people would like to see it as a monolithic part of the VRWC, look hard enough and you can find almost any political or social opinion you want to - but I'd have to say that my experience has been that the officers who think we're wrong to be in Iraq are a minority.

Too, I don't believe that combat commanders give a damn about whether the casualties under their command occurred with "publicity or fanfare" or not. They would care deeply about the casualties, but little about whether CNN was there for them.

Finally, I don't know where in the post you got the idea that I presented the incident as proving anything about the smartness or righteousness of the war, one way or the other - to my mind, it was an interesting study of human nature that transcended politics. That's why I posted it. (Call it one Afghan's discovery of enlightened self interest.) I find it a little annoying to have to deal with people (usually left-wingers) who see everything through the lens of some bizarre political dialectic.

UPDATE: bblatt asks about colleges with military history departments. OK, I have to admit to a flight of rhetorical excess with that one - Given today's climate in academia, I suspect most military history consists of the occasional bitter professor here and there, waiting for retirement, and made miserable by departmental meetings. However, I did find this list of graduate programs in military history on the web. The University of Kansas one looks cool, what with its relationship with Leavenworth.