Jo,
Just think, if these chickenhawks had not so successfully ducked their responsibilities back when, why some of them might not be here now to lead this country. In their own minds they may think they were "saved" just for their current mission to protect us, far from their own personal danger of course, as our leaders and opinion makers. But if some of them had not ducked their responsibilities and survived, might they not have had a better sense of the senselessness of war, to better lead us?

I caught on Charlie Rose yesterday a rerun of the segment with McNamara (11/11/03 - Veterans' Day) and Earl Morris re: the latter's documentary "The Fog of War" that focused on McNamara's role in Vietnam. I have not seen this documentary as yet but will do so. We all need a reminder from time to time that our leaders can make mistakes, and big ones. While McNamara does not fully recognize his mistakes, he thinks it is necessary that actions such as his be examined and reviewed carefully. McNamara is not yet a hero. He needs to speak up more, especially about the current situation in Iraq and the world and the U.S. role. He encourages debate, but does not want to get directly involved. But he knows better than most what went wrong back then. He and others must speak up. Youngsters today have no institutional memory of past mistakes and our leaders our bound to repeat them.

I wish you and your visitors, whether veterans or not, democrats or not, a better New Year. And I urge you and them to continue to speak up.

Shag from Brookline

Reading this in the NYT finally allowed me to crystalize my whole objection to chickenhawks. They argue that it is not necessary to have served to have an opinion on the military, whether we are talking weapons programs or deployment of troops. And in an intelletural sense this is true. But what is abundently clear from comments from the likes of Ledeen, Sullivan, and George Will is that fundamentally they think of soldiers as counters. Veterans think of them as people. "That could have been me, that could have been my best buddy", for us the casualties lists cause physical, gut-wrenching pain. The other guys care only about the pain that casualties might cause to Bush's approval rating.

War is not a game of Risk.

Americans like war?!?

What the hell America do these people live in?

They should come down to Cinco Bayou and attend a few funerals for members of the AF Special Ops command or the 33rd Fighter Wing.

That Ranger went through training at the school at on the Eglin reservation.

Every Navy pilot is trained at Whiting and Pensacola just west of me.

These aren't statistics, they are my neighbors. I see them in the supermarket and the DMV. They are real people, with real families. They are also getting real divorces because of the strain.

That Sergeant, and the young mother are going to get poverty level pensions, wait months for medical attention, and generally be hidden so the "beautiful minds" of the neocons won't be bothered.

Tell the American people the truth. Tell them we have med-evaced over 10,000 Americans out of Iraq in addition to the nearly 500 funerals, and there were no WMDs, it had nothing to do with 9-11.

Amen.

Just as an aside, despite the outlook of future "VA Benefits", the OIF and OEF casualties are getting the best care they can, while here in San Antonio. I'm stationed here and we are doing our best to return them to life.

Regarding the mention of Robert Strange McNamara and the documentary about him, The Fog of War, I saw it yesterday. It covers a lot of ground - his childhood, his work in WWII under General LeMay, working at Ford and then as DOD chief going through the Cuban Missile crisis and Vietnam. It's called the Fog of War because he admits they didn't know what was going on a lot of the times they made decisions, some understandable (that Cuba ALREADY had tactical nuclear missiles as well as nuclear missiles pointed at the Southern United States during the crisis) and some baffling and seemingly caused by willful blindness (that the North Vietnamese were not a puppet regime of the Chinese). Regarding the latter, the interviewer mostly lets McNamara talk but at one point in an interview when McNamara was struggling to put words into something, Morris offers "we see what we want to see" and McNamara concurs. Regarding the Cuban missile crisis, McNamara makes clear just how close the US came to invading Cuba and says "we lucked out". He said he didn't find out how lucky until decades later when he learned that Cuba already had working nuclear missiles pointed at the US (and tactical ones for use in a possible invasion), and that if the US had invaded Cuba, Cuba would have counterattacked with nuclear weapons, and this would begin a chain of events which would probably mean all out war between the US and the USSR.

The Vietnam portion is interesting as well. Morris uses a lot of recordings, and plays one betweent he Gulf of Tonkin commanders, where two ships are supposed to have been attacked by North Vietnamese boats. The second ship attacked is what caused LBJ to get the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, but in the radio transcripts about this supposed attack where the Vietnamese supposedly fired missiles and missed is said over the radio tapes which are played to have been probably just static picked up on radar due to weather, jumpy radiomen after the first attack or the like. McNamara says they interpreted the "attacks" (which seems to be actually an attack", as a message from the North Vietnamese to the US that they were escalating things. The first attack is not mentioned much, but I've read elsewhere about the circumstances surroundign that. The main point is that McNamara and LBJ were wrong that the North Vietnamese command had told it's Navy to escalate with the US was wrong.

1. Timely
   
2. Strategery
   
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4. Huh?
   
5. Bunnypants in Bagdad
   
6. Outage
   
7. Filthy Lucre Watch
   
8. Playing the numbers
   
9. My letter to Countdown
   
10. Jefferson's Nigerian Scams