Boys are born equipped with this neat little toy.  Amongst its many enjoyable attributes, you can write your name in the snow with it.  There are lots of other things you can do with it.  Long hikes without pit stops?  No problem.  Use a tree or, if you’re adventurous, see if you can fill the Grand Canyon.  Long drive without pit stops?  No problem.  That’s what empty soda bottles are for.  Object that offends you?  Well, if you’re adrenalized, testosteronized, and hanging around with the boys, that might not be a problem either, ’cause you can whip out your toy and make a statement (warning:  slightly graphic and definitely NSFW):

Click here to view the embedded video.

I certainly don’t approve of what those guys did.  It’s vulgar, and I’m opposed to vulgarity on principle.  It’s stupid, both at a micro level and, as the recent headlines show, at a macro level.  It’s a typical example of group think.  I routinely tell my children to be very careful when they’re with a group, because there’s something about a group mentality that causes massive IQ loss.

The one thing I’m not is outraged.  This is not systemic abuse of the type that surfaced in Abu Ghraib.  Nor does it cross the line from stupid and vulgar into terribly abusive.  Terribly abusive would have been a video of these men doing the same thing to living prisoners.  Having Al Qaeda types — the ones who like to slice of men’s cool toy and stuff it in the victim’s mouth, or who videotape themselves beheading people, or who torture children to death, or who gang rape women, or who blow up school buses, etc. — having these types express outrage over this alleged “barbarity” only serves to highlight just how innocuous what these young men did really was.  Crude?  Yeah, sure.  But also innocuous.

I’m also not alone in my lack of outrage.  Even liberal Washington Post readers are unimpressed.  As of this writing, 82% of them think “It’s not surprising — things like this happen in war,” while only 11% find it an “unacceptable desecration” and 7% an “embarrassment.” Americans understand that boys will be boys, they understand that boys will always have their toys, and they understand that, under actual combat conditions, men make foolish decisions that nevertheless do not qualify as war-time atrocities.

UPDATE:  In Comment 2, DQ, who my best friend and someone I admire greatly, disagreed with my rather cavalier dismissal of the Marines’ conduct.  He stated “I am outraged,” and then explained why.  I countered by explaining why I did not consider what happened an outrage.  Later, it struck me what the difference was in our approach to this video.

As I mentioned in my Michelle Obama post, grammar matters.  When it comes to the response to peeing Marines, one has to remember that the word “outrage” functions as both a noun and a verb.

DQ is totally within his rights to feel outrage.  The verb is his own response to a crude, vulgar, and stupid incident.  It marks him as a man with higher, more refined feelings.

I, however, was not really talking about my own feelings when I posted about the Marines.  I was talking about the noun, rather than the verb.  In the theater of war, and especially in the theater of war propaganda, it is a mistake to call what happened “AN OUTRAGE.”  That elevates the Marines’ conduct to an atrocity or a war crime in terms of their risk of court martial and in terms of the animus America’s enemies direct against her.

When the US government and the Pentagon, instead of issuing a dry “their behavior was inappropriate and they will be dealt with,” starts apologizing as if the video was the crime of the century, that allows the enemy to justify ever greater efforts against American troops.  “They peed on our dead.  We’re going to torture them, behead them, blow up their women and children, etc.”

My post was about proportionate response.  I therefore made in my own mind a distinction between being outraged and categorizing something as “an outrage.”  This distinction is an important factor in figuring out where bad behaviors (and there will always be bad behaviors) belong on the scale of military scandals.

A friend sent me a link to an editorial bemoaning the fact that, by abruptly pulling out from Iraq and, soon, Afghanistan, the Obama administration is ensuring that we’re leaving a job undone — something that invariably means one has to do it again.  If history is going to keep repeating itself, why can’t we just repeat the good parts?

World War I ended with a definitive American victory, but a dangerous, un-managed peace, one that pretty much made World War II inevitable.  By 1942, my favorite songwriter, Irving Berlin, pretty much summed up the WWII mindset, which was “do it right this time.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Verse:]
‘Twas not so long ago we sailed to meet the foe
And thought our fighting days were done
We thought ’twas over then but now we’re in again
To win the war that wasn’t won

[Refrain:]
This time, we will all make certain
That this time is the last time

This time, we will not say “Curtain”
Till we ring it down in their own home town

For this time, we are out to finish
The job we started then

Clean it up for all time this time
So we won’t have to do it again

Dressed up to win
We’re dressed up to win
Dressed up for victory
We are just beginning
And we won’t stop winning
Till the world is free

[Coda:]
We’ll fight to the finish this time
And we’ll never have to do it again

Trust old Irving to hit the nail on the head. And, in fact, that’s what the Allies did.  First, they destroyed entirely the totalitarian states in Germany, Japan and Italy.  Then, in those regions over which they had control (as to those the Soviets held), the Americans carefully rebuilt the nations into democratic allies.  It was a tough, long-haul job, but it prevented post-war massacres and ensured that (so far) we haven’t had to “do it again” with Germany, Italy or Japan.

Clearly, we’re a whole lot dumber now than we were in the mid-20th century. In 1991 we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq (which is one of the reasons I’ve never liked Colin Powell, whom I’ve always blamed, fairly or not, for being the architect of that foolish retreat). Now, with Obama’s help, we’re doing it all over again, only worse. Does any nation get a third chance to remedy its chronic stupidity? I doubt we will, especially because Obama is also choosing to repeat the disarmament mistakes of the 20s and 30s. Ain’t those fancy Ivy League educations grand? They go in smart and come out stupid.

I’m an armchair warrior (aka a chicken hawk) and I’m disgusted and frustrated. I can only imagine how the troops — the ones who sweated and bled — feel as they watch their Commander in Chief dismantling all of their good work.

Was it a surprise to you that Egypt went Islamist?  It wasn’t to me.

Was it a surprise to you that Libya went Islamist?  It wasn’t to me.

Was it a surprise to you that Tunisia went Islamist?  It wasn’t to me.

Has it been a surprise to you over the last decade that Iraq hasn’t bloomed into the Middle Eastern equivalent of small town America?  It hasn’t been for me.

If any of the above surprised you, my guess is that you worked for the Bush administration or are working for the Obama administration.  The first group naively believed that, if you gave people the vote, they would vote for freedom, not repression.  As for the second group, I don’t know if they shared that same naiveté, or if they’re truly bad people.

Anyone who has been paying attention to the Middle East has understood that, for many citizens in those benighted nations, Islamist government promises purity in lieu of deep, violent corruption.  The people there don’t understand the notion of freedom, but they’re very much alive to hypocrisy — and their Imams have been promising that this is the one thing they won’t get under an Islamist government.  Islam will bring them the peace of total submission to God’s rules, rather than the instability and terror of individual tyranny.

For people who have spent decades on the receiving end of arbitrary and capricious pseudo-Western governments, all the while hearing that their faith will provide honesty and peace, the outcome of elections was a no-brainer.  Lacking the one and a half centuries of self-governance that America had before she even embarked upon her Constitutional experiment, the notion of freedom and individual rights has no resonance.  Sure, some understand it, but for most freedom simply means not being bossed around by a Mubarak or Saddam or Gaddafi.

Mark Steyn ranks with me as being one of the un-surprised — and he recognizes how our blindness abroad leads to threats at home.

I’ll add too that relentless PC multiculturalism, which lauds every culture but our own, is de-programming the love of freedom bred into American DNA, and is therefore probably the greatest internal threat we face.

I was very surprised to see an AP wire story reporting that Islamic militants (as opposed to mere “militants” or “insurgents”) were holding “Christians” (as opposed to mere “people”) hostage.  Even more surprising, the AP reported that the Islamic militants were probably affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq, an entity one apparently couldn’t acknowledge during the Bush years.

Just as I was thinking to myself, “Well, that AP worm has certainly turned, with this surprisingly honest report,” I read another wire story about the Chandra Levy murder trial.  You remember that story, right?  A decade ago, Rep. Gary Condit’s career was destroyed when an affair he had with Levy (which was definitely an unprincipled, immoral thing to do, since he was married), got morphed by the media into an unofficial murder charge.  Now, the probable actual murderer is on trial.

This is what the AP says about the defendant:  “Ingmar Guandique, a native of El Salvador, is on trial for the murder and attempted sexual assault of Levy nearly a decade ago.”

Now I, not having been born yesterday, verbalized yet another thought to myself:  “What are the odds that Guandique is an illegal immigrant?”  Turns out the odds are 100%.  Somehow, though, the AP just couldn’t bring itself to put that adjective out there.

Let me remind the open borders crowd that one of the virtues of having legal as opposed to illegal immigration, is that it enhances our government’s ability to weed out the killers before they cross our borders.

UPDATE:  This Philip Terzian post about the WaPo best seller list seems like an appropriate coda to a post on media bias.  I especially like the way Terzian describes the media’s inability to recognize its own bias:

One of the inherent difficulties of defining left-wing bias in the press to journalists is that it is something like describing the ocean to fish: It is so pervasive, and such a comfortable, nurturing environment, that it is hardly noticed.

Yeah — what he said.

“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”  — attr. to various generals at the Battle of Bunker Hill (although it has a longer pedigree than that).

Liberals have been orgasmically excited by a video that Wikileak published showing a 2007 shootout in Baghdad, during which two Reuters stringers died.  Wikileaks contends that the video shows ordinary guys just walking down the streets with cameras, when suddenly blood-thirsty U.S. troops rained horror and death down on them from the skies.  That’s certainly how it’s being sold in the liberal American and European media.

My liberal husband, who saw the story in the New York Times, was “shocked” at the type of killing machines the U.S. troops were.  After he admitted that he hadn’t actually watched the video, I explained that the video took place in a moving battle zone, and that the photographers were embedded with non-uniformed combatants who were carrying guns, including what looked like an RPG.  I also said the vehicle that pulled up later was unmarked and that more men, also out-of-uniform, came spilling out.  My husband fussed and fulminated about the fact that this was “no excuse” for what the Americans did.  My son was more to the point:  “RPGs?  Those photographers were idiots.”

If you’d like details about the combat zone; the weapons; the lack of identification on the photographers, the combatants and the vehicles; and the explicitly stated, on-the-ground perceptions of the American troops, Bill Roggio and Rusty Shackleford have been all over this one.  You can read Rusty here, here and here.  Roggio’s analysis is here and here.  (Bob Owens chimes in here too.)

I wanted to talk about something different, which is the liberal perception of rules of engagement.  It’s very clear from the coverage that liberals believe that American soldiers should not be firing if they merely perceive themselves to be at risk, no matter the amount of evidence supporting that perception.  Liberals would rather see a battalion of soldiers die, than suffer the loss of one Reuters photographer who deliberately places himself in a battle zone, and goes about without any identification or advanced warning. (Of course, the lack of advanced warning arises because the reporters and photographers who have embedded themselves with combatants hostile to the US can’t exactly let the US know in advance where the combatants will be.  That is one of the risks of embedding with one side or another during a war.  You take the same strikes your new comrades take.)

Given their sensibilities, the liberal ROEs are simple:  You can’t know that someone wants to kill you until they actually try to kill you.  American troops, therefore, should not fire until one of their own has been bloodied or killed.  Only in that way can they be absolutely assured that they are firing at a legitimate military target, and not simply firing at something that looks like a legitimate military target.

These ROEs, of course, get expanded to world conflicts.  Just because Iran is busy building a nuclear arsenal and has spent the last 30 years stating explicitly that it believes Israel should and will be destroyed in a tremendous Holocaust is meaningless.  Because there are good people in Iran (true), it’s simply not fair to judge Iran by its words and conduct, if those words and conduct fall short of actually launching a nuclear missile at Tel Aviv.  Only when Iran follows through on its threats, and actually launches that nuclear missile, can Israel be justified in taking the chance that any defensive actions might kill innocent civilians.

Here’s our Commander in Chief speaking of the situation in Afghanistan while he was running for office:  “We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.”

This post is not about the cognitive dissonance of a man who, now that he used that lie to become president, is refusing to act to send more troops to Afghanistan to take off that “enormous pressure.”  It’s about his jaundiced view of the troops he hoped then to, and now does, lead.

At Flopping Aces, WordSmith has a detailed photo essay about the troops of whom Barack Obama spoke.  It’s shocking.  If I were you, I’d get out a handkerchief, because the images there may bring tears to your eyes.  Also, after you’ve checked out Flopping Aces, you may feel compelled to go here and tell the troops exactly what you think of them.  I’ve already done so, and will do so again and again.  The feelings I have now deserve to be vented.

Movie review one:

The movie is a viscerally exciting, adrenaline-soaked tour de force of suspense and surprise, full of explosions and hectic scenes of combat, but it blows a hole in the condescending assumption that such effects are just empty spectacle or mindless noise.

[snip]

Ms. Bigelow, practicing a kind of hyperbolic realism, distills the psychological essence and moral complications of modern warfare into a series of brilliant, agonizing set pieces.

[snip]

It has intense, horrific violence and appropriately profane reactions to the prospect of same.

Let me sum that up: This is an incredibly violent movie, with really gross stuff, but we love it.

Movie review two:

[This movie] thoroughly blurs the line between high-minded outrage and lurid torture-porn.

[snip]

Not since “The Passion of the Christ” has a film depicted a public execution in such graphic detail. In the approximately 20 minutes during which the killing unfolds, the camera repeatedly returns to study the battered face and body of the title character (Mozhan Marno) as she is stoned to death.

[snip]

In one of the film’s sickeningly exploitative touches, Ali, wearing a triumphal grin, examines his wife’s crumpled, blood-drenched body to make sure she is dead and discovers signs of life in a rolled-up eye. The stoning is promptly resumed.

[snip]

Mr. Negahban’s Ali, who resembles a younger, bearded Philip Roth, suggests an Islamic fundamentalist equivalent of a Nazi anti-Semitic caricature. With his malevolent smirk and eyes aflame with arrogance and hatred, he is as satanic as any horror-movie apparition.

[snip]

As “The Passion of the Christ” showed, the stimulation of blood lust in the guise of moral righteousness has its appeal.

Again, let me sum things up: This is an incredibly violent movie, with really gross stuff, and we were deeply offended.

As I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, the second movie is The Stoning of Soraya M. It depicts true events in an Iranian village that is subject to the worst kind of sharia law, misogyny, and power run amok.  The movie does not shy away from showing what it looks like for someone to be stoned to death, nor the evil that motivates that kind of action.  And lest you think the violence is exaggerated, just think of the beheading tapes the jihadis like to release, in which they are in an ecstasy of bloodlust.  Bottom line:  showing the true horror of a religious, misogynistic act is really tacky, and it’s downright cruel to force New York Times reviewers to have to watch it.

The first movie may not be one you’ve heard of.  It’s called The Hurt Locker — and is a critic’s pick.  Set during 2004 in Iraq, it shows a squad dedicated to disarming (or blowing up) IEDs.  The only really problem, in the critic’s eyes, is that the film isn’t more antiwar.  Thus, he lauds the fact that “you will . . . be thinking” but complains that the film did not go further:

[You will . . . be thinking] Not necessarily about the causes and consequences of the Iraq war, mind you. The filmmakers’ insistence on zooming in on and staying close to the moment-to-moment experiences of soldiers in the field is admirable in its way but a little evasive as well.

It is in this context that the reviewer thinks all that bloody, graphic, horrifying violence is just about the most thrilling thing he’s seen in, God, who knows how long.  Bottom line:  showing American military people and Iraqi citizens being blown up in graphic detail is incredibly exciting, because it reminds us that Bush lied and people died.

As I said, all violence is equal, but some violence is definitely more exciting and rewarding than others.

I’ve always loved that quintessential little kid excuse:  “But, Mommy, he hit me back first….”  Even kids understand, although they don’t always appreciate, the notion of a preemptive strike.  Lately, there’s more and more talk about Israel engaging in a preemptive strike against Iran (cheered by friends, feared by foes).  George Bush painted our attack on Iraq as a preemptive strike.  In 1967, Israel engaged in a preemptive strike against Egypt.

All of which got me thinking about what exactly constitutes a preemptive strike.  Because really, when you think about it, even if you call it a “preemptive strike,” it is actually the first act of cross-border aggression.  When Israel destroyed the Egyptian air force in 1967, that air force hadn’t yet crossed into Israeli airspace.  Israel acted first.  I happen think Israel acted correctly because, had she waited for Egypt to cross into her airspace, it would have been too late to mount any defense.  While Egypt lost merely airplanes and military personnel, Israel would have lost her towns and her citizens.

Likewise, while we were worried about Iraq’s WMDs, we actually didn’t know whether Saddam actually planned an immediate attack.  The problem from our point of view was that we couldn’t wait for that attack to reach fruition.  We were engaged in conventional warfare, but a WMD attack would have constituted destruction on a scale almost impossible to contemplate.

Israel again faces the same dilemma.  If we play purist and ignore the fact that Iran is funding almost daily attacks on Israeli soil via Hamas (which is Iran’s proxy), Iran itself has actually not crossed Israel’s borders.  Nevertheless, most thinking people believe that Israel cannot wait but must engage in a preemptive strike.  Otherwise, she risks apocalyptic destruction — and Israel believes, with good reason, that Obama’s honeyed words to the Muslims, generally, and Iranians, specifically, won’t stop that.

So, I’m thinking that a preemptive strike is a responsive, not an aggressive act, when your enemy has given overwhelming strong indications that it intends to engage in an apocalyptic strike against you.  That is, without even crossing your border, its actions constitution an act of war, justifying your response.  Moreover, preemptive strikes are directed solely at military targets, with every effort made to minimize collateral (i.e., civilian) damage.

Under this line of thinking, Japan, even though it had a military objective at Pearl Harbor, was engaging in an act of pure aggression, rather than a preemptive strike.  This is so because it did not satisfy the predicate requirement of facing an enemy that was planning its imminent, and complete, demise.

Because this will surely be an issue in the upcoming weeks and months, I’d love to know what you think on this subject.

Greyhawk is trying to put the pieces together in Iraq and Afghanistan when it comes to troop rotation.  Right now, on the information available, it looks as if their’s some sleight of hand going on with regarding to troop movements and the American public.  What do you think?

In the mid-19th Century, Palmerston called the manuverings between Russia and England over Central Asia “the great game.”  It looks as if the Obama administration is so self involved, the only game it’s playing is a shell game with itself and the American people.

The head of the UN General Assembly just called Israel an “apartheid” state.  In other words, Israel is emblematic of evil in the world.  I’ve finally realized what the problem is:  Israel has a mixed population.

Think about it:  Iraq expelled her Jews and hounded her Christians into obscurity.  Saudi Arabia makes it illegal to be Jewish or Christian — so there are no Jews or Christians, making it a nice, homogenous population.  Iran also simply expelled or murdered different people.  The same holds true for Arab/Muslim state after Arab/Muslim state, all of whom are in good odor at the UN.

The secret, therefore, to avoid this insulting epithet isn’t to try to accommodate your hostile minority populations.  Instead, the secret is to destroy them entirely.  Once they’re good and gone, and once you’ve become a completely homogeneous racial or religious state by virtue of their (enforced) absence, nobody can tar you with the crime of being an “apartheid state.”

Orwell would be proud.