In the nearly two years Cpl. John Callahan of the Army was away from home, his wife, he said, had two extramarital affairs. She failed to pay his credit card bills. And their two children were sent to live with her parents as their home life deteriorated.
Then, in November, his machine gun malfunctioned during a firefight, wounding him in the groin and ravaging his left leg. When his wife reached him by phone after an operation in Germany, Corporal Callahan could barely hear her. Her boyfriend was shouting too loudly in the background.
“Haven’t you told him it’s over?” Corporal Callahan, 42, recalled the man saying. “That you aren’t wearing his wedding ring anymore?”
Really, read the whole article. Once again, we're confronted by the fact that a very small number of Americans are bearing a crushing burden for the sake of this war. As I said the other day, my brother-in-law's National Guard unit has been put on alert for possible imminent deployment to Iraq. If he goes, he will leave behind a wife and three small kids. Tens of thousands of men like him have had to do the same thing. I've been doing a lot of thinking about what Julie and I can do from this distance to help my sister and her family make it through the year deployment, if it comes. They're luckier than many Guard families, but like the Times piece says, as tough as these long, even multiple, deployments are on all military families, the active-duty military families at least have a ready-made community on bases and suchlike; that's not the case with Guard and reservist families.
Have to say that I've heard some pretty heartless stuff about the price being paid by these families, along the lines of "They knew this was a possibility when they signed up" and "You call this a war? Three thousand dead is nothing!" This strikes me as mostly a way of dismissing their hardship and suffering, not trying to put it in context. There is a certain amount of truth to both statements, but they also miss the main point, which is this: if we are going to ask our fighting men and their families to make heavy sacrifices, including possibly the sacrifice of their lives, we had better make sure the goal is worth it.
Is the goal in Iraq worth the continuing sacrifice? Can we "win" in any meaningful sense? I don't believe we can, but reasonable people differ on this question. But the question has got to be asked, and anyone who still supports the US mission in Iraq has the moral obligation to read that Times story and contemplate whether the Iraq mission -- which has now lasted longer than the Second World War -- continues to be worth putting soldiers and their families on the home front through this.
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that 3,000 number is nothing, unless one of the 3,000 happens to be your husband or son or brother and But I just don't see why a cost-benefit analysis that involves taking into account the suffering of these military families is not worth considering. Rod, do you realize how uneasily these two sentences sit next to each other? Cost-benefit analysis is fine, and some kind of it is inevitable for making political decisions. But it utterly crumbles in the face of "what if it was YOUR brother"-ism (or its kissing-cousin, fine-sounding humanistic "it tolls for thee"-ism). Cost-benefit analysis is only possible once these factors and arguments are taken off the table as illegitimate. In fact, ironically, the more "what if it was YOUR brother"-ism is afoot and accepted as legitimate, the worse will be the problem of the gap between those who bear burdens and those who rule. Because the rulers who have both the power to make decisions (*somebody* must rule) and more ability to shield "those like us" (rulers usually have more power and means) will have been validated in their thinking that it matters at all whether it rains on them or someone else.
What I am saying, though, is that war is not its own justification... I'm not sure I agree with that. Or to be more precise, I think that once joined, victory is its own justification and defeat in any war is always costlier than victory, regardless of either the underlying issues or the current costs. The loss of prestige and reputation will always attract evil consequences down the road. The textbook recent case being Bill Clinton fleeing Somalia after a mere 20 soldiers were killed, convincing Osama bin Laden that the US was a paper tiger. ("But what if the 20 included YOUR brother"?) We can dither about strategies or the meaning of "victory" till the cows come home. Or persuade ourselves that we didn't really lose, just decided it wasn't worth the cost. Whatever salve we like. It won't make a hill of beans difference if we retreat from Iraq in ignominy or on any terms other than our own. Remember Kevin Kline at the airport near the end of A FISH CALLED WANDA insisting that the Vietnam War was a tie? It'll be like that. In fact, worse, because the only thing worse than being feared and hated is being not-feared and hated.
Victor, to be clear, I'm not saying "what if it was your own brother" with the intent of delegitimizing your argument, in an "It's a black thing, you wouldn't understand" way. This is a common way of arguing -- e.g., the people who say pro-life arguments made by males aren't valid because the males cannot bear children -- and I'm not engaging in it here. What I am saying, though, is that for people who have loved ones in harm's way in Iraq -- as I soon will -- the arguments about the war are no longer abstract, but painfully concrete. That doesn't make us right, but it does give us more of a stake in the outcome of the argument. If I'm understanding you correctly, you believe that there is no price too high to pay for American victory in Iraq. I don't agree. I believe we have lost, not for lack of valor among our troops, but because the objectives we were/are pursuing -- a stable pluralistic Iraq -- is unachievable. Presumably you don't agree with me, but for the sake of argument, if you believed that we could not put Iraq back together again, what do you believe we should then do militarily? I agree that this defeat will have enormous repercussions. But I also believe that we cannot achieve victory based on will alone.
Even uber-neocon Charles Krauthammer now thinks the al-Maliki government is not worth the blood of our troops and the treasure of our taxpayers. I mean, look at this guy. He makes kissy face with the Iranians. He prevented us from going into Sadr City to search for a kidnapped soldier, who is still missing. The police and security services are just laced with Shi'ite militia types and we are supposed to have our troops spend the night at police stations after clearing an area? Doesn't this make us a party to ethnic cleansing. Then to really top it off, a Sunni woman is allegedly raped by Shi'ite security forces. Maliki, after less than 24 hours investigation, says it's a bogus claim, even though the nurse who attended the woman said she had been assaulted. Then, he fires the Sunni politician calling for an investigation.
Then on the same day in the same newspaper, I read that troops are being sent back to Iraq without adequate equipment, because it's worn out and they don't have time to replace it.
Then I read that the Brits have declared victory and are getting out. Yet I also read that things aren't really all that settled in the south of Iraq, that different Shi'ite factions are fighting each other. Then Cheney says the Brits leaving despite this latent civil war in the south is a sign of success, but if we leave, it's cut and run and will embolden the insurgents. Then I watch TV and see that huge amounts of cash were distributed in Iraq by that brilliant genius Jerry Bremer, and most of it is missing and unaccounted for, maybe like $2 billion !! Taxpayers' money, and I can guaran-damn-tee you that some of our tax dollars fell into the hands of insurgents who used it to kill our troops! WTF?????? Have these people completely lost their minds? Has there ever been such a toxic blend of ignorance and arrogance? And now they want to "do" Iran? And what in the hell was I thinking when I voted for them!!! I am so so so sorry that I did. The bunch running Iraq now may have been democratically elected more or less, but they are not worth the blood of ONE MORE soldier or ONE MORE DOLLAR of our tax money!
My husband is jumping through all sorts of military hoops hoping to go back into the army- guard this time- with the clear understanding that he will, sooner or later, be in the middle east and be, literally, a flying target. He could become one of the next 4,000 casualties. He could leave me a widow raising a number of young children. We both accept these possibilities because we believe that pacifying islamists is a direct route to a non-Christian future and nation for our grandchildren. We believe that fighting a war in hopes of bringing freedom to a whole nation of people is worthy. Its one thing to tell our sons about honor and duty and love of country and quite another to show them. Whatever you may think of the war or the hardships that military families endure in its wake, please don't hold us up as helpless victims worthy of universal pity. We DID choose this and publishing stories about some miserable trollop as a representation of what soldiers families are and do is an insult to the majority of us who are too busy raising our kids and honoring our spouses to even think of screwing around.
This doesn't "feel" like a war to me. I had a great year finanicially in 2006. My family is not at serious risk. My taxes are low. In short, I'm making NO sacrifice for the war. Yet, there are some families (mostly working class) that are making tremendous sacrifices. It's not defensible morally.
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