Rod Dreher: June 2007 Archives

In today's Wall Street Journal (firewalled), there's a story about Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, and his famously stinging essay criticizing the top leadership of the Army for its failures of leadership in Iraq. The piece is more broadly about the growing chasm of confidence separating junior-level officers from their seniors. Here's an excerpt:

In 2005, Col. Yingling volunteered to go back to Iraq with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. He was given responsibility for overseeing economic-development projects, Iraqi security forces and governance in Tal Afar, a small city in northern Iraq. The 3,500-soldier regiment's year was so successful that President Bush cited it in a nationally televised address.

When Col. Yingling returned to Fort Hood, he says, he found an Army that hadn't really changed. "The thing the Army institutionally is still struggling to learn is that the most important thing we do in counterinsurgency is building security forces and local government capacity," he said in an internal Army interview in 2006. "And yet all our organizations are designed around the least important line of operations:
combat operations."

A few weeks later, after attending the Purple Heart ceremony for the wounded soldiers, he decided he had to do something. His essay, "A Failure in Generalship," drew upon dozens of conversations he had overheard in mess halls and on patrol in Iraq. "It included no original thoughts," he says.

But it quickly made him something of a cult hero among the Army's junior and mid-grade officers.

At the Army's School for Advanced Military Studies in Kansas, where its brightest majors attend a one-year course on war planning, Col. Kevin Benson dropped lesson plans to let students discuss the article. "Most of the majors' reaction to the article was 'Right on,'" says Col. Benson, who until last month headed the Army school. Col. Benson says he counseled the young officers to be cautious about judging their superiors. "All right, you are going to have to work for some of these general officers," Col. Benson says he told them. "If you feel this way, what is your obligation to them?"

At Fort Hood, Maj. Gen. Jeff Hammond, the top general at the sprawling base, summoned all of the captains to hear his response to Col. Yingling's critique. About 200 officers in their mid- to late-20s, most of them Iraq veterans, filled the pews and lined the walls of the base chapel. "I believe in our generals. They are dedicated, selfless servants," Gen. Hammond recalls saying. The 51-year-old officer told the young captains that Col. Yingling wasn't competent to judge generals because he had never been one.

"He has never worn the shoes of a general," Gen. Hammond recalls saying.

The captains' reactions highlighted the growing gap between some junior officers and the generals. "If we are not qualified to judge, who is?" says one Iraq veteran who was at the meeting. Another officer in attendance says that he and his colleagues didn't want to hear a defense of the Army's senior officers. "We want someone at higher levels to take accountability for what went wrong in Iraq," he says.

It's interesting to read this today in light of a passage I read last night in Paul Fussell's World War I book, "The Great War and Modern Memory," which we're about to read and discuss in the Dallas Morning News summer book club. In Chapter 1, Fussell discusses how the scale of the slaughter, and its senselessness, shook an entire civilization. He gives as one example the British Gen. Sir Douglas Haig, who led his troops in a massive attack on German positions at the Somme. It was a massive planning failure that resulted in 60,000 British dead -- half the attacking force -- in one day.

Why the debacle? According to Fussell, it was partly to do with Haig's witlessness and lack of imagination. Another cause was the upper-class British officers' belief that the working-class infantrymen were too stupid to be taught how to attack "in any way except in full daylight and aligned in rows or 'waves.'" The British attack dragged on until it ended in November, having changed nothing.

Haig was promoted on New Year's Day to Field Marshal. By 1917, things were going so badly for the British that the government put up posters on the home front exhorting the population: "Don't think you know better than Haig."

Would somebody please tell men who walk around with those stupid Bluetooth headsets permanently jammed into their ear, even if they're not talking on them, how dorky they look? Would somebody please tell women that it doesn't matter how done up you are, if you walk around smacking chewing gum with your mouth open, you look like a hick. I'm just sayin'.

Where can you find Reihan Salam, Daniel Larison, Noah Millman, James Poulos, Alan Jacobs and others, all in the same place? Besides the discount licka sto, I mean? On the new, improved, must-link-to American Scene.

Remember Farfour, the Hamas TV version of Mickey Mouse, who taught children about the evil of the Jews, and how they ought to get guns and take care of business? Well, today on Hamas TV, Farfour was beaten to death by an Israeli official trying to buy his land. No kidding, the producers decided to kill the children's character by having an actor playing an Israeli murder the mouse:

"Farfour was martyred while defending his land," said Sara, the teen presenter. He was killed "by the killers of children," she added.

This is beyond pathological.

I am pleased by the Supreme Court decision that cut back on the ability of public schools to use race as a heavy determinant of which kids get to go to which school. I think you cannot improve upon the pithy comments both Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas, respectively, made in their opinions:

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." (Roberts)

"What was wrong in 1954 cannot be right today." (Thomas)

Justice Thomas rather powerfully explains in his opinion how the liberal minority in this ruling uses the same philosophical rationales in upholding these race-based schemes that the segregationists did in Brown v. Board. Thomas also correctly said in his opinion that "racial imbalance is not segregation," no matter how you spin it. Racial imbalance could result, said Thomas, from "any number of innocent private decisions, including voluntary housing choices." The point is that if people freely choose to live in certain areas, and the result of that choice is racial imbalance, that does not prove segregation in the de jure sense, which is clearly unconstitutional.

He also wrote that every time the government gets involved picking and choosing winners and losers on the basis of race, somebody gets treated unjustly as the result of a conscious and deliberate decision (like telling a kindergartner he can't go to the school around the corner solely because he is of a certain race), and the result is an exacerbation of racial mistrust and tension. Is this really in the state's interest? On the idea that students of different races are more tolerant of each other when they go to school together, Thomas said the research is actually mixed there, and besides, there's no guarantee that once put in the same school, that they'll mix to a significant degree. Everybody knows that, whether we like it or not, the black kids tend to eat at the black kids' lunch table, and so on and so forth. Voluntarily.

Read Thomas entire opinion in PDF form here.

Begging the pardon of longtime readers who have read what follows before, I want to explain something. My passion on this and related diversity issues has something to do with having been turned down for a newspaper job as a film critic some years ago. For personal and professional reasons, I really wanted a job at -- well, let's call it the Shelbyville Gazette. I heard that there was an opening at the paper for a film critic, which I was at the time. The arts editor reviewed my clips and met me informally on a personal visit to Shelbyville one weekend. He was enthusiastic about my work, indicated that he wanted to hire me, and all that was necessary was to arrange an interview. He left me with the impression that it was a mere formality -- especially as I'd already secured the recommendation of the critic I'd be replacing, who is now a nationally known film writer.

I was thrilled -- I was to be married in months, and wanted to settle with my new wife in Shelbyville for important reasons. But that was the last I heard from the arts editor, until he finally returned one of my many phone calls. He sheepishly told me that he'd been informed by his superior that they would not be talking to me because I was a white male, and they wanted to hire either a woman or a minority. He told me that he had to undertake a "national search" for a film critic who is either or both female and minority.

I was stunned, and infuriated, that the quality of my work counted for nothing at all with these people -- that only the color of my skin, and my gender, mattered. I come from a working-class rural background. My father was the first in his family to go to college. His mother and father didn't even have indoor plumbing until he installed it as a high school student in the 1950s. I was a public school student in an integrated school. My dad was an ill-paid civil servant; my mom was a school bus driver. We were not the mighty-whitey cultural elite.

Everything I achieved was done through hard work and the encouragement of parents who esteemed education, and saw to it that my sister and I did too, in part as a way to achieve our dreams. And now I was being told that none of that mattered in this hiring decision. That the content of my work was meaningless. That only my race and/or gender -- which had absolutely nothing to do with the content of my film reviewing -- counted.

Oh, I was enraged by this injustice and humiliation. But I didn't want to give up. I phoned the superior -- some sort of managing editor -- and asked for an interview. I told him I'd pay for the trip myself. He was frosty to me, saying that he'd meet me in the company cafeteria for a cup of coffee if I insisted, but that in no way should I consider that an interview. I declined.

Months went by. I got married, and we went off on our honeymoon. Upon my return, there was a voice mail message from the New York Post, asking me to come up and interview for the film critic's job. I was thrilled! I did just that, and got a nice offer that very day. Happily, when I returned to Florida (where I was then living) that evening, there was a phone message from the arts editor in Shelbyville, happily informing me that their national search had turned up nobody they wanted to hire, and that they'd like to fly me in for an interview. With great pleasure I told him that I'd just accepted a job as chief film critic for the Post. He was crestfallen. I felt vindicated -- though I didn't feel angry towards him, because he was caught in the middle in an unjust system of racial spoils. Mind you, I support the right of the Shelbyville Gazette, as a private employer, to have treated me that way. But not the government. Anyway, it is still unjust, and perhaps the most galling thing about it to me is that these liberal bigots believe their reverse racism sets them out as morally enlightened and superior.

So it all worked out for me much better than it might have, for which I'm grateful. But I've never forgotten that. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race. Period. Full stop. The end.

We live in a world in which people obtain unfair advantages all the time. Look at the cronyism of the Bush administration for an example of how well that kind of thing works out. It's everywhere. But we ought to be working toward a world in which this kind of discrimination is recognized and repudiated, or at least minimized. We want a world in which people are judged not by their family name, their connections, the schools they went to, their race or gender (when it has nothing to do with their job), but only on the quality of their work, and -- here's a radical concept -- the content of their character. When I was stewing in my anger over the racist treatment that had been given me by the Shelbyville paper, I thought about how many times that sort of thing must have happened to countless black folks and members of other minority groups. But you know, not once did I think that therefore I deserved to be punished for the sins of my ancestors. We don't believe in collective punishment in this country.

Finally, I wonder how many of you saw Nightline last night? My Internet connection is screwy this morning, so I can't find the link to the lead report now, so I'll post later if I can find it. Anyway, the lead report was about this SCOTUS decision. Ann Crawford Greenburg traveled to Louisville to interview one of the victorious plaintiffs in the case -- Crystal Meredith, whose kindergartner son was told he couldn't go to his neighborhood elementary school because he was white. I, of course, agreed with her, but what was interesting was a black woman ABC profiled who shared Meredith's views. She'd raised her kids through the terrible busing fights in Louisville in the 1970s, which were replete with vile white race hate. Disgusting stuff. But she said that today, all that has not helped black students, who are worse off today in terms of educational achievement than they were back then. She said that she misses her neighborhood schools -- how she used to sit on her front porch back in the day, and hear the voices of neighborhood children walking to and from the schools. Now, she said, all she hears is the roar of the school buses taking the kids across town. She said she'd be happy to return to neighborhood schools, even if that meant racial imbalance, as long as the schools were equally funded, and all kids in Louisville had the same materials, no matter where they lived or what their color.

She's right.