It is the soldier, not the reporter,

who has given us freedom of the press.



It is the soldier, not the poet,

who has given us freedom of speech.



It is the soldier, not the campus organizer,

who has given us the freedom to demonstrate.



It is the soldier, not the lawyer,

who has given us the right to a fair trial.



It is the soldier,

who salutes the flag,

who serves under the flag,

and whose coffin is draped by the flag,

who allows the protester to burn the flag.



By Father Dennis Edward O'Brien, USMC

I never once suggested that the soldiers haven't done the job assigned them, or that they haven't done it well. What I argued is that, however you see the work of the soldiers in Iraq, the success of the surge is in significant part not a direct result of the increased number of soldiers on the ground.



On a related, but different, note - depending on how one defines the term and position 'soldier' - the idea that soldiers gave "us" freedom of the press, speech, freedom of assembly, and fair trials does not tell the whole story of the role of many soldiers - both domestically (think everything from the use of the National Guard to put down legal strikes and protests) and internationally (think Chile, Nicaragua, Iran, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia and any number of other once and present client states) - in selectively both enabling and suppressing those very freedoms. Furthermore, and again a great deal depends on how you operationalize soldiers (and assign responsibility for their actions), the idea that soldiers participated in the winning and defense of these - and other - freedoms independent of the actions and demands of the public, the press, poets, campus organizers and lawyers, much less the executive, judicial and legislative branches of our civilian government is to elevate soldiers above their constitutional status and to ignore the power of the people.



I have nothing against soldiers in general - at least not anything more than I have against reporters, poets, organizers, lawyers, doctors, plumbers, etc. in general - my dad, grandfather and many relatives far and wide have been in the military, though I do have both empirical and political problems with some soldiers and representative of those other professions particular... my concern, in this case, was clearly much more with the claims of one editorialist writing about the dynamics of two men (one who was once a soldier) to be the civilian leader of the nation.



The world is a complex place, my sense is that it is time we started looking at it that way.

I think General Petreus looks at counter-insurgency as a very complex problem. Certainly the Sunni awakening is a key element to the surge. It's easy to "awaken" when you see thousands of additional troops streaming into your province looking to either:



1. Hunt you down and kill you right along with your Wahibi pals.



or



2. Pay you good money for helping to kill your Wahibi pals who you always thought were a pain in the ass anyways.

Well, my sense is that Petreus is a pretty bright, capable and complex guy, but surely he knows that the Awakening started 6 months before the surge.... which causes problems for your causality... and McCain's... see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ilan-goldenberg/not-a-gaffe-a-fundaemtn al_b_114394.html

though my sense is that Goldenberg takes this further than he needs to...

Agreed. And thanks for the Goldenberg link.



Certainly the surge helped make the Anbar Awakening even more successful. And the Awakening made the Surge more successfull. But that is the way counter-insurgency is supposed to work. The big hurdle is convincing the locals you're the winning horse.



"...war is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him...but to make him do what you want to do. Not killing...but controlled and purposeful violence.



But it's not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how -- or why -- he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people -- 'older and wiser heads,' as they say -- supply the control. Which is as it should be."

Sgt. Charles Zim

As I have no idea one way or the other whether the surge and awakening fed off one another - though it certainly seems possible - I'm not sure there's agreement among the locals or between various factions in Iraq and the US on the definition of winning, much less who's horse will come out on top at this point. What I can't stand, and what started all this, is pundits and politicians making linear statements that serve their interests, particularly when they know better (or would if they did anything like research or study the issue at hand.)



In many ways, my feeling is that we have too few genuine statesmen and women in the world today.

I had a lawyer friend tell me the easier information is to find, the harder it is to learn. It all gets to be a fog...the pundits, you and me. We're all full of shit, arguing today about things that happened in 2006 filtered through our own hearts and ideology.

Confucian lawyers... more or less trustworthy than the conventional kind? My sense of the FoS-ness of exchanges such as this depends on whether others are listening/reading, if public space and free speech matters, if others are having parallel/similar conversations and if it contributes to getting us, all collectively, somewhere. So far, I reserve judgment... but I love hearing from Dan and Zog.

Dan will cut you though, turn your scrotum into a gearshift cover.

I figure the danger's greatest when he's hangin' with Chuck... sadly, I live ~1200 miles away and my scrotums altogether too safe... g'nite.