Month: April 2004

t.rev is cranking out some excellent stuff in the comment thread below.

In a war, you have a large set of actors and a much larger set of actions taken by said actors. Some actions will be heroic, some will be atrocities, many will be just grim violence, and the vast majority will be mind-numbingly tedious.

Some actions will be essentially unobserved (no one will survive them), most will be observed by a handful, and a tiny fraction will be observed and communicated on a wider scale.

Each side in a war will have what you could call an ‘atrocity-averseness’ factor, which is going to be dependent on two things: the expected number of observers of a given atrocity, and the damage that a given perceived atrocity will cause to that side (in morale, diplomacy, etc.)

I would argue that the US has an extremely high atrocity-averseness factor, for reasons that I think are obvious (or deserve a different essay, anyway).

And he goes on from there. I don’t normally go “hey, look at the comment thread!” but a lot of what he’s saying about the impossibility of stamping out all atrocities are things I’d like to say, except he already said ‘em better.

Compare and contrast:

“Are we going too soft in Iraq? Some people think so. It seems that way to me, too, though I’m reluctant to make a judgment at this distance. But in my lifetime, at least, the United States has generally erred by not being violent enough, rather than by being too brutal.”

That’s Glenn Reynolds, April 30th, 2004.

“It was American soldiers serving as military police at Abu Ghraib who took these pictures. The investigation started when one soldier got them from a friend, and gave them to his commanders. 60 Minutes II has a dozen of these pictures, and there are many more – pictures that show Americans, men and women in military uniforms, posing with naked Iraqi prisoners.

“There are shots of the prisoners stacked in a pyramid, one with a slur written on his skin in English.

“In some, the male prisoners are positioned to simulate sex with each other. And in most of the pictures, the Americans are laughing, posing, pointing, or giving the camera a thumbs-up.”

That’s CBS News, April 29th, 2004.

Good timing, Glenn.

Remember: commemorating Pat Tillman and his death is OK. Commemorating soldiers who didn’t give up millions of dollars to fight is wrong.

Also, photographs of anonymous coffins are an invasion of privacy in some fashion that does not apply when you’re talking about former NFL players.

Finally, the people of America must be protected at all costs from the evil liberal media, which wishes to use the deaths of soldiers in Iraq for political gain. The people of America, sadly, are not capable of thinking for themselves. They are so damned emotional that the liberal media can play any tune it likes on their heartstrings.

If it’s so obvious that Ted Koppel is only reading the names of the dead for manipulative purposes, why wouldn’t the average voter notice? I mean, come on. Doesn’t anyone have any faith in Americans any more? (Rhetorical question.)

Nota bene: I think that Ted Koppel should read the names of the Afghanistan dead in a separate program; it only makes sense to include them in the Iraq broadcast if the two wars are linked, which they are not. I also believe that Pat Tillman is well worth honoring. So are the 130 or so soldiers who died in Iraq this month alone.

Arlen Specter won the Pennsylvania primary over Pat Toomey by a very narrow margin. This is a loss for the hard right wing of the Republican Party. It may or may not translate into a boost for the Democratic Senate candidate; 48% of those who voted against Specter said they wouldn’t vote for him in the general election, but a lot of those people are going to come back to the fold.

No telling if the hard right wing will feel betrayed by Bush, who endorsed Specter. Specter is not well-liked in some quarters, however.