Afternoon Baseball

E&P
Joel Stein is an interesting fellow. He wrote absolute drivel -- stuff that he thought was witty and cute but was actually the giggling, ultra-safe and thus lame entendres of a fifth-grader -- for about 10 years, mostly with Time, the magazine that decided at about the time Stein came aboard to be Entertainment Weekly for people who think EW is too edgy.
Then he writes a column, weekly, for the LA Times. A new gig, a nice gig. He needs a hook for his latest column. Wait! How about "I don't support the troops." His reasoning is that people who don't support the war are simply taking the easy way out by saying they support the troops.

Now, believe it or not, there is an argument for not supporting the troops. If you actually champion the Iraqi insurgent (or Saddam) cause, then yes. If you are the pacifist of pacifists who doesn't believe in militaries, then you may not support any troops, anywhere. Stein wants to ask these questions, he wants to look around for new, tangible ways to say he hates this war, especially coming up on three years. Understandable -- and even supporters of the war should be looking in the mirror frequently. But Stein doesn't seem to like the insurgents. He probably isn't a complete pacifist, as in dismantling the military entirely. So what's left?

The other argument for not supporting the troops would be if they were committing mass atrocities. Now, the cases at Abu Ghraib (spelling?) were terrible, and something that arguably was under-punished. However, they are not an indicative trait of the whole military or any major subset of it. The conduct of the American troops in Iraq has been, on the whole, as honorable and nonviolent as an army in wartime could possibly be, particularly when there are no traditional battles, the enemy is disguised and mixed among civilian populations, and the army could understandably have lowered morale. (The hotly-disputed civilian casualty numbers in Iraq, you would think, are more of a problem with metropolitan war zones and the obvious flaws with bombing populated areas than of soldiers going after every civilian they see). Similarly, the idea of an all-volunteer army fighting Bush's personal battles is wrong. Maybe not the personal battle part. But if the army was truly volunteer, they could go home at any point. Most signed up before Iraq, and those who've signed up since aren't guaranteed to go there, nor is it fair to say that they only signed up to go kill some Iraqis (or substitute epithet here). Besides, not having an army at all, which seems to be the logical conclusion for some, is thinking that's never going to find the mainstream. Maybe in Canada, where they really probably don't need one.

So is Joel Stein that much of a pacifist? Or, does he think that the soldiers should have something to say about this war? Wait, why don't the soldiers just tell Bush, hey, you screwed up, we're going home, dammit. Making a moral, principled stand, right? After all, "The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they're following orders or not," as Stein says.
Yeah. Military juntas are great for nations. Like it or not, the military doing its job is going to do what its commanders say because that is their job, and quite frankly, a military devising its own political agenda is simply too dangerous, particularly when it's the most deadly collective force in the world.

This betrays a complete lack of knowledge (transcript from his appearance on conservative Hugh Hewitt's show) of the military experience, wartime experience, or the inability, naturally, of soldiers in battle to have the outside perspective that military leadership or civilian leadership are supposed to have. This is not genocide being practiced by soldiers. There are no death squads, lining hundreds of people up just to shoot them. There are mostly random attacks, explosions, fighting off ambushes and snipers, and a shocking lack of control over the situation for the average soldier outside the Green Zone.
They cannot be held to account for the whole war, no matter what the verdict eventually is (or has been decided, depending on the view) on the war and the reasoning behind such action.
It is similar to the idea that we should acknowledge that there may be a legitimate resistance, not simply bloodthirsy insurgents, in Iraq. True. We don't like to think about that, and we should. But how are soldiers supposed to do that? Unless we think American troops should be killed because they are defying a resistance, we can't have them make that judgment call. A guy shooting at them, or trying to blow them up, is simply a guy trying to shoot at them or blow them up. They have to be stopped and our troops should be expected to try to keep themselves safe. Similarly, having each soldier decide individually whether the war, battle, or even mundane order from his C.O. is moral or worth it is at face-value an absurdity.

Stein contradicts himself, anyways, a paragraph later, saying, "I do sympathize with people who joined up to protect our country, especially after 9/11, and were tricked into fighting in Iraq."
So he doesn't support the troops, but he supports some of the military, some of those in Iraq. C'mon.
As for being tricked, now, maybe some of these people felt Iraq was part of the overall response to 9/11. Maybe they weren't all "tricked." I know that's anathema to the consensus that Iraq was a con job crime, but it's surely reasonable to think at least some of the military servicemen and women weren't tricked.
But even if those people were tricked, do we now turn around, as Stein says we should, and hold them accountable for the entire geo-political situation? Do soldiers "lucky" enough to get sent to the Korean border, Germany, Afghanistan, Japan or elsewhere not get indicted on war crimes simply because someone else decided their assignments? And again, what actions are soldiers, en masse, supposed to take? How would mass mutiny really, honestly, be good?
As terrible as the actions of Nazi Germany were during WWII, we did not lock up or kill every foot soldier the Third Reich had fighting off in Africa, deep in Russia, or elsewhere. We focused on the people in leadership roles, purely vindictive and extermination roles (concentration camp officials, the SS, military and civilian leadership in Berlin), because they were the ones with the perspective to fully know what the actions of their nation were and what the effects were.

If we didn't "blame the troops" and hold them "ultimately responsible" in the most easily decided moral case of the American era, then it's idiotic to do so in a conflict that's still playing out, both in the military and political arena. And a conflict that, worse-case, would be a strategic and moral failing by civilian leadership, not a moral failing or mistake by the troops on the ground.
Supporting the troops can mean as little as hoping they can come home as soon as possible, and that as many of them as possible don't die. It can mean keeping in touch with those you know serving and their families. You can do that even if you would have a party after the assassination of President Bush.

Beyond all of this, Stein is simply not being honest. It's easier to respect someone who just says, for instance, that America is terrible, wrong and should be defeated, if they really think America is that horrible. You may rightly ask why they would live here (if they do), but they don't hide their opinion. You can confront their argument head-on. Stein, for all his tough talk, is trying to get away with supporting the troops throughout his column. He realizes that rooting against every soldier makes no sense and opens up a lot of worm cans that he also can't deal with or talk sensibly about, so he backs away, slowly but surely, from his opening salvo of "I don't support the troops."

Stein is limited by his 750-word-or-so space. He's also limited by a lack of perspective, a lack of introspection, a lack of any knowledge of politics, the military, military life, or even basic common sense. Any man who can unite Hewitt and the liberal blogger Atrios in calling someone an idiot has clearly said something truly stupid.