I've been waiting to post on Alex Rossmiller's Still Broken till I could peg it to TAP's conversation around the book. The talk, which features Spencer Ackerman interviewing Alex, is now up, and well worth a read. As for the book (and full disclosure: Alex is a friend, and I'm in the acknowledgements), it records Alex's time working with the Defense Intelligence Agency on Iraq issues, and is a rare window into the chaos and dysfunction that afflicts the organizations actually prosecuting this war. And in that, it's extremely valuable.There are no end of competing hypotheses that propose to explain why we invaded Iraq. But beneath the question of why this war versus another, or versus none at all, is the issue of why the country, and the media, and the politicians, evinced so much confidence in our capabilities. Insofar as the war was a subject for dispute, the questions tended to be about justification: Was the war the right thing to do, the humane thing to do, the ethical thing to do, the lawful thing to do? Rarely did we question whether it was within our capabilities to carry out.In part, that's because you're not really allowed to question the military. Troops always deserve our support, and support, in this context, means admiration, and even overestimation. It would have been political suicide for a prominent politician to stand up and say that our military was unfit for this task: It wasn't culturally astute enough, experienced enough with occupation or counter-insurgency, populated by enough Arab speakers. It would have been even more unthinkable to question the virtues of the soldiers themselves, admitting, as we all know, that they are a fighting force composed largely of young, aggressive kids who've never been out of this country and, through no fault of their own, are utterly unprepared for a task of this delicacy. Add in our fetishization of military hardware, and the apparent ease with which we toppled the Taliban, and you had a deeply skewed conversation which seemed singularly unable to address what should've been the threshold question: Can we do this? STILL BROKEN.
I've been waiting to post on Alex Rossmiller's Still Broken till I could peg it to TAP's conversation around the book. The talk, which features Spencer Ackerman interviewing Alex, is now up, and well worth a read. As for the book (and full disclosure: Alex is a friend, and I'm in the acknowledgements), it records Alex's time working with the Defense Intelligence Agency on Iraq issues, and is a rare window into the chaos and dysfunction that afflicts the organizations actually prosecuting this war. And in that, it's extremely valuable.There are no end of competing hypotheses that propose to explain why we invaded Iraq. But beneath the question of why this war versus another, or versus none at all, is the issue of why the country, and the media, and the politicians, evinced so much confidence in our capabilities. Insofar as the war was a subject for dispute, the questions tended to be about justification: Was the war the right thing to do, the humane thing to do, the ethical thing to do, the lawful thing to do? Rarely did we question whether it was within our capabilities to carry out.In part, that's because you're not really allowed to question the military. Troops always deserve our support, and support, in this context, means admiration, and even overestimation. It would have been political suicide for a prominent politician to stand up and say that our military was unfit for this task: It wasn't culturally astute enough, experienced enough with occupation or counter-insurgency, populated by enough Arab speakers. It would have been even more unthinkable to question the virtues of the soldiers themselves, admitting, as we all know, that they are a fighting force composed largely of young, aggressive kids who've never been out of this country and, through no fault of their own, are utterly unprepared for a task of this delicacy. Add in our fetishization of military hardware, and the apparent ease with which we toppled the Taliban, and you had a deeply skewed conversation which seemed singularly unable to address what should've been the threshold question: Can we do this? 
