Chris is quotable:
Note to members of the United States House of Representatives on both sides of aisle: Soldiers are people. Some volunteered out of patriotism, some out of economic desperation, some because they couldn't think of what else to do. Some of them are truly heroic, courageous, conscientious and brave. Some are racist and sadistic. Some are both at different times. Some began as kind-hearted and generous and have had their entire personalities change by the cruelties of war. Can we please, please, please stop pretending that we currently have 160,000 saints with guns patrolling the streets in Iraq? Can we please stop justifying the war in terms of it somehow being waged on the soldier's behalf? Can we please acknowledge that our fetishization of our warriors is due to the fact that an ever-shrinking percentage of the population has been asked to sacrifice a single thing to wage this so-called epic struggle for freedom? Please?
The glorification of the individual soldier is pernicious on a couple levels, not least that if we think every American with a flak jacket is some sort of rambo-bhoddisatva hybrid, we're liable to overestimate the army's effectiveness. It keeps us from adding things like Abu Ghraib or Haditha or the time we bombed a wedding party into the initial calculus of how the war is likely to go, and so we vastly exaggerate our potential for success. The sooner we realize that military force is a blunt instrument, rather than a fantastically supple collection of hyper-qualified diplomat/soldier/thinker/humanitarian/civil servants, the better off we'll be. And the better off the soldiers will be. We've asked them to run missions they're simply not trained for, and that's not fair.
