Once More, William Arkin, with Feeling!

Having dropped the throttle on his crazy train yesterday, William Arkin is now yanking on the brakes for all he’s worth.

Oh…still no link to him. If today’s any indication, you may not be able to find the link to his post today with a team of bloodhounds. Seems he’s a bit cranky today again. The unwashed masses in camo took the teensiest bit of umbrage to his comments and responded rather colorfully.

But there are a few points I think need to be rebutted forcefully. That means I’ll have to muck about in the fever swamp of Arkin’s prose. This is not a good thing to be doing, but being a blogger means that sometimes you take a dip in the crazy so your readers don’t have to.

Arkin’s “apology” post is titled “The Arrogant and Intolerant” and I can tell you that he’s not referring to folks like me. He’s referring to soldiers who have again dared to forcefully voice their opinions. What follows is Arkin’s attempt to think. It’s not pretty and I’m sure that he was setting off smoke alarms all over the Washington Post building.

But here’s his attempt at a “that’s not what I said” moment.

Contrary to the typically inaccurate and overstated assertion in dozens of blogs, hundreds of comments, and thousands of e-mails I’ve received, I’ve never written that soldiers should “shut up,” quit whining, be spit upon, or that they have no right to an opinion.

Okay, I’ll grant him half of that. He didn’t actually use the words “shut up”.

I’m all for everyone expressing their opinion, even those who wear the uniform of the United States Army. But I also hope that military commanders took the soldiers aside after the story and explained to them why it wasn’t for them to disapprove of the American people.

I’m not sure where “it wasn’t for them to disapprove” fits in the hierarchy of “shut up” and “no right to an opinion” but it’s right in there somewhere. I wonder how many women or blacks opver the years have heard “it’s not for you to disapprove” about how they were being treated.

It’s no less condescending nor dismissive when it’s done to soldiers than when it’s done to any other minority you want to use.

And no, he didn’t actually say that people should spit on the troops. He only said that the troops should be grateful that we’re not spitting on them. Technically, he’s right, but it doesn’t make what he said any better. Actually, it makes it worse.

Moving on:

I said I was bothered by the notion that “the troops” were somehow becoming hallowed beings above society, that they had an attitude that only they had the means – or the right – to judge the worthiness of the Iraq endeavor.

I was dead wrong in using the word mercenary to describe the American soldier today.

These men and women are not fighting for money with little regard for the nation. The situation might be much worse than that: Evidently, far too many in uniform believe that they are the one true nation. They hide behind the constitution and the flag and then spew an anti-Democrat, anti-liberal, anti-journalism, anti-dissent, and anti-citizen message that reflects a certain contempt for the American people.

Here’s where Arkin sets up his strawman. See, the thing is that very few of our soldiers believe their attitude is more valid than anyone else’s. Arkin is projecting something on “the troops” that just doesn’t exist. No soldier I’ve ever known (and, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve known more than five or six) believes they are members of “the one true nation”. It’s just not there, folks. That’s an artifact of the left, best seen in the “chickenhawk” argument that Arkin ought to know pretty well. The left often says “if you’re not serving, you can’t speak about the war” but when those who are serving speak about the war, they’re told it’s not their place to speak.

Confused yet? Imagine being a leftist. It must stink when your own thoughts make your head hurt all the time.

Let’s draw that out a bit and make it explicit:

1) Against being in Iraq + never served in the military = Okay to talk about the war.
2) Against being in Iraq + served in the military = Okay to talk about the war.
3) For being in Iraq + never served in the military = Chickenhawk.
4) For being in Iraq + served in the military = Wants to impose military rulership on America and should shut the heck up so that the folks in 1) and 2) can run things.

But what about the angry e-mails? Well, Arkin gives us a few samples and I”m trying to figure out how the samples actually support his argument. Let’s look at what he regards as the most illustrative.

An army Major with the 1st Cavalry in Baghdad writes: “there is no way to accurately opine about the war unless you’ve been on the ground.”

KJ (and many others) adds that I am just “sitting in the lap of luxury that is the United States.”

Only the first e-mail, from the Major, seems to support Arklin’s point. But it only supports part of it. Remember, Arkin wants us to believe that our military believes that only it has “the right” to speak about Iraq.

BUt that’s not what the Army Major said. He didn’t say that we didn’t have the right to talk about Iraq if we weren’t there, but that our opinions could not be accurate. I don’t agree with that, because it’s possible to get an accurate opinion about the condition of Iraq by listening to the people who have been there and have seen the conditions for themselves.

And that is really where this argument comes to a point. The troops aren’t distressed abot the protests as much as they are about the fact that the protests get wider coverage than what they are doing or saying. They object to the fact that the MSM spend more time on people who have never set foot in Iraq telling us how horrible it is and how we can neer win than they do with the people who are right there, right now telling us something completely different.

The problem the soldiers have – and you can read this by finding any half-way updated milblog or by reading some of the amazing work of Bill Ardolino, Bill Roggio, or Michael Yon among others – is not that their point of view better than ours. It’s that their point of view is being completely plastered over by a point of view that is not simply different but that is factually incorrect. It has nothing to do with whose opinion matters more but with whose opinions are being blared from nearly every television and newspaper in the country and whose are not.

How many times have we seen Cindy Sheehan’s rage-twisted mug on our televisions telling us how we can’t possibly win in Iraq? A dozen? A hundred? More?

Now how many times have you seen some soldier – any soldier – fresh from a patrol in Najaf or Fallujah on our televisions telling us how he and his fellow soldiers had just broken up another nest of terrorists or how they had just met with some city leaders who were glad they were there or how they visited the school they helped set up before and found it running really well?

All those things are happening all over Iraq, but when was the last time you saw it as a headline in the New York Times or at the lead story on NBC or CNN?

Yeah, I can imagine that the soldiers are just the eensiest bit frustrated that all their hard work seems to be translating into absolutely nothing by the time it gets to the States, if it ever gets there. I can see very well how soldiers, when given the chance by NBC to tell America just how bad things aren’t going in Iraq, ran with it. None but Arkin and his ilk could possibly blame them for grabbing the opportunity to finally get their voices heard in the discussion.

Oh…wait…I’m not supposed to use the word “ilk”.

The Army Major goes on to say that “soldiers — unlike journalists — have values inculcated from the very beginning of basic training.”

D speaks of “last week’s leftist freak show in D.C.” to describe anti-war protest.

KC questions how I could jeopardize the “safety and morale of those who lay their young and noble lives on the line for you and your ilk.”

Too many to count denounced me (and my ilk) for being elitist, arrogant, exclusive, a Washington a@$*hole or worse, above-it-all, and superior.

Given that I spent so much of my time in this column every week railing about Washington myself, the dismissal is hilarious. But there is such contempt for civil society in these words and I wonder where it comes from?

As the Major says, something is inculcated into the minds of military members from day one of duty. It is not just defense of the Constitution, it is also unanimity of thought and an unwavering regard for hierarchy. Without this, you can’t have a military and you can’t expect human beings to go against their instincts to put their lives on the line.

I’m not saying that this makes people in the military automatons, or that they are stupid. But this unanimity of thought and this absolute allegiance to a hierarchy of ideas is and should be foreign in the civilian world. That’s what makes the two different.

This honestly made me laugh. After the bilefest that was Arkin’s earlier post, there is no way he should be scolding anyone about their “contempt for civil society”. He definitely has no grounds to beat anyone down for being arrogant or intolerant. Not after yesterday’s post he doesn’t.

The shame is that he really thinks he has the high ground in this discussion. He believe wholeheartedly that he’s being reasonable and decent and probably a little kind. After all, he didn’t have to take the time to educate the masses about how the system works, did he? We should be grateful. Instead, we’re angry. That confuses him and makes him cranky and a little weepy, like a colicky baby.

And like a colicky baby, we can’t do much but let him cry and tell everyone around us that his crying doesn’t really signify anything but his colickyness. Heads will nod and we’ll go back to the business of being adults in a world of adults.

Poor Arkin really can’t see that making an incredibly comfortable living railing about Washington doesn’t actually disqualify him from being elitist and arrogant. Does it really need to be said that you can be really arrogant and hate one political party, or the whole Washington establishment, a whole lot?

Does the name Tom DeLay mean anything to you? How about Ross Perot? Ayman al-Zawahiri? How about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Any of those arrogant yet scornful folks qualify?

It’s kind of stupid that Arkin’s argument requires me to state the obvious. But there you go.

Oh yes, there’s that word again: stupid. Funny how when someone from the left talks about our soldiers, that word seems to hover in the air. This time, Arkin grabbed it out of the air and slapped it on paper. No, of course he doesn’t think our soldiers are stupid. He just thinks they don’t know the difference between military and civilian life. Stupid? Oh, no, no, no. Heaven forfend that he’d actually use the word. He’d rather slime his way toward the implication.

Ditto the “automaton” characterization. He’s not gutsy enough to actually say our soldiers are automatons. He’ll just say that they’re “inculcated” with “this unanimity of thought and this absolute allegiance to a hierarchy of ideas”. That certainly doesn’t make you an automaton. That makes you a Democrat!

Ouch. That was really mean of me. I didn’t mean to say that Democrats are automatons. I just meant to say that anyone who disagreed with the party line, say at their 2004 Presidential Convention, would have been just the teensiest bit conspicuous. Y’know, kind of like a smart person in William Arkin’s office.

Ouch. That was really mean of me, too. But I meant to say that.

You see how that implication thing works?

Let me get back on track and inform Mr. Arkin of something also fairly elementary. Our soldiers fully realize that there’s a difference between the civilian and military worlds. They know this because they have all spent most of their lives as civilians. That’s how they were raised and how they grew up. And guess what, Mr. Arkin? Assuming they survive their military experience, they’ll also die as civilians. I’m pretty sure they have a handle on what being a civilian means. They also know, because it is one of the things that is “inculcated into the minds of military members from day one of duty”, that the ultimate control of the military belongs to the civilians – every single civilian including them! Because when you are a soldier you do not lose the essence of civil society. You are still a civilian so far as the Constitution, which makes no distinction between civilian and soldier, is concerned. You have all the essential rights a civilian has.

What bugs me the most is that William Arkin is the guy for national security at the Washington Post and he doesn’t seem to know the first thing about what soldiers really think. That surprises me because he actually was one. One might assume that, being a soldier, he would have met a few soldiers and gotten to know them. He might have seen that there are as many opinions in the military as there are outside of it and when an opinon starts to get enough traction that when groups or footsoldiers are willing to voice them on national television and on the internet and anywhere else they can find an outlet, it might warrant some level of investigation. Instead, Arkin dismisses the soldiers as both arrogant and brainwashed, both intolerant and supportive of a new nation very different from their own, without somehow including himself among those soldiers.

Yeah…I can imagine that he’d be a bit cranky. I would be too if I twisted my brain into that convoluted a pretzel.

UPDATE: Gaius has a line so good it must be shared. He says that not only has Arkin dug himself a hole, he’s “off and excavating like a gopher on crack”.

Man, that’s funny. Go on and read the rest of that post, and do follow the link he offers toward the end.

Chris Muir’s cartoon is perfect. I very nearly made a comparison between Arkin and Marie Antoinette. After seeing that, I’m glad I didn’t. Muir did it much better.

UPDATE II: Apparently, Arkin can’t bother to quote his critics correctly (via Sister Toldjah, who echoes my sentiment that it’s good to see Arkin finally letting his crazy left-think slip in public).

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Category: Moonbat Nonsense, Oh, THAT liberal media.