WHAT THE MILITARY THINKS

I asked Nato about what the military thinks in this election, and he sent me an interesting letter. I was interested because the "forward strategy of freedom" depends heavily on our soldiers risking the ultimate sacrifice, so in moral terms I think one's appraisal of it depends a lot on whether those soldiers are proud to get this opportunity to spread freedom, or whether they feel ill-used, like "this is not what I signed up for." Now the military has to behave in a politically neutral way. It's good for our democracy that our military is reliably subordinate to civilian authority, so it's probably a good thing that the Army and its soldiers (though they vote of course) don't lobby for certain policies or support certain candidates, because they would compromise the authority of elected leaders in foreign policy. And yet when our new foreign policy idealism depends so much on the soldiers, I almost feel soldiers ought to have extra votes (five or ten, say) in recognition of soldiers' disproportional contribution. That's unconstitutional, but I think a lot of people in the public might be proxy voters for the soldiers, voting for Bush if and only if the soldiers believed in him, if they knew what soldiers thought. With that in mind, here's Nato's letter:

The military is not the method of service most chosen by left-leaning
people, as you know. Before I joined the Army, I had two friends in the
Peace Corps (which is, I think, far more arduous, more hazardous, and less
well-remunerated than the military), two friends in Americorps, one working
in a Guatemalan free clinic under the auspices of an American NGO, one who
worked part time for Planned Parenthood, and one who worked for Lambda Legal
Defense. My brother had been in the military as had my father, my
grandfather and my grandmother plus both uncles and a cousin, but all of
them are more conservative than I am*.

Generally speaking, I think the military tends to support Republican
presidents because they tend to share values in a broad sense. The modern
military is far more political than it was twenty years ago and military
officers are about twice as likely to identify themselves as conservative as
the general population of college graduates.

That said, soldiers tend to trust other soldiers. When General Shinseki
said we'd need "hundreds of thousands" of troops to pacify and rebuild Iraq,
we took that seriously. And he got canned for saying it - apparently
because this contradicted Rumsfeld. Also, we know our leaders care. When
my regiment had a ceremony for the soldiers who died in Iraq, no few
commanders and sergeants major shed tears openly and had difficulty reading
the names. Meanwhile, Wolfowitz, when asked to estimate how many troops had
died in Iraq, underestimated by more than two hundred. Clearly he's
either a liar or just doesn't care enough to know. That's unacceptable,
totally. When soldiers hear things like that... Well, it's not good for
morale.

At this point the friction between the military and its civilian leadership
is mostly confined to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, but I also hear a surprising
amount of griping about Bush himself. I'd say that about 45% of my platoon
loathes Bush, and about 30% support him utterly, with another 25% being
pretty out of it. I wouldn't take this as indicative of the Army, however,
since it's a military intelligence unit and thus has a pretty different
demographic than the rest of the Army. Army-wide, I'd say a small majority
still support Bush.

This is different from supporting the war in Iraq, of course, but from a
certain perspective *I* support the war in Iraq, despite feeling the way it
was executed was inexcusable. I'd say only a minority actually oppose the
war in Iraq, and generally for not-very-good reasons. Many, many more feel
they were ill-used, but by whom is a good question. Some right-wingers
still try to blame things on Clinton, which seems bizarre to me but might
make more sense to you.

I knew there was a conflict between Rumsfeld and the military hierarchy about "transformation," with Rumsfeld having lots of new ideas that the military resisted, and generally I thought the events had proved Rumsfeld right, and all the predictions of disaster humiliatingly wrong. I was stunned by the three-week victory. Weren't you? But then, if Shinseki's reason for wanting "hundreds of thousands" of troops was not to defeat Saddam but to "pacify and rebuild" the country afterwards-- to prevent terrorism and insurgency-- maybe events have vindicated him somewhat. (It sounds to me suspiciously like a self-serving reinterpretation of one's remarks after the fact, but maybe that was what he meant.) The trouble is that we don't know the counter-factual. Would more troops have prevented the security problems, allowing us to establish a strong regime which could then be passed to elected Iraqis sooner? Or would more troops have made the occupation weigh heavier on the Iraqis and provoked more resistance, becoming targets for suicide bombers? From this distance, it's hard to know.

The point about "our leaders care" is well-taken. Another military friend of mine said the military was "like an ethnic group." It has its own culture, its own ceremonies, its own dialect its own bonds of mutual affection. Colin Powell is an admirable representative of that culture. I'd like to see him installed at the Pentagon for the soldiers' sake, even if he's a lot less neocon than I'd like.

It had never occurred to me to blame "the way [the Iraq war] was executed on Clinton! Nor am I a Clinton-hater, in fact I am pretty supportive of his domestic policies, though I consider his foreign policy in large part misguided and amoral. What I do blame Clinton for is the Iraqi sanctions. Faced with a defiant, WMD-armed Saddam, Clinton preferred to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children rather than a few hundred US troops. Bush, unlike Clinton or Kerry, is a man whom I have come to trust not to make such moral lapses; I think a mscular conscience is at work in him, guiding him on just paths, and when there are no well-trodden just paths for him to take, he blazes his own trail towards justice. America under Bush won't do anything that I'll need to do penance for when I meet my Maker. Clinton was a salesman, led astray because his conscience was weaker than his desire to please and convince, who could change his beliefs like he could change his shirt, but Kerry is something scarier: a moral relativist. That's why he flip-flops: he says what people want to hear for the sake of his own ambition, but he doesn't believe it, and he doesn't sound like he believes it. His flip-flops make people wonder who he really is, what is "Kerryism," but I think the answer may not be far to seek after all. It's right there in his well-publicized biography: he went to Vietnam to fight for freedom, and was disillusioned. Kerryism is disillusionment with the fight for freedom. He doesn't support Bush II's "forward strategy of freedom," he doesn't support Clinton's talk of the "indispensable nation," he doesn't believe in the "axis of evil," he believes in leaving each nation to its own devices, its own values, its own culture, and in not meddling with it or bothering about it. This is the Kerryism that people will vote for in November, and that he will observe while he's in office. It is this quiet apostasy from the brotherhood of man that will break my heart if Kerry is elected, but that just shows my quixotic eccentricity, I guess.