HERSH: I got a call last week from a soldier — it’s different now, a lot of communication, 800 numbers. He’s an American officer and he was in a unit halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. It’s a place where we claim we’ve done great work at cleaning out the insurgency. He was a platoon commander. First lieutenant, ROTC guy.
It was a call about this. He had been bivouacing outside of town with his platoon. It was near, it was an agricultural area, and there was a granary around. And the guys that owned the granary, the Iraqis that owned the granary… It was an area that the insurgency had some control, but it was very quiet, it was not Fallujah. It was a town that was off the mainstream. Not much violence there. And his guys, the guys that owned the granary, had hired, my guess is from his language, I wasn’t explicit — we’re talking not more than three dozen, thirty or so guards. Any kind of work people were dying to do. So Iraqis were guarding the granary. His troops were bivouaced, they were stationed there, they got to know everybody…
They were a couple weeks together, they knew each other. So orders came down from the generals in Baghdad, we want to clear the village, like in Samarra. And as he told the story, another platoon from his company came and executed all the guards, as his people were screaming, stop. And he said they just shot them one by one. He went nuts, and his soldiers went nuts. And he’s hysterical. He’s totally hysterical. And he went to the captain. He was a lieutenant, he went to the company captain. And the company captain said, “No, you don’t understand. That’s a kill. We got thirty-six insurgents.”
Now’s also the time to remember the dismissive reaction to this from U.S. conservatives. Here’s Max Boot writing in the Los Angeles Times:
…in his lectures [Hersh] has spread the legend of how a U.S. Army platoon was supposedly ordered to execute 30 Iraqis guarding a granary.
…maybe you’re an aging lefty icon who got famous reporting the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. And so maybe you’re still milking your notoriety for everything it’s worth. And maybe you’re always imagining another scoop like My Lai, because you’re afraid that on some level you’ve become just another old gasbag on the lecture circuit.
Of course, we still don’t know the truth behind Hersh’s story. But if accurate, it does more than indicate the recent Haditha massacre wasn’t an isolated incident. It suggests it may be fairly common.
Why? Note again the location Hersh gives for the alleged fall, 2004 massacre:
…he was in a unit halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border.
Now, note the location of Haditha, site of the confirmed November, 2005 massacre:
The point of Memorial Day is to honor the service and the sacrifice of those who have given their lives in the nation’s wars. But I suggest that we take a little time today to consider the living.
Look around and ask yourself if you believe that stability or democracy in Iraq — or whatever goal you choose to assert as the reason for this war — is worth the life of your son or your daughter, or your husband or your wife, or the co-worker who rides to the office with you in the morning, or your friendly neighbor next door.
Before you gather up the hot dogs and head out to the barbecue this afternoon, look in a mirror and ask yourself honestly if Iraq is something you would be willing to die for.
There is no shortage of weaselly politicians and misguided commentators ready to tell us that we can’t leave Iraq — we just can’t. Chaos will ensue. Maybe even a civil war. But what they really mean is that we can’t leave as long as the war can continue to be fought by other people’s children, and as long as we can continue to put this George W. Bush-inspired madness on a credit card.
Start sending the children of the well-to-do to Baghdad, and start raising taxes to pay off the many hundreds of billions that the war is costing, and watch how quickly this tragic fiasco is brought to an end.
At an embarrassing press conference last week, President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain looked for all the world like a couple of hapless schoolboys who, while playing with fire, had set off a conflagration that is still raging out of control. Their recklessness has so far cost the lives of nearly 2,500 Americans and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis, many of them children.
Among the regrets voiced by the president at the press conference was his absurd challenge to the insurgents in 2003 to “bring ‘em on.” But Mr. Bush gave no hint as to when the madness might end.
How many more healthy young people will we shovel into the fires of Iraq before finally deciding it’s time to stop? How many dead are enough?
At this point, you’d have to be blind to miss the pattern. Every prominent progressive leader who comes along is openly derided in the media as fake, dishonest, conniving, out-of-the-mainstream, and weak. We simply can’t continue to chalk this up to shortcomings on the part of Democratic candidates or their staff and consultants. It’s all too clear that this will happen regardless of who the candidate or leader is; regardless of who works for him or her. The smearing of Jack Murtha should prove that to anyone who still doubts it.
Meanwhile, any conservative who comes along is going to be praised for being strong and authentic and likable.
The rest, of which there is quite a lot, and is all worth reading, is here.
The only part I disagree with is the very end:
…for years, the media has employed a double-standard in covering progressives and conservatives…it can’t go on.
First of all, the corporate media has ALWAYS employed this double-standard, not simply “for years.” And of course it can go on. What would stop it?
Of all the things that drive me crazy about my progressive compatriots, it’s this belief that you can change the corporate media with accurate criticism of it. They believe at some point the people within the media will realize they’re wrong, and their behavior will improve.
This is insane. The corporate media is the way it is because it exists to make as much money as possible. It doesn’t exist to give people an accurate picture of the world. It doesn’t exist to provide jobs for honest journalists. On rare occasions it will do both. But mostly it won’t, because the need to make as much money as possible usually conflicts with everything good.
Waiting for this to change is like waiting for Santa Claus to bring us presents. But Santa Claus won’t ever bring us presents, because THERE IS NO SANTA CLAUS.
WASHINGTON, May 25 — A military investigation into the deaths of two dozen Iraqis last November is expected to find that a small number of marines in western Iraq carried out extensive, unprovoked killings of civilians, Congressional, military and Pentagon officials said Thursday.
An image from videotape taken shortly after a fatal raid in Haditha, Iraq. Residents there said several marines carried out unprovoked killings.
Two lawyers involved in discussions about individual marines’ defenses said they thought the investigation could result in charges of murder, a capital offense. That possibility and the emerging details of the killings have raised fears that the incident could be the gravest case involving misconduct by American ground forces in Iraq.
Officials briefed on preliminary results of the inquiry said the civilians killed at Haditha, a lawless, insurgent-plagued city deep in Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, did not die from a makeshift bomb, as the military first reported, or in cross-fire between marines and attackers, as was later announced. A separate inquiry has begun to find whether the events were deliberately covered up.
Evidence indicates that the civilians were killed during a sustained sweep by a small group of marines that lasted three to five hours and included shootings of five men standing near a taxi at a checkpoint, and killings inside at least two homes that included women and children, officials said.
And yet, there’s such reluctance in this country to ever criticize any member of the military (unless of course you’re talking about former generals or Marines who speak out against the war — the right wing obviously considers them fair game), that even as he initially broke this story, Jack Murtha made a point of saying, “Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them.”
Well, sorry — no. Sorry to everyone whose worldview rests precariously on the belief that every single one of Our Brave Troops are beyond reproach or criticism at all times. This one wasn’t the president’s fault, except in the larger sense that this war should have never been started in the first place, but that doesn’t excuse an atrocity like this. And it wasn’t just some momentary war zone version of road rage, a few minutes of crazy shooting and then the remorse settles in.
This was a premeditated massacre.
“A sustained sweep by a small group of marines that lasted three to five hours.”
Non-combatants. Women and children.
Three to five hours.
Jesus wept.
These guys make Richard Hickock and Perry Smith look like pikers.
David Brooks is in fine form this morning (behind the Select firewall, of course).
You see, he’s been trying to get at the root of this whole “income inequality” thing. At first, he’s reluctant to concede that such a thing even exists, at least in its popularly-understood form (in which there is often “inequality” in levels of “income”). As he notes at the top of the column:
When you delve into this literature, you realize inequality is more complicated than some polemicists let on. For example, inequality is much lower when measured by consumption than by income because poorer people now spend much more than they officially report as income.
At some point in every David Brooks column, you reach the “has he ever…?” moment. As in, “has he ever actually met/seen/spoken to a representative of the group about which he is making wild unsubstantiated generalizations?” That moment comes rather quickly in this one — in the second paragraph, to be exact. Allow me to repeat that last bit for emphasis:
For example, inequality is much lower when measured by consumption than by income because poorer people now spend much more than they officially report as income.
What I believe he’s referring to, with this glib reference to inequality “measured by consumption”, is what the rest of us call “crushing consumer debt”. It is not “officially reported” as income because no one capable of rational thought would ever consider charging items on a credit card to be a form of income. But to someone like David Brooks, who undoubtedly pays off his credit card balance each month without a second thought, the consumer goods that poor families may buy on credit at usurious rates — let alone the necessities such as groceries that they may be forced to charge — represent some sort of undeclared income which at least partially negates the concept of income inequality.
Already, I’m banging my head against the kitchen table, and I’ve barely started the column.
Now, in the third ‘graf, Brooks does reluctantly acknowledge the obvious:
Nonetheless, certain conclusions are unavoidable. First, the gap between rich and poor is widening. It’s like global warming; you can resist the evidence for a while, but eventually you have to succumb
Or to put it another way, it’s like having your head up your own ass. You can pretend you don’t for awhile, but you won’t be fooling anyone but yourself.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a David Brooks column without a dizzying leap of logic that leaves you shaking your head and rubbing your eyes and wondering how, exactly, we managed to get from point A to point 3.14159265, and where the intermediate steps in the argument might have disappeared to — and this column does not disappoint. In two short paragraphs, Brooks dismisses the notion that income inequality is anything that can be addressed through economic or social policy:
Some economists believe we should reduce inequality by restructuring the economy — raising taxes on the rich and redistributing money to the poor. That’s fine, but it won’t get you very far. In Britain, Gordon Brown has redistributed large amounts of money from rich to poor regions, but regional inequality has increased faster under the current government than under Margaret Thatcher.
Income inequality is driven by human capital inequality, and human capital can’t be taxed and redistributed. You have to build it at the bottom to ensure maximum fairness.
And as you sit there slightly dazed, saying, wha– wha– what?, Brooks is off and running!
When you turn your attention to human capital formation, you begin by thinking about job training and schools. But you discover that while learning is like nutrition (you have to do it every day), earlier is better. That’s because, as James Heckman puts it, learners learn and skill begets skill. Children who’ve developed good brain functions by age 3 have advantages that accumulate through life.
That takes us to where the debate is today. How do we inculcate good brain functions across a wider swath of the 3-year-old population?
Just to avoid any misunderstanding, let me state up front that I stand second to no one in my dedication and commitment to good brain functions in very young children. This I believe with a startling lack of ambiguity: good brain functions are desirable and to be encouraged with all possible gusto!
Let us pause for a brief cheer: Hurrah! for the good functioning brains of children!
Nonetheless, you really have to admire this extraordinary feat of op-ed ju jitsu, with which Brooks begins a column about economic disparity, and within a few hundred short words, somehow makes it to this conclusion:
The problem is this: How does government provide millions of kids with the stable, loving structures they are not getting sufficiently at home?
It’s like the op-ed version of ‘24′. Jack Bauer himself could not lead us to a more unexpected finale.
If there’s one thing that leaps out of all the brain literature, it is that, as Daniel J. Siegel puts it, “emotion serves as a central organizing process within the brain.” Kids learn from people they love. If we want young people to develop the social and self-regulating skills they need to thrive, we need to establish stable long-term relationships between love-hungry children and love-providing adults.
That’s why I’m grappling with these books on psychology and brain function. I started out on this wonk odyssey in the company of economic data, but the closer you get to the core issue, the further you venture into the primitive realm of love.
And there you have it. Attempts to address economic disparity with, you know, remedial policies are all much too complicated, and probably won’t do any good anyway — just look at Britain! They still have poor people there! No, to address the fundamental issue of inequality in this society, what we really need to do is make sure that parents love their children.
Or that somebody does. Or something.
And then all our problems will be solved, and we’ll all live happily ever after.
Who can take a sunrise
Sprinkle it with dew
Cover it with choc’late and a miracle or two
The Candy Man
Oh, the Candy Man can
The Candy Man can
‘Cause he mixes it with love
And makes the world taste good
Who can take a rainbow
Wrap it in a sigh
Soak it in the sun and make a groovy lemon pie
The Candy Man (the Candy Man can)
The Candy Man can
‘Cause he mixes it with love
And makes the world taste good
Perhaps you’ve already seen this column by David Broder, Dean of the Washington Press Corps, in which he explains what he’s interested in:
But for all the delicacy of the treatment, the very fact that the Times had sent a reporter out to interview 50 people about the state of the Clintons’ marriage and placed the story on the top of Page One was a clear signal — if any was needed — that the drama of the Clintons’ personal life would be a hot topic if she runs for president.
MR. RUSSERT: David Broder, is it possible for official Washington–the president, Democratic leaders, Republican leaders–to arrive at common ground, a consensus position on Iraq?
MR. DAVID BRODER: It’s possible, Tim, but they won’t get there by arguing about who did what three years ago. And this whole debate about whether there was just a mistake or misrepresentation or so on is, I think, from the public point of view largely irrelevant. The public’s moved past that.
Of course, by “the public’s moved past that,” Broder meant “I’ve moved past that.” Just days after he said this, a New York Times poll found that 80% of Americans felt it was “very” (56%) or “somewhat” (24%) important for Congress to investigate Bush’s use of intelligence on Iraq.
So to sum up Broder’s worldview:
Bill Clinton’s Wang And What It’s Doing Right This Second: HOT! HOT! HOT!
Lies That Have Killed Tens Of Thousands: EH. THIS MAKES ME SLEEPY.
“I would work with our friends in OPEC to convince them to open up the spigot, to increase the supply. Use the capital that my administration will earn, with the Kuwaitis or the Saudis, and convince them to open up the spigot.”
That’s candidate Bush in 2000, describing how he will lower gas prices if elected.
Economist Dean Baker is appearing now until 2:30 pm ET over at MaxSpeak! to answer questions about his book The Conservative Nanny State (which is available as a free download). I myself will be at MaxSpeak! making strained, non-funny jokes such as “please speak more clearly and directly into the microphone.”
