Support The Troops; Kill A Kitten!

There's a big kerfluffle going on in the blogosphere about comments alleged to Harry Reid yesterday in The Politico. TNR's The Plank tries to make the allegation that Politico is trying to gin up interest by essentially falsifying quotes. Turns out the quotes appear to have been confirmed, and TNR basically admitted as much today, retracting most, although not all, of their allegations.

But that shit is all inside baseball, as they say, and completely uninteresting. The bigger point, to me, is the fact that Politico's allegations really aren't that big of a deal, as far as I am concerned. Let's get to the meat of it.

Reid is quoted as calling General Peter Pace, the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, as being 'incompetent.' He also implied that General Petraeus is 'out of touch.' This, of course, led to the usual fulminations from the right-wing rage machine, such as Tony Snow's exclamation that

At a time of war, for a leader of a party that says it supports the military, it seems outrageous to be issuing slanders toward the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and also the man who's responsible for the bulk of military operations in Iraq

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, ridiculous, and I'm sick and tired of this characterization of 'supporting the troops'. Fuck the troops. I support America. The fact is, we send the troops to kill, and sometimes to die, when it's in our national interest to do so. The question of whether or not they want to do it is, basically, irrelevant.

Spencer Ackerman wrote an article in last week's Washington Monthly which claimed that, on balance, the troops are in favor of our mission there, and would be disappointed if we left. In his diavlog with Eli Lake on bloggingheads.tv, I was particularly struck by the fact that he claimed the biggest complaint that the troops have is that they don't get in enough honest firefights. But this shouldn't be surprising. There's an old saw that says "when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail." What do you think the view looks like when you are the hammer?

The troops are our hammer. The civilian leadership in the government is the carpenter. The beauty of being a carpenter (at least, if you are a halfway decent one) is that you have a whole belt full of tools and techniques to attack a problem with. It should come as no surprise that the troops want to be in Iraq. They've been told that it's their job to do that, and as they are loyal, faithful, and, frankly, trained not to think too much about it, that's what they believe.

The whole reason that the Constitution puts civilians in charge of the military is that we don't want the hammer telling us what it can effectively pound on. The civvies in charge have to be the ones to make the decisions of what is, and what is not, worth doing. The hammer's job is to pound what it is told to.

So fuck Tony Snow. Fuck 'supporting the troops.' Let's worry about supporting America, and do what's right for us, and the world. In this case, that will result in less troops dying, less young Muslim men growing up learning to hate America, and less outright hypocrisy. When noting that the general in charge of an occupation that took a reasonably functional, albeit dictatorial, country and turned it into a seething mass of hatred and murder, just might not have been doing his job exactly right is equated with 'not supporting the troops', then 'supporting the troops' is the wrong thing to do. Good for Harry Reid for showing testicular fortitude and starting to point that out.