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Chicken-Hawks (again)

Which ably demonstrates that no argument is too baseless, too idiotic, too pernicious in foreseeable long term effects, for the those of the left to brandish it as a club against their political rivals. Rob has noted the most recent outbreak, and I see no reason to link to the ass hats who continue to forward this idiocy.

I had thought I was done with this issue when I posted on it nearly three years ago. Sadly I see that the calumny lives on and that its champions are still spreading it, and thus need to be answered. Just to make my overall opinion of the matter and my starting position absolutely clear, I offer the following to the proponents of the Chicken Hawk meme:

And yes, I am laughing at them, not with them.

Now, for those interested in the actual issues, I offer the following.

The general form of the Chicken Hawk slur is that the opinions of those who have not served (or are not presently serving, or who are not serving in combat, or who are not serving in the infantry, or who have not been wounded...[it’s truly amazing how many conditions some of these 'patriots' can, and do, assemble.]) can and should be dismissed out of hand when it comes to matters of national defense and war.

The first objection to this line of 'reasoning' is that we live in a Constitutional directly elected representative Republic which offers unlimited franchise to all of its adult citizens. Thus all adult citizens have a say in the election of representatives (directly in the case of Congressional Representatives and Senators, and indirectly [via the electoral college] in the case of the President) who determine national policy. Certainly some are better qualified in their opinions on certain matters than are others. Were it not so we'd all be seeking the legal advice of our barbers and the medical advice of our automobile mechanics. Yet neither barbers nor mechanics are denied the right to express opinions beyond their professional expertise. Do the proponents of the Chicken Hawk meme intend to carry it to it's logical conclusion and exclude all the non-veterans from the electorate? Do they intend to allow only veterans to run for elective office? How do they plan on selling that Constitutional Amendment to the requisite 2/3rds of the states given that it will disenfranchise about 80% of our citizenry?

The second objection is one of logical consistency. We find ourselves currently fighting wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. As a consequence it would logically follow under the Chicken Hawk theorem that only a veteran would be qualified to be President in such a time of war. Have the proponents of the Chicken Hawk meme all (mostly, at all) endorsed the only veteran remaining in the race? I, for one, haven't heard any cries of "Ave, John, Imperator" from the sinistrosphere...

It thus follows that the proponents of the Chicken Hawk meme are not really interested in a debate of the issues. Nor are they troubled by consistently applied logic. They in fact are seeking to shut down debate (which makes sense given how poorly they do in open debate).

I find that despicable.

Out Here
Rodney Graves
rodney.g.graves@gmail.com

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What price will we pay
for forgoing the study of war?

Education is the Achilles heel of democratic systems of government. A people who do not understand the historical outcome of bread and circuses will vote themselves just that. A people who have no understanding of the long term effects of appeasement will gladly pay Danegeld.

What then of a people whose academe has decided that they will study war no more?

Why Study War?
Victor Davis Hansen

Military history teaches us about honor, sacrifice, and the inevitability of conflict.

Try explaining to a college student that Tet was an American military victory. You’ll provoke not a counterargument—let alone an assent—but a blank stare: Who or what was Tet? Doing interviews about the recent hit movie 300, I encountered similar bewilderment from listeners and hosts. Not only did most of them not know who the 300 were or what Thermopylae was; they seemed clueless about the Persian Wars altogether.

It’s no surprise that civilian Americans tend to lack a basic understanding of military matters. Even when I was a graduate student, 30-some years ago, military history—understood broadly as the investigation of why one side wins and another loses a war, and encompassing reflections on magisterial or foolish generalship, technological stagnation or breakthrough, and the roles of discipline, bravery, national will, and culture in determining a conflict’s outcome and its consequences—had already become unfashionable on campus. Today, universities are even less receptive to the subject.

This state of affairs is profoundly troubling, for democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war—and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever.

...

The academic neglect of war is even more acute today. Military history as a discipline has atrophied, with very few professorships, journal articles, or degree programs. In 2004, Edward Coffman, a retired military history professor who taught at the University of Wisconsin, reviewed the faculties of the top 25 history departments, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report. He found that of over 1,000 professors, only 21 identified war as a specialty. When war does show up on university syllabi, it’s often about the race, class, and gender of combatants and wartime civilians. So a class on the Civil War will focus on the Underground Railroad and Reconstruction, not on Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. One on World War II might emphasize Japanese internment, Rosie the Riveter, and the horror of Hiroshima, not Guadalcanal and Midway. A survey of the Vietnam War will devote lots of time to the inequities of the draft, media coverage, and the antiwar movement at home, and scant the air and artillery barrages at Khe Sanh.

What, one may well ask, has filled the void? If the academe no longer teaches the history of warfare, what do they teach?

Peace Studies.

Or, as a companion piece in City Journal describes it:

The Peace Racket
Bruce Bawer

...

We need to make two points about this movement at the outset. First, it’s opposed to every value that the West stands for—liberty, free markets, individualism—and it despises America, the supreme symbol and defender of those values. Second, we’re talking not about a bunch of naive Quakers but about a movement of savvy, ambitious professionals that is already comfortably ensconced at the United Nations, in the European Union, and in many nongovernmental organizations. It is also waging an aggressive, under-the-media-radar campaign for a cabinet-level Peace Department in the United States. Sponsored by Ohio Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich (along with more than 60 cosponsors), House Resolution 808 would authorize a Secretary of Peace to “establish a Peace Academy,” “develop a peace education curriculum” for elementary and secondary schools, and provide “grants for peace studies departments” at campuses around the country. If passed, the measure would catapult the peace studies movement into a position of extraordinary national, even international, influence.

...

The people running today’s peace studies programs give a good idea of the movement’s illiberal, anti-American inclinations. The director of Purdue’s program is coeditor of Marxism Today, a collection of essays extolling socialism; Brandeis’s peace studies chairman has justified suicide bombings; the program director at the University of Missouri authorized a mass e-mail urging students and faculty to boycott classes to protest the Iraq invasion; and the University of Maine’s program director believes that “humans have been out of balance for centuries” and that “a unique opportunity of this new century is to engage in the creation of balance and harmony between yin and yang, masculine and feminine energies.” (Such New Age babble often mixes with the Marxism in peace studies jargon.)

The ancients (Flavius Vegetius Renatus) warned us: Si vis pacem, para bellum (If you would have peace, prepare for war). The world has not become a more peaceful place in the intervening sixteen centuries. The study of peace prepares one only for the grave, or dhimmitude.

Out Here
Rodney Graves
rodney.g.graves@gmail.com

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Americanism

Recent events have given me cause to ponder.

What Does it Mean to be an American?

Being an American is more than an accident of birth. More than a few who were born within the territorial limits of the United States of America, and who are citizens in the eyes of the law, frankly are not Americans. The fault, and it is indeed a grave fault, is entirely their own.

Americans are self selected.

Americans, or their ancestors, chose to come here. More importantly, Americans choose to identify ourselves as "Americans." Just that, and no more.

Theodore Roosevelt famously and brilliantly stated that:

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts "native" before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else.

Truer words were never spoken.

Americans are those who choose to be Americans. They are Americans without hyphen, caveat, or exception. Their sole allegiance is to the United States of America.

Nothing else matters in that regard. Not color of skin, nor nation of birth, nor gods worshiped, nor mother tongue.

And I will go one step further.

The only distinction I will recognize between Americans is this: Any American who supports, if needs be with their very life, the Constitution of the United States ( as it is, not as it may be) is my brother or sister.

They are mine and I am theirs.

To those who live within the borders of these United States, I have a message: Be an American, or be something else somewhere else.

Out Here
Rodney Graves
rodney.g.graves@gmail.com

Expanded from a piece originally posted on Baen's Bar
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The Last Helicopter; the true legacy of the Flower Children

The Generation which fought and won the Second World War has been (appropriately) memorialized as "The Greatest Generation." What then of their children, the Baby Boomers?

If we know them by the fruits of their labor, history will not be kind to their memory. Indeed, large segments of the world even now see their impact upon the United States symbolically as the Last Helicopter.

Hassan Abbasi has a dream--a helicopter doing an arabesque in cloudy skies to avoid being shot at from the ground. On board are the last of the "fleeing Americans," forced out of the Dar al-Islam (The Abode of Islam) by "the Army of Muhammad." Presented by his friends as "The Dr. Kissinger of Islam," Mr. Abbasi is "professor of strategy" at the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guard Corps University and, according to Tehran sources, the principal foreign policy voice in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's new radical administration. For the past several weeks Mr. Abbasi has been addressing crowds of Guard and Baseej Mustadafin (Mobilization of the Dispossessed) officers in Tehran with a simple theme: The U.S. does not have the stomach for a long conflict and will soon revert to its traditional policy of "running away," leaving Afghanistan and Iraq, indeed the whole of the Middle East, to be reshaped by Iran and its regional allies.

Sadly, Abbasi and those of like mind have a historical case to support their position. The litany is certainly long; Vietnam, Mayaguez, Desert One, Beirut, Mogadishu. Yet even so Mr. Taheri is less sure of the strength of that precedent:

The reason was that almost all realized that the 9/11 attacks have changed the way most Americans see the world and their own place in it. Running away from Saigon, the Iranian desert, Beirut, Safwan and Mogadishu was not hard to sell to the average American, because he was sure that the story would end there; the enemies left behind would not pursue their campaign within the U.S. itself. The enemies that America is now facing in the jihadist archipelago, however, are dedicated to the destruction of the U.S. as the world knows it today. Those who have based their strategy on waiting Mr. Bush out may find to their cost that they have, once again, misread not only American politics but the realities of a world far more complex than it was even a decade ago. Mr. Bush may be a uniquely decisive, some might say reckless, leader. But a visitor to the U.S. soon finds out that he represents the American mood much more than the polls suggest.

For the sake of both my Republic and the world, I pray that Mr. Taheri's observation proves more accurate than that of Abbasi.

Hat Tip: Powerline

Out Here
Rodney Graves
rodney.g.graves@gmail.com

Originally posted on Bayosphere
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On Copperheads;
Democratic Patriotism returns to Civil War standard

During the American Civil War there was a body of Northern Democrats who actively supported the South. These traitors became known as Copperheads, after the poisonous snake (Agkistrodon contortrix) found throughout the region.

Exemplars of the treacherous breed included:

Representative Clement Vallandigham, Democrat of Ohio
Representative Fernando Wood, Democrat of New York.

The Copperheads championed the following positions:

The North was responsible for pushing the South into secession
The Republicans were committed to establishing racial equality, a prospect opposed by many working class immigrants who wanted to protect their low-paying jobs and by racists
Lincoln had become a tyrant and was bent upon destroying civil liberties
The war was a national tragedy and must be ended, even if that meant granting independence to the Confederacy.

The historical parallels between the Civil War era Copperheads and the current Anti-War Democrats (and their supporters) are noteworthy.

They assert that the United States is responsible for world terrorism.
They believe that Iraqis are incapable of democratic self government.
They assert that President Bush has become a tyrant and is bent upon destroying civil liberties.
They assert that the War in Iraq is a national and international tragedy which we cannot win and which must be ended, even if that ending is a victory for the Terrorists.

It is certainly possible to disagree with the President's war policies without being a traitor. But the combination of factors above demonstrates a reckless disregard both for the truth, and for the National Interests of the United States.

It is time and past time that this parallel be shouted from the rooftops and corners. Anyone who satisfies in their public writings or utterances three or more of the four tests above is a Copperhead.

These snakes have no honor and are actively working to the detriment of our nation. Let us call them on it. When you see someone pass three of the four tests above, name them Copperhead. Repeat the naming whenever and wherever they repeat these calumnies. Dog their every public appearance and utterance with the name Copperhead such that all may see them and know them for what they are.
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Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes

Roll of Honor
in recognition of the deeds of the brave

Class of 1987
Ex scientia tridens.

Your Host
"It's not the years, it's the mileage."

Looks so Peaceful
But it's not, and never has been.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.

Chicken-Hawks (again)

What price will we pay for forgoing the study of war?

Americanism

The Last Helicopter; the true legacy of the Flower Children

What price will we pay
for forgoing the study of war?