Asymmetric Military

Colbert interviewed Amy Goodwin, the director of Democracy Now!. You can see the video on Elmer's Brother, one of my new blogging buddies. Now, let's leave aside the irony that the leader of Democracy Now! is opposed to the action that led to democracy in Iraq and focus on her statements.

She makes two claims: The first has to do with whether the troops want to get back. I'll agree with that. Who doesn't? I did.

The second has to do with whether the soldiers think the war is wrong. That's a more complicated question and Goodwin should qualify. There's two ways to view the war as wrong. The first is to view the war as intrinsically wrong as in: It's never correct to invade another country even though its leader is an evil dictator and it has weapons with which they can attack us. The second is to view the war as a effort gone badly as in: The Iraqis didn't have WMDs, Iraqis will never get along, and we should leave.

I don't think the majority of soldiers would agree with the first statement. If WMDs were found and Iraqis got along, they wouldn't say the war is wrong. For those that do think the war is wrong, may I posit an explanation?

For some soldiers, a justified war is to repel an attack on the US-to defend the United States. To the soldiers who hold on to this somewhat romantic notion, the geopolitical intricacies and complicated motivations of this conflict don't rise to the level of a Pearl Harbor. In other words, these soldiers may not consider or disagree with the importance of the Iraq war to the future of the region and to U.S. security. Let me remind everybody that if direct attack on the United States were the standard, only one war against one enemy would have been "worth it."