Ryan is right, and also wrong. Where he is right... well... about 70% of everything he said. His points on morality, war fighter reintegration, and more.
Where Ryan is wrong and Stephens if correct is that forever wars can be said to be more destructive on all sides of the conflict than winning quickly. Thus, morally wrong.
Think of this: What if the US obliterated Iraq's military, it's religious fundamentalists, it's warlords, and anyone else able to gather more than a 10 person crowd. Some are dead, some are arrested.
Then, took the low level Baa'thist and allowed them to administrate the country. (Nothing stops a bullet like employment?) The first job is to put kill zones on the borders of Syria and Iran. Stop all travel into Iraq by military age men. Let the neighbors know that we will be attacking extremists in their country also.
Any gatherings of fundamentalists is immediately destroyed. Mosques included. Zero tolerance of militias, fundamentalists, and sayers of ney!
"Shock and Awe" should have lasted a month. Or more. Not a few days.
This would have meant the immediate deaths of thousands of civilians. Meaning... about 10% of what actually died in Iraq. I'm sorry... dying... still today.
Also... it's important to point out that Saddam was killing or disappearing on average about 20k-30k Iraqis himself each year. (Amnesty International numbers.)
How can I morally take this position that would have had the US killing a lot of civilians.
Two things. Short wars are morally superior to long ones. And... John Locke.
Like Locke, I believe that every citizen has a moral duty to create and maintain a government that works and plays well with others. It doesn't matter how hard it is to remove a dictator. The citizenry is ultimately responsible. Individual Russians are responsible for allowing Putin to terrorize their neighbors and of course the Russia citizenry itself. Individual Iraqis were responsible for Saddam.
I am responsible for the shit show in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am responsible for Jake Sullivan not having any foreign policy experience yet forming the US plan for helping Ukraine.
This duty is what gives you power as a citizen. You have agency. Use it. The numbers are always on the side of the citizenry. The US founding fathers new this. It's why the second amendment exists. It's a check valve that allows revolt at a moments notice.
I detest everyone involved in Jan 6. I think they are no better than antifa and radical environmentalists. But there is one "good" thing that came from Jan 6... Our government officials were reminded that revolution is the OTHER check and balance the citizenry has.
The best thing that could have happened to the average Iraq would have been 4 months of absolute hell, then a new government. Without the "Contextual Democracy"... but that's another rant.
Ryan: You didn't counter his argument about end results. You did touch on the consequences of crossing the line and what it means to those who actually have to do it and that's an important point. But I don't think he's making a military point, he's making a political one. You may not mean to do this, but you seem to automatically dismiss a different opinion when the opinion comes from a non veteran. Ask yourself this: Is he wrong that a peace deal now with Hamas or Russia will only postpone the fighting until another time? I don't think he is, especially Hamas.
A cool thing I learned: as far back as the 9th century, the first real rules of war (besides those in the Old Testament) were made, which directly lead to things like the Geneva Conventions. It was the Peace and Truce of God Movement, beginning in France. It started out with things like not massacring unarmed non-combatants like monks, nuns, and clergy, and not destroying churches and cemeteries and such. And it continued to be developed over time.
There are real rules, and there are imagined rules that people create out of nothing to hobble their enemies, partly from ignorance and partly malevolence. There is the real Geneva and the Geneva of the mind. Pretending that the US or Israel can't attack an army hiding in a city or a "diplomatic" building that is actually a military base is one of the most dangerous "big lies" of our era, told solely to protect the most evil people Earth has ever seen. We can win playing by the real rules, yes. But it's messy and it will harm the soldiers regardless. Especially if the opponent hides grenades among the LEGO, mortars under a girl's bed, a Dragunov sniper rifle inside a big teddy bear, and himself in a clinic or kindergarten. It used to be understood that the inevitable civilian deaths were the fault of those who placed military assets there.
My theory about Hamas in particular is that many people would prefer they survive, because the "eternal" struggle does something for them morally and psychologically: It makes citizens of formerly imperial powers feel better about themselves. They can point to the Jews who went back to their land as the imperialists. They enjoy the pose of anti-imperialism, and they want this to continue. Brussels has gone from a place people left to go hack the hands off Africans for missing rubber quotas to a place where they tut-tut about Israel and the US trying to control the enemies of civilization by moral means. History has an ironic sense of humor.
Long ago I spoke to a Dutch veteran who had fought against the Japanese in Indonesia. His primary role was to train the friendly side of Indonesians. When they saw the Indonesian soldiers rape and murder Japanese women and children, talking didn’t help. A particular strong Japanese girl had placed a bamboo tube in her vagina with a razor blade in it. When raped the soldier bisected the front 1/2 of his penis. He bled out and the Dutch brought hundreds of Indonesian soldiers to see his penis and told them Japanese has a special claw in their vaginas. The soldiers were superstitious and spread the word. They still killed all Japanese but at least there was less suffering.
Ryan has, in a very polite way, pointed out that the NYT is a far left rag uninterested in facts and reality and much more a product and instrument of indoctrination. We all know they are unlikely to hire any extra veterans unless they are fitting a demograph such as transgender. Their “news” is not fact based but rather propaganda tailored to fit an ideology. Imagine being a Jew working at NYT and constantly being required to curse Israel and chant “river to sea”? My grandfather was a Jew who joined the Nazi party to survive. I wonder if that’s what it’s like to be a Jew at NYT?
Brett Stephens is either an idiot, an attention seeking troll, or both. It's interesting that anyone would be willing to broadcast from the highest tower how extraordinarily ignorant they are just for negative attention. He should be permanently barred from publishing his dim thoughts.
This points to a larger problem at the NY Times (to which I still subscribe), and other publications, which have turned their editorial sections into rage inducing clickbait factories, to the great determent of the national discourse and the reputation of our most important newspapers.
I was assigned to an ICU in Desert Storm. I had cold water to give my Iraqi patients. I remember one of them telling me he had been drinking rain water for two weeks.
Two thoughts:
When they came to take him to a camp a couple days later he waved enthusiastically and, with a big smile, said "Bye American." Maybe I changed his mind, just a little bit.
Two, I am thankfuI to have been in an Army that delivered enough water pallets to float a battle ship, and the refrigerators to make it ice cold!
I think you are severely misunderstanding his point: politically we give away all the leverage that fear and shock provide the way we fight wars now.
The last real war the United States fought to a succe conclusion was Worls War 2, to do it we bombed Germany back to the stone age, 100th Bomb Group died almost to a man with the purpose of killing German civilians, the head of the British bombing campaign bragged repeate that he killed thousands of people a night and could simply point at a city and erase it. We bombed Japan back to the Jurasic and took basically no prisoners throughout the whole of the Pacific. That's our last example of a won war.
We were fought to standstill in Korea, lost Veitnam, and gave up in Desert Storm because we were too good at killing Iraq's soldiers. Iraq war 2 the electric boogaloo was a horrific slog for 15 years and now Iraq is an Iranian puppet, and we spent 20 years building Afghanistan only to surrender to the Taliban. These are facts.
That story you tell about the terrorist and the water has always struck me as odd. I think realized why, it has two ends. One is you, as a morally upright, Godly American soldier, showing mercy to an enemy. The other is the terrorist, captured by his enemy, and restoring his face by demanding water, which is provided, then shaming his enemy demanding it to be cold, an impossible demand and an insult upon your hospitality. Since he got to walk away without punishment, in his mind he's the winner of that story.
And because we can't beat that worldview out of men like him without shedding our innocence and becoming corrupted by it, we find ourselves over and over again having to go back and Awe Shucks our way through another cluster up in the sandbox. And it's going to keep happening until we remember what war is, and I fear what will be the lesson that teaches us.
Finally, I don't think Ukraine is a good example of a moral undertaking. They're losing now since they've been betrayed by their arms supplier, and if they ever do take Luhansk or Donetsk, inshallah, I doubt they will show mercy to the people that brought this monstrosity upon them.
Thanks for helping the information pendulum swing away from "It's all fake news" and back towards critical thinking and statistical probability. (previously "common sense")
I will never know what impact it had on the Taliban sponsored fighter who became my first detainee screening as a medic.
I do know what effect it had on me.
This person sought to kill the faceless Americans in my MRAP. Fortunately, he detonated the IED a moment too early and only caused some tire damage. He was captured. I introduced myself as the medic in the truck he had just tried to blow up, and proceeded to treat him with nothing but respect and ensured he had proper food and water and wished him a long and peaceful life.
I don’t know if he even gave a damn about how I treated him. We never saw each other again, but I can still look at myself in the mirror every day.
Anyone worth their salt would rather trade beers over bullets.
I bear no ill will towards the opposition, I have no idea what circumstances led to them being on the other side, nor any idea of what they’ve been told.
If you treat your enemy like the Russians do, there is zero incentive for them to surrender and every reason to fight to the end. If you treat them with dignity and respect they might weigh their personal beliefs against possible death and decide surrendering is not that bad of an option.
Because I not only didn’t serve in the military, and was drafted five times during the Vietnam war, escaping all but the last one, when I went though induction only to be rejected by the army for medical reasons, I had a fairly negative view of the military in general. I eventually became a kind of television journalist, and I took my bias with me. And then, on assignment for the National Geographic, I worked on a piece at the National Training Center at Ft Irwin in California, where immense laser tag war games are fought with real tanks, helicopters, various ground vehicles and many, many troops. General Wesley Clark was the commander at that time. What I learned is that (contrary to my prior beliefs) soldiers and officers in the military are professionals, the job they do is complex and extraordinarily demanding, that they operate within strict boundaries of ethical, moral and professional behavior and that they are essential to our national survival. It changed my mind, but unless you spend time with soldiers, I don’t know how you would push past what is a fairly common liberal bias. So there is that.
But more to Ryan’s point, we have plenty of examples of what happens when troops or their officers decide to take the gloves off on their own, or decide to ignore the rules. We get Wounded Knee, or the wide spread killings and rapes during the Philippine-American War or My Lai or Abu Ghraib and so on. These are the reasons we have discipline and training, but most important, standards of conduct which are often very difficult during real combat, especially desperate combat. I recently saw an Israeli journalist claim that the IDF should have been more aggressive in Gaza rather than less, because it would have (in his estimation) made the war shorter. But in my view, the way the war has been waged in that conflict, with the level of disproportionate destruction and civilian deaths, has damaged Israel’s reputation in the world and wounded its relations with its most important allies for a generation. And they have not won the war in six months of fighting and 35,000 Palestinian casualties. Many believe this is not a war that can be won without a political solution to the Arab/Israeli conflict, in which Arabs began resisting Jewish immigration and killing Jews in 1928. It feels like a forever war.
So congratulations to Ryan for an important and thoughtful examination of the importance of laws, standards and decency in war. And thank you for that.
Ryan is right, and also wrong. Where he is right... well... about 70% of everything he said. His points on morality, war fighter reintegration, and more.
Where Ryan is wrong and Stephens if correct is that forever wars can be said to be more destructive on all sides of the conflict than winning quickly. Thus, morally wrong.
Think of this: What if the US obliterated Iraq's military, it's religious fundamentalists, it's warlords, and anyone else able to gather more than a 10 person crowd. Some are dead, some are arrested.
Then, took the low level Baa'thist and allowed them to administrate the country. (Nothing stops a bullet like employment?) The first job is to put kill zones on the borders of Syria and Iran. Stop all travel into Iraq by military age men. Let the neighbors know that we will be attacking extremists in their country also.
Any gatherings of fundamentalists is immediately destroyed. Mosques included. Zero tolerance of militias, fundamentalists, and sayers of ney!
"Shock and Awe" should have lasted a month. Or more. Not a few days.
This would have meant the immediate deaths of thousands of civilians. Meaning... about 10% of what actually died in Iraq. I'm sorry... dying... still today.
Also... it's important to point out that Saddam was killing or disappearing on average about 20k-30k Iraqis himself each year. (Amnesty International numbers.)
How can I morally take this position that would have had the US killing a lot of civilians.
Two things. Short wars are morally superior to long ones. And... John Locke.
Like Locke, I believe that every citizen has a moral duty to create and maintain a government that works and plays well with others. It doesn't matter how hard it is to remove a dictator. The citizenry is ultimately responsible. Individual Russians are responsible for allowing Putin to terrorize their neighbors and of course the Russia citizenry itself. Individual Iraqis were responsible for Saddam.
I am responsible for the shit show in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am responsible for Jake Sullivan not having any foreign policy experience yet forming the US plan for helping Ukraine.
This duty is what gives you power as a citizen. You have agency. Use it. The numbers are always on the side of the citizenry. The US founding fathers new this. It's why the second amendment exists. It's a check valve that allows revolt at a moments notice.
I detest everyone involved in Jan 6. I think they are no better than antifa and radical environmentalists. But there is one "good" thing that came from Jan 6... Our government officials were reminded that revolution is the OTHER check and balance the citizenry has.
The best thing that could have happened to the average Iraq would have been 4 months of absolute hell, then a new government. Without the "Contextual Democracy"... but that's another rant.
A slippery slope to be sure. We've never been, as a nation, good at pragmatism. It's a weakness and strength at the same time. :(
Well said.
Ryan: You didn't counter his argument about end results. You did touch on the consequences of crossing the line and what it means to those who actually have to do it and that's an important point. But I don't think he's making a military point, he's making a political one. You may not mean to do this, but you seem to automatically dismiss a different opinion when the opinion comes from a non veteran. Ask yourself this: Is he wrong that a peace deal now with Hamas or Russia will only postpone the fighting until another time? I don't think he is, especially Hamas.
For anyone who wants to read the article without paywall, I found it here: https://www.indianagazette.com/opinion/bret-stephens-do-we-still-understand-how-wars-are-won/article_84612986-a9ac-5236-9ec1-1b06330d23fa.html
A cool thing I learned: as far back as the 9th century, the first real rules of war (besides those in the Old Testament) were made, which directly lead to things like the Geneva Conventions. It was the Peace and Truce of God Movement, beginning in France. It started out with things like not massacring unarmed non-combatants like monks, nuns, and clergy, and not destroying churches and cemeteries and such. And it continued to be developed over time.
There are real rules, and there are imagined rules that people create out of nothing to hobble their enemies, partly from ignorance and partly malevolence. There is the real Geneva and the Geneva of the mind. Pretending that the US or Israel can't attack an army hiding in a city or a "diplomatic" building that is actually a military base is one of the most dangerous "big lies" of our era, told solely to protect the most evil people Earth has ever seen. We can win playing by the real rules, yes. But it's messy and it will harm the soldiers regardless. Especially if the opponent hides grenades among the LEGO, mortars under a girl's bed, a Dragunov sniper rifle inside a big teddy bear, and himself in a clinic or kindergarten. It used to be understood that the inevitable civilian deaths were the fault of those who placed military assets there.
My theory about Hamas in particular is that many people would prefer they survive, because the "eternal" struggle does something for them morally and psychologically: It makes citizens of formerly imperial powers feel better about themselves. They can point to the Jews who went back to their land as the imperialists. They enjoy the pose of anti-imperialism, and they want this to continue. Brussels has gone from a place people left to go hack the hands off Africans for missing rubber quotas to a place where they tut-tut about Israel and the US trying to control the enemies of civilization by moral means. History has an ironic sense of humor.
Long ago I spoke to a Dutch veteran who had fought against the Japanese in Indonesia. His primary role was to train the friendly side of Indonesians. When they saw the Indonesian soldiers rape and murder Japanese women and children, talking didn’t help. A particular strong Japanese girl had placed a bamboo tube in her vagina with a razor blade in it. When raped the soldier bisected the front 1/2 of his penis. He bled out and the Dutch brought hundreds of Indonesian soldiers to see his penis and told them Japanese has a special claw in their vaginas. The soldiers were superstitious and spread the word. They still killed all Japanese but at least there was less suffering.
You will also want to see this op-ed from Gabriel Elefteriu https://brusselssignal.eu/2024/05/insufficient-destruction-is-why-no-one-wins-wars-anymore/
Ryan has, in a very polite way, pointed out that the NYT is a far left rag uninterested in facts and reality and much more a product and instrument of indoctrination. We all know they are unlikely to hire any extra veterans unless they are fitting a demograph such as transgender. Their “news” is not fact based but rather propaganda tailored to fit an ideology. Imagine being a Jew working at NYT and constantly being required to curse Israel and chant “river to sea”? My grandfather was a Jew who joined the Nazi party to survive. I wonder if that’s what it’s like to be a Jew at NYT?
Brett Stephens is either an idiot, an attention seeking troll, or both. It's interesting that anyone would be willing to broadcast from the highest tower how extraordinarily ignorant they are just for negative attention. He should be permanently barred from publishing his dim thoughts.
This points to a larger problem at the NY Times (to which I still subscribe), and other publications, which have turned their editorial sections into rage inducing clickbait factories, to the great determent of the national discourse and the reputation of our most important newspapers.
I cancelled my subscription when I read an article that contained numerous easily verifiable objective falsehoods.
I was assigned to an ICU in Desert Storm. I had cold water to give my Iraqi patients. I remember one of them telling me he had been drinking rain water for two weeks.
Two thoughts:
When they came to take him to a camp a couple days later he waved enthusiastically and, with a big smile, said "Bye American." Maybe I changed his mind, just a little bit.
Two, I am thankfuI to have been in an Army that delivered enough water pallets to float a battle ship, and the refrigerators to make it ice cold!
I think you are severely misunderstanding his point: politically we give away all the leverage that fear and shock provide the way we fight wars now.
The last real war the United States fought to a succe conclusion was Worls War 2, to do it we bombed Germany back to the stone age, 100th Bomb Group died almost to a man with the purpose of killing German civilians, the head of the British bombing campaign bragged repeate that he killed thousands of people a night and could simply point at a city and erase it. We bombed Japan back to the Jurasic and took basically no prisoners throughout the whole of the Pacific. That's our last example of a won war.
We were fought to standstill in Korea, lost Veitnam, and gave up in Desert Storm because we were too good at killing Iraq's soldiers. Iraq war 2 the electric boogaloo was a horrific slog for 15 years and now Iraq is an Iranian puppet, and we spent 20 years building Afghanistan only to surrender to the Taliban. These are facts.
That story you tell about the terrorist and the water has always struck me as odd. I think realized why, it has two ends. One is you, as a morally upright, Godly American soldier, showing mercy to an enemy. The other is the terrorist, captured by his enemy, and restoring his face by demanding water, which is provided, then shaming his enemy demanding it to be cold, an impossible demand and an insult upon your hospitality. Since he got to walk away without punishment, in his mind he's the winner of that story.
And because we can't beat that worldview out of men like him without shedding our innocence and becoming corrupted by it, we find ourselves over and over again having to go back and Awe Shucks our way through another cluster up in the sandbox. And it's going to keep happening until we remember what war is, and I fear what will be the lesson that teaches us.
Finally, I don't think Ukraine is a good example of a moral undertaking. They're losing now since they've been betrayed by their arms supplier, and if they ever do take Luhansk or Donetsk, inshallah, I doubt they will show mercy to the people that brought this monstrosity upon them.
Thanks for helping the information pendulum swing away from "It's all fake news" and back towards critical thinking and statistical probability. (previously "common sense")
Rules of war is a bad joke…. What happens when 1 side follows the “rules” and the other thumbs it nose at it?!
I will never know what impact it had on the Taliban sponsored fighter who became my first detainee screening as a medic.
I do know what effect it had on me.
This person sought to kill the faceless Americans in my MRAP. Fortunately, he detonated the IED a moment too early and only caused some tire damage. He was captured. I introduced myself as the medic in the truck he had just tried to blow up, and proceeded to treat him with nothing but respect and ensured he had proper food and water and wished him a long and peaceful life.
I don’t know if he even gave a damn about how I treated him. We never saw each other again, but I can still look at myself in the mirror every day.
Anyone worth their salt would rather trade beers over bullets.
I bear no ill will towards the opposition, I have no idea what circumstances led to them being on the other side, nor any idea of what they’ve been told.
If you treat your enemy like the Russians do, there is zero incentive for them to surrender and every reason to fight to the end. If you treat them with dignity and respect they might weigh their personal beliefs against possible death and decide surrendering is not that bad of an option.
Because I not only didn’t serve in the military, and was drafted five times during the Vietnam war, escaping all but the last one, when I went though induction only to be rejected by the army for medical reasons, I had a fairly negative view of the military in general. I eventually became a kind of television journalist, and I took my bias with me. And then, on assignment for the National Geographic, I worked on a piece at the National Training Center at Ft Irwin in California, where immense laser tag war games are fought with real tanks, helicopters, various ground vehicles and many, many troops. General Wesley Clark was the commander at that time. What I learned is that (contrary to my prior beliefs) soldiers and officers in the military are professionals, the job they do is complex and extraordinarily demanding, that they operate within strict boundaries of ethical, moral and professional behavior and that they are essential to our national survival. It changed my mind, but unless you spend time with soldiers, I don’t know how you would push past what is a fairly common liberal bias. So there is that.
But more to Ryan’s point, we have plenty of examples of what happens when troops or their officers decide to take the gloves off on their own, or decide to ignore the rules. We get Wounded Knee, or the wide spread killings and rapes during the Philippine-American War or My Lai or Abu Ghraib and so on. These are the reasons we have discipline and training, but most important, standards of conduct which are often very difficult during real combat, especially desperate combat. I recently saw an Israeli journalist claim that the IDF should have been more aggressive in Gaza rather than less, because it would have (in his estimation) made the war shorter. But in my view, the way the war has been waged in that conflict, with the level of disproportionate destruction and civilian deaths, has damaged Israel’s reputation in the world and wounded its relations with its most important allies for a generation. And they have not won the war in six months of fighting and 35,000 Palestinian casualties. Many believe this is not a war that can be won without a political solution to the Arab/Israeli conflict, in which Arabs began resisting Jewish immigration and killing Jews in 1928. It feels like a forever war.
So congratulations to Ryan for an important and thoughtful examination of the importance of laws, standards and decency in war. And thank you for that.
I wish every command had their men and woman sit down and watch this video Ryan…. and if the day comes, for General Milley’s “wannabe dictator”.