“The difference between death and taxes is death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.” - Will Rogers

Once again, I triumph!

Army military police 1st. Lt. Dawn Halfaker paid dearly for a Purple Heart

USA Today reports,

On June 19, Lt. Dawn Halfaker and soldiers from her military police platoon were on a reconnaissance patrol in Baqouba, Iraq, when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded inside their armored Humvee, grievously wounding two of the soldiers inside.

Dazed and covered in blood, Halfaker mustered the energy to give an order to her driver. “Get out of the kill zone!” she shouted. Halfaker’s right arm was loosely connected to her torso.

Doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center could not save her arm. She will leave the Army after completing physical rehabilitation.

Charmaine Yoest asks, “Is this what America Wants?” A member of the Center for Military Readiness, Charmaine observes,

This is a perfect example of “the boiled frog strategy”: the Army wants the American public to gradually “get used to” seeing women in combat. They know if they put it to a vote in Congress—which they are legally required to do—they would lose. So the strategy is to just gradually change the regulations, so that more and more women are put in harms way; then, when women like Dawn get hurt, no one can say anything.

The “boiled frog” part refers to the old saw that if you throw a frog into hot water, it’ll immediately jump out, but if you place it in cool water and gradually turn up the heat, it will remain until it boils to death.

I criticized Charmaine’s post about Army chief of staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker. I agree that Congress needs to take a closer look at the employment of women in post-9/11 combat zones. The existing laws and regulations date from the Cold War era when there were still thought to be front lines and rear areas. The kinds of missions that Halfaker’s MP unit is carrying out in Iraq were never envisioned for MPs in the old days. As I said before, I oppose increasing combat roles for women and I think such roles should actually be pared back.

But Charmaine seems to assign nefarious motives to the Army’s senior leaders; they are apparently scurrilous minions of the feminist left who have a master plan eventually to infiltrate women into every combat job. In the meantime they have to desensitize moms and dads and other Americans to the idea of women killed, wounded and maimed in battle. At least, that’s the way I read her post.

However, the real culprits, if culprits there are, are not the generals but America’s young men. The engine of increasing womanpower is decreasing manpower. The generals are stretching women into roles and jobs they didn’t have before because they don’t have men to put there.

The Army disestablished the Women’s Army Corps in 1978, when women comprised less than 10 percent of the Army. By then, more than 90 percent of all military occupation specialties (MOSs) were open to women. In 1983, the Army adopted a coding system for assigning women that purported to measure the likelihood of direct combat for every job in the Army. It was called the Direct Combat Probability Coding System (DCPCS). Infantry, armor, special forces, some aviation, low-altitude air defense, cannon artillery and combat engineers were the broad categories of jobs that were off limits to women. Additionally, women could not be assigned to battalions or smaller units of those kinds of specialties. By 1985, the number of specialties open to women actually declined to 86 percent while the proportion of the Army made up of women increased to more than 10 percent. Today more than 16 percent of the Army is made up of women.

Any move to scale back the employment of women in combat zones needs to explain where the warm male bodies are going to come from to replace them. The notion that the Army can recruit a significant percentage more of men than it is recruiting now is not very credible. More than anything, I think that what is impelling the Army toward bending the policy.

And bending it is. On April 11, Gen. Schoomaker took part in a panel discussion on The Future of the United States Army at the American Enterprise Institute. During a Q&A session, Bob Miller of Hope for America asked Schoomaker about the gradual increase of women in combatant categories and the unprecedented numbers of women casualties. The verbatim question is long, so I’ll summarize some.

First, Miller said the issue raises the moral question that begs to be reconciled with what’s happening in Iraq.

[D]o you and the Army see … that men have a moral responsibility to be protective of women? ...

And if we do not hold that there is such a moral responsibility, then does the all volunteer force stand unable to recruit and commission men who do commit themselves to such a sense of moral obligation to be protectors of women rather than employing them in hostile and dangerous circumstances to be killed and to kill.

Gen. Schoomaker’s answer was also long but I paste it here unedited.

GENERAL SCHOOMAKER: I think we have a moral responsibility to protect the weak regardless of gender, and I do not see this as a gender issue. First of all, we have a policy, and OSD policy, that says that we will not assign females to the infantry armor and Special Forces organizations that are trained, organized, and equipped to routinely close with and destroy the enemy. And we have an Army policy that adds to that, not an OSD policy, but an Army that adds to that says we will not co-locate these women at the time that those units are undergoing those operations.

The realities of the battlefield are such that this is not an issue of whether or not women will become injured and maimed anymore than anybody else will, anymore than children will or elderly or males. The fact is that I think we have a moral responsibility to prepare those women that are serving in our armed forces to number one have the very best chance of surviving by providing them with the warrior skills and tasks that are required and number two make sure that as we operate that we operate in such a way that reduces the probability that any soldier will be placed in a position to be injured or killed. So that’s kind of the way that I approach that.

I don’t know if I understood your total question, but I don’t happen to share a feeling that somehow that women do not have either the capability or the responsibility to share and service the country, and I think that that’s—we’ve now had a volunteer force for over 20 years, and the women play such an extraordinary important part in what we do that I think we’re good to go so far.

MR. MILLER: The other part was whether men who do hold that moral commitment are unsuitable then for a role in the Army.

GENERAL SCHOOMAKER: Well, that’s an interesting question I would never have thought about. I would say no. But, you know, I think that we all have different little things that—but, you know, that may differ from one another on some things, but I mean I think you’re going in the direction of conscientious objectors kind of status. I mean something that would be similar to that, and I don’t see that as—I mean, you know, there are some people that would say, you know, men and women can’t even share the same tornado shelter in Oklahoma. I mean there are. I mean there’s quite a wide spectrum here on what all this means. I think that maybe since we’re killing 40,000 people a year on the highways, they shouldn’t drive. Okay. That’s very dangerous, too.

[Laughter.]

GENERAL SCHOOMAKER: I mean I’m not trying to make fun of it. I’m telling you that I think that, you know, you can expand this argument to an incredible deal. I think that we are paying fair—we are paying attention to the realities, you know, of where we are now. If you were to ask me a different question which I don’t want to go into here today, you know, do I agree with all of that, that’s another issue. When I’m out of uniform, I’ll share that with you.

This is pretty much a dodge answer. Schoomaker never got to what I think was the real meat of Miller’s question, whether the Army is able to recruit enough men to make unnecessary the expansion of women’s roles in combat areas. All this begs for Congressional oversight. But that’s not the end of it, because an internal Army report conducted last year revealed that more and more civilian women are staying away from the Army precisely because of the threat of death or wounds. The report also said that black Americans of both sexes are turning away from Army service for the same reason.

The number of blacks in the Army’s recruiting classes has dropped 41 percent over the past five years, from 23.9 percent in 2000 to 14 percent last year. The number of women has dropped 13 percent. AP reports that the possibility of being sent to Iraq is the “biggest turn off” for both groups.

These numbers bode ill for the Army, which is having the hardest time meeting recruiting goals. For many, many years black Americans have been greatly over-represented in the Army, compared to their proportion of the general population. The data mean that 41 percent fewer blacks are joining the Army now than before, of whom the vast majority are men - a hit to replacing women in combat-related units that the Army isn’t going to make up with white guys.

So it seems that the answer to Charmaine’s question, “Is this what America Wants?” is yes, it is what America wants. And shame on us. I am reminded of Robert Heinlein’s observation that “women and children first” is the only real basis on which a civilization can endure over the long term. When it gives up that principle, he said, it is doomed. Of course, by the time we find out he was right it will be too late.

See the other fine posts listed at James Joyner’s linkfest.

Prof. Norm Geras, an old-line English Marxist, identifies the two main failures of the Western Left post 9/11.

First is the sin of Marxist reductionism. In his own generation’s Marxist development, Geras says that,

[I]t labored in its literary output, in dense and prolific works of argumentation, theory, historiography, social and political analysis-to separate itself from the earlier simplifications and reductions of the tradition it came from and that it sought to enrich. This was a generation for whom anti-reductionism was a constant watchword. A reductionist Marxist was something that, even at the height of Marxist intellectual fashion, no one wanted to be. Whether by way of the cultural themes of the Frankfurt School, of Gramscian “hegemony,” Althusserian “relative autonomy,” or the more empirically grounded methods of Anglophone socialist research, an enormous effort was made to establish a complex and multilayered theoretical sensibility, so that henceforth we might be in a position more effectively to grasp the multiple determinations of both the present and the past. It was a generation claiming to know that such determinations, in their range and variety, were intractable to being unified within one simple, all-encompassing story.

But all this theoretical work seems to have been for nought:

In affecting the general alignment of most of the socialist left in the conflicts that have preceded and followed the events of September 11, 2001, all this effort that I have tried briefly to characterize might just as well not have taken place. For even if more advanced models of theoretical explanation are now available to the left, it nonetheless seems to suffice in any given international conflict to know that on one side is the United States, and that the United States is a capitalist power that always has designs on the natural and human resources of the rest of the world. If you know this, everything else falls instantly into place; all other levels of analysis, all other considerations, are superfluous. They can either be ignored altogether, or they can be conceded in passing, but as merely secondary and hence ignorable in practice. ...

Knowing what the United States is-hegemon of global capitalism-and knowing what it must be up to, you have no need to allow any explanatory or strategic weight to other social, political, legal, or ideological realities. No need to give any decision-making, choice-determining weight to mass murder, or torture, or the fundamental rights of human beings; to the laws of war, the effects of specific political structures and belief systems, or the effects of the operational and moral choices made by movements cast by part of the left in an anti-imperialist role; to the character of the regimes opposed to the United States and its allies, however brutal those regimes might be; to the illegalities and oppressions for which they are responsible, whether at home or beyond their own borders; to genocidal processes actually ongoing and about which something cries out to be done; to the threats posed to democratic societies by movements that have already shown their deadly intent.

The second main fault of the Western Left is related to the first. Geras terms it “a poverty of moral imagination,” which he defines as,

... a seeming lack of ability, of the imagination, to digest the meaning of the great moral and political evils of the world and to look at them unflinchingly. ...

They come to be treated, generically, as the product of class societies and, today, as the product of capitalism. The affinity between this overall intellectual tendency within Marxist and other left thinking, and the practical reductionism I have just described-in which America is identified as the source of all worldly wrongs-should be transparent. ...

The Taliban in Afghanistan; Saddam’s Iraq; the reduction of a human being by torture; the use of terror randomly to kill innocents and to smite all those by whom they are cherished; mass murder; ethnic cleansing; all the manifold practices of human evil-to look upon these and at once see “capitalism,” “imperialism,” “America,” is not only to show a poverty of moral imagination, it is to reveal a diminished understanding of the human world. A social or political science, or a practical politics, that cannot rise to the level of what has been understood, in their own mode, by the great religions-and I say this as a resolute and lifelong atheist-and what has also been understood, in their own mode, by all the great literatures of the world, is a science and a politics that can no longer be taken seriously. It should not be taken seriously by anyone attached to the democratic and egalitarian values that have always been at the heart of the broad socialist tradition.

My politics certainly aren’t Marxist like Norm’s, but I always enjoy reading his material. Read the whole piece, it’s quite worthwhile. See also his blog. And see as well Ron Rosenbaum’s October 2002 essay, Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee.

Got a phish mail this morning that began,

You have recieved this email because you or someone had used your account to make fake bids at eBay. For security purposes, we are required to open an investigation into this matter.

Let’s see: “you … used your account to make fake bids as eBay.” Well, if I used my account to make a bid, how can it be fake?

And how would eBay know whether my account was being used to make bids by someone else unless I told them? I know, I know - but a small percentage of people who get this email will panic and click on the bogus link to eBay and thereby learn too late that their bank account was drained shortly afterward.