OK, someone is going to go to bed with no dinner.
From the Weekly Standard:
THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned from a military source close to the investigation that Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp–author of the much-disputed “Shock Troops” article in the New Republic’s July 23 issue as well as two previous “Baghdad Diarist” columns–signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods–fabrications containing only “a smidgen of truth,” in the words of our source.
Separately, we received this statement from Major Steven F. Lamb, the deputy Public Affairs Officer for Multi National Division-Baghdad:
An investigation has been completed and the allegations made by PVT Beauchamp were found to be false. His platoon and company were interviewed and no one could substantiate the claims.
According to the military source, Beauchamp’s recantation was volunteered on the first day of the military’s investigation. So as Beauchamp was in Iraq signing an affidavit denying the truth of his stories, the New Republic was publishing a statement from him on its website on July 26, in which Beauchamp said, “I’m willing to stand by the entirety of my articles for the New Republic using my real name.”
This seems pretty definitive, and unless someone who is accountable by name is flat-out lying – which in this era seems pretty darn risky – I’d say that we’re one step away (public comment from Beauchamp and/or release of his sworn statement) from putting a wooden stake into the heart of this story.
On the other side, I’ll raise a simple proof that would go a long way toward establishing some veracity on Beauchamp’s part. Find someone who recalls a burn-disfigured woman who served at Camp Buehring, in Kuwait during the time that Beauchamp might have been there. I can’t believe that’s not something people would remember.
For me, I think this issue is close to closed. Sadly, it’s also closed for people who want to believe the worst of our troops – that the kind of soulless cruelty that Beauchamp wrapped himself in is close to the norm, rather than the exception – the truth or falsity of Beauchamp’s ‘facts’ are irrelevant – his stories, like all good literature speak to a deeper truth that they embrace tightly.
This whole episode just exacerbates the ongoing problems that our media outlets have with reporting on the war. Most if not nearly all have no experince with military culture, and therefor have a hard time cutting through the crap. A lot of the Beauchamp narrative reminded me of the petty and pathetic work of Anthony Swofford’s “Jarhead”, another Hemmingway wannabe. I’m not surprised that their writing style seems similar.
Nearly everyone who has spent 4-8 years in the service knows someone like Beauchamp, the braggart type who embellishes every detail to the extreme, badmouths the chain of command and questions their every move because “they know better” and is basically a shitbird. It comes as no surprise to me that Beauchamp had previous NJP, and it should have been a major red flag to Foer and the TNR that he would have an axe to grind, but Foer and TNR had no true military experience, no interface with the culture, and seemed almost desperate to buy into Beauchamp’s story regardless of how extreme it sounded. The story fit their narrative of the war, the same one painted by the NYTimes and the rest of the defeatist media and chattering classes. Lets ignore that the whole affair sounded like something out of a poorly conceived Hollywood film than an actual look at combat. It mixed the worst sterotypes of soldiers painted by the ANSWER/MoveOn crowds.
What strikes me as even more pathetic about this whole affair, is that it seems the only time the Kos/DU/Angry Left will “support the troops” is when they are “speaking truth to power”. Note how they turned on the soldier who spoke out at the Yearly Kos event, going so far as to intimidate the soldier because he expressed support for the surge. And look how they all leapt to Beuchamps defense, because he was saying what they so desperately believe our soldier to be.
Why would a Beauchamp recantation now tell us anything at all about how much truth he had presented before?
Everybody in the military who lasts any length of time knows the very first rule is CYA. If Beauchamp finally gets that, and sees that he absolutely has to do as he’s told, why is that even news?
Nice, JT – thereby everything that is said about the military that isn’t damning is prima facie a lie. And everything that is damning had the advantage of truth because anything that contradicts it is CYA, and likely to be a lie.
So why even discuss it?
A.L.
_Nice, JT – thereby everything that is said about the military that isn’t damning is prima facie a lie. And everything that is damning had the advantage of truth because anything that contradicts it is CYA, and likely to be a lie._
AL, that certainly isn’t what I’m saying.
I’m saying that the truth is mostly independent of the CYA process.
You can do CYA with the truth when the truth supports you. It absolutely does not work to take everything a military public information guy says and assume it’s a lie. If you could do that you could get reliable negative information from them.
It isn’t that they lie all the time no matter what. It’s that there’s no particular information there. It’s predictable they’ll lie if it would look bad not to lie. But when things really do look good they don’t have to lie. When you get the same outcome either way, you don’t learn anything new when you get the outcome you knew you’d get.
Again, what’s amusing about this, is the pro-occupation bloggers occasional seizures of “wanting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”.
I say, good on that impulse!
Now, turn it on the administration! Don’t waste time with some Army guy, and a random story or a publication with not so many readers.
Just think, what AMac, and his smart mind, could do, if he obsessively posted again and again about how the administration lies, distorts, misleads, in regards to just about anything. (In particular, science). It would have a much more beneficial impact.
But the occasional allegiance to “truth”, is telling, and gives the game away.
Also, re: the recantation. Unless there is an official recantation (might be coming, who knows), a leak to the Weekly Standard isn’t definitive.
As for Gabriel:
“What strikes me as even more pathetic about this whole affair, is that it seems the only time the Kos/DU/Angry Left will “support the troops” is when they are “speaking truth to power”. Note how they turned on the soldier who spoke out at the Yearly Kos event, going so far as to intimidate the soldier because he expressed support for the surge. And look how they all leapt to Beuchamps defense, because he was saying what they so desperately believe our soldier to be.”
Well, again, the support our troops impulse is a good one, I fully endorse.
But I have to say, use that impulse, to support troops in something that MATTERS, yes? And criticize those who don’t support troops materially.
“For example, Bush threatens a veto to a pay raise to the troops”:http://thinkprogress.org/2007/05/17/bush-military-veto
Or, for example, “support the Troop Protection Bill”:http://bobgeiger.blogspot.com/2007/07/more-senate-support-for-webbs-troop.html, offered by Webb.
It’s George Bush and company, that is redeploying our troops without sufficient downtime.
It’s George Bush, that is issuing “stop loss” for troops, so that a person who has honorably fulfilled his contract to this nation, and put himself in harms way, is PREVENTED from getting an honorable discharge, exiting the Army, as the Army changes the terms of his contract.
I said this before – but you can’t say that morally, it is right to ask a military person who has served his time, honorably, and with distinction, to be forced to stay in, over forcing any random civilian, to GO in. If someone is going to be forced, it should be by lottery, to all citizens who qualify.
Not imposed on people who have already served, already put themselves in harms way, already done their duty, faced chaos and bullets, already sacrificed.
“Support the troops”.
Great impulse. Materially, supporting some fairness for the troops, supporting that they have adequate downtime before they go back into combat, supporting their ability to EXIT the service, having put in their time, matters A LOT MORE than TNR having embellished writing on their staff.
Because it’s all about Bush.
Pathetic.
If I hear one more idiot bring up the stop loss thing I’m going to barf.
Go read the damn contract you sign when you join.
Nice frackin’ supporting of the troops there Gabriel.
I refuse to take the troll bait. Sorry to disappoint.
But, even if you find an unfortunate lady matching the description there at that time, that may be the only smidgen of truth. That would seem to be close to the lowest standard of proof available and would prove little or nothing.
I would take that argument further, but it seems inappropriate to even talk about hypothetically.
The New Republic just issued a statement on STB:
Source:
http://www.tnr.com/blog/theplank
Thoughts?
_Thoughts?_
The military investigation isn’t completely over and they haven’t decided what to announce. It doesn’t mean much that they aren’t saying yet. The WS claim is probably accurate. I’d give it 4:1 odds, anyway.
I’d say Beauchamp’s recantation was pretty well implied by the Army’s statement that the incidents were investigated and found baseless.
If Beauchamp stood by his stories to Army investigators, he would have to sign a sworn statement doing so. If he swore falsely and the Army found out he was lying, he would be facing serious articles and they would be in no mood to cut him any slack.
If Beauchamp stood mute when questioned, the investigation would probably still be underway and the possibility of a court-martial would still be open.
Declaring the matter closed with no court-martial, then, points to a recantation.
As for TNR’s new statement, they obviously haven’t been in contact with Beauchamp since the investigation began. They now must rely on official sources that have no reason to feel accommodating towards them. They’re now in a fine position to be the last people on earth to find out what happened. But they’re used to that position by now, I would think.
Don’t get too far ahead of this story. Mapes and Rather called a press conference to say they still believe the original posts. They were heard to mutter something about impeccable sources as their mike went dead.
The Weekly Standard responds to TNR:
“Source”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2007/08/beauchamp_recants_update.asp
[ Note from NM: Please don’t post bare links. It messes up Movable Type’s poor little formatting mind. I fixed this one. Thanks. ]
Blogger “Confederate Yankee” has been outstanding in synthesizing reports, and in doing some of his own legwork in fact-checking. Two posts up today:
“It Didn’t Have To Be This Way”:http://confederateyankee.mu.nu/archives/236266.php
and
“Suddenly Shrinking Sources.”:http://confederateyankee.mu.nu/archives/236296.php
Both worth reading as the Baghdad Diarist saga draws to a close–unfortunately, in pretty much the way that many of us feared it would.
This story has received more comment from the right thqan even the “6 burning Sunnis” story. Look TNR has a circulation of only about 60,000. Most Americans have never even heard of TNR let alone read or even heard about Beauchamp.
When the Republican PArty gets another smack in the face in 2008 because of Iraq this story is not going to even be remembered.
How important is/was the Beauchamp story ? Not very important.
Armed Liberal:
So true.
Moreover, those who have persistently defended Scott Thomas Beauchamp have argued so deviously that it’s not worth talking with them. They’re practicing a warped sort of rhetoric, not having a conversation. And in seeking to win, to press their agenda, they’ve been so dishonest that you can’t believe a word from them unless you have time and the means to check every word they say, including things they strategically didn’t say. And nobody has – or should have that much free time.
I am taking aim here mainly at The New Republic. They lie and they lie and they lie. Their rigorous editing and fact checking is bogus, yet they have been insufferably pompous about it. I don’t have the time or the means to check every lying word about their rigorous internal processes. But, I shouldn’t have to. They’re obvious phonies engaged in mudslinging and stonewalling.
Likely, everyone will drift back to treating them as – semi-credible? then mostly credible? – an accepted presence, let’s say, because they’ll still be there and talking.
This is how it’s worked with other mainstream media scandals. The mainstream mudslingers go to work, they get caught, but they retain the pulpit and the mud accumulates.
“Shock Troops” will live on as “controversial” and “disputed” – a reading of the Iraq war narrative that is accepted by some and contested by others.
This accumulation of unfounded inflammatory talking points is like spam: it’s bogus and endless. You know they’re lying, but they’re going to keep it up anyway. Professionals whose job it is to come up with cheap, easily produced but acceptable hot talk topics every week, will keep doing what they’re doing because there will continue to be a market for it, and nothing is cheaper than anti-Bush venom.
That shouldn’t be the case. You shouldn’t be accepted as part of the real conversation unless you scrub away the mud you slung. But what shouldn’t be will continue to be.
I guess I have a right to my disgusted weariness and indifference on this, and TNR subscribers have a right to whatever it is they get for their money.
#17 from John ryan: “When the Republican PArty gets another smack in the face in 2008 because of Iraq this story is not going to even be remembered.”
Likely true.
#17 from John ryan: “How important is/was the Beauchamp story ? Not very important.”
Also true. It’s just one more handful of dirt. Nobody sane and with a job (that isn’t in the media) can even be bothered to keep track of all the details of these fake scandals.
AMac –
Confederate Yankee makes a good point about TNR’s failure to properly fact-check the Glock incident; let me expand on it a little.
Beauchamp’s unit finds a dead body and a shell casing (“9mm with a square back”). Beauchamp goes Sherlock and swiftly observes that the shell casing could only have come from a Glock pistol, which he claims is only used by the Iraqi police. The unstated (but pointedly obvious) conclusion is that the Iraqi police shot somebody and left their body to rot, death-squad style. Oh, shades of Vietnam and El Salvador ….
This should have snagged an editor’s eye like a fishhook. Firstly, the very serious accusation that is being made, and secondly, the casual ease with which Beauchamp makes it. This would stand out as something that needed to be fact-checked. TNR claims that they make sure their stories “smell good”, and this little story stinks of careless aspersion.
There is one thing that the editor could have determined immediately, without a single phone call or keystroke. Beauchamp is stating that the casing could only have come from a Glock – by which he must mean (and readers have had to do this reconstruction themselves) that only the Glock has a square firing pin. That is something that only a firearms expert is qualified to judge, and in fact, I doubt if you could find an expert who would be willing to make that judgment. There are hundreds of pistols manufactured all over the world that fire 9mm ammunition, and I doubt if you could find someone who is intimate with all of them. If such a person exists, his name is probably not Private Beauchamp. That part should have been deleted or re-written as a matter of course.
The entire passage should have been re-written to remove ambiguity, BTW. (Stephen Glass’s style was so bad that most of his stories were heavily re-written by other TNR editors, including the late Michael Kelly.) Maybe a gun-illiterate editor at TNR did re-write it and screwed it up, but I think even a TNR editor knows that bullet cartridges are round and not square. That fact alone indicates to me that TNR barely looked at what Beauchamp had written.
All of that should have been obvious without research. Then there is Beauchamp’s insidious claim that only Iraqi police use Glocks. By TNR’s sniff test alone, that should definitely have smelled not good. The Glock is a phenomenally popular 9mm automatic, and in Iraq the Glock probably outnumbers the camel spiders. In Israel they almost outnumber Israelis. The ME arms market is crawling with them, and any insurgent or Shia miltiaman could easily have one.
At any rate, any fact-checker worth his salt would quickly dispose of the notion that the cartridge casing had to have come from an Iraqi police weapon. That part, too, should have been deleted or re-written.
Never mind Beauchamp’s mistakes. These are obvious and glaring editorial mistakes that can’t be blamed on the fact that the reporter is a damn liar.
My guess, though, is that no fact-checker has ever gotten near these stories. My guess is that these stories were vetted by Foer and Beauchamp’s wife, both of whom are emotionally and personally unobjective, and are possessed of poor judgment and poor editing skills to boot.
Which suggests that the familial atmosphere at TNR makes it totally useless as a journal of reported fact, and that goes for all their stories, not just the invented ones.
Close friends of mine came back from three tours in Iraq with similar stories of their own. They’re people I care for and respect as human beings, and they did things that would have gotten them arrested in peacetime. That is, indeed, why they say that War Is Hell.
Beauchamp’s stories weren’t on my radar — not because I “believe the worst” but because I believe that the things he described are far from the worst that human beings (not Americans, but human beings) are capable of in wartime.
Were Beauchamp’s stories fabricated? I haven’t the slightest. Even if what he said was true, it sounds like rapid backpedaling and CYA has taken place, and he’s burnt a lot of bridges.
I’ve got no love for TNR; I stopped reading loooong ago and their biweekly emails haven’t done much to convince me I made the wrong choice. If TNR is guilty of insufficiently vetting a first-hand account of a warzone because it fit their editorial stance, it’s not shocking.
What I’m trying to figure out is why so many commentators on the conservative blogging side are angry, nay, livid, at the general idea that people tend to do ugly and cruel things when they are in the middle of a shooting war? This is not exactly rocket science, not exactly a new idea.
I’m not trying to be snarky, or sarcastic, or defend a kid who appears to have BS’d his way into a writing gig with some gritty combat color. The same people have spent the past several years telling me that we, collectively, must be stone cold killers, remorseless dudes willing to disregard the conventions of polite society in order to take on the profound existential horror of Islamic radicalism and terrorism.
If Beauchamp was lying, were my friends lying when they came back, too? And if they weren’t, does it matter? It proves nothing about American troops other than the fact that they are human beings, relatively young ones, dropped into a war zone halfway around the world and told to to a near-impossible job.
“An Army Lawyer” with knowledge of the regulations “offers his perspectives “:http://armylawyer.blogsome.com/2007/08/07/the-further-adventures-of-beauchamp/ on the self-inflicted minefield that Beauchamp is navigating. This would-be Hemingway clearly didn’t think his stories through before he started enthralling TNR’s gullible editors… and readers (e.g., me). At “Hot Air,”:http://hotair.com/archives/2007/08/06/breaking-beauchamp-signs-military-statement-recanting-tnr-pieces/ AllahPundit and Bryan go back and forth as they try to narrow down the specifics of Beauchamp’s lies.
As Glen Wishard and David Blue point out, TNR has made it clear that it should stick to policy critiques and book reviews. But it won’t.
Beauchamp may have a promising career ahead of him, speaking more truth to power.
It seems like the Army is the only institution to have its reputation suffer unjustly, constrained as it is by privacy and due process considerations.
Jeff Eaton wrote —
bq. What I’m trying to figure out is why so many commentators on the conservative blogging side are angry, nay, livid, at the general idea that people tend to do ugly and cruel things when they are in the middle of a shooting war? This is not exactly rocket science, not exactly a new idea.
Jeff,
I looked into this because I got pwned by Beauchamp, reading the Diarist pieces and believing that they were first-person descriptions of real events. Then I got pwned by Franklin Foer and the TNR staff, who claimed repeatedly that they had rigorously fact-checked the pieces. I don’t know anyone who enjoys being lied to, and I’m now ready to say that that is what both Beauchamp and Foer have done.
More specifically, people don’t like being manipulated. (This could have been a touchstone issue for the left: “we’re against manipulation, too, on principal.” But it wasn’t.)
As has been discussed before in these threads, I think you misinterpret the intent of Beauchamp and the thrust of “Shock Troops” by describing its thesis as being “the general idea that people tend to do ugly and cruel things when they are in the middle of a shooting war.” Perhaps this is why you are puzzled by the wingnuts’ (charming term, yes?) anger and livor.
Creative writer Beauchamp crafted his pieces with a theme in mind. The anecdotes of ugly and cruel conduct were only stepping stones. The objective of the essays was to show the reader how the moral sense of the army–that is, as represented by the company that Beauchamp belongs to–has become corrupted by the Iraq war.
Soldiers and their friends doing bad things wouldn’t make this point. As you noted, anybody with either experience or sense already realizes that some young men (of all nations and all armies) commit terrible deeds in wartime. Usually, under extreme circumstances.
Beauchamp informed us that his entire unit has come to this place. All the corporals, sergeants, and lieutenants either participate in or condone gratuitiously cruel behavior. Soldiers of neighboring units surely join in the laughter. Captains, majors, and higher-ups must be aware as well, perhaps content to look the other way. By reading TNR, those of us at home can see that, in its depravity, the US Army of 2007 is coming to resemble the Wehrmacht of the Eastern Front.
Did your friends act as they did because it was normal, and everyone did it, boasted about it, laughed about it? NCOs and officers too? Did they feel no shame? Or would they shake their heads, no, that’s not what I’m trying to say?
Beauchamp turning out to be a fabulist doesn’t, of course, mean that his meta-narrative is wrong. Stopped clock, twice a day. 1ID in Baghdad, or some other unit, somewhere else in Iraq or Afghanistan. Abu Ghraib did happen.
Tarting up urban legends as facts, and dressing up email-to-presses as rigorously fact-checked material only poisons the well.
People react badly when they suspect they’re being played for fools.
J Thomas —
1. HotAir.com has details from “ArmyLawyer” who is … well an Army Lawyer. Short answer: fibbing to investigators gets him 7 years at Leavenworth. Telling the truth even if all allegations were true: a few months in the stockade, less than honorable discharge.
You figure how Scott Thomas rolled: tell the truth or lie to investigators.
2. This matter came to the personal attention of Gen. Petraeus who asked for an investigation. Given the man’s serious nature, I doubt there was any cover-up.
3. So many things were wrong and checkably wrong, from Glocks and square backed ammo to “no Kuwait, yeah that’s right, Kuwait, that’s the ticket.” And so on.
Why is this story important? Because Libs are so clueless and hostile to the Military that their BS detector doesn’t go off. It’s why Obama lurches around from Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove, why Clinton had ludicrous fantasies of “black clad ninjas” doing in Osama or the screw-ups in Mogadishu, the Cole, and so on.
Scott Thomas told Liberals what they wanted to hear: military men were degraded, inhuman monsters who were casually cruel to everyone and morally inferior to educated, upper-class liberals.
This isn’t about the military. It’s about CLASS. Wealthy liberal elitists hating the common man. And there’s nothing more common than the military. Soldiers who can any moment suffer an IED attack don’t mock those who they may resemble. Some of them go through training to simulate IED attacks and what to do when someone’s leg is blown off and they’re screaming, blood everywhere. This is the reality of the dirty jobs us ordinary people do for the priviliged elites: it’s ugly and disgusting but has to be done.
Sorry we weren’t born with silver spoons in our mouths. So crass of us.
John Ryan — very likely the Republican Party will win. Civil Rights for terrorists, no listening in on the phone calls to Osama (Pelosi now wants to repeal what she passed), defeat and surrender are not popular vote winners. Particularly since the enemy gets a vote and any one of: Iran lights off a nuke, Pakistan falls to the Taliban/AQ, US gets another 9/11 makes Dem weakness and surrender a losing hand. Bush’s approval in Iraq is what, 29% or so? Congress on that matter is 3%. THREE PERCENT.
Handwringing over KSM’s treatment (when Senators pay good money for that treatment) only makes that worse: most Americans would rather he be set on fire with jet fuel and tossed off the 82 floor like his victims.
AMac, Thanks for your reply. I suppose my perspective may be a bit different as I had no exposure to Beauchamp prior to the controversy, and only read snippets of his writing.
My curiosity is not so much about what he wrote, then, as what people who got angry were so angry about. Most had never read his articles, either, and the general response was not Jason-Blair-esque. Rather, it was that Beauchamp had attacked the character of our troops, etc. etc. A few even said that he’d accused American troops of war crimes, a startling thing to say since they’d earlier claimed that actually torturing live people wasn’t a war crime in the strictest sense of the word. That’s what baffles me and leaves me scratching my head. In the context of the things that we (the chattering bloggy crowds, the public, the pundits, etc.) have been discussing for the past several years, screaming about Beauchamp’s claims seems a little… well, bizarre.
The infamous bits that I heard so much about were the mocking of the disfigured woman, killing dogs, and wearing a skull. Of the three, I’d be most ready to accept that the skull incident was a fabricated “Isn’t war horrible” story. The other two, though, were mirrored by similar anecdotes told by the friends I mentioned. They weren’t lurid, gritty prose in the pages of The New Republic, obviously, but the jist was there. They sometimes mocked ugly and unfortunate people. They sometimes shot stray dogs to pass the time. They developed a somewhat calloused view of human life.
One friend in particular has mentioned being punished for receiving cookies in the mail during boot camp, but not for, say, shooting stray dogs.
Again, though. Am I saying that they’re horrible people? That this is some kind of hidden sickness that should be traced up the chain of command until we can put it to a stop? No. I’m saying that they were people in the middle of a war zone, fighting, trying to save lives, trying to do the right thing, trying to survive, and trying to live in some of the worst conditions we can imagine.
I just don’t understand the folks who demonstrate through their actions and their outrage that running over a dog is far more serious than torturing a prisoner. I’m not suggesting anyone here feels that way, just reiterating that that weird dichotomy is what fascinates and baffles me about this controversy.
“I just don’t understand the folks who demonstrate through their actions and their outrage that running over a dog is far more serious than torturing a prisoner. I’m not suggesting anyone here feels that way, just reiterating that that weird dichotomy is what fascinates and baffles me about this controversy.”
Well, no one who is serious (on the “Right”) about what is happening in Iraq denies the abuses in Abu Ghraib. On the other hand, there are plenty on the other side of the debate who will buy any fantasy that supports their world view, and when that fantasy is exposed as such, deny that the fact that it was a fantasy has any bearing on the validity of their arguments.
I wonder how much those same folks admire the Flat-Earthers, or the Creationists for that matter. Because the thought process is exactly the same.
Jeff Eaton:
Jeff, the refrain is heard many times in these debates: Why don’t you guys get this upset over Abu Ghraib?
When I was a kid my mother used to pull this stunt on me all the time:
I guess I could have retaliated in kind: “Why are you so mad at me when the Khmer Rouge are murdering millions of people? Because you don’t care!”
In short, this is logical fallacy bordering on comedy. If we were to compare similar things, I would ask why the left shows insufficient outrage over the incredibly savage murders and beheadings that the enemy has carried out – pointing out that Abu Ghraib was reproved and punished, while the enemy glories in its evil.
Jeff –
It’s infuriating because we really only see three dominant themes on the war in the press:
1) the enemy is endlessly strong, and we are too weak to win, therefore we will lose anyway and should win;
2) Our troops are so powerful that fighting this opponent leaves so many dead children and women and innocent men and is so essentially unfair that the cost of winning cannot be borne (see Martin Van Creveldt);
3) War is so damaging to our sons and daughters (physically and morally) that it cannot be borne.
The reality is that there is a kernel of truth in all these stories; but there are other stories which are never told which contradict them (because reality is, after all, a welter of contradictory stories) and which – if told – would paint a picture of the war that would better equip us to understand it and decide how we feel and should react to it.
So the media lies; not always by “making shit up” as is likely here, but through selective emphasis and (arguably) misleading impression. Here’s a case where they doubled down; where they actually made shit up in order to paint that misleading impression.
One reason I keep coming back to stats is in an effort to combat the impression left in the media that every streetcorner in Iraq is the scene of a horrible slaughter daily – although the thing which isn’t remarked on enough is that it could be, and probably will be if we suddenly withdraw.
So for me, the outrage is that TNR chose to paint such a morally uncomplex picture of the situation our troops face in Iraq, and one that fit so neatly into the model I set out above.
A.L.
I wondered how quickly this would come up. I prepared a FAQ. Curiously,
Please keep in mind what I said, not what you filled in after reading the first few sentences of my post. There are two major issues with your comparison:
1) You’ve neglected the issue of seriousness. I don’t think anyone on the right or left would say that killing dogs and making fun of disfigured women is a good thing. But it’s reasonable to say that torturing other human beings, or genocide, or any number of ‘ugly and brutal’ things that commentators on the right have said we must be willing to do are far more serious.
2) I was clear in my comment when I said that my confusion and curiosity was focused on that specific group: commentators on the right who say that we must be willing to put aside the conventions of civilization when fighting terrorists. (Not a small group, mind you.) They’ve spent a few years talking about things like collective punishment, torture, and so on as regrettable costs of ‘being serious’ about all-out war, but they react with shock and outrage when someone claims soldiers killed dogs and mocked disfigured women. It is this dichotomy between what is advocated and what the same commentators say is horrific that fascinates me.
I suppose, though, if this news story is the one that convinces the right that ‘You weren’t this angry over the beheadings’ is an absurd and fallacious dodge, Beauchamp’s stunt will have been a net positive for public discourse.
I got to go with John Ryan on this one. Outside of WOC, I haven’t heard of this one. If beauchamp was lying (and it appears that he was, although my knowledge of the story is limited)than it’s good that this has been dealt with and discarded.
On the other hand, This appears to be a non-story. I’m a little cut off right now, without cable (and no radio in the house) I’m relying entirely on internet news, but I’ve checked my daily cabal of news/editorial sites and found nothing. I haven’t found the news rush to embarass the military on this one.
AL, thanks for the response. This, I can understand. Seeing the Beauchamp story as an example of “the sort of story that fits the narrative” does make sense.
That’s true — there are an infinite number of stories and a finite number of outlets for those stories in the public sphere. To some extent, this ties into a theme that you’ve discussed before: that the biggest danger to discourse in our nation and culture is the emergence of ‘separate and contradictory pools of facts and truths’. If one side insists things are going well, and the other insists they’re going horribly, there may well be truth in the middle. But neither side — left nor right — will be pleased with the ‘objective truth’ and drift into their own walled cities, venturing outside only to snark at the opposition’s “clearly biased” information.
I’m not sure I see this as a case of ‘the media making shit up’ so much as the media accepting, relatively uncritically, a story from a remote source. The Jason Blair of Iraq, or something along those lines. Definitely a blow to editorial dignity at The New Republic. But, again, this is where my own experiences with friends who’ve returned from Iraq might ‘bias’ me. His writing struck me as hackneyed, tough-guy retellings of stories I’d heard before from folks who were there.
Fair enough; moral complexity’s tough, and ‘gritty stories from the front’ are a lot easier to land…
Jeff Eaton has it exactly right. I would add this really has nothing to do with Beauchamp per se; instead, the larger picture is that you have a small but vocal band of pro-Iraq warmongers who hope to chip away at the MSM in order to create a slippery slope from which they can argue that all reporting on Iraq is suspect.
Let’s remember the facts, shall we? When the Beauchamp story broke–from a rightwing blogger–the usual cast of characters fell over themselves to claim ‘Scott Thomas’ wasn’t really a soldier. As this claim was disproved, they moved on to advocate violence against Beauchamp. There were the ludicrous ‘debunkings’ of Beauchamp’s story–one involved a Tonka toy truck.
All this feigned outrage–and it is feigned–is rather amusing. You have people who really ought to know better, desperately trying to pretend that young soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen never–never–do anything that is unseemly or untoward. Such people either have never served or are lying to you.
I would also remind those who are claiming Beauchamp’s stories have been ‘proven’ false that they have no evidence for such a claim. Yes, you have the Weekly Standard claiming unnamed sources but the Army refuses to say–on the record–either way.
I don’t think so, Jade. I think it’s honest outrage. I grew up in the Evangelical Christian community, and it’s similar to the outrage one sees when someone writes (either truly or fancifully) about a hypocritical Christian. There is a perceived narrative that many in the church believe is being advanced: that Christians are hypocrites. Anything that looks like ‘part of that narrative’ is attacked. Sometimes that means untrue stories are disproved, other times it means that cognitive dissonance goes a few rounds before getting the beat-down.
The jist of it, though, is that I dislike assuming that anything is ‘feigned’: it’s part of that presupposition of good faith that helps public discourse keep going.
True, though the fact that the Army claims to have completed the investigation already at least hints that the story collapsed. I think we can fairly presume for the moment that Beauchamp retracted his stories and TNR is holding the line until they get official word.
Actually, jadegold, Kevin Drum appears to have been the first to make the claim that the right was claiming ST wasn’t a soldier. The tyoical response wasn’t far from mine – that these stories didn’t seem plausible.
And as of this morning, the Army has officially taken the position that the stories are false.
So let me invert your narrative.
“…instead, the larger picture is that you have a small but vocal band of anti-Iraq ‘peace at any price’ believers who hope to chip away at national support for the war in order to create a slippery slope from which they can argue that any support for the war in Iraq is suspect.”
Fits kinda neatly, doesn’t it?
Truth, sadly is more complicated than that…
A.L.
Yes, it is feigned, Jeff Eaton. Again, let’s remember the rightwing highlighted this story; they called attention to it. They demanded to know who or what ‘Scott Thomas’ was. So when they claim Beauchamp is smearing *all* soldiers–they were the ones who spun the story up.
And it’s feigned in that so many of these folks dearly try to pretend young soldiers are incapable of acting badly. I’m not trying to equate Abu Gharib, Haditha and other criminal acts with this instance–we have plenty of examples of young soldiers misbehaving. Thanks to YouTube, we’ve seen the ‘Haji Girl’ video and the tank crew teaching Iraqi children to say “F#ck Iraq.”
AL: I realize you’re attempting to adopt the TIDOS Yankee version of events regarding the rightwing and whether ‘Scott Thomas’ was a soldier. The fact is Blackfive, Ace of Spades, Greyhawk at MilBlogs, Malkin and quite a few others called ‘Scott Thomas’ a “purported” or “alleged” soldier. Most claimed he wasn’t–that he was actually some civilian journalist.
And as of this morning, the Army has officially taken the position that the stories are false.
And this “official” position is where? Are you saying the Weekly Standard citing unnamed sources is now the official media organ of the Pentagon?
Oops, I found a recap of the story on “slate”:http://www.slate.com/id/2171840. It’s actually a preety good piece, more on the responsibility of the media to ensure their story before it hits the shelves. Here are some highlights…
bq. One question today is whether Beauchamp’s dispatches are true. A second, more pressing question is how to better gather and report such stories, and how we should evaluate and verify them._
bq. Among military circles, the reaction to Beauchamp’s stories has been mixed. A number of my friends were disturbed by the article, especially what it implied about his unit and its leadership, but very few questioned its basic truth. Everyone’s war is different, and it’s nearly impossible to judge the veracity of another person’s combat experience. When I read Beauchamp’s first two articles, I was disturbed but not surprised. His tamer reports echoed my own experiences of Iraq and mirrored stories I’d heard from other soldiers there. The third dispatch, however, struck me as too fantastic to believe…_
bq. [Although] American soldiers have certainly done worse… Life magazine even printed a photo of this brutality in its May 22, 1943, issue, showing a young American woman with a boiled Japanese skull sent home to her by her boyfriend overseas. The American military has changed over the decades, becoming a much more educated, professionalized, and disciplined force. Yet bad things still happen in war, and anyone who finds Beauchamp’s story incredible merely because it’s upsetting has no idea what war can do._
bq. How, then, should journalists tell the story of what happens in wartime? 1.journalists must expect that their truths will be challenged when writing about a subject as divisive as Iraq. 2. When journalists do use anonymous sources to report critically about the military, they must do so with the greatest care. Fewer than 1 percent of Americans serve today in uniform, and fewer still have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. At best, the American public is getting a filtered picture of the battlefield today, and at worst, it’s getting pure garbage from both sides of the aisle.
bq. The Beauchamp dispatches show the extent to which the discourse over Iraq has been poisoned and how quickly the left, the right, and the military were willing to go to the mat to defend their version of what is—or what they thought ought to be—true. No one cares anymore about the troops, the truth of their reports from Iraq, or the serious issues of professional journalism associated with a series of this type. The troops have become pawns in this debate; their stories a kind of Rorschach test that reveals more about how we view the war than its reality on the ground.
Hopefully this looks ok (I miss the preview button).
alchemist, thanks for the link. That Slate article hits (more calmly) on some of the key points I’d hoped to convey.
And this “official” position is where?
In an obscure wingnut journal known as the “New York Times.”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/washington/08diarist.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Again, Rob Lyman, the NY Times is merely reporting what the weekly Standard is saying.
Are you seriously suggesting the NY Times is the DoD’s official spokesman?
The link is bad, and in the absence of preview, I can’t tell how to fix it. Sorry.
But Jadegold, it’s obvious you haven’t even attempted to read the article, which isn’t exactly hidden on the website.
Here is a direct quote of the NYT article:
bq. “We are not going into the details of the investigation,†Maj. Steven F. Lamb, deputy public affairs officer in Baghdad, wrote in an e-mail message. “The allegations are false, his platoon and company were interviewed, and no one could substantiate the claims he made.â€
I’m not suggesting that the NYT is the DoD’s official spokesman, I’m suggesting that MAJ Lamb is.
Now, I don’t know to whom that email was sent, whether it was to TWS, TNR, or NYT, or bloggers, or anyone who asked. The phrasing suggests that it was to Patricia Cohen, author of the article, but I have no proof of that. She does, however, clearly mark assertions made by TWS and TNR.
So I think we have a pretty strong case that the official line is: story false.
In the interest of fairness, Jadegold, this is one of those times when the issue of burden of proof can easily be raised. How many folks on the left would take a skeptical view of the NYT reporting that, say, the Army had concluded an internal investigation about torture and was punishing those responsible?
By the same token, those who take the Weekly Standard’s reporting without question in this case might well demand an official announcement before accepting the hypothetical Times story on torture.
This is basic psychology: the burden of proof is much, much tougher for those who are contradicting the listener’s pre-existing narrative. That, to some extent, is one of the stories-within-this-story.
Jadegold – no it isn’t. Rob’s html is malformed (I’ll fix it in a sec) but “here’s the quote”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/washington/08diarist.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
I’d say that absent a massive coverup – which in this day and age will last about three weeks – we can pretty clearly accept that Beauchamp was at minimum taking a fiction writer’s liberty with things he’d seen, at at maximum making them up from whole cloth.
Bob Owens “has a named quote”:http://confederateyankee.mu.nu/archives/236328.php from a contractor who has served for several years at the camp Beauchamp was at in Kuwait and says that a) he’s never seen anyone matching the burned woman’s description (and she’d doubtless have been memorable) and b) that policy is that injured contractors are evaced out and seldom return for company liability reasons.
So yeah, put a fork in it, I’d say. It matters to me for the reasons I set out in the comment above, and which I’ll try and expand in a post tonight when I’m done w/work.
A.L.
Jadegold, can you give me one or two cites where one of the named RW blogs claimed he wasn’t as soldier (as opposed to the qualifier “alledged”?)
A.L.
Rob Lyman: Bad link or not, I did read the NY Times article by Patricia Cohen. The article notes many questions are left unanswered and reported the Army was very vague on what the investigation found or didn’t find.
Jeff Eaton: I don’t really wish to raise the acts described by Beauchamp to the level of war crimes. There is no equivalency.
WRT pre-conceived notions, I would reiterate that those claiming our young soldiers are incapable of bad acts or behavior are deluding themselves or are not telling the truth.
AL: Again, TIDOS Yankee is simply not a credible source.
There are situations of surrealism in any war. There are situations of coarsening in any war. There are situations of people going pyschotic from the extreme stress of combat. It’s generally accepted that more than 1600 hours under combat conditions drives everyone temporarily insane, and that most people can’t take that much. And, like any large organization, the military understands the meaning of SNAFU.
So given that I believe all of that, why did and do I have a hard time accepting Scott’s account?
Because, it didn’t pass the smell test. 😉
Not so much for me because I caught alot of small factual errors, but because as a writer I saw in the structure of the narrative the hallmarks of a fictional account. The truth is that real life rarely forms tight narratives. Most of the time, life doesn’t make a good story, and to get it to make a good story you have to heavily edit it. That editorial process is inherently obfuscatory, which is why there will never be a realistic war movie. Real war doesn’t make a for a tight two hour narrative with five part structure. Real life rarely if ever works that way. Even movies based on a true story – say ‘A Beautiful Mind’ or ‘Walk the Line’ – take either considerable liberties with the story or leave significant parts of the story out for the sake of a having a clean narrative structure. This editorial hand leaves a clear mark of quasi-fiction that is there to see if you are looking for it. It makes for good movies, but it tells you really very little about the truth.
But I didn’t even give Scott’s narrative that much credit, because his narrative even more tightly conformed to a type. In a nutshell, Scott was describing war in the mode of ‘Apocalypse Now’. That annoys. It seems to me that war is hell in its bare facts without the need for embelishment. Moreover, it always seemed to me that the most convincing diadactic narratives where the ones that were least trying to shape your perceptions. They just let you make up your mind. Real narratives are filled with considerable nuance. They rarely cleanly have easy meanings. Everything about the Scott B. narrative suggested someone trying to convey some easily understood meaning through dramatic license, not someone recounting a personal history of the war. That suggested to me that alot of things might be based on personal experience, but the actual events probably never happened or never happened as they were described.
The article notes many questions are left unanswered..
Well, yes, but one question not left unanswered is the Army’s official position, which is where I came in. They say they investigated and that the allegations are false.
AL: Links follow:
Claims ST is a former disgraced soldier
Here GreyHawk strongly suggests ST is not a soldier
Here the Racist Malkin & Co claim ST not a real soldier
Many other rightwing sites like Ace, Malkin, LGF use terms like “alleged” or “purported” or place the word soldier in quotations to describe ST. The clear implication is to cast doubt that he is indeed a soldier. As one wag said about Ace–would he like to be described as a “purported” heterosexual?
Jadegold, 2 of the 3 the links you post don;t say what you claim; all of them raise doubts about Thomas’ identity, but none of them assert that “he isn’t a soldier”. The one attempts to identify him through narrative points as a specific individual who is a former soldier.
And to say that an anonymous person making implausible claims is “allegedly” who he claims to be isn’t unreasonable to me – what’s the sense of the group on that?
No, no gotta push back on that claim.
A.L.
* “People who doubted Scott Thomas’ stories questioned whether he was a soldier serving in Iraq. Some of them suggested he wasn’t. Why, a few even asserted he wasn’t a soldier at all!”
* Those who doubted Scott Thomas’ stories are bad people. They get outraged about the wrong things. Why, theyfeign outrage!”
That the discussion moved so quickly to issues like this may indicate that there isn’t much left to talk about. “You can’t make me believe that Beauchamp was deliberately untruthful in his account! You can’t make me believe that the TNR’s claim of rigorous fact-checking have been shown as false! You can’t make me believe that some stories in some magazine are more important than the sheer badness of the people who have pursued the story, and the wrongness of their overall agenda!”
Well, that’s true.
* Creative writer Beauchamp crafted a tale about the moral depravity of his infantry company, a collapse that everybody in the unit was complicit in. The anecdotes of bad behavior were only stepping stones. They were not the point of the narrative.
* Objections to Beauchamp’s story centered around the unlikeliness and implausibility of the events he claimed to chronicle. Informed skeptics thought many of the particular episodes were unlikely to be true–notwithstanding the incontrovertible fact that American and other soldiers have done other bad things in Iraq and other war zones. The skeptics turned out to be right.
* Objections to TNR’s handling of the matter centered around their repeated claims of rigorous fact-checking before the story was published, and further rigorous and transparent vetting once the story’s factual basis came into question. Skeptics compiled circumstantial evidence that pre-publication fact-checking had been, at best, casual, and that TNR’s accounts of its pre- and post- publication vettings have been self-serving, opaque, misleading, and in some cases untruthful.
Facts may emerge that show this summary of the affair to be incomplete, or false. But they haven’t yet.
Jeff Eaton,
I agree that killing dogs and making fun of disfigured people is not on the same level as torturing people and killing civilians. However, as one of those wingnuts who thinks we aren’t being brutal enough, let me suggest that there are some nuances in the wingnut position. Deliberately targeting civilians like our enemies do and like our Marines apparently did in Haditha is unacceptable. Being willing to kill whoever gets between us and the bad guys when killing them is necessary to get the bad guys is not, e.g. bombing a mosque or village that is sheltering insurgents or terrorists. Rounding up random people and torturing them for fun or torturing children to get their parents to talk (as Saddam’s regime did) is unacceptable. Torturing known terrorists who have information that might save American lives is not (to me anyway). So while, like you, I cannot really work up any great outrage over Beauchamp, I also still haven’t managed to work up any outrage about Abu Ghraib or Gitmo.
like our Marines apparently did in Haditha
Speaking of narratives that have largely fallen apart when people were asked to speak under oath…
Just by the bye, in all the current thread kerfuffle, some people have posted in “the older Quiggen et al thread.”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/009725.php Anyone active here want to “represent the echo chamber{sic}”? {Because, of course, that’s what it’ll be called…)
AL: Push back but you’re not really making the case. The implication is extremely clear here. GreyHawk, for instance, asserts Beauchamp is either not a soldier or he’s the dumbest soldier who ever lived–the clear implication is that ST is not actually a soldier.
Look, one can accuse someone of being, say, a child molester without actually saying, ‘Joe Shmoe is a child molester.’ Just say that Shmoe has a weird interest in kids or that parents should be wary if their children are around Schmoe.
Again, the use of quotation marks around “soldier” and the terms “alleged” or “purported” is meant to convey skepticism.
Now, you can argue that the rightwing purveyors of this nonsense don’t understand what “purport” means: “To have or present the often false appearance of being or intending; profess: selfish behavior that purports to be altruistic.” But that’s pretty weak beer.
As another wag put it: ” purportedly meth-free, allegedly never convicted of serial sheep molestation, a “sober driver†who has allegedly never beaten a puppy with a folding chair, etc.”
Jadegold, I’ll make one final attempt and then raise my hands…
Lots of people – including me – saw things in Beauchamp’s accounts that read as massively unlikely or factually inauthentic. Because Beauchamp was writing from behind a pseud, it wasn’t unreasonable to take that inauthenticity and use it to qualify his identity.
When I was behind a pseud, if I wrote about – police tactics – inaccurately, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for people to question my credentials and to ask me to validate them.
No one that I know of on the Right (I don’t reed Freep or the comments at LGF) asserted that “JT isn’t or can’t be a soldier”. That’s what your accusation says, and that’s not what happened.
People did say “this seems wrong – who is this guy?” – and that seems just fine to me. If you’re going to argue from authority, and you get your facts wrong, it’s not insulting for people to ask for your credentials.
Can me move on to more important stuff?
A.L.
Jadegold:
It was entirely legitimate for critics to question whether or not Beauchamp was really a soldier. Such a question was neither foolish nor malicious.
The diaries could easily have been written by someone who is not in the military or in Iraq. In fact, any number of writers could have done a better job of fooling people than Beauchamp did, without ever setting foot in the country.
But why bother to do a good job when you know your audience? The anti-war set is obviously prepared to believe anything they’re told if it’s what they want to believe, and they react with outrage if people refuse to believe it even after it has been refuted in toto.
For the thousandth time we must point to Stephen Glass, who got away with incredible lies until someone who was outside of TNR’s political headspace shot him down. And again we are reminded that the Rathergate forgeries were crude beyond belief, with nothing to recommend them except their political payload, which obviously out-weighed all other considerations so far as the strangely-named “reality-based community” is concerned.
Your point has no point on the end of it.
Why did Scott Thomas Beauchamp choose to fabricate details that (in retrospect, anyway) were very likely to be challenged? He had the experience and the writer’s eye to come up with plausible ones. (E.g. taunting a melted-face Iraqi woman, desecrating an abandoned cemetary, shooting stray dogs for fun.)
Did he fancy himself so clever that nobody could catch him?
Did he figure that nobody reads TNR, anyway?
Did he suppose that the veil of his carefully-chosen pseudonym was impenetrable?
Was he looking for an early discharge?
Was he trying to embarass TNR (for its pro-war history? for its recent turn leftward?)
Is he a very impulsive person, who doesn’t think much about the future consequences of his actions?
If we must talk motives. it is Scott Thomas’ that are interesting. If impenetrable.
Well, unless Beauchamp’s description of his own character is a fabrication too, then he probably did it because he’s inflamed rectal tissue on two legs.
“Michelle Malkin has a Winter Soldier round-up,”:http://michellemalkin.com/ and you can compare their motives.
Maybe Beauchamp is a pathological liar, a habitual criminal, a political hatchet-swinger, or maybe he just wants to be a United States Senator.
_My guess, though, is that no fact-checker has ever gotten near these stories._
Monday’s bloggingheads btw/ Jonathon Chait of TNR and Ross Douthat of the Atlantic had some interesting discussions on different degrees of fact-checking. “Bloggingheads”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=358&cid=2104
Douthat argued that the weekly opinion magazines like TNR and National Review do not fact-check with the intensity of essay/policy magazines like the New Yorker and the Atlantic, whose fact-checkers “re-report” the stories. Self-serving perhaps, but Chait seemed skeptical that one could re-report stories based upon first-hand experience, particularly when they happen overseas.
It might be useful to juxtapose these thoughts with Chait’s “views”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=MzM4s1IY2RzX1Esupl7P%2FA%3D%3D on what constitutes the best type of reporting:
bq. _Part of the problem is that journalism terminology glorifies “shoe-leather reporting,” whereby you pound the pavement so often you wear out the soles of your shoes. Yet there’s no widely used term of approbation for the other kind of reporting. For this very reason, my New Republic colleague Franklin Foer and I decided a few years ago to coin a phrase: *ass-welt reporting.* It means you’ve sat in your chair for so long reading books and documents that you’ve worn a welt the shape of your backside into your chair. I’m not saying that every news story could be reported without leaving one’s desk. (Bernstein: “Woodward, look! I found a clip from 1971 in which President Nixon tells the Omaha World-Herald he plans to order his goons to break into Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Hotel!” Woodward: “I’ll cancel that meeting with Deep Throat.”) I’m simply saying that, sometimes, laziness can be the better part of valor._
It strikes me that most of the weekly opinion magazines are based on ass-welt reporting, with a large portion of the facts supplied by documents and tips from Washington insiders. Nothing wrong with that, at least their not wearing pajamas. But I would suggest the most generous take on this story (and its not one I’m inclined to take) is that TNR was not well-suited to publish this soldier’s diary.
It was entirely legitimate for critics to question whether or not Beauchamp was really a soldier. Such a question was neither foolish nor malicious.
Yes, it was. As I’ve noted before, it’s part and parcel of a familiar pattern many rightwing sites use against stories or articles they don’t like. First, they assert the author isn’t who he or she says they are. Alternatively, they may suggest the author is a traitor, a plant, or some other pejorative.
When this line is debunked, they put the goalposts on the skateboard and claim the author is wrong because of some minor point (e.g., GreyHawk’s bizarre claim about DFACs and chow halls) or simply based on speculation (a soldier would *never* do such a thing.)
Meanwhile, you had various rightwing sites (e.g., Blackfive) advocating violence against Beauchamp. Is that not foolish or malicious?
The diaries could easily have been written by someone who is not in the military or in Iraq.
I’m sure they could have been. The fact remains they were not. And those claiming otherwise had no basis for saying so other than they did not like the story.
But why bother to do a good job when you know your audience? The anti-war set is obviously prepared to believe anything they’re told if it’s what they want to believe, and they react with outrage if people refuse to believe it even after it has been refuted in toto.
Miss many points, Glen Wishard?
Both you and I have no insight as to whether Beauchamp’s story is true, false, or somewhere in between. We have speculation.
The point you insist on missing is that the rightwing–your side–created this dustup. Believe me, as part of your so-called “anti-war set,” I’d never heard of Scott Thomas and I rarely read TNR. Moreover, if I believed every word Beauchamp had ever written was pure Gospel, it wouldn’t have changed or reinforced my views either way. Nor, as a vet, would I have felt ‘smeared’ or ‘betrayed.’ I know, for a fact, young servicemen are perfectly capable of bad behavior. In the instances described by Beauchamp, the behavior was tasteless but pretty benign. It doesn’t jog my outrage gage.
What does, though, are the warrantless and baseless attacks on Beauchamp. The threats of violence. The weirdly amusing use of a Tonka truck to tell us that an M1 can’t possibly run over a dog.
All from many of the same people who tell us torture and real atrocities are A-Ok.
Blackfive advocated violence against Beauchamp?
When this line is debunked, they put the goalposts on the skateboard and claim the author is wrong because of some minor point
This from the guy who claimed not to know the Army’s official line, claimed that a direct quote from a named Army public affairs officer was somehow just copying what TWS reported involving an unnamed source, and then fell back on “there are unanswered questions.”
The weirdly amusing use of a Tonka truck to tell us that an M1 can’t possibly run over a dog.
Do you mean an “M2/M3 Bradley”:http://www.army-technology.com/projects/bradley/? ‘Cause I’m fairly confident you won’t be running over anyone in an “M1”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_Garand
Of course, you might have meant an Abrams, but it’s getting harder and harder to believe you’ve been paying enough attention to tell the difference, given that the issue isn’t “could you possibly run over a dog in a Bradley?” but rather “is it plausible that somebody repeatedly smashed walls, market stalls, curbs, etc. in pursuit of dogs without discovering a boot in his ass?”
Jadegold,
The statement by the deputy Public Affairs Officer refutes your claim that we don’t know whether his story is true or not.
_An investigation has been completed and the allegations made by PVT Beauchamp were found to be false. His platoon and company were interviewed and no one could substantiate the claims._
Beauchamps is not the victim of a baseless attack. He is the fabulist who lied about fellow soldiers and tried to smear them as “Shock Troops”. You may not feel that you would be offended but there are plenty of people who are.
Jadegold:
You’ve done an extremely poor job of demonstrating that pattern.
You are clinging to a non-argument whose usefulness has past. The point of the false generalization that “right-wing bloggers claimed Scott Thomas didn’t exist and/or was not a soldier” was to pretend that the argument was settled when TNR revealed Beauchamp’s identity. This supposedly disposed of all other criticisms as well.
That defense is now pointless, given the current state of Beauchamp’s credibility. Obviously, proving that he exists was not the point. Like TNR, you still refuse to acknowledge the Army’s statement that “the allegations made by PVT Beauchamp were found to be false.”
We’re not the ones moving the goalposts.
Heavens to Elizabeth, did we ever. Forgive me for failing to point that out; let me do so now. Boy, did we ever start it. That broomstick up TNR’s pasty white ass has our name written all over it. Guilty, guilty, guilty!
I only wish I could take one iota of credit for it. Once again I bow to the tireless paladins of the Lidless Eye. The Milbloggers rule.
Don’t feel bad. Bill Clinton never read TNR in his life, not even when it was the so-called “In-Flight Magazine of Air Force One.” More than 90% of Democrats wouldn’t know it from a Chinese menu.
But it’s all relative, and TNR was once the premier weekly journal for dinkum-thinkum Democrats, exerting an influence far beyond its circulation figures.
I think several people have claimed that this controversy only came to their attention because of Winds of Change. I guess that makes Armed Liberal one of the major perpetrators. When the tribe assembles to trade scalps and divide the spoils, I think he should get Franklin Foer’s job.
Does that mean Beachamp won’t be getting his Bronze Star after all?
I have no idea if the kids stories hold up or not and don’t really care all that much.
But one thing we have learned over the past 5 years is that it’s a good idea to allow a statement from a PAO to perculate for at least five weeks. Just in case they decide to correct the record.
But hopefully this silliness can just all go away.
Is it trivial when a trivial number of trivial charges made by a trivial blogger in a trivial rag end up being trivially inaccurate?
I just cant bring myself to care about this allleged controversy. Even if by some miracle one side or the other ends up being ‘right’, its completely inconsequential to anything of true substance.
“When the tribe assembles to trade scalps and divide the spoils, I think he should get Franklin Foer’s job.”
AL is better qualified to edit a major news magazine than Mr. Foer, but I think AL’s already got a job.
Then again, his likely editorial direction would be taking TNR back to its roots as a liberal hawkish rag, so maybe you got something there. Could be the right move to reinvigorate the readership.
_Why did Scott Thomas Beauchamp choose to fabricate details that (in retrospect, anyway) were very likely to be challenged? He had the experience and the writer’s eye to come up with plausible ones._
Because truth is often stranger than fiction? He could have made more believable lies, but he reported his own experience and didn’t think to change it around to make it more believable?
This would be the most plausible explanation if his stories were believable. But then, if his stories were believable then the explanation why he wrote things that people didn’t want to believe wouldn’t have come up…..
Do you mean an M2/M3 Bradley? ‘Cause I’m fairly confident you won’t be running over anyone in an M1
Of course not, Rob Lyman. It would be “absolutely impossible to run anything over with this”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_Abrams
Absolutely impossible. Inconceivable.
Glen Wishard: You have exactly zero evidence to claim anyone’s credibility is shot.
_The statement by the deputy Public Affairs Officer refutes your claim that we don’t know whether his story is true or not._
Not at all. Possibly the deputy PAO knows the truth, or possibly he’s reporting something he’s willing to accept on authority. But it’s silly for reasonable people to suppose it’s true just because the army says so. Our army is at war.
Jadegold:
Wrong again.
Apart from internal evidence that Beauchamp is lying, which is plentiful in itself, we have a statement from Maj. Lamb (the very source TNR has turned to in their feeble attempt to rebut The Weekly Standard) that the stories are false.
You can reasonably argument that this evidence does not as yet add up to incontrovertible proof. But you cannot argue that zero evidence exists.
I think you are too new to this debate to be making sweeping assessments, especially with no evidence. Unless you have some evidence.
BTW, this dust-up is badly in need of a timeline. What sordid tale of media duplicity is complete without a timeline? I’m sure somebody is working on it.
_Blackfive advocated violence against Beauchamp?_
Jadegold:
It is historical fact that M1-designated tanks did exist (the original variant from the mid-’80s). It is conceivable that there is at least one in service with the Coalition or Iraqi Armed Forces in the Middle East that has not been “upgraded to a later designation.”:http://www.fprado.com/armorsite/abrams.htm
I wouldn’t let myself be sidetracked (oops, pun, sorry) by Mr Lyman’s jape.
Apart from internal evidence that Beauchamp is lying, which is plentiful in itself, we have a statement from Maj. Lamb (the very source TNR has turned to in their feeble attempt to rebut The Weekly Standard) that the stories are false.
Internal evidence? Is that like “double secret probation?”
Let’s review MAJ Lamb’s statement, shall we?
What allegations? What evidence?
We also have MAJ Lamb’s statement that seemingly puts the kibosh on the Weekly Standard’s claim of a recantation.
We also have the fact Beauchamp has been denied access to email and phones, so we’re not hearing his side, are we?
Let’s have the Army lay their cards on the table for all to see. Evidence isn’t someone telling you they hold four aces.
NM: Sorry, I was in defensive mode there–besides I’m not from the groundpounding side.
_Is it trivial when a trivial number of trivial charges made by a trivial blogger in a trivial rag end up being trivially inaccurate?_
Yes.
Is this one trivial?
“link”:http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/world/stories/050507dnintethics.372ee0d.html
It’s old news, of course. It would seem to provide much better information than anecdotal evidence like Beauchamp’s, and there’s no particular reason to deny it (although there may be reasons to predict nonrandom sampling).
Jadegold:
By “internal evidence”, I meant the indications in the stories themselves that they were false. This has been the subject of many, many posts over the past few weeks.
You were the one who introduced the term evidence. This is what evidence is. If we were in court these are the sort of things that would be introduced, and your side would have to answer them. Maj. Lamb saying that the stories are false is evidence. And so on.
Now, look at TNR’s brief encounter with Maj. Lamb, where they apparently questioned him as gingerly as an attorney who does not want to elicit damaging testimony. Note that they did not ask him to confirm that the Army had concluded that Beauchamp’s accounts were false, which is a pretty major omission for a fact-checking expedition. Or if they did ask him that question, they do not tell us what his answer was. Do you wonder why not?
Instead, they asked him to confirm that Beauchamp had recanted, as Goldfarb reported. The major had no comment. That’s a long way from a kibosh.
As I’ve said before, I think that the Army would not have concluded their investigation the way they did, and as quickly as they did, unless Beauchamp recanted. But let us grant that the recantation is not established fact. Neither has your side offered anything to refute it.
There are good reasons why Lamb would state that the information in the diaries was false, without also confirming that Beauchamp had admitted to inventing them. The latter detail is just that – a detail. It gets into a non-judicial disciplinary matter that is not public information.
And don’t expect us to suspend judgment until Beauchamp tells us his side. Jupiter’s Nuts. If Beauchamp has any sense at all, it will be a cold day in Hell before he utters another word to TNR while deployed, for risk of making matters worse.
It is not up to the Army to tell the rest of this story, and it wouldn’t be up to Beauchamp even if we believed him. The ball is in TNR’s court. They have all the information they need to start doing the right thing, right now.
_I’m not from the groundpounding side._
_Blackfive advocated violence against Beauchamp?_
chirp. chirp.
That was a misreading of one of Jimbo’s posts, I think. You can find links to everything we wrote about the STB case here.
I see, Uncle Jimbo is a potty mouth and Jadegold likes hyperbole.
Glen Wishard has nailed the key points in this topic.
The main one is that the New Republic team have shown themselves unqualified as reporters of fact. Maybe they can do opinion pieces for an undemanding readership, but that’s it.
Yet on and on the story goes.
“Ross Douhat at Atlantic Online”:http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/08/tnrs_real_problem.php thinks he knows “TNR’s Real Problem”:
I can’t speak for the rest of the raging horde, but I never took this as a “grand statement against the war.” Such a statement would imply courage – albeit, only enough courage to stand up to a handful of non-anti-war Blue Dog Democrats, but at least some courage. Depending on the reasoning given, it would also require something like principle.
I took it as a slander against people who deserve something better than a kick in the face. Perhaps not a calculated slander, but a careless one. Not based on reasoned argument – even malicious reasoning – but on a smug assumption of superiority by people who congratulate themselves on their alleged intelligence and sensibility. A bigot repeating a n—r joke with no idea why he shouldn’t.
PD Shaw: So sorry as to not respond immediately to your demands. There’s a war on, you know. 911 changed everything, etc.
Here’s the comment WRT violence from BlackFive:
Now you may call this hyperbole–it’s easy to do so as such threats aren’t directed at you. Of course, since it’s from Uncle Jimbo, it probably is hyperbole since the chance of him breaking the suction seal between his wide butt and the LaZBoy chair likely transcends physics.
Jadegold,
I was, of course, being sarcastic about the M1, which, had you read the next sentence (“You might have meant an Abrams”), you would have realized.
The broader points are:
1) We know what the Army says. Maybe they’re lying, but we know what they say, and when you claimed we didn’t way upthread, you were wrong.
2) Nobody has said you can’t run over a dog in a tank or APC. Some people have (apparently erroneously) claimed that the blind spots make it impossible to see a dog you’re trying to hit. But others have pointed out that if you do the things Beauchamp described (not merely hitting dogs, but swerving wildly and taking out lots of private property, on multiple occassions), you get punished.
3) To the extent that STB argues that his anecdotes illustrate the terrible toll war takes on soldiers, he must assert that all, or at least many, soldiers engage in similar activity. Otherwise, all he’s saying is that he and his friends are first-class losers. That’s why other soldiers resent it as a smear: his clear intent is to say not “I’m a loser” but “War has made the whole Army rotten.”
Rob Lyman: In reality, you don’t know what the Army says because you haven’t seen the results of the investigation. Instead, you are inferring what you think the Army has said based on what is a pretty vague statement.
WRT to the dog and the Bradley–you’re simply wrong. Aside from the ludicrous Powerline/Tonka truck modeling and simulation exercise, rightwing blogs such as Red State and OPFOR pooh-poohed the idea that a vehicle could or would hit a dog.
On your third point, there is no evidence that STB says all soldiers behave like this. Having said that, though, I will note once more young soldiers can and will do stupid things. O-1s and O-2s as well. They’ll do things that will literally make your jaw drop in amazement and horrified awe. I’d remind you that what STB claims is pretty benign. So much so that most NCOs or officers would let it go or just tell ’em to knock it off. Compare it “with these accounts”:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/hedges
In reality, you don’t know what the Army says…pretty vague statement…
We are now is never-never land. A public affairs officer emails to journalists that “The allegations are false” and you claim that is both vague and somehow not “what the Army says.” How is the Army supposed to communicate its official position if not through PA officers speaking to journalists? Tonka trucks look pretty good compared to that level of reality-denial.
rightwing blogs such as Red State and OPFOR pooh-poohed the idea that a vehicle could or would hit a dog.
Well, if true (link?), that’s just dumb. Vehicles of all shaps and sizes hit dogs and other animals all the time. If all STB said was “our Bradley hit a dog once” then there would be no reason to doubt that. It was the allegations of repeated instances of wild driving and property destruction that I doubted.
there is no evidence that STB says all soldiers behave like this.
If they don’t, then his entire point–that war is dehumanizing and turns ordinary people into monsters–collapses, and his stories just show that he’s a jerk.
Rob Lyman: War is dehumanizing; it is not a natural or healthy condition. That’s why we have PERSTEMPOs; we recognize we can only ask for so much for so long before operational effectiveness breaks down sharply.
Again, the incidents described by STB are tasteless and not good behavior but they are pretty tame.
You may or may not have ever been in the military but I can’t imagine the dynamics are much different in any large organization. There is behavior which may be in direct contradiction to established policy that gets overlooked or ignored or dealt with outside a formal process. Generally speaking, in the military, there is discretion or latitude in strictly enforcing regulations if such violations don’t impair readiness or safety. If we were to enforce every reg to the letter, we’d probably have a very diminished military. In a war zone, this latitude becomes somewhat larger as NCOs and officers should and do have more pressing matters to be concerned about.
You can say STB is a jerk or not; that’s an opinion. To claim he’s a monster is hyperbole considering the very real atrocities that have been committed in Iraq. OTOH, as Phillip Carter notes in the Slate article referenced above in comments, STB’s articles come as no surprise to people in the military.
Except those, of course, who are feigning outrage for altogether different motives.
There was an atroctiy all right. It was committed “on the truth”:http://confederateyankee.mu.nu/archives/236527.php . To a good number of people that isn’t surprising. The question is this. Is it evidence of a “culture of corruption?”
Jadegold, I think it is pointless to argue with you because we obviously don’t live in the same world of facts. Let’s try one more time.
“The Army has made a statement on this to the AP,”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/09/AR2007080900008_pf.html and it’s anything but vague:
Meanwhile, at TNR:
Now, why in the world won’t Foer talk to the AP? How hard would it be to just pick the phone and explain to the AP that all the outrage is feigned, and that this is just a right-wing smear job against Beauchamp (Who is just trying to tell the truth! The truth!) by people who love torture and war? And dogs? And Tonka toys?
Jadegold:
Not according to Beauchamp. According to Beauchamp, eating lunch in Kuwait is dehumanizing. After he deployed to Iraq his behavior actually improved.
Of course Beauchamp lies like a fine Persian rug, but if you’re going to use his narrative at least get it straight.
Glen Wishard: Indeed, we exist on seperate planes of reality.
You have taken a statement a 1SGT that says all claims by SBT, in his blog, have been refuted. Read it again. All claims. Not some, not a few, not certain claims–all claims.
In his blog, SBT claims to be in Iraq. Per your overwhelming evidence, SBT is not.
You’re welcome at my card table anytime. Bring money.
Now, why in the world won’t Foer talk to the AP?
Wow, that is hard evidence of guilt.
Of course, it raises the question as to why the Army refuses to produce the results of its investigation, the charges, and to allow access to SBT.
Jadegold, can you at least admit we do know what the Army’s official position is? They may be lying, but there is no uncertainty about what they are saying officially, right?
Beyond that, your parsing of the “all claims” language makes me strongly suspect you’re actually Bill “meaning of is” Clinton.
That was the last chance you’ll get from me, Jadegold. Enjoy your rewarding career as a troll.
One more nail in TNR’s Coffin
Can anyone explain to me why Foer still has a job?
Oh and Jon Cole is still full of shit.
By “pushed forward” I take it he means lifted up over the rear road wheel and carried forward alongside the vehicle. Anything caught in the track would be lifted and carried forward along with it, not dragged behind. “This was the first thing that struck me as highly unlikely about the Bradley story.”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/009713.php#c40
_yes, I did talk to a young researcher with TNR who only asked general questions_
I guess that rules out Dan Rather or Mary Mapes. The modus seems strinkingly similar.
I don’t see what the big deal is here. Beauchamp’s claims seem pretty much like SOP for troops in a combat zone like Iraq for too long.
Contrary to what the (scurilous as always) Weekly Standard attempts as refutation, Beauchamp did not say ar,ored vehicles were taken on “Joy rides”. Dogs and such were run down as the vehicles were out on patrol. This doesn’t surprise me at all and, again, who gives a FF?
And yes, you absolutely could run down a dog as Beauchamp claims. Some here – and the WS – try to insinuate that Beauchamp was talking about something akin to target practice on the KD range. Contrary, he was just saying that you throw a vehicle into that sort of manuever and you sometimes nail a dog.
But more importantly, just because the Army denies it doesn’t mean squat.
Again, who cares. I don’t see how what Beauchamp says is out of the ordinary or how it diminishes the combat effectiveness of our troops or their ability to achieve their objectives.
What? did you think all of the troops are a bunch of super hero boyscouts or priests or something? Get real.
avedis, that was a particularly nonresponsive attempt to almost defend TNR and Beauchamp. Especially given how far along this story is. Perfunctory even.
The above is a good example of why the people who say we need to declare victory and move on are wrong. And unrealistic, too, because even the MSM are picking this story up at a surprising pace.
“TNR is now ignoring ABC News, too,”:http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/Story?id=3455826&page=2 along with who knows how many others:
This is incredible to me. TNR is a news and opinion magazine that regularly contacts people for comment – often disdaining those who refuse to respond – and you would think that among journalists there is some inclination to avoid treating each other the way stonewalling corporate spokesmen treat them. It’s unbelievable that TNR is blowing off the AP and ABC, while they blithely update their staff blog 20 times a day.
They’ve already done a Stephen Glass reprise. Now they’re set to do their version of Rathergate, too, by turning an embarrassment into a disaster.
Glen, Rob, A.L., et al:
You’re patient men. Thanks for clearing the drain.
“avedis, that was a particularly nonresponsive attempt to almost defend TNR and Beauchamp. Especially given how far along this story is. Perfunctory even.”
Not Really.
I have been following this thread all along and I am amazed at how some people, like yourself, can make such a big issue out of nothing.
I felt it was just time to weigh in and provide a little perspective, as in there is nothing to see here folks. Move along now.
Beauchamp is a soldier. Good for him. Why slander him with negative speculation as to why he enlisted? So what if he enlisted to have experiences that could be the inspiration for literature? He sure wouldn’t be the first to enlist for si,ilar reasons. How is that any worse than enlisting for the pay check? Or for a chance to legally kill people? I’ve known a number that enlisted for these very reasons. At least he is in and doing his job wich is more than can be said for many of his detractors.
And then these nitpicky CSI type disections of his stories in such pathetically desperate attempts to discredit him. Again, Why?
No one has explained just what it is that Beauchamp did that merits such ire from the rightwing. Yeah, yeah, some how he is supposed to have disgraced the uniform, tarnished the image of the US fightmen and women. Again, I don’t see how. He told some simple stories that ring very realistic to me. Why can’t some of you people handle the fact that troops in combat zones get a little nasty, a little rough around the edges and a little mean?
As some one way above noted (as have I) Beauchamp’s stories are relatively tame. Far worse has been recorded from every conflict in which US troops have been involved.
Relax and get over it. Go look for the boogey man somewhere else.
avedis —
> I don’t see what the big deal is here.
Take away the snark, and you are re-asking the question that Jeff Eaton asked earnestly at #21. Actually, you aren’t inquiring, you are reciting talking points in a Q&A format.
Jeff got a number of thoughtful responses. He didn’t like the answers he got. It turns out that his priorities are different from those of the commenters who believe that Beauchamp and TNR tried to pull off something sleazy, got caught, and then arrogantly doubled-down on their mistakes. (At least in TNR’s case–who knows what that embarrassment Beauchamp would say at this point, if he were talking.)
But that’s what happens when you talk about contentious issues with people who come to the table with different points of view.
At this late date, anyone who characterizes the positions of the nutty right-wing wingnut nutheads (hope I got the terminology right) as avedis does either hasn’t been paying attention, or is looking to set up straw men for the obvious purposes.
Numbers 97 and 101 don’t contain any questions or issues whose response would take more than cutting-and-pasting from up-tread comments. I’ll decline, thanks.
bq. Anyone familiar with tracked vehicles knows that turning sharply requires the road wheels on the side of the turn to either stop or reverse as the road wheels on the opposite side accelerates. What may not be obvious is that the track once on the ground, doesn’t move. The road wheels roll across it but the track itself is stationary until it is pushed forward by the road wheels.
bq. The width of the track makes it highly unlikely that running over a dog would leave two intact parts. One half of the dog would have to be completely crushed.
I never understood this reasoning. If the dog is just forward of the front tread, he could get crushed — provided that particular front tread is rolling forward at the moment. Or if it’s still in reverse, the dog could get crushed beneath the back tread if it’s at precisely the right spot. Anywhere between those spots the dog would wind up above the track. It would be hard for a dog to dig his way under the tread. He’d wind up right in there with the wheels and sprockets. Maybe half of him would get crushed in there and carried, while the other half is left behind. Maybe it would take awhile for the uncrushed half to get separated and dropped. Could a dog get carried up to the toothed wheel? What would happen there?
We’ve already seen from the square-back bullet casing that Beauchamp or some transcriber wasn’t completely clear about all the minor details. If half a dog falls off a Bradley tread after some distance as opposed to getting dragged that distance, it just doesn’t mean that much.
If we’d put this depth of skepticism into the original story about iraqi WMDs, it’s very unlikely that Beauchamp would be in iraq to write his story. Worse, some of us *did* put serious research into that, and knew there was no credible evidence for iraqi WMDs, and we got ignored.
> I don’t see what the big deal is here.
_[…] you are re-asking the question that Jeff Eaton asked earnestly at #21. [….]_
_Jeff got a number of thoughtful responses. He didn’t like the answers he got. It turns out that his priorities are different from those of the commenters_
Yes, that’s what I’m noticing. It’s peculiar.
The surge has unquestionably failed. The original claim was that security was the limiting factor that kept the iraqi parliament from making the political progress that iraq depends on. So we would provide that security for a limited time, by extending deployments and cutting the time between deployments to get an extra force, and the iraqi government would reform, and then we could send a lot of the soldiers home. This has failed. It _did not work_.
We can try to shift the goalposts and decide that it’s a success even though the purpose has utterly failed. For example, we have negotiated with some of the insurgents, and we have agreed to give them weapons and training. This may have reduced the violence in the short run, but it is not at all what we were calling success when the surge started.
So what do we do now? Do we wage a supersurge? It isn’t going to take a whole lot more 15-month deployments before our soldiers’ divorce rate goes way up. Should we blame the iraqi government? Announce that we did our part and they didn’t do theirs, and it isn’t our fault, and pull out? Should we let them tell us to get out? Pull back the ground troops and do a lot of airstrikes?
I don’t see anybody even considering the crisis. Instead they’re arguing about the fine details about Beauchamp and TNR. Definitely different priorities. It isn’t parallel but I got a flash of Dick Cheney. “I had other priorities.” Why aren’t we fact-checking a small-circulation GOP journal like _Weekly World News_? They’re defunct, but then TNR is almost defunct, I hope.
J. Thomas #104:
I think you’ve gone slightly beyond the present media CYA position. What they seem to be saying is that while there are some signs that the surge is having “military” success, and changing the local political circumstances (see the NYT on the O’Hanlon, Pollack, Brookings Report) the national government is still in disarray. Even O’Hanlon sees a possible connection between the turn of events on the battlefield and the future of the national government, suggesting that we ought to wait to see.
Certainly, he does not say the surge “has failed.” Far from it. So not only is your statement unsupported, and at least to some degree empirically incorrect, but you’ve essentially acknowledged in your choice of argument that the surge is providing additional security for the locals.
However, I don’t see any necessary connection between the local security situation and the Iraqi government, because the Constitution of Iraq establishes a nationwide faction-slate proportional representation election system. As Larry Diamond and others have pointed out, this system is about the worst possible choice if your intent is to produce an effective government that reduces the influence of class, religious, and ethnic factions. What’s needed is a constituency-based system rather than a national-slate. Moreover, PR is notoriously unstable, so a winner-take-all system would be more likely to undermine factions. This may seem counterintuitive, but is empirically demonstrable. See Mattei Dogan.
It’s certainly better, for the sake of ordinary Iraqis, for security to improve. But the only way that’ll have a long term impact on the Iraqi government is if it spurs people to elect legislators willing to change the constitutional provisions, and institutionalize something that actually works.
One would think that the political revolution now taking place at the local level as a result of the surge tactics employed by Petraeus, et al, would result in renewed interest on the part of these local constituencies for some local representation. That’s the connection, but it’s not the sort of thing that happens at the drop of a hat. Nor does the fact that it hasn’t happened yet mean that the surge “has failed.”
Not that this makes the slightest difference to you, but I figured it might be of some interest to those not pre-programmed into a copperhead position.
Demosophist, you might possibly be right about what could happen. We might be providing adequate security to a small fraction of iraq. We might be getting effective local collaborationist government that might have some sort of effect on something. Perhaps someday we might get legislators in the iraqi government who will change their Constitution to something we’d like better.
However, the surge was proposed as a temporary surge that would provide security primarily in Baghdad so the iraqi government would function. It has failed at that. You can move the goalposts enough to make up new goals that might be considered less than a total failure. But Petraeus’s plan has failed. This is not debatable. To say it hasn’t failed you have to make up a new plan with new objectives and say maybe it’s meeting your new objectives.
The surge has failed. The legislation it was supposed to facilitate has not been done and the Parliament has gone home and will not pass that legislation by the deadline.
The next question will be what to do next. We can super-size the surge. Extend it. Maybe put everybody on 18 month deployments with 6 months home. We could increase the numbers more by treating it more like WWII, nobody comes home until after the victory.
If we let the surge lapse, what are the chances that iraqi troops can do the work all by their lonesomes? The kurdish troops need to go home soon anyway, they have 200,000 turks telling them to kill off their terrorists or else. Probably all the work we did with the surge will be lost, and our collaborators will be killed, and if we do it again it will be harder to find collaborators.
So it really makes sense to extend the surge, to spend a billion dollars a day staying in iraq until someday things improve enough we can leave. Or else pull out.
So, can we persuade the public that it’s really worth staying, by next november? Maybe we could win if we increase our commitment to half a trillion dollars a year for at least 10 years? If we keep the public commitment high enough to stick it out for 5 more congressional election cycles and 2 more presidential elections? When all it takes to lose is for the public to vote in the wrong people *once* and then we get out and waste all the sacrifices we put into it.
So OK, you want to say the surge hasn’t failed after all because you see some things that might someday give a good outcome — not the things we listed as outcomes in the original plan, but some sort of promising signs anyway. So we wait and see. And then we’ll try something different and wait and see, and something else….
I just don’t see where you come off calling this something other than failure.
#105 said:
“Even O’Hanlon sees a possible connection between the turn of events on the battlefield and the future of the national government, suggesting that we ought to wait to see.”
—-
Why should I or anyone else listen to what O’Hanlon says about the war after visiting iraq for a few days? Your use of the word “even” suggests that you’re participating in, or taken by, the Pro-war propagandists who are attempting to portray these two original war supporters as “harsh critics”.
Furthermore, a third companion of O’Hanlon, had a different response to the same War Junket:
—-
O’Hanlon/Pollack Rebuffed By Travel Companion Cordesman: ‘I Did Not See Any Dramatic Change’
In their infamous New York Times editorial, Brookings analysts Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack alleged that “significant changes [are] taking place†in President Bush’s escalation, potentially ushering in a “sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with†in the future.
Center for Strategic and International Studies military analyst Anthony Cordesman, who accompanied O’Hanlon and Pollack on the trip to Iraq, recently published a report expressing a difference of opinion.
In a briefing today, Cordesman further elaborated on his disagreements with the Brookings analysts and asserted that there has been little change in Iraq:
“I did not see any dramatic change in our position in Iraq during this trip. Many of the points, the problems which exist there are problems which have existed really since late 2004, if not earlier. I didn’t see a dramatic shift in the ability of the Iraqi’s to reach the kind of compromise that is almost the foundation of moving forward. […]
But I also want to stress another thing. I did not see success for the strategy that President Bush announced in January.”
While O’Hanlon and Pollack claimed “many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the [security] force have been removed,†Cordesman observed the opposite. “The security forces are more divided, facing more problems in terms of alignment with Shi’ite factions than I had expected to see, even for the army.â€
Later in the briefing, Cordesman slammed O’Hanlon’s plan calling for a “soft-partition†of Iraq into three distinct regions, stating that such an effort would be “brutal, it is repressive, it kills people, it injures them, it drives them out of their homes, and it drives them out of their country. To talk about this as if it was something that is gentle or nonviolent is simply dishonest.â€
Cordesman added: “It is clear, that in some ways our intervention in Iraq has allowed the Sadr militia and Shi’ite extremist groups to operate in terms of sectarian cleansing with more freedom than they had in the past.â€
—-
#105 again: “That’s the connection, but it’s not the sort of thing that happens at the drop of a hat.”
Well, we don’t have any more hats to drop and there’s not ENOUGH evidence that anything is going to be different in Iraq whether we stay or leave at this point….so let’s get our kids home and start wasting some money here at home instead.
O’Hanlon and Pollack are too distrusted to be persuasive. I would reccomend Cordesman’s recent report (dated 8/6/07):
bq. _While all the half-truths and spin of the past have built up a valid distrust of virtually anything the Administration says about Iraq, real military progress is taking place and the U.S. team in Baghdad is actively seeking matching political and economic progress._
. . .
bq. _Can the Iraqi political structure and the US pull this off? The odds are at best even._
. . .
bq. _It is just possible that “strategic patience” can work over time. What are the odds of such success? No one can honestly say, but they may well become higher than the 50-50 level
if Iraq’s political leaders do move forward by early 2008, if the Sunnis are co-opted by the
government and brought into the Iraqi Security Forces, and if the US does not rush out
for domestic political purposes._
“The Tenuous Case for Strategic Patience in Iraq”:http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/080607_iraq-strategicpatience.pdf
AMac; “Actually, you aren’t inquiring, you are reciting talking points in a Q&A format.”
I don’t know what the talking points are so I can’t be reciting them. These are questions that came to my mind. Instead of dismissing them as “talking points” you could answer them?
“It turns out that his priorities are different from those of the commenters who believe that Beauchamp and TNR tried to pull off something sleazy, got caught, and then arrogantly doubled-down on their mistakes.”
But why would someone take the time to even think about this let alone make an issue of it and then formulate priorities surrounding the created issue.
I just don’t get it. I mean there is so much BS being tossed around in the media, by politicians, etc……so why does Beauchamp even come up on the radar screen?
TNR lets us know they haven’t fled to Costa Rica:
Incredible that a political magazine is being questioned by political people, and not by Tibetan monks.
In the film Shattered Glass, TNR editor Charles Lane (played by the outstanding actor Peter Sarsgaard) confronts a fellow editor after he just fired Stephen Glass:
Yeah, don’t people know that? I guess not.
avedis,
I apologize for my earlier “talking points” snark.
* The issue with Beauchamp and the TNR is not “soldiers, even American soldiers, do bad things in war.” Before this broke, everybody already knew that.
* This issue with TNR is not “well, a magazine got a story wrong.” Before this broke, everybody already knew that.
There’s no faux surprise among the critics. There’s no feigned outrage. At least not that I’ve seen. (Though I’m sure if you look hard enough you can find faux surprise and feigned outrage to be surprised and outraged–or even just puzzled–about. That’s a trivial consequence of the ‘blogosphere’ being comprised of a million independent printing presses.)
At this point, it is a straw man to presume that the critics’ concerns about this story are what I’ve just stated that they are not, and then argue (etc.) from there.
After reading this thread and checking a few links, it should be possible for an alert reader to state what the thoughtful skeptics’ concerns are about Beauchamp and the TNR, and why we feel that TNR has inflicted a major scandal upon itself. “Mirroring” in this way doesn’t mean that a person agrees with the position being described–it just shows that a person understands what it is.
As far as “why are you spending time on issue X, I don’t think it’s important enough to command your blogging attention.” Well–most of the critics’ critics who make this point don’t seem willing or able to do that ‘mirroring’ exercise. This naturally leads to the suspicion that they belittle the importance of issues that they don’t understand. Further, there have been as yet no decent rebuttals or explanations from Beauchamp or TNR or their various apologists and allies. Just, “nothing to see here, move along now.”
And, of course, a person could well decide that the surge or Plame/Armitage or single-party payer insurance or global warming is more important than this one small affair. Or simply that other issues are more interesting. That’s fine–there are plenty of blogs with open comments that are addressing those very issues, and others. I miss the point of comments that argue that the matter being discussed isn’t worth commenting on. Electrons are not a scarce resource.
I’ve only made general arguments here, and have left out the specific reasons why I think the Beauchamp/TNR scandal is both important and interesting. That’s because these questions have been covered extensively–earlier in this thread and, obviously, elsewhere.
AMac, you have misunderstood my question – which is my fault for not formulating it correctly.
What I am really wondering is why Beauchamp and his stories were even called into scrutiny in the first place; why did they even smell fishy to anyone?
There is nothing about the stories that is remarkable as far as I can see; all silly punditing about the “impossibility” and “unlikelyhood” of running down dogs with a Bradley aside.
As for any comments from military PR officers regarding the status of the “investigation”, I have to agree with others here who perceive a CYA. I’d have to see the notes of the investigation, the details and hear from other members of Beauchamp’s unit after they were discharged. Remeber, this is the same source – only this time in a far less official statement – that has had to go back….way back….on its reporting of Pat Tillman’s death, Jessica Lynch and other noteworthy and more serious events in the last few years.
avedis —
> why were Beauchamp and his stories even called into scrutiny in the first place; why did they even smell fishy to anyone?
I see two possibilities:
* Conspiracy, i.e. a concerted right-wing noise machine effort to discredit an honest and unremarkable first-person account, for nefarious purposes (encourager les autres/divert attention from more important issues);
* Skeptical people with expertise and first-hand knowledge found that many parts of Beauchamp’s stories were fishy.
Occam’s Razor biases towards the second. In addtion, if the anecdotes in the “Baghdad Diarist” pieces had held up to scrutiny–they would have held up, rather than collapsing further upon examination.
The behavior of the TNR editorial staff has been its own scandal, giving the term “fact-checking” a new, derisive meaning. If they had taken their lumps when questions were first raised, this would have blown over by now. In their arrogance and cynicism, they have been their own worst enemies. Or maybe not: a large portion of their base seems pleased that they are standing up to the wingnuts, rather than dismayed that they’ve sold out their journalistic standards for a mess of pottage.
The Glassish nature of the story comes full circle. Beauchamp is refusing to comment now:
The army wants this story to go away. Nothing about it makes them look good, the best they can hope for is damage control.
They aren’t interested in getting to the bottom of this trivial story, they want it to go away.
I predict that this is the last we’ll hear about the story from Beauchamp or from the army, until Beauchamp is no longer in the army. And at that point it will be a dead issue.
There’s a pretty good chance we’ll have already withdrawn from iraq before we hear anything more about it, though TNR might possibly say something or other. They might possibly feel like they improve something by not letting it drop. Not so much like picking at scabs as picking at a sucking chest wound.
J Thomas, that’s a bizarre comment because the only one who comes out of this looking good is the Army.
Robin, the army doesn’t come out looking good. The army at best comes out undamaged.
The army comes out better if Beauchamp looks like a total liar than if it looks like he was telling truths. But the army would be better off if Beauchamp had never said anything, than if he comes off looking like a liar. The army is better off reporting successes than doing effective damage control. They have to do damage control, but it doesn’t put them ahead, it just leaves them undamaged.
Nothing about this story is useful to the army. They’re better off if everybody immediately forgets it completely. They’ve done the best damage control they can, now it’s time for good news and nothing more about Beauchamp.
J Thomas:
Either you’ve been trolling this issue all along, or you keep falling asleep in class. Which is it?
And I don’t want to hear any excuses about how this is typical of the mistrust engendered by Bush, etc., blah blah blah. You are responsible for what you think, and no one else.
“….And I don’t want to hear any excuses about how this is typical of the mistrust engendered by Bush…..”
OK. How this……this is typical of the mistrust engendered by the Army post Tillman, Lynch, Abu Gaihb, etc, etc, etc
I don’t understand Glen’s claim here at all. I don’t see why my #117 would be at all controversial.
Beauchamp’s story, true or false, does not at all help the army. Convincing the public that it’s false is only damage control, not any sort of improvement. So dwelling on it is wasted effort. The army would have been better off if the story had not been told in the first place. Barring that, the army would have been better off if the story had been widely ignored. Since it’s too late for that, the army now is better off if everybody forgets it as soon as possible.
The best they can do is an adequate CYA. Every bit of attention devoted to Beauchamp interferes with the army getting its message out about all the good news coming from iraq.
J Thomas –
I’m sure the Army is grateful for the advice. Why don’t you get a subscription to TNR? They could use more readers like you.
J Thomas —
Your comments #117 and 120 aren’t so much wrong as they are detached. Your references to the Army’s “damage control” and “CYA” would make sense if they had wrongly gotten Beauchamp to tell his truthful (or even truthy) tales, and were now faced with cleaning up their mess. But nearly all people who have been paying attention realize that that was not the case. The mess-makers have been Beauchamp (in making stuff up to conform to his writerly aspirations and his meta-narrative), and Foer (in publishing with hardly any fact-checking and then misleading about it, and undertaking post-publication fact-checking as an exercise in damage control and CYA).
If your point is that Beauchamp and Foer have placed the Army in a no-win situation from a P.R. point of view, and that its bureaucratic ethics further constrain it to operate by its own Due Process rules, well yeah. If you’re kinda trying to say that and kinda trying to say something quite different, why not be clearer with your message.
Avedis is right.
There was precious little in SBT’s stories that were “fishy” beyond the fact certain rightwingers didn’t like them. That’s why we got the silly Tonka truck modelling and simulation exercise. And that’s why we got the even more foolsih pretense that soldiers are never cruel or callous in their comments.
Really, this entire episode of mass pearl clutching is about the rightwing’s attempt to seek retribution from TNR on its apostasy concerning the debacle in Iraq.
It appears willful ignorance has taken root. Perahaps this thread should close.
_If your point is that Beauchamp and Foer have placed the Army in a no-win situation from a P.R. point of view, and that its bureaucratic ethics further constrain it to operate by its own Due Process rules, well yeah._
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. This was lose-lose for the army from the beginning. Having it get a lot of publicity did the army no good, win or lose. Now the best they can hope for is that everybody drops it.
Jadegold, with all due respect, you’re not clueless so you may be disingenuous. There was a lot in these stories that was ‘fishy’ to people who’d been to Iraq and to people who know anything about the mechanics of how certain military things work.
You can claim otherwise until you’re blue in the face, but people raised specific claims pretty much immediately – and it appears that many of those claims bore out.
Yeah, it’s close to time to close this off; I’ll give it today and we’ll all move on.
A.L.
AL: Again (with feeling), let’s review what was “fishy” to these folks. First, they claimed SBT either didn’t exist or that he wasn’t in the military. When this theory didn’t pan out, it was on to Plan B which was to attempt to discredit elements of his story. This is where we got the argument (from someone who has never been in the military) that running over a dog with a Bradley was impossible. He had the proof in the form of a toy truck.
Next, we were treated to the “fishy” story that soldiers sometime say callous and reprehensible things. Nevermind “Hadji Girl” or the video of US soldiers teaching Iraqi kids how to say “F$ck Iraq.”
The fact is nether you or I know whether what SBT has written is truthful or all lies or somewhere between the two. I do know, from personal experience, that sometimes young servicemen (and women) act badly and/or do stupid things. Pretending otherwise is to present a cartoon version of the military. And I know, as JThomas points out, this episode is something the Army considers a “lose-lose” proposition. As a result, the Army is performing damage control as best it can.
Jadegold, you really don’t understand at all. It isn’t that those who found these stories to be less than credible believe that soldiers don’t do reprehensible things. It is that the stories did not have an authentic feel, or atmosphere, and had descriptions of events that didn’t match how things usually happen in the military. That was the reaction of many people who been there, done that and had the t-shirt. They read more like someone badly transcribing sea stories than actual experiences. And I suspect that that is what they were.
It is that the stories did not have an authentic feel, or atmosphere, and had descriptions of events that didn’t match how things usually happen in the military. That was the reaction of many people who been there, done that and had the t-shirt.
You mean folks like Michael Goldfarb and TIDOS Yankee? Sorry, but their time being there, doing that and wearing the t-shirt is exactly zero. The guy with the Tonka truck’s military time is nil as well.
The fact is you will find folks who actually have the t-shirt split on this issue. As Phillip Carter wrote in Slate:
Jadegold, let it go. The issue wasn’t that Beauchamp told stories about military folks saying and doing bad things; that’s accepted – they are human. I just finished a class with my son taught by three retired (or two retired and one waiting to be called back) Marines; they were pretty far from polite of politically correct; I could choose to emphasize those aspects of the class and make them sound like asses.
The reality was more complex, of course…
It’s that he told stories about military people doing bad things that didn’t read right. The specific facts Beauchamp described rang untrue – like bad fiction where implausible things happen for the sake of the plot. And stacking the implausible onto the implausible it got to a point where – unless you were invested in the “truthiness” of his stories – the doubts were too strong to just ignore.
My broader point about electing to publish this stands; but this isn’t about the media and its choices, it’s about the specifics of these articles.
A.L.
I can’t comment on how the stories would feel to somebody who’d been there, since I haven’t been there and I’ve only read little snippets of the stories. But what we have here is a story that felt wrong and had a bad tone.
What if it was a story that felt wrong and had a better tone? Like, I could probably write as well as Beauchamp did, making it all up from things I read. I could write about the guy who aimed a RPG at the HumV, and he was holding a 10-year-old girl in front of him. And my buddy had to shoot them both, and he was all shook up about it. How can those guys be so inhuman, did they think we’d just let him blast away at us because of her? And my buddy has been having nightmares, but he says we have to win because we can’t leave guys like that insurgent running things.
Anybody who’d been there could trip me up easily on details, and they’d probably announce I was a fake. Would very many people care? If I was just some kind of gloryhound pretending I’d been there when I hadn’t, and saying things that support the mission? I’m guessing that an attempt like that would be discredited pretty soon and it wouldn’t be a big deal. Because it didn’t make the army look bad.
Now say it was somebody who was really there, who wrote about bad stuff with a bad attitude, but it felt real. What then? Would there be any better response than to alert his superior officers that he’s in bad shape and needs counseling of one sort or another? That is, the response that would have been best for the military and for Beauchamp as soon as Beauchamp revealed who he was?
I think the outrage comes when he says things you don’t want to hear. And it helps then when people can say he’s fake.
A few thoughts.
1. The Beauchamp doubters keep returning to what Beauchamp wrote and TNR published. Are the claims credible, plausible, in accord with known facts, aligned with the standard procedures in the Army, the sort of things that happen in a war zone? Over and over, the judgments come back negative. In contrast, the Beauchamp supporters don’t contest the assertions and findings of the doubters. Instead, they argue that “whatever Beauchamp wrote, that might have happened” (that’s postmodernism applied to journalism), and “the people questioning Beauchamp have bad motives.”
2. Similar processes at work with the doubters of the TNR fact-checking claims, and the denial by Foer’s supporters that the TNR editors have done anything unethical.
3. In these sorts of debates, it’s generally possible to key into one of the major websites of one side, and quickly appreciate what the other side’s positions are. With the Beauchamp/TNR scandal, this holds true–but only in one direction. For instance, start with “today’s post at ‘Confederate Yankee’,”:http://confederateyankee.mu.nu/archives/236955.php and you can progressivley click back to all of TNR’s rebuttals and defenses. For contrast, start at “the latest post”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w070806&s=editorial081007 on TNR’s blog “The Plank,” and you’ll find defenses to charges… well, you won’t know what the range of charges are, or who made them (beyond a linkless mention of the Weekly Standard). Instead, you’re invited to rely on TNR’s retellings, which have been inaccurate, misleading, and tardy throughout this debacle.
4. Some people had their minds made up from the beginning, and that’s the way they are going to stay.
I think one of the commenters to that Confederate Yankee post has it right. The “driver’s license” byplay reads like gallows humor, not statements of fact.
4. Some people had their minds made up from the beginning, and that’s the way they are going to stay.
The fact is the Army could put all this to bed by simply releasing the results of the investigation and allowing Beauchamp to comment.
I find it extraordinarily odd (well, not really) that those who are asserting others have their “minds made up” are the ones who aren’t pressing for a full and open hearing of the facts. Instead, they have heard what they wish to hear and consider the matter settled.
Imagine–for a moment–the Army had come back and said ‘our investigation reveals Beauchamp’s claims to be completely accurate’–without any amplification. Do you seriously think the rightwing would take that as the truth?
And let’s be honest–the rightwing’s claims regarding this episode have been worse than inaccurate and misleading.
“Imagine–for a moment–the Army had come back and said ‘our investigation reveals Beauchamp’s claims to be completely accurate’–without any amplification. Do you seriously think the rightwing would take that as the truth?”
Well, for a moment lets assume ‘rightwing’ means, ‘tended to think that the TNR peice was inaccurate’.
In that case, I think, “Yes, the doubters would have been convinced had an official army spokesperson confirmed the story is accurate.” Considering that AL was nearly convinced as soon as TNR made the claim that other soldiers had confirmed the story, I think its pretty wierd to suggest that even the strongest doubters would not have been convinced by an official army statement.
Granted, I can see why the believers in the TNR story would not be as equally convinced by the Army’s claim that they found no evidence to support Scott’s claims, because at least the army has a plausible motive for denial.
However, to believe that they covered up this comparitively minor scandal when they have been public and forthcoming in much larger scandals requires a certain mindset I just don’t have. And given the army’s inability to cover anything up successfully even when someone was trying (I’m thinking Pat Tillman here), it’s hard to imagine that they’d bother trying now – especially if we are talking about a coverup that extends above company level CYA (and that only because if we assume that the story is true, then it must also be the company commander is an idiot.)
> Imagine the Army had come back and said ‘our investigation reveals Beauchamp’s claims to be completely accurate’–without any amplification. Do you seriously think the rightwing would take that as the truth?
Huh? “The rightwing,” I dunno. But your hypothetical would tell me that there would have likely been considerable merit to Beauchamp’s claims.
> And let’s be honest–the rightwing’s claims regarding this episode have been worse than inaccurate and misleading.
“The rightwing,” I dunno, again. In a grouping that includes every LGF commenter (or every dKos commenter on the other side), there will be some slight evidence to fit just about any preconcieved notion.
Let’s slim down the problem. I keep pointing to “Confederate Yankee”:http://confederateyankee.mu.nu/ as a source of serious claims against Beauchamp’s account, and against TNR’s handling of this case both pre-publication and in its aftermath. The “Confederate” (ugh) in the title tells us he’s “rightwing.” Further hint, the site’s slogan, “Because liberalism is a persistent vegetative state” (ugh).
OK, his rightwing bona fides established:
* What are the major claims regarding this episode that CY has made?
* Which of them have been rebutted by TNR/Beauchamp supporters?
* Which of them were worse than inacurate and misleading?
* And which major claims have proven to be correct, or have yet to be directly addressed by TNR?
> The fact is the Army could put all this to bed by simply releasing the results of the investigation and allowing Beauchamp to comment.
“Bill Roggio.”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2007/08/post_8.asp
In that case, I think, “Yes, the doubters would have been convinced had an official army spokesperson confirmed the story is accurate.”
We’ll have no way of knowing for sure but the track record of many in the rightwing speaks for itself. The Jamil Hussein story is another such example.
Granted, I can see why the believers in the TNR story would not be as equally convinced by the Army’s claim that they found no evidence to support Scott’s claims, because at least the army has a plausible motive for denial.
Again, I think you would be hard-pressed to find many who claim, with certainty, that STB’s articles are true.
The point being missed is that so many on the rightwing side are adamant that a full airing of the facts not be made.
_The fact is the Army could put all this to bed by simply releasing the results of the investigation and allowing Beauchamp to comment._
I think they’ve done much better at “putting it to bed” the way they did it.
_Considering that AL was nearly convinced as soon as TNR made the claim that other soldiers had confirmed the story, I think its pretty wierd to suggest that even the strongest doubters would not have been convinced by an official army statement._
You can hardly call AL typical. He’s often shown an admirable capacity to rethink his assumptions.
_However, to believe that they covered up this comparitively minor scandal when they have been public and forthcoming in much larger scandals requires a certain mindset I just don’t have._
Larger scandals have much more data. Like with Tillman, they had a body, an autopsy, a bunch of official statements by people who were there, etc. With Beauchamp it’s all undocumented and trivial. Like, suppose they wanted to investigate every example in the last 6 months where somebody in the DFAC insulted somebody else, to decide whether they were justified and whether to punish them for it. This particular insult may have been worse than usual, but by rights shouldn’t they investigate all of them? So in 6 months, 100+ guys, they can expect what, 200 insults? All of them undocumented, entirely he-said/he-said, mostly by guys who want to stay out of trouble but if they don’t report things that somebody else reported they might get in trouble for not reporting. But if they report things that annoy the brass they could get in trouble for that too. A whole lot of hoohaw for no good purpose. In a war zone. How important is it for the army to investigate this, and how important is it that they make sure it doesn’t happen again? I’d say the only priority is making sure it doesn’t happen again, whichever thing it was that happened.
Similarly, say somebody allegedly ran over some dogs months ago. *Maybe* there’s a video record that’s been saved that long. If not, what will they do? He-said/he-said. How does it advance their mission to waste a lot of time on this? What does it do to morale?
The only thing that makes the story important is the vast importance a bunch of right-wing bloggers have given it.
Jadegold:
Wrong again. Non-judicial proceedings against individual soldiers are not public information, and no one has the right to expect the Army to make them public.
Beauchamp can pick up the phone and tell TNR everything that happened. So long as he refuses to do so, the Army has no obligation or right to make him do so.
If their guy won’t talk to them, that’s TNR’s problem. Meanwhile, it’s fun to see how much time people spend telling everyone how this whole thing is no big deal.
In retrospect, it’s obvious that TNR should have stood by Stephen Glass instead of firing him. Why not? Who the hell cares?
J Thomas has it right.
There is no way a truly conclusive investigation could take place. If I was an enlisted man (or an O_1, O_2) and I was officially questioned as to whether or not I had made sport of running down dogs while on patrol months ago I would most definitely answer in the negative, regardless of the truth. So would would everyone else in the unit. Maybe I’d hedge and say that a dog or two may have been hit by accident. Maybe that the driver did swerve at the time the dogs were hit, but only in an attempt to avoid – not hit – the animals.
Ditto for all other of Beauchamps stories which are rumored to be disproven.
BTW I find AL’s repition of the mantra that Beauchamp’s stories smelled fishy to those in the know, despite Jadegold’s having provided evidence to the contrary, to be below board.
I second the notion that the military is famous for this sort of CYA and that when actual physical evidence and/or reliable (meaning non-coerced) witnesses exist the military often must go back on its story (e.g. Tillman, Jessica Lynch).
Short of the (now disproven) mantra that the storied felt wrong to those who would kbnow better and the shaky at best investigative efforts by the Army, there is no reason to conclude that Beauchamp is anything other than what he and TNR originally said he was all about.
Jadegold writes: “The point being missed is that so many on the rightwing side are adamant that a full airing of the facts not be made.”
To quote the Caveman in the Geico commercial … uh, what?
That makes absolutely no sense.
avedis, J Thomas, Jadegold —
Well, thanks for trying to explain your points of view. Having read and commented at TNR’s blog, “The Plank,” you’re pretty representative of the majority there.
I don’t think that you’ve answered any of the objections to Beauchamp and to TNR’s handling of the affair. Instead, we have high-number comments like #140, which read as though earlier-stated concerns had been settled on the side of Beauchamp and Foer. Unfortunately, it’s close to the other way around.
From the first 50 comments, I’d invite the reader who has jumped to the end to review #s 20, 23, 28, 42, and 45. My #49 summarized “my side’s” view–three issues which TNR’s apologists have yet to address.
From the thread’s tail, I’d ask the late-arriving reader to follow the two links in #136, and consider what they imply.
Beyond that, I won’t go over old ground again. Readers will look around and decide for themselves.
avedis – what?
“BTW I find AL’s repition of the mantra that Beauchamp’s stories smelled fishy to those in the know, despite Jadegold’s having provided evidence to the contrary, to be below board.”
I love the flat assertion of unproven – or disproved – fact here.
What ‘evidence’ did he suggest? I read Phil’s piece, which is as close to such evidence as I’ve seen out there. Nowhere in that piece did Phil suggest that reasonable people didn’t or couldn’t find Beauchamp’s story fishy. He is focused on the real issue that bad things do happen in wartime, and that proving that Beauchamp is a fabulist in no way invalidates the core truth of unpleasant war stories based on people being people.
What a crock. Virtually every milblogger, virtually every embed – you know – people with real experience in Iraq and the military – called the stories somewhere between implausible and fishy. I’d love a list of people – with boots-on-the-ground experience in Iraq – who didn’t.
Provide that, and you can talk evidence.
And the simple fact is that Beauchamp could pick up a phone and prove his claims – if he could – and no military bureaucracy could touch him because of his media star status. So let’s not talk about intimidation. He’d have a million-dollar book advance waiting for him when he got booted out of the Army.
A.L.
Avedis, I have to disagree with one point.
_…the (now disproven) mantra that the storied felt wrong to those who would kbnow better…_
Various people who would know said htat the story felt wrong to them. Somebody quoted one guy who’d know who didn’t say that the story felt right to him, but that the war is varied enough that you can’t really say what ought to feel right. He didn’t say it did feel right to him, he said things varied so much he couldn’t say it had to be wrong.
I don’t know how much faith to give to the real experts who say it felt all wrong. I can’t tell them they’re wrong to trust their own gut instincts. Philip Carter can say that, and leave me not knowing who to believe, but I can’t say it myself. So those guys might have a point.
And it’s fun to talk about the Tonka truck story, but that doesn’t prove anything. There can be idiots on all sides of any issue, and what they do doesn’t prove much at all about the issues.
If I spent a lot of time arguing about stupid things that Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter or guys on LGF said, what good would it do? There are probably people on DailyKos or some such place saying things just as stupid, and I ignore them because I don’t want to think about them. Say somebody kept telling me about some stupid thing some moonbad did, like it had anything to do with me — I’d get annoyed. Wouldn’t you?
Despite that, I still don’t get why people get so utterly outraged at Beauchamp. Not like he has the sort of audience Rush does. And my best guess is that there simply isn’t any good news from iraq to get distracted with, so they have nothing better to think about.
And yet, if somebody asked me why I’m spending so much time on this nothing story I’d have trouble saying. I guess I’m easily trolled.
_And the simple fact is that Beauchamp could pick up a phone and prove his claims – if he could – and no military bureaucracy could touch him because of his media star status._
I tend to doubt this. There are a million ways the bureaucracy could get him, if they wanted to. He could possibly spend the rest of his enlistment praying for the day he could get out — and he wouldn’t necessarily get a clock or calendar or window to help him guess when it would be.
No guaranteed million-dollar book sale. By the time he gets out people might have mostly forgotten him. And he probably doesn’t have anything really dramatic to say beyond what he’s already said, except about his punishments.
Here’s a minor old story about the bureaucracy. My father spent WWII helping to run a boot camp in texas. When the war was winding down the recruits drained away, and the base slowly closed down. Each week he’d get more extra jobs piled onto the jobs he already did, as the people who’d done those jobs before left. Finally some sergeant told him he was supposed to go to town on Sundays and pick up the mail. He was already working a lot harder than he had when the base was running smoothly, and he refused. “You’re not my sergeant and I don’t have to do what you want.” He said something like that. One of his jobs was pharmacist’s assistant. He’d done vaccinations, he’d done blood tests, he’d fed the K9 dogs, he’d inspected food, he’d tracked down a gastrointestinal epidemic, etc. The sergeant he’d denied had a say in Records. A whole group of pharmacist’s assistants had been scheduled to go to japan and participate in later stages of the invasion. After V-J day, all of them had their orders changed, there was no point. But then the day came, and it turned out all of them had their orders changed except him. He got sent to guam on an antiquated troopship, just him and a lot of supplies and such. He was seasick the whole way. The only way he could eat was to stand on deck beside the horses and look at the horizon, and eat some of the horses’ carrots. They weren’t expecting him on guam. They put him in an empty hospital ward and during the night a bunch of POWs flew in and got put in the same ward. He almost got to fly home with them the next day but it got straightened out in time. He got jungle rot but he didn’t meet up with any of the japanese soldiers who didn’t know the war was over and who didn’t believe we’d let them surrender. But he could have. He had a long time to think about it. His conclusion was, if you get orders from somebody outside you CoC, don’t say no. Try to delay, and report, and hope somebody in your CoC says no for you.
People served by bureaucracies can get anonymously fubared a million different ways. Usually you have various recourses. You can switch to a different bureaucracy, or sue, or make a big public stink, etc. Those are mostly closed off in the military. You have unofficial recourses, but if there’s a consensus you don’t deserve good treatment then those are closed off too.
Beauchamp could probably get on the phone and say whatever he wanted. And he’s probably been given a clear idea what’s likely to happen to him if he does. Not that there’s a cover-up. The army probably doesn’t know what happened and doesn’t much care. What they do know happened is that Beauchamp got a whole lot of civilians upset at him personally and he made his unit look bad. He can quite legally suffer various forms of “administrative action” and he can be put directly under the control of people who consider him the enemy for making them look bad.
Or maybe there are no consequences whatsoever, and he can gloryhog to his heart’s delight, and tell the New York Times and Pravda absolutely anything that comes into his head with no consequences whatsoever. I’m not there, I don’t know what’s going on. But I think some guesses are likelier than others.
This subject was discussed on Fox News Watch this weekend.
The discussion was notable only for the fact that Neal Gabler (formerly of TNR) claimed that Michael Goldfarb had falsely reported that Scott Thomas was not a soldier in Iraq. Anyone who actually read “the Weekly Standard articles”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2007/07/scott_thomas_speculation_conti.asp – as opposed to merely reading about them on leftist blogs – knows that Goldfarb reported no such thing.
Since not even TNR has accused Goldfarb of that, it’s interesting to see where people like Gabler get their non-information from these days.
Liberal columnist E.J. Dionne, on the other hand, “still gets his non-information from TNR”http://www.townhall.com/blog/g/01a7d315-b20f-4567-901d-0ef4f07b2e9e:
Or better yet, not deal with it.
#145 tells a good story, J Thomas. Your dad’s experiences do make a case for Beauchamp clamming up no matter what, at this point. So then we have to base our opinions on other aspects of the case.
This provides an explanation for Beauchamp’s recent silence, but doesn’t excuse Foer’s conduct during this affair. When questions were first raised, he could have said, “These are ‘Diarist’ pieces, we trust the author, but don’t really fact-check them–they are meant to convey impressions. Our oversight was to not put a disclaimer to this effect on our back page, which we’ll rectify starting with the next issue. And we’ll get back to you on the anecdotes being challenged.”
Perhaps Foer regrets not taking the embarassing and truthful way. But perhaps not–he seems to be immune to shame, and his string of misleading and unethical explanations haven’t cost him much among his base, at least yet.
Glen Wishard: In point of fact, Goldfarb’s initial posting on ‘Scott Thomas’ does indeed question whther ‘Scott Thomas’ is a soldier:
Further, many other rightwing bloggers did question whether ‘Scott Thomas’ was a soldier. As I noted, you had one suggest he was a former soldier who had been discharged some time previously. You had GreyHawk using some bizarre story about DFACs and chow halls to suggest ST was no soldier. And you had numerous rightwing blogs cal ‘ST’ a “purported” or “alleged” soldier often with ‘soldier’ appearing in quotation marks.
Beauchamp could probably get on the phone and say whatever he wanted. And he’s probably been given a clear idea what’s likely to happen to him if he does. Not that there’s a cover-up. The army probably doesn’t know what happened and doesn’t much care. What they do know happened is that Beauchamp got a whole lot of civilians upset at him personally and he made his unit look bad. He can quite legally suffer various forms of “administrative action” and he can be put directly under the control of people who consider him the enemy for making them look bad.
B*ngo. This is probably the closest to the truth of the matter. Being a PFC is pretty low on the food chain (IOW, you’re lower than whale dung); life can be made as miserable as possible without much trouble.
he could have said, “These are ‘Diarist’ pieces, we trust the author, but don’t really fact-check them-
This is a bit dishonest. AS TNR notes, they did get some corroborating background from STB’s fellow soldiers.
Perhaps TNR could have stated what they said in their “results of investigation”:
“[P]ublishing a first-person essay from a war zone requires a measure of faith in the writer. Given what we knew of Beauchamp, personally and professionally, we credited his report.”
> As TNR notes, they did get some corroborating background from STB’s fellow soldiers.
True–although Foer’s tortured syntax makes it unclear how many soldier or soldiers provided this corroboration, and what exactly was being confimed. Recall also TNR’s rigorous fact checking appeared to confirm the melty-faced woman in the FOB chow hall, until others pulled that anecdote down. Then it didn’t anymore.
>This is a bit dishonest.
Classy.
Jadegold, there’s a big difference between “reporting” someone isn’t a soldier and wondering why a soldier couldn’t tell a contractor from another soldier.
You’ve made quite a habit of playing word games here, haven’t you?
Jadegold, there’s a big difference between “reporting” someone isn’t a soldier and wondering why a soldier couldn’t tell a contractor from another soldier.
Really? The clear implication is that Goldfarb is casting doubt that ‘ST’ was actually a soldier. The implication didn’t leave open the possibility that it may sometimes be difficult to tell the difference between a contractor and military personnel. Instead, Goldfarb left open only one possibility: a soldier can always tell the difference and ‘ST’ could not.
Goldfarb is casting doubt…
Well, that’s exactly what he was doing. But that’s different from “reporting” that STB isn’t a soldier, which would be something like “We’ve located the guy who wrote this column, and we’re confident he isn’t a soldier.”
Reporting != suggesting, implying, casting doubt.
Rob, the proper thing for Goldfarb to have done would be to ascertain whether or not Beauchamp is a soldier. Then state, “Beauchamp is (is not) a soldier”.
Using inuendo to slant perception and to smear is a terrible way to go about the business of “reporting” “news” and is devoid of class (not that this story is really newsworthy in the first place).
I don’t disagree that actual reporting is far superior to innuendo. But that’s exactly why it’s wrong to describe one as the other.