So I said I’d take a shot at the Kerry speech I think he should have given, both about Vietnam and about VVAW.

I’m working on it, but first, let me take a moment to give some personal background that is certainly more than a bit relevant. As a good suburban family, we have a couple of picture walls in our house. One of the pictures is a water-damaged, grainy, B & W print of me…marching, with my organizer’s armband at an antiwar demonstration in May of 1970 in Westwood Village.

It was a successful demonstration; we got a good turnout, the police were overwhelming (giving us the media’s sympathy). Nixon had just revealed his invasion of Cambodia – which turned out so well, after all.

I helped organize other demonstrations against the war in college, but drifted away from the New Left for a variety of reasons (many of which I touch on in my blogging; my personal philosophy sadly hasn’t drifted much in 35 years). One of them was a point I made in a 1973 paper, in which I suggested that the New Left was flawed by the inescapable fact that it represented to many of its participants an adolescent rebellion against their parents instead of a meaningful effort to build a new politics. By 1972 or 3, I’d simply seen too much of it from the inside.I’m not ashamed of those stances today (although I’m glad no recordings exist – outside of some dank FBI storage boxes, I’m sure – of my rhetoric then). I say this for two simple reasons: 1) I was flat wrong about the threat posed by the Soviet Union and the Communist movement in the 50’s through the 70’s. I was in good company, but I was just plain wrong. The challenge was real, and had to be confronted, by force if necessary. 2) Vietnam was, however, the wrong place to do it. It was an unnecessary war. Ho Chi Minh had approached Harry Truman, asking for recognition and aid, and the Viet Minh had cooperated with the OSS in fighting the Japanese. In Ho’s words:

These security and freedom can only be guaranteed by our independence from any colonial power, and our free cooperation with all other powers. It is with this firm conviction that we request of the United Sates as guardians and champions of World Justice to take a decisive step in support of our independence.

What we ask has been graciously granted to the Philippines. Like the Philippines our goal is full independence and full cooperation with the UNITED SATES. We will do our best to make this independence and cooperation profitable to the whole world.

Any time for a decade or so after this – probably into the late 50’s or early 60’s – the U.S. could have taken the side of the Vietnamese people and supported their nationalist desires. We didn’t.

We got a Communist-backed war of national liberation. Our bad, we chose the French over the Vietnamese. Lots of good that’s done us…

My guess is that some people will agree with and understand my position; others will debate me but still find my positions understandable. I don’t see any unbridgeable gap between where I was then and where I am now, and I think that most people would agree that these positions and the change betwen them at least makes some sense. I was wrong about the threat posed by the USSR and China through their proxies. That makes me as wary about adopting Trent-like positions on the level of threat posed as about adopting the rosy views of John Quiggin – without careful examination of all sides. I was wrong before, after all.

But given that I do see a major threat coming from the Islamists – as evidenced by 3,000 dead who were mostly civilians – I do continue to think that the challenge is real and must be confronted.

That’s how I got from there to here.

Kerry needs to do at least this well in explaining how he got from antwar undergraduate to Navy officer with an ‘interesting’ record to a leader in the antiwar movement who told lies to a presidential candidate who supports the invasion of Iraq. He needs most of all to explain his ‘gentlemen’s heoism’ in service, and do it quickly.

Wow. Roger Simon (who’s been carrying the U.N. Oil-for-Palaces scandal) goes to New York and all of a sudden the New York Times gets bold about it.

Coincidence? I think not…

I’ve been watching the Kerry/Swift Boat Vets hoo-hah with some interest – mostly because it’s actually interesting to me to watch major-league hardball be played by people who are good at it on both sides.

I don’t clutch my chest and swoon over the moral outrageousness of it – either the claimed acts by Kerry or the attacks – because (I always seem to be referring to stuff I’ve already written – does that annoy people?) I’ve covered my position in some detail already:

It’s not a matter of doubt to me that Kerry – as much or more than Bush – used privilege, probably connections, and his knowledge and ability to manipulate the system to get himself what he wanted; possibly, in my estimation, to get his ticket punched so that, like his hero John Kennedy, he could campaign as a warrior.

Why does this matter? Not because I’m making a ‘Kerry is as bad as Bush’ argument (although I reserve the right to make it later). But it matters, because in truth if you look closely at the resumes of the thousand people in the country who could plausibly run for President, what percentage of them do you think have gamed portions of their careers?

I think that Kerry has a strong case in the form of his supportive crew. I think that the Swift Boat Vets have a strong case, given the specificity of their claims and the willingness of their witnesses to stand behind their claims with their names and honor.

Does this sway me on the election? Actually, the answer may surprise you. Yes, it does – but not because of what Kerry (and his troops) did thirty-five years ago. But because of what they’re doing today.

The stunning ineptitude of the Kerry campaign in dealing with this issue, in my mind, calls into question their ability to lead the country.

One of the first things a competent person does when they decide to run for office is to sit down and list the bases that their opponents will use to attack them. I’ve done it, and believe me, I’ll never be running for anything…but the stories I could tell!

Every one of Kerry’s Vietnam-era vulnerabilities was something I was aware of, and with ten minutes of Google research, I bet I can find a dozen national-level commentators who were aware of them as well.

The Swift Boat Vets have been unhappy with him for decades. His service in Vietnam, on it’s face, needs an explanation (four months, three Purple Hearts, no days off duty from injuries). His behavior after the war (Winter Soldier, VVAW, medals across the White House Gate) needs an explanation.

I don’t think that explanations would be that hard to make. If I have time tonight, I’ll try and mirror Noah Millman and draft the Vietnam speech Kerry should have given when he announced his candidacy.

He hasn’t made that speech.

He shows no signs of making that speech.

His handlers and spokesmen are reduced to fits of incoherence when confronted by the claims made about his service. What will they do in October when the claims – and video – of his VVAW speeches and activities are broadcast?

There are three major qualifications to lead this country. You have to have some idea where you want us to go. You have to make us believe you can take us there. And you have to be able to communicate, not only to articulate your vision and show your character but to respond to challenges and convince us that you have the capability to do so.

I’m not seeing it.

I’d like to.

Check out Gideons Blog’s draft of an acceptance speech for Bush.

That’s a damn good speech.

Randomly surfing today while I’m doing some writing, and a tripped over ‘ MY WAR – Fear And Loathing In Iraq‘ by milblogger ‘CBFTW.’

First of all, it’s a damn good blog – whoever this guy is, he’s a helluva writer. He conveys the immediacy, determination, and frustration he writes about incredibly well.

Other bloggers have pointed to him, so he’s only a discovery to me (if you haven’t been there yet, click on over and read a bit, you’ll be glad you did). But aside from discovering a good blog and a good writer, this kicked off an interesting round of thinking in me.

I’ve been wrestling for a while with a post on the ‘two Americas’ cliche. Yes, it’s a cliche, but sometimes cliches exist because they are true. I’m going up to West Los Angeles pretty much every day from my suburban home, and I really do see a huge cultural gap between the well-off residents of Brentwood, Venice and Santa Monica (my old haunts) and the South Bay, where I live now.I’ve written a bit about it before:

…I was having a late-night dinner at a terrible Italian restaurant in Long Beach, CA (wow, too awful to even allow me to remember the name), and the only other party was a group of “modern-Okie” aerospace workers … badly dressed, overweight, uncultured (they were talking excitedly about ‘The Bachelor’). The dads (two couples w/multiple kids) were apparently in the aerospace industry, and I had a jolt of realization … these were the families that built the airplanes that I fly around in, and millions of families like them build our houses, buildings, sewers, provide water and electricity, etc. etc. And I began to look at my own attitudes and wonder just why the hell I felt permission to look amusedly at them, and to wonder for a moment which team I was on, and which one I wanted to be on.

and in getting connected with all the amazing people in the military I’ve met through Spirit of America, most of them definitely were not on the same side of the cultural divide as my friends in Venice Beach.

CBFTW is.

Here’s his Blogger profile:

Interests

* drinking
* skateboarding
* reading
* music
* anti social behavior
* film
* culture
* politics
* San Francisco
* 80’s music
* Charles Bukowski
* whiskey
* Military History
* cult movies
* photography
* art
* punk rock
* abandoned buildings
* Your Mom
* dive bars

Favorite Movies

* Taxi Driver
* Swingers
* Say Anything
* Reality Bites
* Pretty In Pink
* Clerks
* Full Metal Jacket
* Breakfast Club
* Dirty Harry
* The Warriors
* Falling Down
* Texas Chainsaw Massacre
* Beat Girl
* Cape Fear
* Chopper
* Reservoir Dogs
* Pulp Fiction
* True Romance
* Barfly
* Apocalypse Now

Favorite Music

* JAZZ
* Blues
* punk
* harcore
* metal
* alternative
* grunge
* SLAYER
* 80’s music
* classic rock
* classical
* Social Distortion
* Rockabilly
* Sinatra
* Big Band
* everything.

Favorite Books

* Love is A Mad Dog From Hell
* Ham On Rye
* Catcher In The Rye
* On The Road
* Hells Angels
* Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas
* Steal This Book
* Anarchist Cookbook
* The Killer Inside Me
* Army Training Manuals and Field Manuals
* Ranger Handbook
* Jack Kerouac
* Hunter S. Thompson
* Hemmingway
* Naked Lunch
* James Ellroy

Here’s a guy as comfortable as I am hanging out at Skylight Books or searching for an old Social Distortion live album.

Maybe – just maybe – there are a lot of us trapped at the boundary between the two cultures. Maybe it’s the old guys like me who are so polarized, and many of the younger cohorts just don’t worry about it as much as we do.

That’d be good news.

More good news in the form of the response of his chain of command on discovering his blog.

He calmly looked up and told me that my shit was really good, and he liked reading my stuff, and that I was a good writer. He even mentioned something about including it in the units history and archives. That didn’t relieve me one bit, like I said, it made me more freaked out. I’m waiting for him to say the word: “BUT” followed by my punishment. Then we discussed things, and he pointed things out, and told me things. I agreed with 100% of everything he was saying, and the final conclusion from what he told me was that I could continue writing, but maybe have my Plt Sgt read my stuff before I post. He stressed that he didn’t want to censor me and that I still had the freedom of speech thing, as long as I wasn’t doing anything that would endanger the mission. I totally 110% agree with him on that one. I thanked him and I told him that I of course would not want to do anything that would endanger anybody here or back home, which is of course true. He suggested that I should look into getting this stuff published and made into a book someday.

Yes, the military continues to impress me.

In light of my earlier piece criticizing John Quiggins claim that the fighting in Najaf constitutes a ‘war crime,’ let’s go to Omar, at Iraq the Model (hat tip Instapundit):

The chief of Najaf IP, brigadier Ghalib Al Jazaeri was interviewed by Al Sharqyia TV today and gave some important statements. Mr. Ghalib confirmed the IP control over the majority Najaf and said that Al Mahdi militia are besieged in small areas. He also said that most of them are surrendering and that among the 1200 captured till now there are 1000 from outside Najaf (Basra, Kut, Amarah, Baghdad) and 4 of them were Iranians who confessed that they have joined the Mahdi army.

…his statement that most of the thugs were from outside Najaf rule out all the claims that this is an uprising, as if it was so then we would’ve seen the people of the city themselves revolting in large numbers but the fact is that Muqtada has gathered his criminals from many cities and focused on Najaf and Baghdad only because he knew he wouldn’t find enough people to support him had he depended on the people of Najaf alone. While the fights in other cities were small compared to Baghdad and Najaf and there was absolutely no fights in the rural areas which shows that the distribution of fighters was planned to focus on important areas only, and this ensures more media coverage which in my mind is one of the main goals of such movement, as it’s clearly supported and planned by outside parties which are dying to show Iraq as an unstable and hopeless place. Besides we all saw how the people of Najaf were delighted to see the IP control the city again in the previous revolt after many days of fighting. Also an uprising is a reaction rather than a planned action and here the percentage of the fighters from outside the city show clearly that this is closer to a planned revolt.

Note that Quiggin’s criticism was centered on the notion that we were fighting the residents of the community who were engaged in a spontaneous uprising based on the poor conditions and aimed at ousting the foreign occupiers.

Assuming Omar’s claim is true – and he’s closer to the action than John or I – my only comment must be that facts can be such annoying things.

Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin condemns the recent fighting in Najaf.

But what possible moral justification can there be for the two bloody campaigns against Moqtada al-Sadr?

If the figures reported by the US military are true, nearly 2000 of Sadr’s supporters have been killed by US forces (1500 in the first campaign launched by Bremer just before his departure and another 300 in the last couple of days). This is comparable with plausible estimates of the number of people killed by Saddam’s police state annually in its final years.

Boy, there is so much that I think is wrong about this post.

One interesting thing about modern thought – and I won’t necessarily characterize it as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ but instead ‘modern’ – is that the only calculus you can legitimately use is a very crude one. How many alive or dead? The ultimate measure of any policy becomes did it save lives?

There are at least two colossal problems with this.The first is that it ignores the question of whether there are values worth dying – and killing – for. Poland, France, and the UK could have avoided all those deaths in WW II, if only they had simply surrendered. If only President Lincoln had commanded the forces holding Ft. Sumter to simply strike the flag and come home.

You get the point.

It is clear, on one hand, that people often kill for trivial and shameful reasons. It is equally clear, to me at least, that we must sometimes kill for honorable ones.

The second problem, and sad fact, is that we can never know whether we saved lives or not – because events in the world of politics and warfare are ‘wicked problems,’ and so can’t be rerun like computer models with different assumptions.

Doonsbury today has a strip in which Mike has a daydream. He dreams:

“George Bush never became President!

“Not only that, we never invaded Iraq, killing thousands of civilians and turning it into a vast, new staging ground for terrorism!”

“And get this – it says we didn’t torture and kill prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo!”

“And look! We’re not hated around the world!”

“Nope! The American people are far more secure! And haven’t been polarized by a war that has cost nearly 900 U.S. lives!”

As a sidenote, it may be the case that it would be worth re-electing Bush for the simple reason that it might force Trudeau into retirement. On the other hand, if he were to promise to retire if Kerry were elected, he might sway my vote that way…

But back to my point. How does Trudeau know? How does one estimate what the world would look like in an alternate present? And, more important, when one runs his alternate present forward into alternate futures, what do they look like?

We’re dealing in a world where we can count our costs, but have no idea how to measure the benefits. And that’s one of the biggest failures, I believe, of the Bush Administration. They haven’t made it clear what we’re getting for the costs we’re bearing (as they haven’t been as clear as they should of what the true likely costs are).

Quiggin goes on:

These people weren’t Al Qaeda or Baathists, they were (apart from the inevitable innocent bystanders) young Iraqi men who objected to foreign occupation. Sadr’s militia is one of a dozen or so similar outfits in Iraq, and there are hundreds more around the world, quite a few of which have received US support despite having a worse record than Sadr’s. Moreover, there was no cause at stake that justified a war – the first started when Bremer shut down Sadr’s newspaper and the Sadrists retaliated by taking control of some police stations and mosques. The current fighting seems to have had even more trivial causes. It’s the willingness of the US government to send in the Marines that’s turned what would normally be noisy disturbances into bloodbaths.

You know, it’s always us causing the mess. But let’s skip that and point out that one of the primary criticisms of the occupation by war opponents such as Quiggin has been that we have not established order; that we have taken a country that was oppressed – but stable! – and knocked it backward into chaos and horror. Well defeating chaos and horror sometimes involves defeating – which means capturing, killing or otherwise rendering ineffective – those forces that would promote it. Sadr could have chosen a political route; instead he built a militia, and with it, took territory.

That territory is being retaken. One would think that if a pacified, orderly Iraq – and just possibly a free one – is the goal, this would be seen as a good thing. But instead, let’s blame the Marines for creating a bloodbath.

Let’s blame Lincoln and Churchill, too.

I was talking to a good friend this week who was giving me the what-for on why my house is so (relatively) small and my bank account so (relatively) light. He meant it in the best way possible, and he may be right that I should take a little while and focus on making more. But I replied that the last few years had given me the best asset of all – my sons.

And as I’ve been trying to think about what I can contribute to Good News Fridays, it occurs to me that the thing I need to do is start kid-blogging. My kids in part, because I’m stupidly happy with the people they’re becoming, but I’ll look around for neat or cute things that kids of all kinds have done and hold them up for your examination.When you worry that the world is going to hell in a handbasket (or, as a good friend puts it, “…when you wake up wondering ‘Why is it so warm, and what am I doing in this handbasket?’ “), it helps to look at the kids and the fact that they will outrun us.

And when you wonder what’s worth fighting for when things look bleak, the answer’s simple – their future.

So he’s the inaugural kid-blog, straight off my refrigerator.

Blue is the sky
Blue is the sea
Blue is kindness
between you & me.
Blue is water,
blue is tears,
blue comforts you when
all hope is nowhere near.
You can hear things
that are blue if you use
your ears.

-Littlest Guy, age 7

All over the news today is the release of teacher Mary Kay LeTourneau, who may be reunited with the now-of-age former student whose children she had.

I have my own six-degrees story about her – having met and dined with her late father, insanely conservative California State Senator John Schmitz.

He graced me with an insightful observation about modern partisanship I’ve carried around for a long time

When Moscone ran the Senate, he and I used to fight hammer and tongs all day, then go out and have drinks over dinner and laugh about it. We differed on where we wanted the boat to go, but we recognized that we were in the same boat. These new guys would gladly sink the boat rather then compromise.

but he was certainly a guy with issues of his own.

But the man who saw conspiracies everywhere, who was an equal opportunity bigot, and who decried America’s moral decrepitude, had, himself, a skeleton in the closet. It came to light in a curious way. An Orange County child abuse case in 1982 concerned a thirteen-month-old infant who was discovered with hair so tightly wound around his penis that the organ had nearly been severed. The baby was placed in protective custody, and the court demanded that the father step forward. It turned out to be none other than John G. Schmitz, now again a state Senator, paterfamilias of five children and, er, two others with his German mistress, once his student at Santa Ana.

One of the reasons I’m so resistant to calls for public enforcement of morality is that sad fact that so many of those who do so are moral failures on their own terms.

In my post at Armed Liberal, I suggest that “I’ll take as a given that the family had…issues….” Well, that appears to be true as well (from the same article as above):

…the Schmitz household was revealed to have been a chilly place, often under siege due to John’s latest atrocious remark. Mary Kay and her brother would sometimes play German marching music out the window to drown out angry demonstrators. Schmitz’s wife Mary was said by Mary Kay to be an unaffectionate mother who stressed personal appearance, counseling her daughter to always wear lipstick and even toenail polish. Mary was a vocal ally of Phyllis Schlafly, and appeared on TV to denounce the ERA. She stuck with her man to the end.

Eugene Volokh has an interesting essay on the different thinking about sex between an older woman and a boy as opposed to an older man and a girl. As a parent of three boys, it’s something I’m chewing on a bit. Our emotional reaction is somewhat different; but I know that I’d be mighty pissed off if my twelve year old were seduced by his teacher.

And I’ll also note that if – nine years later – he were to go off and build a real life with her, and be genuinely happy, I’d eat my words on toast.

So in the comments to my post below, encouraging energy efficiency, Trent and Joe are jumping up and down and suggesting that I’m somewhere between foolish and stoned.

Which may be true.

But which doesn’t change the validity of my core policy argument, which rests on three legs:

# the most secure energy we can create is the energy we don’t use, and it’s possible – through some modest changes in lifestyle and in better engineering on what we consume – to enjoy pretty much the life we lead now while using substantially less energy per person and dollar of GDP. I tossed out 20 – 25% as a good target for that.# this is a good thing to do, for three basic reasons: a) it will shelter our economy – relative to the rest of the world’s economies – from interruptions in supply or spikes in price, both of which are likely as the Middle East works out it’s problems with or without our help and guidance; b) it will allow us to pick and choose where we buy our energy from – which may not help when it comes to price spikes (see above) but will make us relatively invulnerable to interruptions caused by shutting off the ME oil spigot; c) it will lessen the damage to the world economy from interruptions in supply, as there will be more ‘headroom’ in the markets; d) it will give us more of the moral high ground in discussion about the future of the Middle East, as we take concrete (and expensive) steps to demonstrate that we’re not killing Arabs to ensure that we have cheap gas to burn in our SUV’s.

# that the “don’t conserve” alternative has to be examined and priced out as well. As many of the same commenters who dinged me noted, increases in demand from a consumer society in China and India will wipe out the markets anyway.

Well, let’s go to the numbers again. Again, from www.eia.doe.gov, we get this Excel file that shows annual energy budgets by country.

In 2002, the US used 97.6 * 10^15 BTU. China used 43.2, and India 14.3.

Assume for a moment that China and India – each of whose populations in increasing at slightly more than 1%/year – start using 5% more energy each year. That suggests that in eight years, they’ll go from using a total of 57.2 (*10^15) BTU, to 84.4, for an increase of 27.3.

If the US consumption increases at about 1% per year, we’ll go from 97.6 to 105.7 – an increase of 8.1. But if, instead, we were to cut our consumption by 2% per year, we’d end up using 83.1 – for a swing of 22.7, almost enough to make up for the monstrous growth in consumption in China and India. And certainly enough to have a significant impact on the markets for energy worldwide.

As before, disagreements are fun, but they’re even more fun when based in facts (and occasionally arithmetic).

Do I think that we can conserve out way out of the Middle East crisis? Of course not, and I’ve never said so. I do believe that we’ll have far more freedom to act in the Middle East when we’re not worried that the Saudi’s will shut off the Middle East tap and lop 10% or so off our annual petroleum energy budget.