Napoleon Was Hitler's Genocidal Model, Historian Claims

I noticed the Daily Mail article on the new postmodern history of Napoleon yesterday, while searching Google for information on blacks in the military. Here's the introduction from the story, "The French Fuhrer":

Three days after the fall of France in 1940, Napoleon, lying in his marble tomb in Paris, received a visit from his greatest admirer.

Adolf Hitler, on his one and only visit to the French capital, made an unannounced trip to the tomb in Les Invalides.

In his white raincoat, surrounded by his generals, Hitler stood for a long time gazing down at his hero, his cap removed in deference.

He was said later to have described this moment as 'one of the proudest of my life'.
The next day, during his official sightseeing tour of Paris, Hitler again visited Napoleon's tomb to salute him.

Conscious that his hero was known to the world simply as Napoleon, Hitler boasted that he would not need a rank or title on his gravestone. 'The German people would know who it was if the only word was Adolf.'

Throughout the war, Hitler had sandbags placed around Napoleon's tomb to guard against bomb damage.

Wooden floorboards were laid across the marble floor of Les Invalides so that they would not be scarred by German jackboots.

Until recently, the French would have been incensed by any comparison between Napoleon and Hitler.

But to their rage and shame, new research has shown that France's greatest hero presided over mass atrocities which bear comparison with some of Hitler's worst crimes against humanity.
These reassessments of Napoleon have caused anguish in France. Top politicians backed out of official ceremonies to mark what was possibly Napoleon's greatest victory, the battle of Austerlitz, when Napoleon's Grande Armee defeated the combined armies of Austria and Russia in just six hours, killing 19,000 of their adversaries.

A street in Paris named Rue Richepanse (after Antoine Richepanse, a general responsible for atrocities in the Caribbean) has recently had its name changed to Rue Solitude.

Claude Ribbe, a respected historian and philosopher and member of the French government's human rights commission, has been researching Napoleon's bloodcurdling record for some years.

He accuses him of being a racist and an anti-Semite who persecuted Jews and reintroduced widespread slavery just a few years after it had been abolished by the French government.

These are some sweeping claims, and without reading the book, they sound plausible.

Still, the historical consensus on World War II and the Nazi Holocaust is that the scale and brutality of Hitler's anti-Semitic eliminationist program is unprecedented in modern times, if not world history. The Shoah represents the height of mass-based, mechanized, industrial-scale murder. Further, it is understood that the banality of death under the Third Reich represented a collapse of the Western Christian conscience of man. For these reasons, "never again" is the phrase of warning so that this enormity of man's inhumanity to man is never repeated in the world.

Again, I can't fully criticize Ribbe without reading his work. I looked for information on him and his research online, and there's not a lot. I did find a French blogger who had interviewed Ribbe, where he's quoted:

There are perhaps as many books written on Napoleon as the days since his death (somewhere around 67,500 days). But none of the books talk about the gassing and the slavery.

The French racism is very linked to Napoleon, so attacking Napoleon is the best way to attack racism. He’s the man who reestablished slavery. If the man who reestablished slavery is a hero in France, then it’s impossible to do anything.

If we look at Ribbe's slim Wikipdedia entry we find this:

Claude Ribbe (born October 13, 1954) is a French writer and "human rights commissioner" of Caribbean origin. In his book The Crime of Napoleon, Ribbe claimed that Napoleon's regime used sulfur dioxide gas for mass execution of more than 100,000 rebellious black slaves when trying to put down slave rebellions in Haiti and Guadeloupe, nearly 140 years before Hitler's holocaust.

Some of this account appears historically commensurate with extent records of the times, for example, the history of Haitian independence.

Yet, Ribbe's apparently a controversial figure in the historical profession (by his own account), and it's a stretch to go so far as allege that black Haitians were victims of genocide.

As in the case of American Indians, what happened in Haiti under French imperialism was not a genocidal crime but a tragedy of cultures in conflict. Specifically, French suppression of Haitians - while unspeakably violent - was of a design and scale far below the extermination of the Jews in World War II. Neither is excusable, but Ribbe's allegations of Napoleonic genocide represents an indictment of the entire French system of politics and power. Ribbe, then, falls in line with the postmodern turn in social history that sees the history of the West and the imperial project an irredeemable stain on the course of human history, and thus the justification for a reordering of power relations in contemporary politics, complete with reparations and war crimes remunerations from the state.

Most of all, by elevating Napoleon to the realm of Adoph Hitler, Ribbe minimizes the ranks of evil. If Hitler's no different from Napoleon, then neither is Radovan Karadzic.

But to do this is to refuse discernment on the most horrifying chapter of human destruction in the 20th century.

I never would never wish the fate of French colonialism upon the Haitian people. Nevertheless, the sweeping charge of genocide against Carribean slaves is logically innacurate and politically motivated. It's just too much.

Photo Credit: The Daily Mail

Decision to Stiff Landstuhl Was Obama's Alone

The postmodern lefties are trying to spin Obama's skipped Landstuhl visit as the Pentagon's fault:

I've just gotten clarification from the Pentagon on what really happened with regard to Barack Obama's canceled visit to an Army base in Germany, something the McCain campaign has been using to hit Obama since yesterday.

A Pentagon spokesperson confirms to me that because of longstanding Department of Defense regulations, Pentagon officials told Obama aides that he couldn't visit the base with campaign staff. This left Obama with little choice but to cancel the trip, since the plan to visit with campaign aides had been in the works for weeks.

Note how this is an unnamed Pentagon source, which is strange, as the matter's straightforward Defense Department policy, not top-secret classifed information.

There's no link at TPM other than Jeff Zeleny's piece at the New York Times, "The Cancellation of Obama’s Troop Visit."

Here's the key passage from Zeleny:

Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, issued a statement emphasizing that the Pentagon did not cancel Mr. Obama’s visit.

“Senator Obama, in his official capacity, is always welcome to visit Landstuhl or any other military hospital. But it is not permitted to bring with him campaign staff. His team was notified of that, and they made a decision not to visit the hospital. But we were ready and willing to host him there. In fact, we had made arrangements for his campaign plane to land at Ramstein, and to take care of the campaign staff and press in a passenger terminal there, while the senator and senate staff, if he liked, went on to visit wounded warriors. They made a decision based on their own calculations not to visit. Senator Obama, like any other member of the senate, is always welcome to visit our wounded warriors or our military hospitals around the world. But they do so in their official capacity, and not as a candidate. He can come in and bring senate staffers as well, if he likes, but campaign staffers and press are not permitted to accompany him. That would be a violation of DoD directives.”

There you have it. The Pentagon did not cancel Obama's visit.

No one is responsible for this disaster but Barack Obama and his incompetent advance team.

But note TPM's pathetic spin attempt:

It's unclear how Obama could have made the visit at all, given the Pentagon's directives. No Senate staff was on the trip, and the Obama camp says they received the Pentagon's directives on Wednesday, after they were already abroad.

Bottom line: We're not seeing any issue here at all.

No issue at all? You've got to be kidding! Obama could have visited the troops by himself, with a military escort. And we do have transcontinental telecommunications. A simple phone call takes care of those "Pentagon directives."

I'm simply flabbergasted sometimes at the lengths the postmodern left will go to reduce uncontestable facts to some squishy dream world of illusion.

Maybe Talking Points Memo doesn't even read the stories to which they link?

But, more likely, this is an attempt to provide a postmodern narrative for the press, with the intended effect of washing Obama's massive military misstep away.

I shouldn't be surprised, that's for sure, since as Dr. Sanity notes, the standard recipe for postmodern talking points is to completely ignore reality, reason, and truth:

Those who live in the wonderful world of denial go through their daily lives secure in the knowledge that their self-image is protected against any information, feelings, or awareness that might make them have to change their world view. Nothing - and I mean NOTHING - not facts, not observable behavior; not the use of reason or logic; or their own senses will make an individual in denial re-evaluate that world view. All events will simply be reinterpreted to fit into the belief system of that world--no matter how ridiculous, how distorted, or how psychotic that reinterpretation appears to others. Consistency, common sense, reality, and objective truth are unimportant and are easily discarded--as long as the world view remains intact.

Most people want to believe there's an objective reality.

Unfortunately, in the left's version of relative truth all matters of substance are reduced to a subjective new age spin, with the effect in this case being to abuse the troops for political purposes.

Change we can believe in...

Media Hypocrisy on John Edwards Love Child Shocker

Fox News is now confirming the National Enquirer's breakthrough story on former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards' love child:

A hotel security guard told FOXNews.com he intervened this week between a man he identified as former Sen. John Edwards and tabloid reporters who chased down the former presidential hopeful after what they're calling a rendezvous with his mistress and love child.

The Beverly Hilton Hotel guard said he encountered a shaken and ashen-faced Edwards — whom he did not immediately recognize — in a hotel men's room early Tuesday morning in a literal tug-of-war with reporters on the other side of the door.

"What are they saying about me?" the guard said Edwards asked.

"His face just went totally white," the guard said, when Edwards was told the reporters were shouting out questions about Edwards and Rielle Hunter, a woman the National Enquirer says is the mother of his child.

The guard said he escorted Edwards, who was not a registered guest at the hotel, out of the building after 2 a.m. Edwards did not say anything while he was escorted out, said the guard, adding that at times the reporters on the scene were "rough on him," sticking a camera in his face and shouting questions.

The guard did not recognize Edwards at the time of the incident, but said he concluded it was the 2008 presidential hopeful after hearing reports about the incident and finding an Enquirer reporter's notebook at the scene.

I have been waiting to report on this, as the story first appeared as unsubstantiated rumors. But there's much more credible reporting on the story now, for example, Captain Ed at Hot Air.

Betsy Newmark has also been hot on the trail with a post today, as well as on Wednesday, where she wrote:

If this story about John Edwards is true, and the National Enquirer really seems to have the goods on him, all I can marvel at what a total sleaze he is. While I might be crass enough to get some shivers of schadenfreude at the description of him ducking into a hotel bathroom in the early morning to escape National Enquirer reporters and photographers and waiting for hotel security to escort him out of the bathroom, I can't help thinking of his poor wife and small children. And there is also his newest child to feel sorry for. It's always the innocent who suffer the most in these sorts of stories.

If the National Enquirer is correct, his girlfriend (are mistress and love child passé terms these days?) was six months pregnant in December 2007. Do the arithmetic. He and his wife announced that her cancer was back in March of that year and he must have been out working on his second family just a few months later. And it was all during the campaign last year when he still might have had a chance at the nomination. What is it with these politicians that they think they're immune from standards of normal decency?

We'll be able to trace the parameters of a feeding frenzy when it involves both a Democratic politician and a sex scandal uncovered by the Enquirer. Will the MSM give it the same sort of focus that they gave the arguably lesser scandals involving Larry Craig and Mark Foley? Will it travel the path from the National Enquirer to Drudge to the blogosphere to talk radio to cable TV to the MSM? Or will this story be limited to the fringes of the media? Byron York reminds us of how the media ran with the story of Rush Limbaugh and oxycontin that had been broken by the Enquirer. Mickey Kaus, who has been talking about this story since it first broke last year wonders if this will be

the first presidential-contender level scandal to occur completely in the undernews, without ever being reported in the cautious, respectable MSM? That's always seemed an interesting theoretical possibility--a prominent politician just disappears from the scene, after blogs and tabloids dig up dirt on him, but nobody who relies on the Times, Post, network news or Mark Halperin has the faintest idea why.

I'm cynical enough about the MSM to think that this story won't break through their protective ranks. If they can barely bring themselves to cover the Republican nominee for president, are they really going to take time from Obama's travels and adulation abroad in order to report a scandal about a Democratic politician?

This is the same press that's now contributing to the Obama campaign by a ration of 100-to-one over John McCain. (Source: "Putting Money Where Mouths Are: Media Donations Favor Dems 100-1").

See also, Roger Simon, "Getting Rielle - The Enquirer Files a Criminal Complaint in Edwards Love Child Case."

Landstuhl is Public Relations Disaster for Obama

Barack Obama's cancelled visit to Rammstein and Landstuhl U.S. military bases has turned out to be an ultimate public relations disaster.

Indeed, the presumptive Democratic nominee is now seeeking to atone for his callousness personally calling wounded soldiers at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center:

Obama made phone calls to wounded soldiers at Landstuhl Germany this morning, in lieu of a personal visit to the forces that was canceled by the Obama campaign.

Obama was expected to speak to a number of soldiers individually.

Also, Captain Ed shows that Obama scrubbed the troop visit after learning that he wouldn't be able to bring a media entourage to boost his campaign:

NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski and Courtney Kube get the skinny on the abrupt cancellation of Barack Obama’s visit to Landstuhl and Ramstein yesterday. The campaign tried to excuse it by claiming that it wouldn’t be appropriate to visit while on a campaign-funded portion of his trip, but that wasn’t the real problem. When Obama found out he couldn’t use the visit as a photo op, he canceled:

One military official who was working on the Obama visit said because political candidates are prohibited from using military installations as campaign backdrops, Obama’s representatives were told, “he could only bring two or three of his Senate staff member, no campaign officials or workers.” In addition, “Obama could not bring any media. Only military photographers would be permitted to record Obama’s visit”....

In fact, those same rules applied for the CODEL trip to Iraq and Afghanistan. They serve to keep politicians from exploiting military facilities for political reasons, and to ensure that all visitors get treated fairly. Andrea Mitchell, also of NBC, complained of this very issue during the earlier visits with the troops when she told Chris Matthews that the media couldn’t get access to Obama when visiting troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This makes the decision track very clear. Obama and his team set up the visits to military installations before going overseas. After seeing how the media got excluded in Iraq and Afghanistan, they decided it wasn’t worth traveling to Ramstein and Landstuhl to visit the severely wounded troops because they couldn’t bring the campaign and get the photo ops they wanted. Instead, Obama went shopping in Berlin.

As I noted yesterday, Obama's completely indifferent to the sacrifice and valor of U.S. military personnel.

I seriously doubt a few phone calls will heal the widening rift between the Democratic nominee and members of the armed forces.

See also, Rasmussen Research, "Military Veterans Favor McCain 56% to 37%."

Antiwar Hypocrisy on Iraq

Ralph Peters hits a home run with his analysis of antiwar hypocrisy on the Iraq war:

AM I the only one who's noticed the silence? Mere months ago, left-wing bloggers and demonstrators were wailing Support our troops, bring them home! seven days a week.

Now their presidential candidate has announced that he won't bring all those troops home, but will simply transfer combat forces from Iraq to Afghanistan - expanding that war. (He's discussed possibly invading Pakistan, too.)

And the left's quiet as a graveyard at midnight.

Where are the outraged protests from MoveOn or the DailyKos? I thought the extreme left felt sorry for our service members in harm's way and wanted to reunite them with their families.

What happened?

We all know exactly what happened. The left has nothing against foreign wars (as long as they don't have to fight in person). They just want to pick our wars themselves.

The problem with Iraq wasn't that America toppled Saddam Hussein, but that George W. Bush did it. I've been saying it for years: Had Bill Clinton done the job, the left would've celebrated him as the greatest liberator since Abraham Lincoln.

There's more at the link.

See also, Kathleen Parker, "Pride Clouds Obama's Vision."

Obama's Challenge is at Home

As I noted last night, Barack Obama "is struggling back home to pull out a lead in public opinion over the presumptive GOP nominee John McCain."

It turns out that Peter Nicholas, at this morning's Los Angeles Times, offers a front-page analysis of Obama's dilemma, "Obama's Path to Presidency is Far From Clear":

Even as his turn on the global stage hit an emotional peak Thursday with a speech before a cheering crowd of more than 200,000 in Germany, Barack Obama faced new evidence of stubborn election challenges back home.

Fresh polls show that he has been unable to convert weeks of extensive media coverage into a widened lead. And some prominent Democrats whose support could boost his campaign are still not enthusiastic about his candidacy.

Several new surveys show that Obama is in a tight race or even losing ground to Republican John McCain, both nationally and in two important swing states, Colorado and Minnesota. One new poll offered a possible explanation for his troubles: A minority of voters see Obama as a familiar figure with whom they can identify.

Republicans are moving to exploit this vulnerability, trying to encourage unease among voters by building the impression that Obama's overseas trip and other actions show he has a sense of entitlement that suggests he believes the White House is already his.

In Ohio on Thursday, McCain hit that theme: "I'd love to give a speech in Germany . . . but I'd much prefer to do it as president of the United States, rather than as a candidate for the office of presidency."

Obama also faces discontent from some of Hillary Rodham Clinton's most ardent supporters, who are put off by what they describe as a campaign marked by hubris and a style dedicated to televised extravaganzas.

Susie Tompkins Buell, a major Clinton fundraiser, said: "The Clinton supporters that I know are bothered by these rock-star events. These spectacles are more about the candidate than they are about the party and the issues that we care about."

Obama is to return home Saturday after a nine-day trip that has produced some of the most memorable images of the campaign. Speaking in Berlin before a sea of young faces, the presumed Democratic nominee echoed a famous line from President Reagan, who, at Brandenburg Gate, implored Soviet counterpart Mikhail S. Gorbachev to "tear down this wall."

"The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down," Obama told the warmly enthusiastic crowd in Tiergarten park. He spoke from a stage constructed near the Victory Column, a soaring monument to Prussian military triumphs.

Powerful as the image was, back home some voters wondered whether the trip was necessary. Both Obama and McCain had been invited Thursday to a cancer forum organized by cyclist Lance Armstrong's foundation at Ohio State University.

McCain showed; Obama did not. Some in the crowd took notice.

Ann Marie Jones, a stay-at-home mother whose 10-year-old son was diagnosed with cancer in September, said she had leaned toward Obama "until he didn't show up tonight."

"I feel like I understand what he's doing over there, but I think he needed to be here tonight for this," she said.

The public disappointments with Obama's priorities are not likely to simmer down soon. The Illinois Senator frequently appears indifferent to key constituencies, whether it be cancer patients or American military service personnel.

Perhaps out of pride, hubris, or even megalomania, Obama seems handicapped in his ability to connect with ordinary Americans.

These liabilities may be in play in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, where McCain is leading in public opinion, on the strength of domestic policies, such as offshore drilling for oil.

On military issues, Obama's indifference to the troops poses additional problems. According to Rasmussen's new survey, "Military Veterans Favor McCain 56% to 37%," Obama's overseas tours to Afghanistan and Iraq did little to build confidence among veterans that the Illinois Senator's strong on national security or interested in the welfare of the troops.

Related: "Just Hours Later, Obama Campaign Uses Berlin Speech to Raise Campaign Cash."

Photo Credit: "Obama, Vague on Issues, Pleases Crowd in Europe."

Voters Uncomfortable With Obama on Values, Experience

Amid the virtually unprecedented worldwide adulation for a U.S. presidential nominee, Barack Obama is struggling back home to pull out a lead in public opinion over the presumptive GOP nominee John McCain.

A number of polls in recent days have found Obama holding a slight lead in presidential match-ups, often within statisticals margin of error. Gallup reported yesterday that Obama held "a modest 4-point lead" over McCain.

Today's Wall Street Journal, importantly, notes that Americans are deeply uncomfortable with the Illinois Senator, questioning his values and fidelity to nation:

Midway through the election year, the presidential campaign looks less like a race between two candidates than a referendum on one of them - Sen. Barack Obama.

With the nominations of both parties effectively settled for more than a month, the key question in the contest isn't over any single issue being debated between the Democrats' Sen. Obama or the Republicans' Sen. John McCain. The focus has turned to the Democratic candidate himself: Can Americans get comfortable with the background and experience level of Sen. Obama?

This dynamic is underscored in a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. The survey's most striking finding: Fully half of all voters say they are focused on what kind of president Sen. Obama would be as they decide how they will vote, while only a quarter say they are focused on what kind of president Sen. McCain would be.

The challenge that presents for Sen. Obama is illustrated by a second question. When voters were asked whether they could identify with the background and values of the two candidates, 58% said they could identify with Sen. McCain on that account, while 47% said the same of Sen. Obama. More than four in 10 said the Democratic contender doesn't have values and a background they can identify with....

The excitement and the uncertainties about the Obama campaign flow from his unusual personal profile. Not only is he the first African-American to win a major party's nomination: He also was raised by a single white mother, spent his formative years in Hawaii and Indonesia, got an Ivy League law degree, has been in the Senate less than four years, attended a controversial African-American church, and is married to a strong professional woman who has stirred up some controversy herself.

Interviews with voters suggest that while many who seek change in the White House are excited by that profile, others will need time to digest it - and some may never do so.

Another key finding is that by a margin of 53-to-19 percent, voters found McCain more "knowledgeable" and experienced."

Note too that Obama's world tour has not generated a bump in public opinion for the Illinois Senator, as Fox News reports:

The significant news coverage Barack Obama is receiving on his foreign trip has not translated into a bounce in his numbers, a just-released FOX News poll shows. Obama now holds the slimmest possible edge over John McCain, leading by just 41 percent - 40 percent in a head-to-head contest. In fact, Obama’s support is down slightly from his 45 percent - 41 percent advantage last month.

See also, Gallup's most recent tracking poll data, "Obama Maintains Slim Edge Over McCain."

What can we make of all this?

Well, considering that Obama's currently enjoying superior press coverage relative to McCain - big media's contributed to Obama 100-to-1 over McCain in the money race - Obama's weakness in publc opinion portends serious political liablities.

The McCain campaign's opportunity is in exploiting the public's genuine insecurities on Obama, including questions of character, experience, integrity, and religon, not to mention domestic and foreign policy priorities.

Controversies surrounding Obama's patriotism are of further concern among traditional voters, folks who are resistant to Obama's elitism and absence of small-town values. On that front, the McCain campaign's already attacking Obama's commitment to the troops, following Obama's cancelled visit to U.S. military installations in Germany today.

The GOP would be smart to launch a "it's 3am and your children are asleep" media attack blitz upon Obama's return to the campaign trail next week.

Image Credit: Wall Street Journal

Obama Scrubs Troop Visit in Germany, Readies Transition Team

Via Hot Air, Barack Obama today cancelled a scheduled visit with deployed American service personnel in Germany, at Rammstein and Landstuhl U.S. military bases. Der Spiegel reports:

1:42 p.m.: SPIEGEL ONLINE has learned that Obama has cancelled a planned short visit to the Rammstein and Landstuhl US military bases in the southwest German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. The visits were planned for Friday. "Barack Obama will not be coming to us," a spokesperson for the US military hospital in Landstuhl announced. "I don't know why." Shortly before the same spokeswoman had announced a planned visit by Obama.

Note that the U.S. hospital facility at Landsthul is the premiere American armed forces medical center in Europe:

LRMC [Landstuhl Regional Medical Center] is the largest American hospital outside of the United States, and the only American tertiary hospital in Europe. We provide primary and tertiary care, hospitalization, and treatment for more than 52,000 American military personnel and their families within the center’s boundaries. The center also provides specialized care for the more than 250,000 additional American military personnel and their families in the European Theater.

The bulk of serious casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan are treated at Landsthul, and an Obama visit there would have sent a powerful message of support for America's fighting men and women.

Why'd the Illinois Senator blow off the troops? He wanted to party in Berlin:

Obama noted that in a break from his whirlwind schedule, "we've got some down time tonight. What are you guys gonna do in Berlin? Huh? Huh? You guys got any big. plans? ... I've never been to Berlin, so...I would love to tour around a little bit."

So here we have the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, who some are predicting that "this man will become the 44th president of the United States," putting a stroll along the Potsdamer Platz ahead of an up-close-and-personal visit the American grunts who are fighting and dying for our country.

The troops are noticing as well. Blackfive reported yesterday the disappointment of one enlistee in the USAF who saw Obama at Bagram Airbase, Afghanistan:

He got off the plane and got into a bullet proof vehicle ... As the soldiers where lined up to shake his hand, he blew them off and didn't say a word as he went into the conference room to meet the general ... I swear we got more thanks from ... the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders than from one of the senators, who wants to be the President of the United States...

Blackfive has more first-hand reports from troops in the field, "More Witness Email - Senator Obama's PR Tour."

It takes no great leap of imagination to tie Obama's indifference to U.S. military personnel to questions surrounding the Illinois Senator's patriotism. Some star-bangled European photo-ops with the troops would have gone a long way in helping Obama distance himself from his earlier controversies involving the Pledge of Alligiance and American flag pins.

But Obama's got no time for that. He's too busy taking in the European nightlife, not to mention assembling his presidential transition team.

Change we can believe in...

Army Integration: Bullets Don't Care About Diversity

Buck Sargent, at Mudville Gazette, takes issue with this story from CBS News, "After 60Years, Black Officers Still Rare":

Sixty years after President Truman desegregated the military, senior black officers are still rare, particularly among the highest ranks....

The rarity of blacks in the top ranks is apparent in one startling statistic: Only one of the 38 four-star generals or admirals serving as of May was black. And just 10 black men have ever gained four-star rank - five in the Army, four in the Air Force and one in the Navy, according to the Pentagon.

The dearth of blacks in high-ranking positions gives younger African-American soldiers few mentors of their own race. And as the overall percentage of blacks in the service falls, particularly in combat careers that lead to top posts, the situation seems unlikely to change....

Army Lt. Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq, [acknlowdges the] concerns.

"It's all about how many people you put in the front end of the pipe," Austin said in an interview from Baghdad. "It's very difficult for anybody to get to be a colonel or general in any branch of the service if you don't have enough young officers coming in."

Austin took the combat path to his three-star rank, starting as an infantryman and tactical officer. Later - as a general officer - he commanded troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The forces he sees now, he said, are far more diverse than when he graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1975. Then, he said, blacks made up only about 2.5 percent of the Army's officer corps.

"We treasure diversity because it brings in a lot of different viewpoints and blends in a lot of cultures," he said. "It makes us better."

Here's Sargent from Mudville:

I have so many problems with this article that I'm not even sure where to start. Last time I checked, a bullet didn't care what color you were, and in my time in the Army I've encountered very few soldiers who did either. If the Army isn't the most colorblind institution in America, I'd be hard pressed to name another. I can't speak for the other service branches, but I have no reason to believe they'd be much different....

My young son will not be raised to "treasure diversity," whatever that meaningless feel-good phrase is even supposed to mean anyway. He will be taught that the only "cultural blend" that is important is the uniquely American culture of political, economic, and individual freedom, and self-sufficiency from government. If he so chooses to serve in the Armed Forces of the United States, he will be instructed that service is the operative word. As in, selfless service, not self-service.

See also, United States Army, "Army Commemorates 60th Anniversary of Armed Forces Integration."

McCain, Obama, and the "Shorthand" of the Surge

Here's John McCormack's comment on McCain and the surge from yesterday morning:

The "surge" ... is often shorthand for both the addition of U.S. troops as well as the adoption of a counterinsurgency strategy.

Debate on this shorthand is currently raging across the left blogosphere.

Matthew Yglesias says, for example:

So John McCain said the surge led to the Anbar Awakening even though the Awakening, in fact, happened before the surge began. So he's ignorant. Or maybe dishonest....

Shawn Brimley tries to bring common sense to bear on this: "The word "surge" has always been used to as shorthand referring to President Bush's decision to deploy about 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq in early 2007, the first of which did not arrive in Iraq until later in the spring." McCain is arguing, I guess, that "the surge" doesn't refer to the manpower boost more formally termed the "surge of forces" by the military. Instead, "surge" is, perhaps, short for "counterinsurgency."

The main problems here would be that nobody uses "surge" that way...

Well, that's not correct.

Security studies experts do indeed use the term as a "shorthand" for the Bush administration's overall combined military AND political adjustments designed to bring order and progress to the Iraq deployment.

For example, in "The Price of the Surge," the lead article from the May/June 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs, Steven Simon noted:

In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new approach to the war in Iraq. At the time, sectarian and insurgent violence appeared to be spiraling out of control, and Democrats in Washington - newly in control of both houses of Congress - were demanding that the administration start winding down the war. Bush knew he needed to change course, but he refused to, as he put it, "give up the goal of winning." So rather than acquiesce to calls for withdrawal, he decided to ramp up U.S. efforts. With a "surge" in troops, a new emphasis on counterinsurgency strategy, and new commanders overseeing that strategy, Bush declared, the deteriorating situation could be turned around.

Thus, while there are technically discrete elements in the overall approach to strategic adjustment in Iraq, it's generally understoood that reference to the "surge" implies a macro-analytical concept, and the direction of success is evaluated by unpacking the various components in the military/political balance and making additional revisions .

Of course, the whole debate's something of a smokescreen hiding the fundamental issues: Victory in Iraq's impending, and the left forces are out to portray John McCain as a bumbling, fumbling old man, confused about the facts on the ground. This meme combines with a second thrust currently in play on the Iraq debate: that victory in Iraq means American troops can come home, and that Barack Obama's 16-month withdrawal plan is the ticket to "responsibly" ending the deployment.

All of this spin is geared to smothering the fact that Obama's been consistently wrong about the mission in Iraq, and thus his judgement as commander-in-chief is questionable. This strange turn of events sees those who not only opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, but who resisted the initial surge of troops while endlessly announcing the failure of the increase in troops, as the beneficiaries of the administration's resolve and McCain's forbearance.

The New York Times puts it all in perspective:

Conducting a presidential campaign in the middle of a war is somewhat unusual, and several foreign policy experts lament that a great deal of nuance and thoughtful discussion is lost in the political back-and-forth.

If Mr. McCain found himself criticized for seeming to confuse the chronology of events in Iraq, some analysts said Mr. Obama seemed to be giving too little credit to the surge for improving conditions in Iraq. Mr. Obama, who opposed the Iraq war, said in an interview with “Nightline” on ABC this week that if he had to do it all over again, knowing what he knew now, he would still not support the surge.

Mr. O’Hanlon, of the Brookings Institution, said he did not understand why Mr. Obama seemed to want to debate the success of the surge. “Any human being is reluctant to admit a mistake,” he said, noting that it takes on added risk in a political campaign.

And Anthony H. Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the political debate did not always illuminate the issues very well. “There are times, I think, where maybe we really ought to step back from this semantic horror show, and remember that this is a political campaign, it is posturing,” Mr. Cordesman said. “Would anyone want either presidential candidate to keep any promise they made today if reality was different in January, or in any point afterwards?”

That's it, then.

An unenlightening semantic debate, which is the forte of left-wing partisans, who've consistently opposed most everything geared to success in Iraq and peace for the Iraqi people.

Here's more examples, from the Huffington Post, "Depends on What the Meaning of the Word 'Is' (Surge) Is," and MyDD, "Depends What The Meaning of "The Surge" Is."

Okay, if ya'll say so...

Barack Obama and the Surge in Iraq

I'm betting the claim that Barack Obama was right about Iraq all along will be the dominant hard-left foreign policy meme throughout the fall.

In the postmodern world, neither the Bush administration, Senator John McCain, nor General David Petraeus deserve credit for the improvement of security in Iraq and the shift toward political accomodation. Indeed, for left-wing partisans, the increase in troops was never good policy, and an Obama administration will finally do the right thing with an immediate troop drawdown next January.

The challenge for the McCain campaign will be beat back that spin by successfully demonstrating Barack Obama's inferior judgment on war policy.

This morning's USA Today provides the talking points, noting that Obama's been spectacularly wrong about the surge:

In January 2007, America's adventure in Iraq seemed like a chaotic failure. The country was riven with sectarian violence, and al-Qaeda in Iraq had gained a foothold in western Anbar province. Attacks on U.S. troops were running well over 1,000 a week, and Iraqi civilians were dying at a rate of more than 3,000 a month.

In that context, President Bush's announcement that month that he planned to "surge" more than 20,000 extra U.S. troops into Iraq felt to many critics, including Sen. Barack Obama, like doubling down on failure.

A year and a half later, though, violence is down dramatically and there's a cautious hope that both the U.S. and Iraq could achieve an outcome once seemed out of reach.

The surge didn't do all of that; a cease-fire by Shiite militias and the switch by Sunni insurgents from attacking Americans to fighting al-Qaeda helped enormously. But the extra U.S. troops, brilliantly deployed by Gen. David Petraeus, have made a huge difference in calming the chaos. In doing so, it also contributed to the other developments.

Why then can't Obama bring himself to acknowledge the surge worked better than he and other skeptics, including this page, thought it would? What does that stubbornness say about the kind of president he'd be?

In recent comments, the Democratic presidential candidate has grudgingly conceded that the troops helped lessen the violence, but he has insisted that the surge was a dubious policy because it allowed the situation in Afghanistan to deteriorate and failed to produce political breakthroughs in Iraq. Even knowing the outcome, he told CBS News Tuesday, he still wouldn't have supported the idea.

That's hard to fathom. Even if you believe that the invasion of Iraq was a grievous error ... the U.S. should still make every effort to leave behind a stable situation. Obama seems stuck in the first part of that thought process, repeatedly proclaiming that he was right to oppose the war and disparaging worthwhile efforts to fix the mess it created. Hence, his dismissal of the surge as "a tactical victory imposed upon a huge strategic blunder."

The great irony, of course, is that the success of the surge has made Obama's plan to withdraw combat troops in 16 months far more plausible than when he proposed it. Another irony is that while Obama downplays the effectiveness of the surge in Iraq, he is urging a similar tactic now in Afghanistan.

As for the surge not producing sufficient political reconciliation in Iraq, it's true that efforts to integrate Sunnis into a Shiite-dominated political culture are only inching forward. But reconciliation takes many forms, and Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's military attacks against rogue Shiite militias in Basra and Baghdad's Sadr City were a hugely important signal to Sunnis....

Perhaps Americans don't expect their president to be right all the time. They do expect him to change course when he's proved wrong.

See also, "Candidates Spar Over Troop Surge and Iraq Chronology."

Image Credit: Michael Ramirez

The Commentocracy of Hate

"Okay, tell me something I don't know..."

This was my basic sense, while first reading through the Politico's feature article, "The Commentocracy Rises Online."

Except the article DID tell me something new.

The piece starts with the story of Erick Erickson of Redstate, who had his all of his personal contact information, including his work phone number, posted at Daily Kos in the comments thread:

Site moderators removed his information, but not before Erickson received a number of ominous phone calls and e-mail messages, including one from a writer who threatened to “rape my wife and unborn child.” He placed a call to the FBI in response, and nothing came of the threats.

“That was first time anything like that happened to me,” he says, “and I was really taken aback, but now it’s almost run of the mill.”

Behold the Commentocracy, where big ideas and rough remarks sit shoulder to shoulder, altogether transforming the nature of the Web and of journalism.

Okay, the "commentocracy." I'm hip ... the blogosphere's a rough place.

So rough, in fact, according to the Politico, that some top bloggers and mainstream news sites simply do without commenting - why waste the time and energy moderating a bunch of uncultured yahoos?

Not Daily Kos, though. Commenters there are essentially team members, community participants adding "content" to the blog:

Kos Editor Susan Gardner recalls her own hesitancy in posting comments when she started out as a reader on the site back in 2003. At the time, she says, there were only 8,000 users who had registered to comment, compared with more than 170,000 today.

Active commenters, though, remain a relatively small and self-selected group. “For every 10 who read,” Gardner continues, “one will sign up as a reader. And of every 10, only one will comment, and of every 10 who do, one will become a diarist.”

A ratings system allows readers to recommend their favorite missives, thus fashioning a commenting meritocracy, or at least hierarchy. “For the most part, what you do see is people are rising purely on merit or at least on popularity,” she said. “They’re giving community what the community wants, which is different than the outside world.“

Mindful that in the past, certain incendiary or inappropriate comments have been used, most famously by Bill O’Reilly, as though they represented the views of Daily Kos and all its readers, the community has vigilantly taken up the cause of self-policing against online dejecta, be it bigotry, impertinence or spam.

Frequent open threads on the front page offer commenters a high-profile outlet for whatever’s on their minds.

“Commenters aren’t just commenters on our site, like they are on Politico,” says Gardner. "They are creators of content.”

This is both revealing and highly significant.

As noted in "Progressivism Goes Mainstream?", Markos Moulitsas considers his blogging community as the mainstream of the Democratic Party, and the Kos kids certainly throw their weight around, for example, in pressuring the Austin-American Statesman to renounce its ironic front-page story covering last week's Netroots Nation convention.

The significance, though, is in what the Kos commentocracy signifies. While newspapers like the New York Times debate eliminating comment boards, the hate-filled threads at Daily Kos are considered legitimate intellectual content. The notion that Kos' comments are moderated is laughable. Sure, maybe some posts are taken down, but one can read entire threads, with hundreds and hundreds of comments, to find ready and vile examples of demonism.

Check out these examples from the Kos diary, "Lieberman Goes The Full Zell."

From "Dallas Doc":

Joe Lieberman has consistently advocated that Democrats respond to the lies, the manipulations, the tactical and strategic disasters of the Bush presidency by going along with everything the Boy King wanted. Not to do so, in Joe's mind, would cause vengeance to rain down on Democrats from the mighty Republicans. Is this not a doctrine of appeasement in its purest form?

Joe, of course, is consistent only in being a warmonger. He is a tool of right-wing Israeli politics, and a creature of defense industry contractors (big in CT). If our politics has descended to "Strong = eager to kill" then God help us all. He won't do much for Lieberkrieg.

And this one, from "Red State Progressive":

If Hell exists...

There is a special place for Joe Lieberman.

Also included are photoshopped graphic images, with one picturing Senator Lieberman as a "giant douche" bag, which is captioned, "No offense to douches intended..."

So, with Daily Kos we see the commentocracy as essentially the Wild West of secular demonology.

Where at others left-wing outfits, like the Huffington Post, the problem of hatred is recognized and remedied (Huffington Post frequently closes its entries to comments, for example, for its report on the Times Square bombing in March and after publishing its obituary for Jesse Helms more recently), at Kos the commentocracy of hate is celebrated as "creative."

Perhaps it might be the case that Daily Kos, and other "progressive" blogs will see their influence fade upon the accession of Barack Obama to power in January, should the Illinois Senator prevail in November.

It's wishful thinking to bank on such an outcome, but perhaps with a Democratic victory the demonology of progressive blogging will become little seen and not heard among the more civilized practitioners of online communications.

Anti-Militarism in the Academy?

Hugh Gusterson, at Foreign Policy, offers an interesting example of the anti-military ideology of the university professoriate.

As indicated at the essay, the United States is facing an exciting period in the history of the Middle East in which the Pentagon hopes to drawn on the wide-range of scholarly expertise found across the academy to inform foreign policy planning for a new era.

To meet the challenge, in April the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced the establishment of Project Minerva, a new public/private partnership to support basic research vital to the future security and well-being of the nation:

Throughout the Cold War, universities were vital centers of new research – often funded by the government – and also new ideas and even new fields of study such as game theory and Kremlinology. Federally funded low-cost loans and fellowships made graduate school broadly available for students like me.

As was the case at that time, the country is again trying to come to terms with new threats to national security. Rather than one, single entity – the Soviet Union – and one, single animating ideology – communism – we are instead facing challenges from multiple sources: a new, more malignant form of terrorism inspired by jihadist extremism, ethnic strife, disease, poverty, climate change, failed and failing states, resurgent powers, and so on. The contours of the international arena are much more complex than at any time during the Cold War. This stark reality – driven home in the years since September 11th – has led to a renewed focus on the overall structure and readiness of our government to deal with the threats of the 21st century.

Gusterson suggests that members of the academy, in earlier decades, became alienated from supporting Cold War research, particulary after the war and defeat in Vietnam:

At first glance, Minerva is a welcome breath of fresh air. Remember Donald Rumsfeld? The former defense secretary believed that technological dominance, not cultural understanding, was the key to victory in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But had Pentagon officials consulted anthropological experts on the Middle East before invading Iraq, they would have been warned that U.S. troops were unlikely to be greeted the way they were in France in 1945, and that, in the absence of Saddam Hussein, Sunnis and Shiites might well turn on one another.

Gates, to his credit, is much more interested than Rumsfeld was in mobilizing the human sciences in the “war on terror.” But the tragedy of his initiative is that the very thing that makes it so appealing—at last, the Pentagon is seeking expert input from the academy—could also doom it to failure.

Take anthropology, a field that holds important insights about religious extremism and terrorism. Many anthropologists simply will not apply for funding if it comes from the Pentagon. Their reasons will vary. Anthropologists already report being suspected of working for U.S. intelligence agencies when they do field research abroad, and they will be concerned that research subjects will refuse to talk to them if they have been openly funded by the U.S. military. Some will be concerned that the Pentagon will seek to bend their research agenda to its own needs, interfering with their academic freedom. Still others will be nervous that colleagues will shun them. But many will refuse simply on principle: Anthropology is, by many measures, the academy’s most left-leaning discipline, and many people become anthropologists out of a visceral sympathy for the kinds of people who all too often show up as war’s collateral damage. Applying for Pentagon funding is as unthinkable for such people as applying for a Planned Parenthood grant would be for someone at Bob Jones University. One thousand anthropologists have already signed a pledge not to accept Pentagon funding for counterinsurgency work in the Middle East.

Hmm, the "most left-leaning" discipline, eh? That explains a lot.

And I'm sure a quite few of these folks got some of those federally-funnded grants and loans as well...

Read the rest of Gusterson's piece. He notes that the Pentagon's loss of potential knowledge is a loss for the country as well.

The Obscenity of Spencer Ackerman

Not all left-wing bloggers have given up profanity in their blogging, which was an issue in debate at Netroots Nation.

This morning, in response to Katie Couric's story on Barack Obama's Iraq surge controversy, Spencer Ackerman exclaimed:

Dear press corps,

Please recognize that this is completely f**king wrong.

I'm still amazed at this kind of language among top-level bloggers, especially as Ackerman's directing his appeal to the Washington press corps, which abjures profanity in reporting as completely inappropriate.

Recall, though, for postmodern citizen journalists, explicity crude language is a way to add power to their attacks on the "enablers" of the mainstream press.

Yet, as I noted previously, "It's not as if the bloggers profiled have advanced their journalistic or political careers by deploying gutter language," with the main example being Amanda Marcotte.

I could be wrong about that, however. Maybe profanity, in the world of radical media reporting, is indeed an asset. Ackerman's case might support the conclusion, for while he was fired from the New Republic for inappropriate language and unprofessional behavior, he was immediately hired by extreme leftist Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect.

According to Clint Hendler:

In October 2006, Spencer Ackerman was a twenty-six-year-old associate editor at the New Republic. He had joined the magazine four years earlier and, since then, had reported from Iraq, been twice promoted, and co-written the story that may land Lewis “Scooter” Libby in prison....

Less than a year later, his boss Franklin Foer called and asked him to come in for a talk. Ackerman was working from home that day, maintaining the magazine’s baseball playoffs blog and posting a bit on Too Hot for TNR, his personal blog which he had just set up that weekend.

Ackerman says his relationship with Foer had begun to deteriorate eight months before, in March of 2006, when Foer, who was thirty-one at the time, was given the magazine’s top job by Martin Peretz, TNR’s then owner andeditor-in-chief.

“As I was on the bus on the way down, I thought, ‘This is it. I’m probably going to be fired.’ I’d thought that before, but this felt different,” says Ackerman.

This was different. Foer sat Ackerman down and told him that his behavior—both in the office and on his blog—had been unacceptable. His career at the magazine was over....

Over the years TNR has taken pride in being preternaturally iconoclastic, claiming to be the keeper of the liberal flame while thumbing its nose at progressive stances on health care, affirmative action, and the rulings of the Warren Court. But for the four years that Ackerman worked at the magazine, TNR was defined by its [pro-invasion] position on the Iraq war, the all-consuming debate of the era....

The magazine had become an ideologically difficult place for [Ackerman] ... to be. But, he says, the biggest difficulties came after Foer was promoted. “Frank and I used to be friends. Or I at least I thought we were,” Ackerman says. “Frank is not particularly interested in national security. I am. We had struggled to find an equilibrium.”

This led to what Ackerman diplomatically calls “a couple of heated editorial disputes.” The most notorious of these occurred after U.S. bombs killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June of 2006. At an editorial meeting, Ackerman warned the assembled staff that Zarqawi’s martyrdom might actually make things worse in Iraq. He was accused of being soft on the dead al Qaeda operative. So he demonstrated his hatred of Zarqawi by offering to “skullf**k” the corpse.

“The magazine is not filled with shrinking violets,” says Ackerman, recounting the incident. “I stand by it, damn it. I would skullf**k the guy if I could!”

There were other disagreements. Ackerman thought that his posts to the magazine’s group blog—The Plank, started six months after Iraq’d was shuttered—were getting undue editorial scrutiny. And he was disappointed that he was not invited to participate in a major Iraq roundtable to be published November 2006.

But by then Ackerman would be gone...

Ackerman was quickly hired by Meyerson, in a show of hard-left solidarity:

That night Ackerman went to the movies to see Fearless, a Jet Li film, with some friends. By the time the credits rolled, he had a message on his cell phone from Harold Meyerson, acting executive editor of the liberal—and more consistently antiwar—American Prospect, offering Ackerman a writing contract.

“It was an easy fit,” says Meyerson. “He’d fought the good fight at TNR on national security and the war, which isn’t an easy place to fight the good fight. . . . And if I was going to offer him this, I thought I should do it when it would cheer him up.”

It'd be hard to verify whether Ackerman would indeed perform necrophilia on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's corpse, although his casual use of such language and imagery at a New Republic staff meeting indicates a substantial mien of postmodernism probity for Ackerman, and his immediate employment at the American Prospect comes off as a sound endorsement of his practices.

Interestingly, not only is Ackerman rude and crude, he's also regularly and spectacularly wrong, especially in his false claim that the Anbar Awakening proceeded the surge.

Maybe the "f-bomb" isn't so compelling after all.

See also, SourceWatch, "Spencer Ackerman."

Lieberman: Christians for Israel are "Agents of Destiny"

Senator Joseph Lieberman spoke yesterday to Christians United for Israel, an organization led by the controversial Pastor John Hagee.

Lieberman's speaking engagement drew heavy fire from left-wing partisans, but the Connecticut Senator thanked the organization for its support:

On Tuesday, Lieberman told the group's members they were agents of destiny, and the cause was seeing successes. In Iraq, he said, Saddam Hussein has been replaced by "a growing, sometimes cantankerous Iraqi democracy that is overcoming the terrorists and the surrounding countries that wish to destabilize it, slowly taking its place among the family of responsible and democratic nations."

The senator also fell upon his frequent theme — the threat of Iran. "A nuclear Iran is a mortal danger to all our allies in the Middle East, Israel and Arabs, and it is a threat to us. A nuclear Iran would transform the balance of power in the region in the worst possible way. As Iran continues to expand the reach of its missiles, it will soon not just be the Middle East that is threatened, but Europe as well, and the United States."

Note that Paster Hagee has apologized for his earlier controversies.

Also, here's Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, of Efrat, Israel, on Hagee:

Pastor John Hagee is a towering leader in the Evangelical Church who has dedicated a great part of his enormously successful ministry to reaching out in love and loving-kindness to the Jewish people and the State of Israel. He has admirably defended our right to our historic homeland even when our enemies have attempted to disgorge us from our homes and drive us into the sea; he has praised the Lord for having imbued us, the "post-Holocaust dry bones of Ezekiel," with renewed life and vigor even when our arch-enemy and the arch-enemy of the free world has called us a "stinking corpse." He has organized Christian lobby groups for the only true democracy in the Middle East across the length and breadth of the United States even when a former American President and professors from Harvard and Chicago Universities have denounced our own lobbying efforts as un-American and anti-Democratic....

We are living in a world divided between those who believe in a God of love and peace, and those who believe in a Satan of Jihad and suicide bombers. Any attempt to marginalize and slander leaders of the camp of the former will only serve to strengthen the camp of the latter, with the future existence of the free world perilously hanging in the balance. And so I continue to proudly shout from the rooftops that this rabbi in Israel stands firmly alongside -his beloved friend, a true friend of Israel and the free world, Pastor John Hagee.

Lieberman himself is an orthodox Jew, and as the top supporter of Israel in American government, his appearance at Christians United is a powerful endorsement of the organization's good faith toward the Jewish state.

The lefties, of course, want to whip up a Wright-style scandal from Lieberman's relationaship to Hagee. See : Think Progress, Firedoglake, and Matthew Yglesias.

Anti-Semitism in the Arab World

I'm frankly amazed (or disturbed, even shocked, at the risk of cliché) at this anti-Semitic cartoon from Bahrain, which is one those included in the ADL's, "Anti-Semitism in the Arab/Muslim World:

For context, see my previous post, "Obama in Israel."

Hat Tip: Harry's Place