Boots on the Ground

Wretchard over at the Belmont Club and Gregory Djerejian at the Belgravia Dispatch are debating [sort of] the question of whether or not we have had adequate troop strength in Iraq. Perusing their comments and links will give you a pretty fair idea of the dimensions of the general debate and, while far from perfect, will serve as a useful corrective to the kind of idiocy that you get from cable TV. The worst source in this regard is Chris Matthews on "Hardball "who seems to feel that the real conflict is between the civilian "intellectuals" who are pursuing a rigid ideological course to the detriment of the war effort and the real military men who know what is really happening and would set things straight if only the civilians would listen to them. In truth there are civilians, some of them actual intellectuals, on all sides of the debate and the same can be said for military officers. Matthews gets around this by arguing that the military men who don't support his point of view are simply suppressing their true feelings in order to support their commander in chief. He simply ignores the diversity of civilian opinion by identifying the "intellectuals" as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearle, Bill Kristol, and a few others. Sometimes he refers to the Project for a New American Century crowd or simply to the "neocons." The opinions of others who have influenced policy simply aren't considered. Thus he creates a dramatic dichotomy that might make for good TV, but badly distorts the dimensions and nature of the debate that is really going on within the Pentagon and in the administration. I would point out also that Matthew's civilian/military dichotomy seems to be based on a popular, but wildly inaccurate, view of the Vietnam conflict. I would go on, but Matthews is not good for my blood pressure. Neither, for that matter are most of the conservative political commentators. Now that the election is over I'm finding it hard to watch anything on TV other than movies [and, of course, Ben Wattenberg's "Think Tank"] . Hence the new interest in blogging.