Sullivan makes an absolutely brilliant point about the VT killings:

Imagine that this kind of massacre happened every day. Imagine a police force that was far too small to even respond to most of them. Imagine this occurring repeatedly for years until the perpetrators and their accomplices became the de facto power-brokers throughout the land. Imagine the shootings also being accompanied by the brutal torture of victims. Imagine families never having finality on whether their own siblings or parents or children have been murdered or not.

This is Iraq today. Now think of the justified rage many feel at the VT campus police chief and university president for misjudgments. Now imagine them presiding over several more massacres in the same place. Ask yourself: why do we not feel as enraged by those responsible for security in Iraq? Are those victims not human beings too? Are they not children and mothers and fathers and sons? Are we not ultimately responsible for them, having destroyed the institutions of order in their country? Now go watch John Bolton tell the victims to go help themselves.

Our society has a very strong commitment to law and order — perhaps a bit too strong, given the explosion of violent raids in the last decade. We weep for events like VT because they are so rare. But we are now seeing in Iraq that such violence is the natural state of man in the absence of law and order.

I’m a libertarian. One the common slurs hurled against libertarians is that we are anarchists. But we aren’t. Every real libertarian knows that the most important aspect of government is that it establish law and order. Because without law and order, all the rest — freedom, property rights, wealth — mean nothing. Even a broken and bent law and order is better than chaos. Which would you rather have — the horrid dictatorship of Venezuela or Iran or pre-war Iraq? Or the awful chaos of Haiti? That’s why libertarians support things like martial law in emergency situations. Because law and order is the first and primary duty of government.

A couple of weeks ago, Sullivan posted an article that disputed the leftist assertion that natural man is not violent, but peaceful. I would say that Iraq has illuminated a similar delusion on the theocon right. All they had to do was create democracy and peaceful westernized society would flow from it. But democracy is not a source of law and order — it’s a check on it. It’s not a way of running government, it’s a way of holding government accountable for its actions. You have to build a lawful society first. Then you put in the mechanisms to keep it under control.

Our foreign policy — hell, our entire nation — is being run by dorm room bullshit session. It’s being run by a bunch of guys sitting around talking up great ideas of how society could be run (abstinence only education, democratization of the Middle East, ramped up drug war, massive spending) rather than the complex reality of how society is — the complexity that tells libertarians and federalist to screw big ideas and just establish law, order and freedom. And the tragedy is that they have tried these big idea on a multi-ethnic nation with devastating results.

It could be worse. The last people with grand ideas for running society were the Maoists. But there was a better way. And hopefully in January 2009, we’ll start looking for it.

As we recover from the most deadly shooting in American history, let’s be grateful these things are so rare, that we live in a society that is relatively peaceful and lawful. And let’s make sure we keep it that way.

One of the common talking points for Bush’s supporters — his few remaining supporters — is to drag out letters from soldiers in Iraq. The soldiers are determined to win, so we should stay, goes the argument.

I have no doubt that this sentiment is common and genuine. But that is always the case with soldiers, even in disaster. When General Pickett’s shattered division returned to Robert E. Lee, many wanted to try again. They were sure they could do it. They did not want to have failed him, to have failed the Cause or, most importantly, to have failed their fellow soldiers.

Lee had to be smarter and he was. He had to see the army in the cold analytical terms that a ground soldier can’t — that a dead soldier is a sunk cost. That killing the living will in no way justify the fallen.

I’m not saying we need to pull of Iraq or that we have had a calamity even approaching Pickett’s charge. Hell, Picket lost twice as many men that day as we’ve lost in the entire war. No, what I’m saying is that our soldiers’ desire to stay in Iraq does not automatically mean we should. They always want to win, they always think they can. That’s what makes them better people than, well, shitheads with blogs.

But the President needs to decide his strategy based on the situation, not their sentiment. If you want us to stay in Iraq, you need to make a legitimate argument, not cower behind the courage of our soldiers.

Just watched Flags of our Fathers, the good but not great first half of Clint Eastwood’s Iwo Jima saga. One thing jumped out at me that I have heard from many sources before, notably Studs Terkel’s The Good War (which I received for my Bar Mitzvah and actually read twenty years later). And it flies in the face of the Right Wing’s nonsense about how our country has become wussified and weak.

Americans were not as massively supportive of World War II as the neocons would have us believe. The Iwo Jima survivors were used to raise war bonds — because the country was about to go broke from the unwillingness of the American people to buy them. Americans were growing very tired of the war and the fierce fight the Japanese put up at Iwo was partly to break our resolve. It came close to succeeding. Had we invaded Japan proper, perhaps our will would have broken.

The film — and especially its Japanese-language counterpart — have been lauded as being “anti-war” or “anti-Iraq” or a commentary on veterans affairs (the Iraqi vets aren’t the first to be abandoned by our government). I didn’t see that. I’ll let you know what I think when I see Letters from Iwo Jima.