July 13, 2007
How Goes the War? V Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:20 PM EST A few replies to Mr. Gordon: 1) Mr. Gordon writes, “To say that such a war ‘is breaking the back’ of the United States military does not say much for one’s opinion of the United States military. The fact that reenlistment rates in Iraq are very high argues powerfully that it is anything but ‘broken.’” Yet a recent Kaiser Foundation study found that over 20 percent of military families have had to turn to WIC and Food Stamps to feed their children. Myriad reports also show that the low ratio of dwell time to deployment time is having a brutal effect on these same military families, and in order to sustain their numbers the service branches have had to relax their recruitment standards. The Army entered Afghanistan short $56 billion worth of equipment and has seen its kit deplete rapidly, without any commensurate buildup. Consequently, items like night goggles, Humvees, and body armor are in dangerously short supply in some areas, and the National Guard reports that it has only 50 percent of the equipment it needs. The Army’s own calculations conclude that for every brigade in the field there should be two at home; by these standards, of the Army’s and Marines’ (equivalent unit) 50 brigades, 17 can be safely committed to the field at any given time. At present, 25 brigades (or Marine equivalents) are in the field. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), if the present surge lasts into next spring, the military will have 11 brigades at best—and 3 brigades at worst—ready to address other foreign crisis. Military planners agree that an invasion of South Korea, were it necessary, would require 20 brigades. 2) Mr. Gordon writes: “I was not able to find the articles to which Mr. Zeitz refers, but judging from his description of what Ms. Cooney and Mr. Ledeen wrote, I agree with Mr. Ledeen. Her adult son chose to join the Marines. She should be proud of that fact, not whining about it. Like Cindy Sheehan, Ms. Cooney seems to me to be exploiting her son’s service for her own political agenda. Again, she has of her own free will entered the political arena by writing an op-ed article. She is therefore fair game for criticism.” I’d suggest that before commenting on it, Mr. Gordon read Cooney’s op-ed, which is easily accessible online here. It is entirely apolitical and simply conveys the feelings of a mother whose son is about to deploy. She also invokes Abraham Lincoln in hoping that out country will “care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan” better than it has over the past five years. I suspect that when Mr. Gordon reads this very moving, introspective opinion piece, he will feel a little foolish for accusing Ms. Cooney of grinding a political axe, or of “whining.” Bringing this back to history (sort of), Mr. Gordon claims that Cindy Sheehan is “anti-American to the core.” As a historian, he must know that those who bandy about terms like anti-American (or un-American) seldom look good in the annals of history. Those who criticize American values and institutions—from Thaddeus Stevens and Henry Wallace to Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King, Jr.—tend to be passionately interested in bettering, rather than destroying, the country they live in. Mr. Gordon’s argument is a slippery one, for just as Cindy Sheehan could be accused of “anti-American” bias, so could one level the same charge against mainstream and radical conservatives who hate so much about contemporary America, from its secular influences and liberal sexual mores, to its focus on material acquisition and its sometimes coarse public culture. Criticism and damnation are very different things.
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