Weekly Shredder 27:
The Glory of John Podhoretz
by James Norton

Alberto Gonzalez is steering his way through the various checkpoints and rituals that mark the ascension of a new political superstar. But his new gig as attorney general of the United States seems increasingly shakey. Bernard Kerik's recent political appearance as one of the severed heads from Apocalypse Now has got the media jonesin' for blood and the political priests and priestesses consulting their star charts and chicken bones with renewed vigor.

For archives, audio, and background about the column, click here.

One of the numerous topics of controversy: memos. Weighty memos. Memos that detail... torture being committed in our name.

Unfortunately, those memos are written in nearly impenetrable legalese, so we'll turn to them in a subsequent installment.

In their place, we turn to a much more vulnerable target: the deep thoughts of right-wing commentator John Podhoretz.

Last week, he wrote a column strongly suggesting that anyone who maintains that you can be against the war — while supporting the troops — is guilty of "sophistry" at best, and a thinly-disguised hatred for America at worst.

One of its greatest hits:

Democratic Party bottom-feeders — like the odd and unpleasant people who inhabit the comments sections on Web sites like dailykos.com and democraticunderground.com — have already long since started spewing their bile at our soldiers, sailors and Marines.

Regular readers of dailykos know a couple things about Markos Moulitsas, the site's editor and lead writer. First, he's an Army veteran. Second, the only bile he's spewed has been directed at chickenhawks like Podhoretz, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and President Bush.

With his most recent column in the New York Post, Podhoretz has given the world a self-basting turkey. Apparently surprised the volume and intensity of the mail he received for suggesting that a good 50 percent of Americans are cowardly liars, he's taken the battle to his critics with the passionate and upbeat martial vigor of a man who has never actually served in the military.

"Giving GIs in Iraq Their Glory" is the title, and it just gets increasingly less subtle from there on in.

But first a pause.

What exactly is "glory"?

Is "glory" losing your leg in an IED explosion? Is "glory" shooting up a city block in order to kill a sniper fighting the foreigners who have turned his country into a warzone? Is "glory" dying, with inadequate armor, in a hothouse of rage and post-colonial tribal chaos, because a select group of American politicians made an executive decision to deceive a great democracy into war? No, according to Podhoretz, "glory" is:

[Making] possible the transformation of that country from a totalitarian instability generator into a functioning free society. The nobility of that effort and the glory that will attach to all those who were involved in it seem self-evident to many of those who support the effort.

What pompous garbage.

If you read history, there are two kinds of people involved in wars: the soldiers doing the fighting and dying, and the politicians and pundits extolling its glory from the safety of the extreme rear. Though there have been some high-ranking exceptions, they are very rarely one and the same. To suggest that military action and bloodshed are glorious regardless of the motivation or long-term effects is to absolve most of military history's greatest murderers and all of its greatest blunderers.

Podhoretz's suggestion that Iraq — as bottled, contained and effectively as jailed as a sovereign state can be in modern terms — was an "instability generator" flies directly in the face of George H.W. Bush's reasoning for not driving to Baghdad initially. That reasoning was pretty simple: You break it, you bought it. You shatter the totalitarian government and you must then become the totalitarian government that takes its place to ensure something resembling law and order in a country with three major ethnic divisions, 18 provinces, hundreds of tribes and hundreds of thousands of angry young men with ready access to nasty small arms and explosives.

In fact, maybe "instability generator" isn't the smartest phrase for this writer to be sprinkling around to enliven his prose. Because when you look at Iraq's newfound propensity for attracting and training terrorist fighters, killing American troops and scaring the bejeebus out of its neighbors with its explosive and uncorked internal divisions, "instability generator" seems like a pretty zippy two-word summary.

But according to Podhoetz, anyone taking this into account and suggesting that the war was a mistake is a sophist or hater of the military — and likely the author of the e-mails Podhoretz received and lashed out at in his most recent column.

I received dozens of enraged e-mails over the past week after making a glancing reference to this — while citing a poll that indicated deep support for the mission in Iraq from those Americans currently in uniform.

I'm going to have to paraphrase what those angry e-mails said, because most of them featured profanities, SCREAMING CAPITAL LETTERS and totally! unnecessary! exclamation! points!

You're the one who doesn't support the troops, they all essentially said, because you think they should be sent into harm's way for an unjust, ill-conceived, ill-considered and pointless mission. We, who want the war ended, are the true supporters of the troops.

The poll he mentions was of subscribers to the Army Times. This was not a scientific survey of troops in the field. And by degrading the literary quality of the e-mails in the manner of a demented right-wing Dave Barry, Podhoretz tacitly admits that he can't take on the argument they present without a little ad hominem softening up before he swoops in for the kill.

And here's how he does it — here's how he stomps upon the heads of those who maintain that supporting our troops while criticizing the war:

They deny the nobility of the goal in Iraq, and therefore they also deny the attendant nobility and glory due those who are seeking to achieve the goal. If what our soldiers, sailors, Marines and Guardsmen are doing is pointless, or even injurious to American interests, how can glory redound from it?

I don't know, Mr. Podhoretz. That would have been a good question to have asked before going to war with bad intelligence, false pretenses, an underarmored military unsuited to occupation and a political leadership with no plan for a smooth transition to democracy.

Because this war is injurious to American interests. It has cost the blood of brave and resourceful American troops, diplomatic capital, stability, and attention that could have been spent pursuing the destruction of Al Qaeda.

And what has it given us? John Podhoretz and his chickenhawk cronies call it "glory." The rest of us call it "chaos."

E-mail James Norton at jim@flakmag.com.

— graphic by Derek Evernden (derek@ocellus.net)