Young families, already under strain from young children and spouses far away and in harm's way, don't need an excuse to break. They also, just like the rest of the military, often have trouble making ends meet (we actually typically counsel young soldiers to not give the spouse access to their bank account, if they want to save any money while deployed). There is a lot of financial irresponsibility in young families, to be sure, but they certainly don't need any help screwing up from the federal government.

Contrast that with politicians. I can't believe they are getting paid. When a Congressman makes $174,000/year I doubt many politicians really live paycheck to paycheck, and most of them probably don't even have kids they support any more, judging by the gray hair all over CSPAN. This is our civilian 'leadership?'

In the military, at chow time, there is one simple rule. Leaders eat last. Its simple, it makes sense, and it helps reinforce the basic truth of leadership in the military: you are there to help your subordinates complete the mission.

Colonels don't win battles, privates humping machine guns do. There are a lot of perks to leadership in the military, including better pay and an easier life. But when it comes to doing the job, all anyone is doing is helping the lower enlisted point their guns in the correct direction and pull the trigger. They are carrying the weight, they are bounding under fire, they are walking through the low density minefields that our combat zones have become, or doing whatever it is the rest of the Army does to keep our vehicles and weapons up. On our COP, this rule was strictly enforced. We might have been a 'dynamic' group, and bent the rules as much as we could, but I still got my ass chewed any time I grabbed a plate before my guys, even if they didn't want one. In situations like ours, where there sometimes wasn't enough hot food to go around, that rule is especially inviolate.

Above the platoon level, it becomes even more clear. Officers in TOCs can wait until the guys covered with blood, dirt, and grease get theirs. The Marine Corps FOB I was on briefly in Helmand took it to a whole higher level, not even allowing real food in the FOB because the guys in the combat outposts to the south couldn't have any. This is a basic principle of leadership, reinforcing humility at higher levels of command while making sure the guys that actually need it have enough food.

Leaders eat last. Its that simple. Our national politicians need to get the message. They aren't the purpose of government, they are there to help make it work.
-


Operation Homefront is assisting soldiers and their families, and accepts donations at http://www.operationhomefront.net/donate.aspx - not a bad place to drop a $20.00.
-

« ok, I'm done now

Michael did that, and he writes about it in a way that makes me feel I'm walking at his shoulder, seeing and hearing everything he did. It's really that good. I consider myself a pretty good writer but reading Michael makes me want to go back and redo everything I've ever written for the public. What he accomplishes is transparency and particularity, and most of all personalization. Michael understands that history is made of people, and that to understand history - or society - you need to understand and try and relate to the people who make it happen. Here he's talking about Hezbollah's press aide:

More interesting than anything Afif actually said were his facial expressions. I wished Dan had brought a video camera instead of a still camera so he could capture them.

"You must know." I said, "that Americans are sick to death of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Is there any chance we'll see peace in this region any time soon?"

Afif didn't need Abdullah to translate the word "peace." He knew what it meant in English just as almost every Westerner in the Middle east knew how to say it in Arabic. And when he heard me say "peace," when he was relaxed and not thinking about the fact that I was carefully watching his face, he twisted his flat expression into a grimace. The moment was fleeting, and he composed himself almost instantly, but it's impossible for even the most accomplished poker players and liars to control all involuntary facial muscles that reveal their inner thoughts and emotions.

Michael has a perspective (one that I share) - he thinks Hezbollah is bad and peace is good. But overriding that perspective in his writing is simply treating the people he meets as people first, and not as ideological avatars.

If you're at all interested in the Middle east - and you should be - this is a great book that will help you understand the people and forces that are shaping it today.
-

« ok, I'm done now

But here's Nexon:

That kind of thing makes liberal hawks get all starry eyed. But what makes Libya different than most of the other places where tyrannical governments do nasty things to their citizens isn't terribly Wilsonsian:

* Qaddafi's rule over Libya is, on balance, a net negative for US interests;

* The US doesn't care much for most of his friends either;

* He's sitting on not insignificant fossil fuel deposits;

* He has no real support among the great powers; and

* The UK, US, and France really, really, really don't like the guy.

Well, gosh, that's not very useful. because if that's good policy, then invading Iraq made perfect sense - and as we all know, the smart kids have all determined that it made no sense (I'm remaining on the fence myself, but I'm neither smart nor a kid).

Here's the issue; in my work I'm talking to people all the time about the difference between a strategy and a platitude. Platitudes sound a lot like strategies, but there's a key difference - they don't help shape action in a meaningful way. So just as science requires that a theory be falsifiable in order to be scientific, strategy has to cover certain actions and not others, and group actions into necessary, good, unnecessary and bad.

And unless the modern foreign-policy commentariat can a) make up a strategy that distinguishes Libya from Iraq (except by saying that for the fact that one is the product of a good president, and one the product of a bad one), or b) determine that Iraq was just as good a strategic idea as Libya - we're flat out of strategies.

And that's a Bad Thing. It's a bad thing first because being able to articulate a strategy is the way that we - the American polity - buy in, and buy in is needed if we're going to spend $600M/week in these parlous times. It's also the way that we have a chance to attract all those struggling for liberation - for ideals. What ideals are we trying to project, and how? What are we asking of them to defend those ideals, and what are we prepared to spend in turn?

Like it or not, those are strategic questions. And simply saying that good interventions, like p0rn, are something we know when we see, is nowhere near enough.

Do-over, Nexon? prak?
-

« ok, I'm done now