Posted on 06/17/2017 2:17:51 PM PDT by Lorianne
How do military leaders persuade their soldiers to fight an insane war?
Here’s one way. The setting is a bitter outpost of the American war in Afghanistan. The years-long nightmare has no prospect of ending so long as American troops stay in a country that has a nearly unblemished record of grinding foreign armies to ashes. A bullish general is trying to generate a dose of enthusiasm in the hearts and minds of his unenthusiastic men.
“You boys,” the general says, “are the only things that count. If it doesn’t happen here, it doesn’t happen. End of story.”
“What doesn’t happen, sir?” a Marine asks.
“It, son,” the general responds.
The Marine knows it would be unwise to demand a full explanation.
“Okay, thank you sir.”
The general, who doesn’t know better, bulls ahead.
“Does anyone here know what it is?” he asks.
Silence.
“Anyone? Anyone?”
This scene is familiar to me — I heard similar calls and responses while covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — and at the same time this scene is utterly invented. It comes from the just-released “War Machine,” which is one of the best war movies of the post-9/11 era, yet has been panned by movie critics who know everything about basic cable and nothing about basic training. While the movie is uneven in content and performances (let us resolve that Brad Pitt will never again play a general), it achieves greatness in the way it uses absurdity to assassinate the logic and reality of counterinsurgency warfare.
But you wouldn’t know the movie’s strengths if you read the reviews. “War Machine” has a 56 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and has been largely dismissed by film critics whose closest encounter with a warzone is the bar at Balthazar on a Saturday night. They don’t like it because, as one wrote, there is an “absence of intimacy, of psychology, of characters’ self-revelation in thought and desire.” Yes, that particular reviewer graduated from Princeton with a degree in comparative literature, so there you go.
There is one particular group of people who love the film, and we should pay more attention to them, because in the matter of war movies they are the experts who matter the most: soldiers. They now have more skin in the game than usual, after President Trump gave Secretary of Defense James Mattis a green light to send more soldiers into Afghanistan. Helene Cooper, a military correspondent for The New York Times, noted in a podcast the other day that “everybody at the Pentagon is talking about” the movie, and she added, “the guys who you think would be offended by it, love it.” Retired Gen. David Barno wrote with co-author Nora Bensahel that it “should be must-see TV for our current generals and all those who aspire to wear stars.”
SNIP
I saw it. It was based on a real story. Here’s what I saw. A general came in who wanted to do everything possible to win the war. The government, Obama and SOS Clinton, didn’t want to do it. The general embarrassed them. They sabotaged his efforts and finally to get rid of him they embedded a leftist journalist with the general and his staff knowing FULL well the leftist would present the general and his staff in a negative light.
Catch 22?
Yeah. I Always thought that it was ironic that a Jewish novelist wrote about that absurd war against the Nazis.
I’ve been saying for years now, maybe a decade, that we needed to get out after the punitive expedition phase and never started the meals on wheels phase. Two years max, probably 18 months.
You can’t “nation build” unless you’re willing to sit on them and eradicate the underlying ideology as we did to the Nazis and Japanese militarists as we did in the WWII and the postwar era. And we simply are not. Even if we were, I’m not sure nation building is possible in that same sense for all sorts of politically incorrect reasons.
I think we’re all generally on the same page. See my previous.
I agree and I just wanted to extend your remarks.
I recall reading somewhere that the pacification effort in Germany at the end of WWII extended several years beyond the surrender—in the free part of the country. Besides, Germany had a national identity, something the Afghans can’t conceive.
Absolutely so. And we ruled Germany and Japan under military proconsuls for several years, MacArthur in Japan and a succession of folks in Germany, through the late 1940s. We did *NOT* hand these countries over to the State Dept, as we did with Iraq, say.
And it goes well beyond a national (instead of tribal) identity.
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