Yeah, so Jeff Goldstein seems to fail to grasp that he was being parodied by someone who took his point EXACTLY in the post below. You want to see the whole thing reduced to a VERY fine point? More bombs=more dead people. I don’t see how it could be much more plain than that. Perhaps we should ask the people of Fallujah if we’re showing too much FUCKING RESTRAINT…. I am, y’know, sort of losing my sense of humor about the whole exchange, but, ehm, TBogg, he isn’t.
TBogg take it away….
I’ve also been sitting here reading Glenn Greenwald and Robert Farley writing about Shelby Steele and our favorite chickenhawk, Jeff Goldstein. Farley writes:
Success, for Goldstein, Steele, and the rest is tied to toughness and masculinity, rather than to skill or capability. What determines victory is will, the will to be more brutal than the other side. It’s fair to say that a survey of military history does not support Jeff’s conclusions. When we did incinerate cities, the result was not enemy surrender, but rather increased support for the target governments. Brutal, heavy-handed tactics also have a piss poor history in counter-insurgency operations. Murderous brutality didn’t help the Nazis put down resistance movements in Western Europe or the Soviet Union, didn’t help the Soviets win in Afghanistan, and didn’t help Saddam Hussein defeat the Kurds.
But this is the kind of thinking that we have come to expect from the armchair warriors (or as my friend Isaac calls them: the 82nd Chairborne) who did all of their military training at the movies. In the case of General Goldstein the war in Iraq has become a small campaign in his battle over “otherness” and “signifiers” and the “experiential”; the smoking battlefields that most failed grad students left far behind when the world rather cruelly informed them that epistemological masturbation not only doesn’t pay the rent, but the benefits kinda suck too.
“82nd Chairborne”….
Well, it beats working, I guess.
Sometimes I think that we should have universal compulsory military service in this country, just to give some of these idiots a little dose of reality. It’s easy to be flippant about killing when you’ve neither done it nor seen it done.
I’ve never been there, either, but I believe that’s all the more reason that I have no right to go about willy-nilly demanding killing.
[…] Today was a day of “conservatives” saying things like ‘You Blood for Oil types are the worst sort of reductionists…. now let’s bomb them and take their oil…” and Curtis LeMay poseurs absurdly claiming they just meant bomb the BAD parts of Iraq back to the Stone Age… […]
[…] So, yes. The context of my “Shorter Jeff Goldstein: ‘Exterminate the brutes!‘” is that it was a reference to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as it was the final line of Kurtz’s report to the “International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs.” Apparently, the dart sailed over its target’s head. Granted, I left out the word “all” accidently, but I hope the more erudite among us can forgive me for this small crime. Perhaps this is what confused poor Jeffrey. […]