There are some things I simply don’t understand, such as Popular Mechanics inserting itself into a political and social argument. The magazine is perhaps best suited to discussions of how to create a gas saving RV out of a 1972 Ford Pinto.
That said, James Joyner this morning points out that they’re doing exactly that; inserting themselves into a discussion about the Iraq war:
Soldiers in Iraq are too busy doing their jobs and trying to stay alive to be pay much attention to the domestic discussion of the war, Leslie Sabbagh writes in Popular Mechanics.
It never even hits the radar screen. For the troops on the front lines and the colonels in the rear—and just about everyone in between—the big news in Iraq every day is that they’re still alive and healthy. When it comes to Senate votes on the U.S. presence in Iraq, Sunday talk shows thrashing out length of deployment and stateside pundits talking to themselves, nearly every grunt, airman, sailor, soldier and Marine I speak with just doesn’t care.
It’s not negligence or a lack of opinion about how long they think they should stay here; they’re tuned out because the news doesn’t impact their day-to-day operations—and because comms often leave them uninformed from half a world away.
War deliberations and post-firefight reactions back home can vanish during the 12-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week base-line duty of the average soldier in Iraq. So when line troops are swamped carrying gear from street patrol to street patrol, village raid to village raid, for up to 20 hours a day, they often don’t have the time for, or the luxury of, Internet access. And when they do get it, they’re not punching up CNN—it’s e-mails from home they’re reading.
Forgive me, I am unimpressed by such arguments. They tend to ignore history. Vietnam ,for one thing. Such arguments get even thinner when one considers that troops eventually come home. James suggests that during his service in the previous action, Desert Storm, he never saw any of those arguments. That’s probably true. But it’s also true that that action was short enough that going home on leave and then returning to Iraq was in the cards, and therefore, for the duration, he was not exposed to the arguments going on at home about it. Coupled, frankly, with the idea that the arguments and home were not being waged with nearly the intensity.
I find it difficult myself, to believe that anyone’s assessment would be that the morale of our troops could be completely unaffected by such arguments once they were exposed to them. as Itel chains, in the responses, over there…
Certainly, you’re correct that in the end, and on the whole, each individual soldier must make his own determination as to whether not our actions in Iraq are “worth it”. If I read correctly the reactions of returning soldiers, most think it is.
But I suspect that those nagging doubts raised by the arguments amongst the people that they are supposedly representing, here at home, have more effect on their morale than either article you cite would let on.
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