This essay bears little preface.  In it, Maj. Gen. William Troy speaks about military funerals.  The army requires a general officer to attend the funeral of everyone who falls in service to country.

I have attended 23 funerals in many different states and, to my surprise, have never encountered an angry parent — only heartbroken ones who are intensely proud of their son or daughter. Grief is the crushing load these parents and spouses bear. Yet far more often than not they treat the military in attendance as family. They invite us to the receptions after the services, where they show us scrapbooks and introduce us to friends. They hug us and wish us a safe return to our units and families. They smile through their tears. I often get the feeling their sense of duty wills them through. I suspect that when the crowds have left and they are allowed to be alone, they collapse in grief and exhaustion.

Happy Memorial Day.

HT: Slate.com

On a good day I’m only of three of four minds on the issues of war and violence. I’m not well read enough to discern the differences between various theories of Biblical justification for killing someone. I’ve heard a variety of coffee-table arguments, of course, but I always get hung up on Christ’s admonition that we turn the other cheek. At the same time, I keep a handgun and practice with it for the sole purpose of ventilating anyone who tries to hurt my family. But then there are plenty of gaps between my convictions and my actions.

I thought about this as I passed one of those signs in someone’s yard yesterday, the one that proclaims:

Another neighbor for peace.

It seems such a sign is only telling half the story, and ought fully to read:

Another neighbor for peace at any cost, up to and including the slitting of his own throat.

There’s an inherent silliness to notions that the peace-producing solution, in the face of believers in a murderous death cult who think they can earn a place in heaven by beheading Jews and otherwise murdering men, women, and children, is to make nice with them.

Then I think: Good thing the Christians in Rome didn’t concur. I easily forget that God’s plan in the world is not necessarily my physical security. And then I think about this turning the other cheek business, and I’m back where I started, suspecting that Christians should not engage in war and capital punishment, yet keeping my 9mm Smith & Wesson oiled, and being thankful for well-armed U.S. Marines standing in the gap.

I suppose I can sort it out when I get the time and inclination (though I’m still likely to get it wrong). The reality is that I benefit from the protection provided by thousands of men who have no qualms about killing people they suspect to be bad. In some church services, when Memorial Day is upon us, the pastor will ask veterans and servicemen to stand, so the rest of us can applaud. I don’t know when violence is justified for a Christian, but I know I am thankful for the men who stand. And I believe I would be proud of my sons, regardless of my own conclusions about war, were they one day to stand with them.

Here’s an interest reminiscence from writer Paul Auster, who took part in the Columbia University protests of 1968.  His story starts with his attendance of a protest rally forty years ago today.

The issue had nothing to do with the war, but rather a gymnasium the university was about to build in Morningside Park. The park was public property, and because Columbia intended to create a separate entrance for the local residents (mostly black), the building plan was deemed to be both unjust and racist. I was in accord with this assessment, but I didn’t attend the rally because of the gym.

I went because I was crazy, crazy with the poison of Vietnam in my lungs, and the many hundreds of students who gathered around the sundial in the center of campus that afternoon were not there to protest the construction of the gym so much as to vent their craziness, to lash out at something, anything, and since we were all students at Columbia, why not throw bricks at Columbia, since it was engaged in lucrative research projects for military contractors and thus was contributing to the war effort in Vietnam?

The protest happened, the protesters ended up tearing down the gymnasium construction fence, and then they stormed campus buildings.  Auster was dragged a week later by police into a van and arrested.

What did we accomplish? Not much of anything. It’s true that the gymnasium project was scrapped, but the real issue was Vietnam, and the war dragged on for seven more horrible years. You can’t change government policy by attacking a private institution.

Quite an admission.

The Times asked its readers, “After a poor box-office showing for war-related movies, how could a Hollywood studio possibly entice audiences into seeing the next one?”  The question is, unfortunately, a false dilemma, assuming that these movies are worth watching and assuming that people don’t watch them because they’re marketed poorly.  My answer: Stop making agitation-propaganda films and start making good films that don’t get distracted with unveiled dialogue about American foriegn policy.  Or at least unveiled dialogue that contradicts what most people think.  Read the Times’ readers comments here.  They are mostly sensible.

Yesterday on Meet the Press, Hillary Clinton claimed that the Iraqis are changing their ways — now contributing to the quelling of terrorist violence in their country — because of the Democratic candidates’ “commitment to begin withdrawing our troops in January of 2009.”

So, William Kristol notes wryly on today’s New York Times op-ed page. . .

. . .the Democratic Party, having proclaimed that the war is lost and having sought to withdraw U.S. troops, deserves credit for any progress that may have been achieved in Iraq. That is truly a fairy tale. And it is driven by a refusal to admit real success because that success has been achieved under the leadership of … George W. Bush. The horror!

Read Kristol’s entire op-ed here.

In Iraq, a number of Sunni Arab tribes in the Anbar province have formed a coalition, fighting al-Qaida-linked insurgents. U.S. officials credit such so-called “Awakening Councils” for sharply reducing violence in the region, and the U.S. military has been working to form similar coalitions elsewhere.

The trend has apparently caught the attention of Osama Bin Laden who on Dec. 29 issued a 56-minute audiotape in which he warned Sunnis in Iraq not to fight al-Qaeda and vowed to expand his holy war into Israel. Here’s the story on the tape. U.S. officials claim they have al-Qaeda on the run in Iraq. Is the Bin Laden tape an indicator that they’re right?

USA Today is reporting that a journalistic investigation shows that the strategy now used to defeat the bombmaking networks and stabilize Iraq was pitched repeatedly by military officials, but ignored or rejected for years by key decision-makers, at meetings that included then-Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

The core of the strategy: Clear insurgents from key areas and provide security to win over Iraqis, who would respond by helping U.S. forces break IED networks and defeat the insurgency.

Bush administration officials, however, remained wedded to the idea that training the Iraqi army and leaving the country would suffice. Officials, including Cheney, insisted the insurgency was dying.

Hindsight, as they say, is 20-20 — and Bush administration officials now say they weighed all the options and made “appropriate decisions.” Did they?  Get the rest of the story here. 

As Congress heads toward a budget showdown over Iraq, Democrats seem determined to cling to the rhetoric of U.S. military failure. The Washington Times reports that Jack Murtha, House Democrats’ “point man” on war-funding . . .

. . . today dismissed U.S. military gains in Iraq and vowed to tighten the purse strings until President Bush accepts a pullout plan. ”Look at all the people that have been displaced, all the [lost] oil production, unemployment, all those type of things,” said Rep. John P. Murtha, chairman of House Appropriations defense subcommittee. “We can’t win militarily.”

But other longtime war skeptics are admitting that Gen. Petraeus’s surge is working. The Washington Post called the surge “a remarkable success.” A Brookings Institution scholar called the troop reinforcement plan “stunning in military terms,” successful even beyond the most optimistic predictions. And Newsweek foreign correspondent Rod Nordland, to whom it had become axiomatic that things in Baghdad only get worse, wrote after a recent visit: “I can actually say that things do seem to have gotten better, and in ways that may even be durable.”

Read more about the critics’ turnaround and the military’s results in Iraq in this Commentary post by Peter Wehner. Is Jack Murtha the face of a failing Democratic rhetorical strategy? If the U.S. continues gaining ground in Iraq, might the party have to shift from its tuck-tail campaign strategy? And if it does, what will be the new spin?

Think MoveOn can talk tough? Check out the Iraq war vets representing Vets for Freedom . . .

On Rep. Jack Murtha’s war opposition: He “was a hero, [he] was a patriot, and now he’s judged by his last actions.”

On anti-war soldiers: They are “idiots [who] signed the contract not knowing what they were getting into.”

Thus sayeth Sgt. Marco Martinez, who served in Iraq in 2003 and earned the Navy Cross for valor. Cybercast News Service has the story.

HT: Joe B.

Writing in WORLD this week, John Piper pulls no punches:

If I were the last man on the planet to think so, I would want the honor of saying that no woman should go before me into combat to defend my country. A man who endorses women in combat is not pro-woman; he’s a wimp.

 Gee, John, why don’t you tell us what you really think.