Samizdata

His supreme blogness, Glenn Reynolds, links to an NYT article on how American firms are increasingly warming to hiring former military personnel, on the grounds that the quality of such hires are getting better and are frequently far better than those who have never been in the armed forces. Hmm. It is the sort of story that might be dreamed up by an army recruiter saying: “Join the Army and when you want to quit, make a great life afterward”. That makes a lot of sense. For most people, a lifetime in the forces is not something they would ever want to contemplate, but a short spell, maybe. I know quite a few people who have got decent careers and businesses after having served in the forces, and I notice a few patterns. Of those I know, the following:

My father (RAF navigator): farmer.
RAF jet pilot: air traffic controller, West Drayton.
RAF Defence Rgt: Senior security manager, public transport.
SAS operative: security advisor, South Africa, Middle East.
Army officer, cavalry rgt: salesman, farmer.
Tank commander: hedge fund administrator.
Army officer: wealth management industry job-search executive.
Australian navy officer: property developer.
US navy officer, financial journalist.
US navy submariner: software engineer, paramedic, post-grad student at Columbia.
South African army: landscape gardener, property developer.
Army officer: property developer.
Army officer: pharmaceutical industry executive.
Army sergeant: pest control business owner (no irony intended!).
RAF tailgunner (WW2), social worker.

The last one always struck me as poignant. The man is now in his eighties, was a tailgunner on Lancasters during WW2 and saw his fair share of death and destruction. He ended up running a youthclub for kids in Pimlico for much of his adult life and one of my relations benefited from his tender care.

I’d be interested in seeing if commenters with military backgrounds ended up doing anything comparable to the stuff above, or something totally different.

This is brutal but sadly true about Andrew Sullivan:

There was, in fact, hardly a bigger cheerleader for going to war with Iraq than Andrew Sullivan. And it won’t do for him to invoke the defense that he was misled into the war because Saddam did not possess actual WMD. It’s true that Saddam did not have stockpiles of WMD, as the Bush Administration, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Jay Rockefeller, John Kerry, and many others believed, along with the intelligence agencies of virtually every nation on earth. In retrospect, we know that Saddam engaged in a massive effort to mislead the world into believing he had WMD. The obligation was on him to comply with U.N. resolutions. He did the opposite, and he paid for his deception (and his cruelties) with his life and the end of his regime.

It is fine for people to change their positions over time, either because of new evidence or because of an evolution in their own views. And almost everyone who has said anything about Iraq has gotten something wrong. But few people have changed their minds as dramatically and emphatically as Sullivan has over the last few years.

Absolutely. And I am not particularly convinced, either, by Sullivan’s reply on his blog today, in which he argues thus:

I simply cannot pretend that what we’ve learned about them these past few years – and what I’ve learned about the Middle East and wider dimensions of the struggle against Jihadism – hasn’t deeply affected my views. Just imagine if the press were to discover a major jail in Gori, occupied by the Russians, where hundreds of Georgians had been dragged in off the streets and tortured and abused? What if we discovered that the orders for this emanated from the Kremlin itself? And what if we had documentary evidence of the ghastliest forms of racist, dehumanizing, abusive practices against the vulnerable as the standard operating procedure of the Russian army – because the prisoners were suspected of resisting the occupying power? Pete Wehner belonged to the administration that did this. It seems to me that, in these circumstances, the question of moral equivalence becomes a live one. When an American president has violated two centuries of civilized norms, how could it not be, for any serious person with a conscience?

First of all, no-one, apart from the most deluded hawk, has or would deny that abuses have occurred, involving not just American but other Coalition forces. The point is that those abuses have in some cases already been punished. One can and should argue that the punishments could have been more severe, but that is a detail. As for the other stuff about “abusive” practices, Sullivan is frankly inviting ridicule to argue that the conditions at Gitmo rank on the sort of scale of horrors that have been inflicted on captured combatants in other campaigns, most notably those involving Soviet forces in the past, for instance. For all that one might be alarmed – as I am – about the willingness of some apologists for torture to argue for it, I certainly do not get the impression that it has been widely used or encouraged by the US and other administrations. Of course if that is the case, I might change my mind.

No. I am afraid that the critics of Sullivan have a strong point. His change of mind has been so dramatic, his use of language so heated, that it is easy to see why people who now are on the receiving end of his ire feel the guy has not been entirely honest about his switcheroo. After all, Bush’s Big Government brand of conservatism that Sullivan finds so obnoxious – as I do -was hardly a secret even before 9/11, such as his flagrant abuse of free trade over steel tariffs, for instance.

As to Iraq, what did Sullivan – who is hardly an expert in military affairs – honestly expect would have happened when the invasion began: a squeaky-clean victory, an easy reconstruction and minimal violence? Hardly. To be sure, he was pretty quick to argue that the post-invasion phase needed larger forces, as McCain had argued at the time. And it is easy to see why those who argued that Saddam’s removal from power was justified – as I did – felt angry about some of the errors made post-invasion. But let’s be honest about this. If you back a war, you have to understand the Law of Unintended Consequences – bad shit can happen that you do not expect. To deny this is frankly to invite contempt.

Since we are talking about South Africans (see my post below about cricket), ex-South African-now-American Kim du Toit, occasional commenter in these parts, says he dreams about getting one of these.

Kim’s dreams are pretty scary.