This Is The End, My Only Friend The End: US Combat Forces Out of Iraq

Answer the following question. The closest parallel to the outcome achieved by seven years of war in Iraq is:

a. Vietnam;

b. Korea;

c. Weimar Germany;

d. Only time will tell.

Sunday Radical Roundup: Marry That Book Before She Gets Much Older!

Despite the strange weather, and an oil spill in the Gulf as big as Rhode Island, it's the beginning of summer break and you know what time it is! Time to get gussied up and get hitched to that book manuscript again! This time the relaitonship will work, I swear: there has been counseling, there are promises not yet broken, and for some of us a new computer will get things started on the right foot. So in the interests of a proper, Connecticut-style traditional wedding, the Radical recommends the following news items to you this week.

Something Old: Looking to warm up by writing an article? Well, look around you and check out who the buildings are named for. At UT-Austin, there is a dormitory named after a member of the Ku Klux Klan, so says Thomas Russell (who used to teach there.) The dorm was built in 1954, and named after a former UT law professor, William Stewart Simkins, who used to boast of his time defending white womanhood in formal speeches on campus. While students don't seem to have been aware of Simkins' white supremacist past scratch the surface of many buildings in the former Confederacy and see what you find, children; then start on the other parts of the country), the UT administration is. Russell has recently posted his research on the topic. Not accidentally, Russell argues, the dormitory was named shortly after Brown v. Board of Education. "During the 1950s, the memory and history of Professor Simkins supported the university’s resistance to integration," Russell argues. "As the university faced pressure to admit African-American students, the university’s faculty council voted to name a dormitory after the Klansman and law professor. The dormitory carries his name to the present day. During this time period, alumni also presented the law school with a portrait of Professor Simkins. Portraits and a bust of Professor Simkins occupied prominent positions within the law school through the 1990s."

Something New: And it is so rare in the historical profession! We've got a new journal out published by Routledge called Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice that is devoting itself to out-of-the-box historical writing. As the website describes it, the journal "allows historians in a broad range of specialities to experiment with new ways of presenting and interpreting history. Rethinking History challenges the accepted ways of doing history and rethinks the traditional paradigms, providing a unique forum in which practitioners and theorists can debate and expand the boundaries of the discipline." Hat Tip.

Something Borrowed? Somebody said to me the other day that a certain fabulous feminist scholar was toying with the idea of ditching Nirvana and heading to one of the best Little Women's Studies Ph.D. programs in the East. No, no, no it ain't me babe, although for a few months the door was cracked open and I appreciated the peep inside. Back to the real news: even if this scholar is just a loaner, this university continues to make a serious effort to recruit and retain the best feminist faculty around.

Something Blue: Or at least I find this depressing. For those of us who write about the political history of pornography (is there more than one of us? enquiring minds want to know) we will probably have to start calling it "sex porn" soon. The Week writes that Americans are becoming addicted to "war porn," combat images and video from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that critics charge are no more than snuff films. "No one loves this kind of footage, says the military blog Mudville Gazette, more than the mainstream "news" business, which gets a ratings boost whenever they employ it, too."

The First Casualty Of War

This video of two Reuters news staff, two children and numerous unarmed bystanders (including a van that tried to assist the wounded) being being shot at and killed by a US military helicopter in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad will resonate for those of us old enough to remember the senseless cruelty of the Viet Nam War. As in Viet Nam, the lies begin with the soldiers on the ground and then trickle up.



It's long and tedious, as well as graphic, but worth watching. It was obtained by Reuters with great difficulty via the Freedom Of Information Act, and sent to me by one of my students. For additional information, see Wikileaks.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Gendering War In The Hurt Locker

It may turn out that I am one of the few people in the United States who didn't like The Hurt Locker, a movie about a bomb disposal team in Iraq which is all the rage. Yes, I know it won six Academy Awards, including the first Oscar ever awarded to a woman director, Katherine Bigelow. I realize that I am always supposed to cheer for the woman, but as a feminist historian and cultural critic I found this film terribly disturbing.

(Speaking of history: Bigelow's Wikipedia entry lists her as married to James Cameron; go to his, and you will discover that they divorced in 1991, and Cameron has added one ex and a current wife since.)

There were the good disturbing parts, of course. Bigelow, a director of several action and horror films, was exactly the candidate for the scenes where Staff Sergeant Will James (Jeremy Renner) has to figure out, not where the bomb is, but how many bombs there are. These moments are positively chilling. Bigelow plays with the scene by trigering the emotions -- suspense, relief, dread and "gotcha" surprise -- that are a staple of the horror film, twisting them to suit and transform another genre. In one early scene James, having defused one IED, begins to pull on a wire only to discover that the bomb he disabled is attached to six others live devices, and he is standing right in the middle of all of them. (Imagine a similar scene where a young woman sticks her hand in a cereal box, looking for a snack, and comes out with a handful of spiders.) The horror if war in Iraq, Bigelow tells us by switching up her genres, makes it historically unique among wars. Similarly, there is a grisly scene where the squad discovers a bomb factory: in an inner room, there is a child's corpse with a bomb sewn inside; James must defuse the bomb by plunging his hands into the freshly butchered body. These scenes are outlandish, but their deftness makes them read true.

That said, one problem with The Hurt Locker is that, for a war movie, it is also strangely dull, despite Bigelow's perfect skills as a director and several lively combat scenes. It relies for its narrative on a series of tense scenes: in each, the bomb disposal team deals with excruciating danger as the devious bombers challenge James' skills as a defuser. Each episode is beautifully crafted, but quite similar; they are interspersed with far too sketchy glimpses into the inner lives of the men who do such work (they drink, they fight, they smoke, they play video games.) Recreation for the squad consists of getting nasty drunk and belting each other in the stomach until one guy collapses (because you have to feel the pain somehow, right? Duh.)

Lesson? The inner lives of these men have been completely evacuated by the work they do; they are dead men walking. As I recall, one soldier actually describes himself as "already dead" early in the film. James, in one of the few scenes where the men speak about something other than their work, cannot seem to remember whether he is actually married or not. He knows he has a son, and that his son has a mother, but the woman's precise social relationship to him is foggy, in contrast to the acute sense of space and time he can access when defusing an IED.



Since I tend to not be interested in men or women who have lost empathy for other living things, it may be my limitation that I had trouble connecting to the characters. However, I also didn't love the lack of plot in The Hurt Locker, even though this is probably a skillful political device if you want to win an Oscar about a charged subject. The movie is neither pro-war or anti-war; it just is. Furthermore, I occasionally found the action outside of the bomb disposal and combat scenes confusing -- like why, for example, does James hunt down the family of the murdered child only to terrorize them and then run away? What does he think they did to deserve him storming their house? Is the point that he doesn't know what he wants from them? Is it supposed to be a metaphor for the whole rotten enterprise? None of this is clear. Or why, at the end of film, does he ends up back in Iraq? I thought he had re-hitched because he was no longer suited for civilian life (a common trope for twentieth century wartime masculinity dating back to Erich Maria Remarque's 1928 World War I novel All Quiet On The Western Front.) My friend, on the other hand, thought he had actually been killed, and was doomed for all eternity to dress in the fat suit and wander the dusty streets of (name your favorite city in Iraq here.)

Like Kimberley Pierce, who directed the haunting and lightly released Stop-Loss (2008), I suspect that Bigelow is trying to break out into the big time (and succeeding, as Pierce did not) by marketing herself as a woman director who "knows men." This may be one explanation for the most more serious historical problem with The Hurt Locker in my view: there are no women in it, minus a brief glimpse of the mother of James' son and shots of Iraqi women who literally scuttle around the streets during the various crises. In these scenes even male Iraqi bystanders have agency: they study American soldiers with empty, unreadable expressions (we are expected to experience the soldiers' constant watchfulness that any one of these men might trigger the bomb; the racist effect is that they all become terrorists.) Given the fact that collectively women have served over 150,000 tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and 2,000 of them have won the Bronze Star for valor in combat, I find it inexplicable that there are no uniformed women in this movie. None, not even in crowd scenes where men get to be the stars. In other words, part of what has been erased in The Hurt Locker is what makes this war historically distinctive -- so that Bigelow can hook us with portraits of wounded masculinity from past wars with which we are already (un)comfortable.

Therefore, it mattered that a woman directed this movie because....?

One explanation, and what ought to be of greater concern about The Hurt Locker, is that it skates over much of what is distinctive about this war to beat us over the head with an old story about war: irreparably wounded masculinity. Will James is Natty Bumpo, the man who knows Indians who, as Richard Slotkin taught us, will be central to American regeneration through violence but will forever remain outside civilization as a consequence. Furthermore, the cultural work of The Hurt Locker is similar to that of the Viet Nam movies that Jerry Lembke discusses so intelligently in The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998): to persuade us that returning veterans are likely to be crazed, lost misfits who will never fit into society again. Following on a grisly discovery in London that one trendy chain store is selling a Travis Bickle fashion line (here's another link to a US store that will help you dress like the homicidal Viet Nam vet from Martin Scorcese's 1976 hit, Taxi Driver), I think this cultural trend should be of greater concern. Granted, many soldiers returned from Viet Nam terribly damaged, and some remain traumatized by their experiences to this day (although they weren't helped by the fact that shell-shock had been removed from the DSM-III, so they were given diagnoses that articulated their condition as unrelated to their war experiences.) Many men and women have, and will, return from Iraq requiring far more care than I suspect they will get.

But the legacy of Viet Nam movies, as Lembke argues, is the cultural expectation that once a man has gone to war he never really returns to a normal social world. Bigelow underlines this promise by turning James into a one-trick pony, who lectures his baby son about how he has come to only love bombs. There is also an idiotic psychotherapist who appears periodically in the film to remind us that no one --particularly those whose job it is to do so -- cares about what soldiers are going through. The pompous shrink delivers endless platitudes in the face of his client's growing despair and fear, and he refuses to actually engage the world that the bomb disposal unit inhabits. When challenged to do so by his angry client, for unexplained reasons the shrink finally agrees to go out on patrol with the squad. He does a variety of stupid things, utterly unsupervised by anyone, and gets blown up. Predictably, this adds to his client's burden of guilt and shame.

So yes, The Hurt Locker won six Academy Awards -- but in my view it doesn't hold a candle to the Iraq movies that have been overlooked, most prominently In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, 2007). But the verdict from this historian? Thumbs down.

Cross posted at Cliopatria.

Being Against The War Means Being Actively Interested In The War

Because we were catching up on old episodes of Army Wives before I came upstairs this evening, I am reminded of a fact few people know about the Radical: her connections to the military. Two of my cousins served in Gulf I; and we had a family connection who was deployed to Afghanistan with the Special Forces a couple years back. In fact I, and my sister, are the first generation of my father's family to have not served in the military since at least the American Revolution (since our family comes from western Massachusetts, it seems likely that we could take that date back to the French and Indian War, and perhaps even Metacom's War.) Not accidentally, one of my current favorite activities is reading the blogs of military wives (who probably detest Army Wives, much as medical people scoff at ER and Grey's Anatomy.) At The Real Army Wife you can read the thoughts of an infantry Lieutenant's spouse; her husband is deployed in the Sand Box (this is the kind of lingo you learn if you watch Army Wives, friends, the first season of which can be obtained on DVD.) While the Lieutenant is away, Real Army Wife is organizing for Obama, in addition to living her real life as a marketing exec. Rock on, dear. I hope you are on a base in a swing state. Like North Carolina.

Did you know that some of the important organizers in the early Civil Rights movement in the South were white military wives from the North stationed on bases? True. Progressives are everywhere.

Another military blogger -- who found me, and who I have enjoyed a short correspondence with (she is a McCain/Palin supporter, I'm pretty sure, although she and her family are being trasnferred to England before the election) is Household 6 Hooah's Weblog. Her husband, who sounds like career army, just finished his second deployment, and got home a couple days ago. So they are in the midst of what I imagine is a joyous -- and complicated -- transition. I am very happy too. Once I got to know this blogger a bit, read her blog, and grew to admire her resilience, I became very anxious about her husband's return. I am very relieved, therefore, that he is safe home, and I can put my mind on other things, like the search committee I am running, and the paper I have to give in two weeks. I like this gal, whose email tag is Mommy2MyLilSpud: she's cheerful, and reminds you that not everyone who is involved in the war is a screaming mess like they suggest in the newspapers. This is something I am glad to know, because one of the things that bothers me most about the last seven years is the endless human damage that often begins with the soldier and radiates outward to all his loved ones. But Mommy2MyLilSpud is a one foot in front of the other type of person whose toast seems to fall butter side up most of the time as a result, and I bet there are thousands more like her.

I am reminded when I read military family blogs that for those of us who are against the war it is a complicated issue to extend our sympathy and affection to those who have agreed to fight it. But it is something worth attempting because it expands the world of those of us who the government has deliberately shielded from the emotional consequences of this endless conflict (it does seem the economic consequences are coming home to roost, although as usual, those who made the war will suffer the least.) I can't help extending myself, since my family, as well as my accidental, connections to the military keep me alert to those around me for whom the war is their life context right now (for example, the son of one of my Zenith colleagues was in Desert Storm, having joined the Army to get a civil service ranking that would allow him to be a forest ranger; another friend volunteers to help resettle Iraqi refugees, many of whom have had to flee because they worked for the American military.)

But I also think it is worthwhile for anyone who really believes they are going to support the kind of change Obama is promising after he is elected President to be in touch with military people, deliberately if necessary. Cleaning up after this war -- and the many people who have been harmed by it -- will be a huge part of what will be there waiting for the new President in 2009. Not to mention rebuilding a military that has been decimated by this conflict, and taking it back from the Blackwater, Halliburton and the other Bush cronies taxpayer money has been siphoned off to for the last six years. We need to compensate and care for the veterans, who have been routinely cheated of their bonuses, health care, and disability benefits, so that the money can be cycled back to an Iraqi government that is operating many billions of dollars in the black. Meanwhile the people who politicians refer to collectively as "heroes" are becoming homeless and have little or no access to health care after having been demobilized with severe health problems.

So for those of you who are anti-war: a vote for Obama is a vote for our troops. Get out there and do it in November. Hoo-ah.

Thinking War, Thinking History: A Short Review Essay

(Editor's Note: every once in a while, someone who follows the Tenured Radical is Reading feature asks what I think about a book I have read. Mostly I don't say, since it would be a great burden to review everything, and because there is a reason book review sections have editors. However, as I am formally inaugurating my relationship with Cliopatra today, I though this cross-posted essay might be a good start.)

Perhaps it is an effect of the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, or perhaps it is the impending retirement of my American Studies colleague Richard Slotkin, but I seem to be reading more about war and violence this year than I have in the last decade.

Following on William A. Williams’ Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959), a book that sought to understand how the project of democracy could be simultaneously well intentioned and destructive, a few scholars of the United States – Slotkin among them -- proposed that the history of violence was central to the formation of an “American” identity. Critical to this was a re-examination of the intellectual relationship between American democracy and the frontier, articulated originally by Frederick Jackson Turner (1893). Slotkin, for example, argued over the course of three volumes that it was not the frontier itself, but rather the naturalization of violence particular to the “frontier” -- on the Great Plains, in southeast Asia, or wherever Euro-Americans encountered racial “others” -- that shaped and re-shaped American culture and politics. His most recent book, The Lost Battalion: the Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality (2005) explores another, paradoxical, feature of this history of national violence: the exclusion of African Americans from democratic rights in 1919, despite black soldiers’ hopes that participation in World War I might result in full citizenship.

In the spirit of what I have cited above, I would like to take special note of four books I have read recently. Each pursues important questions about the history of violence, war and nationalism that are useful to us as historians and as critical thinkers about the contemporary United States.

The first volume I would recommend is Ned Blackhawk’s Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). Blackhawk is part of a generation of Native scholars who are making radical interventions in American history. Violence Over the Land demonstrates the consequences of European imperial ambitions for Native North Americans from the sixteenth century onward. But it is the Indian empires of the Great Basin, primarily the Ute, Paiute and Shoshone nations, their strategies, economies and political cultures, which are central to this history of American borderlands. It is also significant to note that Blackhawk, following Richard White’s influential The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics In the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (1991), challenges the idea of an American “frontier” that moved in a linear way. Rather, Indians negotiated their survival on multiple, overlapping frontiers. Simultaneously, intermingled Americans, English, French and Spanish colonists and entrepreneurs created the political, economic and environmental conditions for the success of a United States imperial project in the Far West well before it was fully launched in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The second book on my list is a cultural and political history of death that has already received well-deserved attention, Drew Faust’s, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.) Faust asks a critical question that could usefully be asked about other wars and different forms of social violence: what is the impact of unimaginable death on a society? And how do people assimilate, and learn to cope with, a way of dying that is new to them? Of course, this is a particularly relevant question for the Civil War because, as Faust points out, neither the United States nor the Confederacy had any reason to imagine in 1861 that death might occur on such a scale. Furthermore, the idea that family members might die anonymously far away from the comfort loved ones normally provided, that soldiers might be dismembered and/or buried in haste, was unimaginable to antebellum bourgeois Americans who idealized a “good death.” Asking us to think about the everyday consequences of war to those who bear the brunt of it seems particularly relevant at a moment in time when the United States military works assiduously to keep the dead and wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan uncountable and hidden from view.

My third pick is historical fiction: Pat Barker’s Life Class (New York: Doubleday, 2008). Barker is a British novelist who won the Booker prize for The Ghost Road (1995), the third volume of her trilogy about World War I. This book views the Great War through the eyes of a group of friends whose studies at the Slade are interrupted in 1914. Similarly to Faust, the grisly descriptions of soldiers’ wounds point to the horrifying details of battlefield violence that individualize death through detail: for example, the slight – but consequential -- fact that on the Western Front men died of injuries that might have healed, had dirt teeming with untreatable microbes not been blown into the wounds. One cannot help but think of the contemporary phenomenon of suicide bombers, or IED’s exploded next to groups of soldiers and civilians, during which microscopic bits of human flesh penetrate and infect the skins of those who survive the attack. But the intellectual questions the book asks also should compel historians: does war awaken sensibilities that give art depth and meaning it might not otherwise have? Under what conditions does an aesthetic approach to war trivialize its violence? And under what conditions might any of us – as one female artist in the novel does – decide not to “see” the violence of war at all, and choose to focus on art instead?

My final pick is Cathy Wilkerson’s Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), and I make this recommendation as someone who thinks virtually all memoirs from the radical anti-war movement are oddly annoying historical documents. Bill Ayer’s book, Fugitive Days, which had the bad luck to publish on September 11, 2001, romanticizes the violence and overestimates the political impact of Weatherman; Jane Alpert’s Growing Up Underground (1981) is simultaneously apologetic and too quick to pin responsibility on her co-conspirators. Furthermore, no former activist can write honestly about what happened, since there are people who might still be harmed by what is revealed. But what I love about the Wilkerson book is that it asks the question: how did someone who cared so deeply about peace and justice come to embrace violence as a political necessity? Wilkerson embeds the answer in autobiography, in an excellent social history of the New Left, and in reflections on the life-long burdens she has had to come to terms with for having chosen violence over peaceful opposition to a deeply immoral war.

The Pain of Privilege; Or, You Thought College Admissions Couldn't Get Any Sillier, Didn't You?

Having created a ridiculous problem, which is that high school students have to build a resume and a transcript worthy of a Rhodes scholar to get into a selective four-year college, you will be glad to know that these coveted institutions and gatekeepers to success have found a solution to the stress this causes to young people. The answer is to throw money at it, imply that the students and their helicopter parents are pathological, and urge the admitted students not to matriculate until they have rested and feel less emotional and cynical about the whole thing.



That's right. Do not re-evaluate what you are doing that is causing kids to show up at college as nervous wrecks, and sometimes even leave after a month or two because they are so burned out and care so little about real learning anymore. Do not admit that, because of you, young people are running themselves ragged with multiple after school activities, course overloads, AP examinations, science fairs, commuting to college classes while still in high school, music lessons, meeting with their tutors, tutoring others less fortunate, and being three-sport varsity athletes to get a shot at going to a half-way decent school. Instead, denounce the fact that they are burned out after having done what you insist they must do to gain admission to your expensive university and encourage them to pay you even more money so that they can take a year off doing something enriching in a foreign land. By doing so, you can also help create a new class of experts -- in addition to the private athletic coaches, college application consultants, and SAT tutors who are already flourishing because of your ridiculous so-called "standards" -- who can be paid to help an Ivy League-bound teen relax in just the right way, get away from those pushy parents and regain her shattered peace of mind. All over the country gap year planners will help your child attain the maturity he had no opportunity to develop, so pressed was he with fulfilling his parents' ambitions -- not, mind you, competing realistically to get a place at a selective college or university.

That's right: as Alex Williams reports today in the New York Times,

Princeton unveiled plans to send at least a 10th of its incoming students abroad for a year of social service before starting at the university. High schools now hold gap-year fairs to teach students about the option, and companies and consultants that place students in gap-year programs (guitar-building in England or caring for injured sled dogs in Canada) are proliferating.

Full disclosure: I have had, and will have, a number of young people in my family who have suffered from the effects of what I now call the College Derby, who are actually quite privileged by comparison to most of the young people growing up here in Shoreline, and I think this story is just gross.

In addition to Williams' failure to acknowledge that it is a little nuts for the students in question to be so strung out in high school (something which is perhaps not entirely her fault, since selective colleges -- like the ones she researched for the story -- perceive all problems, even one the colleges are directly responsible for apparently, as having originated in high school or at home), the story also doesn't acknowledge that this year off costs an arm and a leg, effectively adding a fifth year of college fees. Nor does it acknowledge that working and poor people have another way of taking time off before college. It's called military service, without which they cannot hope to pay for higher education, but because of which they might leave all or part of their brains over in Iraq or Afghanistan, and thus perhaps be rendered less likely to make the most of the college experience.

I hate the war so much that it is rare for me to express the sympathy and compassion I feel for the men and women who are fighting it, and for the families who struggle financially and emotionally while soldiers are deployed. But is there a better expression of the "two Americas" that John Edwards put at the heart of his Presidential campaign than a story like this?

So some American kids will take their year off at cooking school in France, and some will take several years off (more, if the military exercises its option to keep them indefinitely; less if they get blown up or become deranged) in Kabul.

Good Morning, Vietnam: A Shout Out From An Old Radical To Some Younger Radicals

As a historian I know perfectly well that the war in Iraq has major differences from the war in Vietnam, and it's not just because depleted uranium weapons are now used in conventional combat, or because the troops are fighting in sand for oil, as opposed to fighting in jungles against Communism. But when I was driving to rowing practice at around 5:00 a.m. and heard about this bombing of the military recruiting center in Times Square, I thought, Wow. That I should live to see this again in my lifetime.

When I was a kid in the 1960's and '70's, such bombings were associated with an increasingly militarized anti-war movement, made up mostly of white college students. I followed the doings of the Weather Underground very closely: my research on this radical antiwar movement and an unhealthy fascination with the doings of the Philadelphia mob are probably what, in the end, either led me to being a historian or -- if you want to see that as more of a rational choice --shaped my interests as a historian who wrote her first book on the FBI and federal fugitives. If the mob was a little more geographically distant, I could encounter federal fugitives who were part of the anti-war movement by riding my bike down to the local post office. In those days, one went to the post office with some frequency: postage stamps were necessary household items, since we didn't have email and we didn't pay bills on line. In addition, if you wanted to send someone a present, you had to buy it, pack it up in a box, and take it to the post office and mail it. I'm mentioning this because, other than what I read in the newspaper (we didn't have alternative radical weeklies on the Main Line), what I knew of Weatherman was what I read off the FBI Most Wanted posters in the post office. And then, a lot of those folks had gone to school in the area -- Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr -- schools where Quaker pacifism and social engagement led students naturally into community organizing and anti-war work. And a very few of those people became radical domestic terrorists.

My favorite was Bernadine Dohrn, who is now a law professor at Northwestern. Once, when no one was looking, I quietly tore her wanted poster down and took it home. I was not alone in this fascination, of course. Read any memoir of the movement, and Dohrn is the quintessential movement woman who some peopel would follow anywhere (mostly men, I think) and some people resented (because she was a powerful woman, and because Weatherman generally gave women very little power.) I dug her because she was sexy, tough and smart. I wouldn't have put it that way then, but I think I wanted her to be my girlfriend. Some years later, when I had a girlfriend, not to mention a whole life, I finally met Dohrn for two seconds at a benefit of some kind. And I have to say, all these years later, she did not disappoint.

But let me say another thing: I have been catching up on my Weatherman reading as part of some new research on radical feminism, and I have also met a few other former cadre, many of whom have careers built around nurturing children and building peace from the ground up. But they also went through a painful process, some while doing serious jail time, of rebuilding lives that were shattered by the form of resistance they committed to as young people There are very few who do not deeply regret the violence for which they were responsible, and the ideological turn that work took that made them see such violence as a reasonable response to a violent war. So here's my message for whoever bombed the recruiting station: I get it. I am even sympathetic to your rage. But stop now, before it's too late. Because careful and confident as you may in relation to your technical skill with explosives and your capacity to plan the explosion around a time when no one is around, eventually you are going to kill someone who doesn't deserve to die because you have a fantasy that you are really damaging the war effort. You will either kill or maim someone you don't know who didn't expect to walk into history that way, or you will kill a friend, as was the outcome of the 1970 explosion of an Eleventh Street townhouse in New York City, a home that five Weatherman cadre were using as a bomb factory. The anniversary of that explosion, eerily, given today's events, is Saturday, March 8.

This post is in memory of Ted Gold, Terry Robbins and Diana Oughton, who were killed on that day.

Blowin' In The Wind

It looks like Senators Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE) are the most recent defectors from the War Party to join their Democratic Party colleagues in asking for a draw-down of U.S. trooops in Iraq that would begin in four months: read about it here. Pete Dominici (R-NM), Lamar Alexander (R-TN), and Richard Lugar (R-IN) beat them to the punch; John Warner (R-VA) is apparently involved in shaping the Republican insurgency, and will publicly break with President George "What--Me Worry?" Bush any day now. You can read the New York Times story here. Just to be nice let's call them Peace Republicans. Or Late to Dinner (did your mother ever say that -- "Call me anything, but don't call me late to dinner?") At least they finally got to dinner, which is more than many of our soldiers will ever do again.

As of today, the body count of U.S. soldiers alone (no Iraquis, no Coalition forces from other countries, no contractors) is 3,607, with three deaths pending confirmation: read about it here, Senators.

I guess the Republicans dropping over the side of the ship put the "grand" back in Grand Old Party, didn't they? Better late than never, is what I say. The fact that several of them are up for re-election next year -- Dominici is the most prominent -- should not exactly classify this as a cynical move, I suppose. But it does make you wonder whether they watch the Lehrer News Hour: I know Snowe and Hagel are sometimes on it. Those of us who see the casualties reported in silence day after day, week after week, month after month, would have voted to leave Iraq several years ago.

I also don't want to get snarky about the fact that both those advocating withdrawing our troops and those advocating that we fight until the last U.S. soldier is left standing, keep demanding that the "Iraquis" take "responsibility" for "their own country." When I try to parse a thought like that, I think of other phrases like, "Why do the gays have to flaunt their lifestyle," "Black men need to take responsibility for their actions," and "The government should stay out of people's lives." The subject of each sentence is so inclusive, and the action being taken so obscure, that such phrases inevitably say more about the speaker than the group or entity that is being spoken about. Another analogy might be the colleague who gets a bad set of exams and gets angry at the students rather than asking first what it is s/he hasn't taught them.

I don't mean to trivialize a horrible situation. But is the bipartisan coalition that finally gets us out of Iraq (and not, by the way, Afghanistan -- our next Iraq) really going to blame the people of bleeding Iraq for this? Really?

Stay tuned: this could be the most riveting summer since Watergate.

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While we are talking politics, did anybody read Joe Klein's piece in the June 7 issue of Time Magazine Beware the Bloggers' Bile? It's all about how he made a mistake on his blog about which way a congressperson would vote on the recent bill to (de)fund the war -- actually, she told him one thing and then changed her mind ("Women!") -- and left wing bloggers "blasted" him unmercifully. I'm sure they did -- it's a strange atmosphere, blogging, and it is uncivil and unpretty when in the wrong hands. But does this conclusion follow? "The spitballs aimed at me don't matter much," Klein writes. "The spitballs aimed at Harman, Clinton and Obama are another story. Despite their votes, each of those politicians believes the war must be funded. (Obama even said so in his statement explaining his vote.) Each knows, as Senator Jim Webb has said repeatedly, that we must be more careful getting out of Iraq than we were getting in. But they allowed themselves to be bullied into a more simplistic, more extreme position. Why? Partly because they fear the power of the bloggers to set the debate and raise money against them. They may be right--in the short (primary election) term; Harman faced a challenge from the left in 2006. In the long term, however, kowtowing to extremists is exactly the opposite of what this country is looking for after the lethal radicalism of the Bush Administration."

Oh. Please. Left wing bloggers are responsible for the incoherence and shilly-shallying of the Democratic party on this war? And it's not like writing that nasty novel about Bill Clinton was a huggy-kissy thing to do, Joe.

Might I also add, for those of us who have had to deal with right wing bloggers and their wacky poison-pen followers, Klein's view that the left is particularly prone to Extreme Blogging is just wrong and deliberately misleading.