I've refrained from saying anything about the Scott Thomas Beauchamp mess, because I think things are still very much in flux, and there's a little too much posturing all the way around. Still, the weekend seem likes a good moment for a breath-catcher and sum up of things thus far.
Beauchamp turns out to be the diarist behind a previously anonymous series of diary entries in The New Republic, which purported to give an inside look at the Army's work from a soldier's perspective. Beauchamp's reporting - particularly of disturbing incidents of cruelty in a Mess Hall incident, desecration of a gravesite and misuse of Bradley fighting vehicles - has been called into question by knowledgeable "milbloggers" (current and former soldiers who blog), and for a while it seemed that no one could even verify that he actually existed, or was actually a soldier.
The other problem for TNR is that its history on hiring and promoting the work of fabulists is not good. The magazine's notorious case of Stephen Glass, who fabricated whole articles and then faked evidence to resist fact checking, was, along witgh Jayson Blair, a disturbing moment for journalists, especially on the left.
Still, the "Scott Thomas" case is starting to look like overkill; Beauchamp's identity having been revealed, the claims by especially rabid conservatives that TNR was dealing with a faker or a fraud have been seriously undercut. While his relationship with a TNR staffer can raise eyebrows, it's hardly the worst thing in the cozy Washington world where husbands and wives overlap with considerable frequency.
As for what Beauchamp has described, the milbloggers may be right that some of the actions merit investigation and possible disciplinary action. It would be nice to think that rules matter, especially in a situation as difficult as Iraq. But very little has come out to suggest that what Beauchamp describes is out and out falsehood (some, like the dining hall incident, feel overstated, but probably substantively accurate).
However, the whole Beauchamp imbroglio does underline a liberal tactic that I tend to find less than completely useful - a belief by antiwar types that piling up an extensive, and exhaustive, list of wrongs by soldiers will get the troops home sooner. The tactic is a reminder that many people, especially people who by design or by simply choosing to remain uninformed, don't have a complete picture of how soldiers operate. It's not that all soldiers are mindless brutes bent on destruction and casual violence; however, by training, these people are put into situations where its likely they will be in combat and do violence to things. It's the reason why use of military force really needs to be thought through: it's likely that once unleashed, there will be incidents - like the Bradley vehicle "takedowns" that are pointless and unnecessary acts of violence by people who are in situations many of us can't begin to imagine.
If one finds such acts appalling - I certainly do - that seems natural. But if one doesn't think that's part of what happens in every war, then one is being naive. Is Iraq a worse theater of battle than, say, what happened as we swept across Europe after D-Day, or things that happened in Japan while we occupied it? Hard to say. A balanced picture of what military forces do in theater is hard, I think; it's complicated, and it's not pretty, and there's good and bad in what's happening with the Army's presence in Iraq. Airing Beauchamp's largely negative portrait of Army service with little balance is, as conservatives note, stacking the deck to get a reaction. And it is, in many ways, preaching to the converted.
If we're going to leave Iraq, it will be because of a larger sense of what cannot be accomplished through military force, not because some soldiers, and really a minority of them, are bad actors. Relying on "the atrocity argument" to make the case for leaving won't get us where we need to be; mostly it will leave a lot of shattered glass around that no one, really, wants to deal with. And as long as peacenik lefties are gong to start from a position of not liking the military for being militaristic, we're really in not in a great position to be useful critics of how the military works. It's a problem.. and it's why I, when faced with a controversy like Beauchamp, I tend to think the wise spot is on the sidelines.
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