WSJ editor says pushing Army, troops ‘not a hard thing to do’

December 19, 2006

Wall Street Journal editorial board member Robert Pollock explained on Fox News Channel recently that we need not worry about the burdens of a troop escalation in Iraq. To hear Pollock explain it, all the president has to do is push the military and the troops to the breaking point.

On the December 16 edition of Fox News’ Journal Editorial Report, after Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason Riley claimed that it would be “very difficult,” politically, for President Bush to increase troop levels in Iraq, fellow Journal board member Robert Pollock countered: “[A]ll that means is decreasing the length of some breaks from tours of duty and increasing the lengths of some tours of duty.” Pollock added: “That’s not a hard thing to do.”

Isn’t that easy?

There was a point, in the early 1970s, when the electorate generally began to perceive the left as unreliable on national security issues. Stemming from opposition to Vietnam, and up through the Iranian hostage crisis, liberals garnered a reputation for failing to be “tough.” If you wanted a party you could trust to stand up to our enemies, voters were told, you needed to back the GOP. The doubts continue to linger.

I’m curious to see if we may soon be approaching a point in which the pendulum swings back and the public begins to reject the right on these issues. If Vietnam was an albatross for the Democratic Party, Iraq has to be an equally serious burden on the Republicans for this generation.

If not, I’m not sure what more it’ll take.

Apparently Robert Pollock has suffered serious mental damage from having spent too many long nights trying to roll triple sixes while playing Risk because he’s conjuring up the ghost of the late unlamented inept British WW1 butcher Douglass Haig and trying for “one more massive push.”

Looks like we found out who volunteer number one for the 20000 is going to be.

  • I don’t care which corporate party’s albatross the war becomes. When Bush calls for troop escalations, the VERY NEXT MORNING we need to start civil disobedience, non-violent weekday protests, and million man sit-ins. There is no excuse for lethargy any more.

  • Thanks CB. Former Dan has formulated a good explanation for this idiot’s idiocy. Instead of a surge, how about a “suckage”. Let’s take a McCain (30k troops) out and see what effect that has. We’ll give that a Friedman and then maybe try another suckage. Perhaps Boy George IV (welcome back Lance) can invade Monaco as an excuse to take the troops out of Iraq.

    Another option is to feed all combatants nothing but soy products until they get so estrogenized they won’t fight any more. (I’m not sure what to feed the women troops.)

  • The corporate-owned media should, any time now, begin spouting the mantra about our only problem in Iraq being the Democrats’ unwillngness to back our men in uniform, just like Vietnam … due, no doubt, to the Dems’ anti-religious un-Americanism and the gay agenda. What’s worse is that the Democrats, especially the leading Democrats, will just sit there and take it as always. I think of Harry Truman and weep.

  • Spot on, CB. It’s time for some “political Ju-Jitsu.”

    It’s time for Democrats to declare: “As the people’s party, we loathe to go war because of the cost in blood and treasure–a debt that will be paid by America’s youth now, and again as their generation ages; but, if America is truly threaten and we must fight, then fight we must.”

  • I don’t care which corporate party’s albatross the war becomes. When Bush calls for troop escalations, the VERY NEXT MORNING we need to start civil disobedience, non-violent weekday protests, and million man sit-ins. There is no excuse for lethargy any more.

    As much as I agree and would love to see that happen, it won’t. The simple fact is, the reason there haven’t been protests of note yet is because the war really hasn’t affected a majority of people.

    College kids don’t care because there’s no draft to protest, thus they’re not affected.

    Most working folks don’t care because none have been asked to make any true sacrifice (fuel rations, etc.). They’re also too busy trying to keep float financially — kinda hard to protest when you’re contemplating filing for bankruptcy because you had a pair of back surgeries and numerous procedures that your insurance company said they’d pay, but didn’t (okay … so maybe that’s just me).

    And the upper classes are enjoying a “surge” in their financial portfolios — why bitch and moan when everything seems to be working out in your favor?

    Again, I wish more Americans would wake the hell up and do something — anything — to show their massive displeasure for this abortion of a war. But until it starts affecting them every single day, it won’t happen.

    🙁

  • Robert Pollock is an ignorant idiot.

    There are no vehicles for these troops to use!

    The remaining Army is training with a fraction of the vehicles they need before they go into Iraq and whole fleets of vehicles are redlined and waiting in depots for repair because BG2’s tax cuts are depriving the Army of the funds they need to fight, train for, and repair from two wars.

    The troops who are going to Iraq are using the vehicles of the troops who they replace. If they don’t replace someone already there, what the Eff do they use, bicycles?

    And we are talking vehicles from main battle tanks to “deuc and a halves”.

    Iraq is not a country you can control with just light infantrymen and we don’t have the support vehicles for them.

    Nice to be back Dale.

  • “That’s not a hard thing to do.”

    Is there a way to make the passive voice illegal? Crap weasles like Bollock couldn’t speak with out it. For whom is it not a hard thing to do Robbie? You? Of course not. You just have to sit on your poxy arse and vomit out one useless opinion after the other. The Prezidint? Right again. The man seems to delight in the idea of more soldiers marching into the meat grinder he created. Military officers? That’s true too, if they know they’ll be nice and safe in some place that is not Iraq or Afghanistan.

    In fact, it isn’t a “hard thing to do” at all if, you don’t count the people being pushed, and if useless cretins like you get your way, will have to push themselves even futher: The soldiers who have to endure things on an hourly basis that would make you crap yourself hollow.

    People who casually talk about subjecting other people to the horrors of war want locking up!

  • As an Army veteran, I would like to think I represent the majority of our armed forces when I say:

    Fuck you, Pollack, fucking never-served, punk piece of shit.

  • The WSJ is the face of our enemy. They represent the corporations who do not give a shit what happens to America as long as they make their money. SCREW THEM.

    And I agree with Ed in #5.

    …the Democrats, especially the leading Democrats, will just sit there and take it as always…

    And until they start representing us, instead of the WSJ readers, our work is not done. Harry Reid, you reading this? I’m looking at YOU. Pelosi? Get with the program and you’ll keep your job. We need Republican enablers like we need a tumor. We hired you to FIGHT those people, not play “Let’s make a deal”.

    And unfortunately Moses has a good point. Americans are so strapped for time they can’t get outraged. This is the genius of re-implementing the draft. If we’re all in it together, we will leave.

    We need to frame the question in terms of where we could be if we had Gore for our president instead of Bush. Aside from all the other issues, think of what we could do with the added cost of Republican mismanagement. With increased tax revenues, and decreased wasted money, we would have AT LEAST a trillion dollars more to work with, and with that we could easily be free of our oil addiction, which is why we’re in the quagmire. Think about that.

    Keep blogging… until the party we vote for votes for us.

  • And BTW, Robert Pollock is Jewish. Maybe he’ll call for universal military service like they have in Israel, so it will be even easier to put more kids into the meatgrinder? Like maybe his own kids?

    Yeah right.

  • Someone in the Democratic party (Pelosi, Reid, Dean — I don’t care) needs to put together a bunch of issues groups to research, write and distribute arguments to counter the R propaganda machine. If Rs want more troops, someone needs to tell the American public what that means and why it’s not easy or wise. Put the Rs on the defensive by overwhemlming them with legitimate points that anyone can understand.

    Demanding ccountability after the fact is a political and legal game; demanding accountability in real time, when warranted, is leadership.

  • Iraq combat veteran “Nitpicker”, blogging for Glenn Greenwald, says:

    In the list of dumb things said about the Iraq War, Robert Pollock’s claim that it’s “not a hard thing” to push some soldiers into Iraq sooner and keep others there longer ought to be put somewhere below Rumsfeld’s “I doubt (the war will last) six months” and above Tony Snow’s claim that journalists were trying to “summarize a complex situation (Iraq) with a single word or gerund, or even a participle.” In other words, it’s better than dangerously blinkered monomania and worse than mush-brained understanding of the English language.

    Why would Robert Pollock (who, as far as I can tell, has never had a job outside the Wall Street Journal editorial pipeline) think that it would be easy to find 40,000 soldiers lounging around just waiting to lose a leg? Because, he said, we do have 1.4 million troops.

    Anyone who’s served in uniform a day in their life just plotzed.

    Robert Pollock is technically correct. According to the DoD (PDF link), we do have 1.4 million active duty service members. However, half of those service members are sailors and airmen (PDF link). They do not have the training required to serve as infantry riflemen or military police, the MOSs most needed in Iraq. Not to mention those 700,000 Navy and Air Force service members are already manning the ships and aircraft for which they’ve been trained. Does Pollock think they can simply switch? No?

    I’m not saying there aren’t plenty of squids and zoomies with sand in their shorts, but only that Pollock’s suggestion that dropping 40,000 troops in Iraq wouldn’t be hard is asinine.

    Don’t look to the Army to just do more, either. It’s nearly broken. That’s not me saying that, but the Army Chief of Staff.

    And I can’t even begin to explain the compassion-free nature of Pollock’s statement. I’m sure he thinks he can feel soldiers’ pain having spent five grueling years in the Wall Street Journal office in Brussels, but as someone who’s been deployed in the past couple of years, I can assure you the unplanned-for extension of a soldier by even a month would drop like a lead weight on the families waiting patiently at home.

    Still, as I’ve said before, none of these Magic Number Theorists can explain what the extra troops would actually do, but that doesn’t keep them from baring their teeth and screaming for more blood.

  • #12
    As an Army veteran, I would like to think I represent the majority of our armed forces when I say:

    Fuck you, Pollack, fucking never-served, punk piece of shit.

    Comment by 2Manchu — 12/19/2006 @ 1:06 pm

    As a Marine veteran, I think 2Manchu speaks accurately. I will add:

    Cheesedicks are the bane of our military. Pollack, you are a cheesdick coward self-serving son of a bitch. Go to hell.

  • Unholy Moses is right (#8) about the apathy of a content society. But we should do whatever we can as individuals anyway.

    See you in DC on the Jan 27th march.

  • Pollack’s “final solution” for this war has to be the nadir of neocon thought. According to him, the precious lives of Americans are so worth defending against aggression that the lives of all of our American troops are rendered meaningless. It’s easy to rationalize away another’s life when you think you own is so much more important. But I wonder how many troops and their families think that their life is worth sacrificing so some idiot like Pollack can spout his inane views.

  • Ohioan–
    I don’t think that it’s a “content” society — it’s a society that’s both too damn busy trying to get by and one that hasn’t been asked to do anything for the effort.

  • This morning one of my students came in to take her final exam and told the class that she had lost her cousin in Iraq. It was a roadisde bomb. It broke nearly every bone in his body, and did irreparible damage to his vital organs. He was named Seth Stanton and he was nineteen years old. Since we share the same religious faith, she has been asking me to pray for him since he was ordered over there last year.

    To hell with anyone who says it would be an easy thing to increase our troop levels. Anyone who thinks in such a way is missing something that should make them fully human. I am including the Democratic leadership when I say so.

  • The lunatic right has always defined those of the moderate to left persuasion as a bunch of cowards, wimps, etc. It has worked quite effectively in turning ignorant know-nothing John Waynes, Nascar men, Marlboro men, and others of their ilk into blue collar fascists. Conservatives are “real men,” lib’ruls are chickens. They have become suckers of the corporate misinformation machine.
    Unfortunately, the “patriot” crowd that screwed up in Vietnam seems determined that they will not “let” this happen a second time. More lives and treasure WILL be sacrificed by these people. It is inevitable. They are going to proceed with their agenda. They will not admit error. Their egos demand it. Their ideology demands it. They’ve watched too many movies.
    One important outcome is to ensure that they are finally and completely tarred with this failure. The sacrifice about to be made by hundreds more of our fellow citizens demands full accountability of the right-wing machine.
    It may seem callous to consider the political ramifications of this mess, but would they have gotten away with this quagmire if they had not escaped accountability for Vietnam?

  • It may seem callous to consider the political ramifications of this mess…

    Not at all. BushBaby wants us to think that we “owe it” to the soldiers who have been killed or wounded to “acheive victory (by allowing more soldiers to be killed or wounded).” What crap. We OWE it to the soldiers to make him pay for this mess and to do what we can to keep future soldiers from falling victim to another mad man’s pride.

  • I wish. Check out Tapped on the AP website for a discussion of how the Repubs will blame the Dems for losing Iraq, thereby continuing the tradition of “who lost China,” “the hippies lost Vietnam,” etc. Given that the American public doesn’t like to lose wars, these stories are an easy sell. Harper’s had an excellent rundown of the history of the right-wing “stabbed in the back” meme a few months ago. Iraq will just be the latest chapter. Remember, the right wing is never wrong about anything.

  • I just heard that the son of family friends is going back to Iraq for his third tour and is scheduled to be there until June. He’s in the Air Force and works on the heavy equipment, a mechanic I think. Supposedly, he’s in a safer area. Are there really any safe areas left there?

    This has got to stop. How do we make this president understand the word “No, we won’t put up with this anymore.” And I wish these talking heads would shut up. Unless they have a son, daughter, etc. serving or have worn a uniform, they can stuff their opinions.

    I think we should borrow the Had Enough? refrain from the midterm elections, change it to: We’ve Had Enough. Bring Our Troops Home Now!, and plaster it all over the country.

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