The Official Line

Maureen Dowd's op-ed piece in today's New York Times ("Goodness Gracious! The Truth!"), she writes (about Secretary of Defense nominee Robert Gates's Senate hearing):

After lunch the nominee clarified his remarks, saying he had not meant to criticize the troops, that the reversals in Iraq were not their fault. They don’t lose battles in Iraq because there are no battles. There’s just a counterinsurgency that they can’t see and that they weren’t prepared or equipped to fight.

My friend Keith S (who emphasizes the phrase in italics) comments:

[Gates's remark is] pure administration bull. Everyone but the twig and his neocon twigistas knew a counterinsurgency was coming. The generals saw it, so did the troops. The twig wouldn't provide the personnel, materiel, or training that our troops needed because it would make it look like "mission ain't accomplished." It would also require raising taxes on his wealthy cronies. So, our troops, our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our moms and dads, our aunts and uncles, our nieces and nephews, as well as the kid next door, are stuck in a horrible situation where the best euphemism for them is "target."

I myself am struck, in reading Colm Tóibín's novel about Henry James (The Master), how Henry James Sr. and Mrs. James didn't approve of their son Bob's cynical letters from his encampments during the U.S. Civil War. His mother wouldn't even open some of his letters after he became critical of the generals' poor planning, which ended up, Bob thought, in many needless deaths. Or she would open them, but regard only the "positive" remarks here and there, ignoring everything else. The James parents wanted to believe in their family's glorious participation in a glorious national endeavor. Mr. James chose to see the maiming of his son Wilkie as having the positive outcome of uniting the family and, no doubt, causing Wilkie to live a more uplifting moral life (should he survive his injuries and the woeful state of nineteenth century medical treatment for infection).