The arrogance of the amateurs

The Belmont Club:

The American Thinker notices that Time Magazine's article, "How to Leave Iraq" is illustrated with a picture of a helicopter pulling a Stars and Stripes "A" out of Iraq. It is pretty dramatic in artistic conception, the only fly in the ointment being that the image is that of a Russian helicopter, an Mi-24 Hind. American Thinker expresses a certain disappointment.

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Such ignorance, rather than undermining the authority of a strategic commentator, is sometimes regarded as actual proof of a wider mind, unlumbered by the low tradesman's obsession with machinery, technics, calibers, ranges, doctrines, history and whatnot. Ever since the Great War "proved" that professional military men were 'donkeys who led lions', a substantial percentage of Western intellectuals wouldn't be caught dead with more than a smattering of knowledge about things military. To know any more might create suspicions of stupidity; a first-rate mind could never interest itself for long with such dumb muck. While the actual rote operation of warfare could be left to the tradesmen, there arose the belief that the really important questions had to be left to the unfettered, liberally educated mind able to see problems in the round. Nowhere was this better expressed than in Clemenceau's dictum, "war is too important to be left to the generals."

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The real Donkeys in the current war are Democrats who have zero expertise in counterinsurgency warfare who are trying to tell the one acknowledged expert on the subject, Gen David Petraeus how to fight the one in Iraq. The media's Democrats' mistakes in coverage of the war are not limited to their choices of pictures. ( I would note that Democrats in 2004 used pictures of Canadian troops in an add "supporting the troops.") They don't comprehend the war and while they are quick to talk about the "mistakes" of the Bush administration, they rarely acknowledge their own which have been worse. Foremost is using violence as a metric of who is winning the war. War is a violent struggle, but for the violence to be meaningful it has to effect a military's ability to operate. Enemy violence against non combatants is a war crime, but it does not effect our military's ability to seek and destroy the enemy. Right now only the politicians in Washington can do that.