Can't remember which member asked Petraeus at the first day on the Hill, but the Op-Ed was brought up in the context of reports, like the GAO, that were contradicting all the optimism. The gist with regard to the reports as well as the Op-Ed was , "Are we just going to dismiss these reports?"

Petraeus basically responded that morale depends on the day and the job the person is doing and where they are and who they're dealing with. He said he, like these soldiers, had bad days. He totally failed to address directly any of the strategic concerns they brought out.

It's really sad that three of the men who wrote that brave Op-Ed are now casualties. It's also ridiculous that their indelible broadside against the Administration line, with all of the credibility of their years of experience in-country and their clear bravery in standing up while still in the theater, received such short shrift from the broader media. And this right after we were forced to listen to a two-week echo chamber of the clearly sold-out O'Hanlon/Pollack piece, fortified by their pathetic whirlwind tour of Potemkin markets and villages.

dh19:

He totally failed to address directly any of the strategic concerns they brought out.

He did address them. In fact, the more he tried to get specific, the more they retreated for fear of losing the audience from too many numbers.

dh19:

It's really sad that three of the men who wrote that brave Op-Ed are now casualties.

And all of their fallen comrades.

dh19:

It's also ridiculous that their indelible broadside against the Administration line, with all of the credibility of their years of experience in-country and their clear bravery in standing up while still in the theater, received such short shrift from the broader media.

The problem was that they couldn't go on TV. That said, it got a lot more comment than the endless stream of blog posts that contradict them every day. As Petraeus mentioned, both officers and troopers are voting with their reinlistments, which remain above plan.

dh19:

And this right after we were forced to listen to a two-week echo chamber of the clearly sold-out O'Hanlon/Pollack piece, fortified by their pathetic whirlwind tour of Potemkin markets and villages.

O'Hanlon has been the supplier of the NYT's periodic "state of Iraq" material, which has been anything but slavish in support of the Administration. Both he and Pollack have been attacking Bush and Rumsfeld for years (although they both supported regime change.) And the Potemkin villages all got blown up by AQI (see what happened to the Yezidis last month.) They went to Ramadi, which was devestated by the fighting, but is now healing, and rapidly. Their comments weren't "mission accomplished", but "something's changed here, shockingly".

I found the quote. It's from Hagel. There's an extended transcript at <link>

"It's not your fault, General. It's not Ambassador Crocker's fault. It's this administration's fault. We have never, ever looked at Iraq from the larger strategic context, of not Iraq only but Iran, Syria, and the Middle East.

Now, where is this going to go?

Because the question that is going to continue to be asked -- and you all know it and you have to live with it -- and when you ask questions, as we all do, about is it worth it, the continued investment of American blood and treasure, when Senator Dodd presents to do [sic] the evaluation of one lonely enlisted man -- and by the way, I assume you read the New York Times piece two weeks ago -- seven NCOs in Iraq, today, finishing up 15 month commitments.

Are we going to dismiss those seven NCOs? Are they ignorant?

They laid out a pretty different scenario, General, Ambassador, from what you're laying out today.

Senator Biden said to me once -- I think it was on our first trip to Iraq. He turned around and I was gone. He said: Where did Senator Hagel go?

He found me out talking to the guys in the jeep, the corporals and the sergeants who have to do the dying and the fighting.

I've always found that, if you want an honest evaluation, and not through charts, not through the White House evaluations, you ask a sergeant or a corporal what they think.

I'll bet on them every time, as I know you will, General. I know you will.

Now, where is this going?

We have got too many disconnects here, General -- way too many disconnects.

Are we going to dismiss the five reports that I just noted? "

Maybe because Crocker answered first, or maybe because he'd already addressed it as you say (I didn't watch the whole hearing so maybe something in his numbers addressed the fact that our supposed allies are pretty much using us), they just kind of blew past this question from Hagel and, I guess later, addressed morale more as a matter of personal circumstance without addressing the writers' main point, which is that it's all pretty moot when the people we're propping up are smiling at our faces and then turning around and planting bombs against us.

Typically, there was no follow-up, the piece was just brought up by an anti-war senator as ammo, then moved on by. And you're right, the writers of the Op-Ed couldn't be on tv to ask the question, or at the Press Club, so that's probably part of the problem.

I overstated O'Hanlon's fealty to the Administration a bit maybe, but the fact remains that as a member of the pro-war foreign policy fundament in DC, he has never been a real anti-war critic, as he claimed. And the reason that we were all supposed to care about his opinion was that, as you say, "something's changed here," but that thing was supposed to be his anti-war stance. We were supposed to be surprised that a Brookings Scholar (everyone knows they're *liberal*) could see a happy ending. The same news hook should have worked in reverse in the case of the soldiers' Op-Ed, but it had little impact. Too bad they couldn't swing press availabilities.

Anyway, their loss is sad in a very specific way that of course does nothing to invalidate the general tragedy of the loss of any of these lives.

We all do mourn their loss. However, many of you act like their writings were unique; I guess thats to be expected by those who spend no time perusing the millblogs. There are several blogs out there maintained by soldiers saying the same thing.

Problem for most here is, that for every one of those, there are at least 20 who are saying it's worth it. The blogs in support of the effort from the recently retired (and therefore, not in any way constrained in what they say) alone substantially outnumber those who say it isn't worth it. Just poll the independent bloggers (who have no boss vetting the angle they chose) embedded outside the Green Zone. There are several, Michael Yon being the most famous (and the first to refer to the situation as a civil war).

Those seven were a minority opinion; valuable, but in the minority in the military. Those that were lost are to be grieved and respected.

...is how soldiers being gung-ho for a mission says anything about the value of that mission. This is the army. They take orders and they execute them with gusto. This is a great and necessary thing, but letting it inform our overall strategy and policy seems kinda backwards to me. Soldiers function in support of the policy of the government, not the other way round. All the way up to the generals.

Hagel's kind of lost his mind on this subject. I absolutely agree that it makes sense to talk to the guys at the bottom. That's why I read milblogs. But as I said, the troopers are voting with their reenlistments, which are running about goals. If they thought it was a lost cause, they wouldn't be doing that.

But otherwise, they're no different from any other trooper's death. They were honorably serving their country and paid the ultimate price to do so.

Your point about smiling and then shooting is less relevant today. Things were certainly that way in the Sunni areas last year. This year, the shooting is mostly gone there. The next test will be what happens as we redeploy from those areas to hotter spots. Will AQI reemerge or will the peace hold?

Liberals listen to soldiers because they're "authentic", i.e., living in the middle of the situation. That's why they love throwing the "chickenhawk" label around.

Conservatives listen to soldiers because they have many values in common.

Larry:

Your point about smiling and then shooting is less relevant today. Things were certainly that way in the Sunni areas last year. This year, the shooting is mostly gone there. The next test will be what happens as we redeploy from those areas to hotter spots. Will AQI reemerge or will the peace hold?

The people and article we're discussing here weren't based in the Sunni Triangle. The dateline on their article was from Baghdad. The people who were smiling and shooting at them -- in August -- were not Sunnis. They were members of the Iraqi Army the soldiers were told to partner with and train, which consists largely of Shiites.

Like Petraeus, you'd rather focus on the one place we're seeing some new cooperation against a common enemy. But that doesn't change that the people these guys were working to help and save are mostly Shiite members of an American-armed "army" loyal more to Sadr or whatever other militia than to the central government, or what supposedly passes for one.

I'm sure there are happy .mil bloggers out there, especially in Sunni areas where their earlier enemies and killers have switched sides. Like Petraeus said, it's all about where you're at and who you're working with.

Hagel's larger strategic point, and that of these soldiers in the NY Times, is that however well we can convince a bunch of outnumbered Sunni insurgents to turn against a more fundamentalist Al-Quaeda subset of their own movement, in the end all we're doing is arming the Sunnis for the larger battle against the Shiite government or militias. We're arming both sides, and if your sources say that one of those sides has stopped trying to kill our people, that's to the good, though I do wonder how long this truce will hold once the Jihadi creeps are purged.

According to these soldiers, the Iraqi army is quiet only when you're looking them in the eye. They then turn around and blow you up. This might be part of why the Sunnis have been so reluctant to join the army, except in the areas where *they* will be the majority of the troops.

The people of Iraq are not coming together and we're stuck in the middle and arming both sides. It's great that the Sunni Triangle hates AQ and fears the Shiite militias enough to quiet down their hatred of us for the time being. But again, strategically, where the hell are we? Nowhere.

Here's what I'm referring to from the original Op-Ed. Note that they are not in Tikrit or Ramadi, and they are not working with Sunni tribes, rather Iraqi Army. They wrote about the futility of propping up a two-faced government, and they were writing about last month.

"A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.

As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias."

Liberals who use the Chickenhawk term likely do so because it points up the fact that a lot of people who claim to share the values of the military while arguing in favor of futile wars and holding actions, share those values right up to the point that their own ass is on the line.

And that really gets to the bottom of the matter doesn't it? The small town where I grew up drew a lot of recruits out of high school from both liberal and conservative families. The value they all shared was service and courage. They all deserve smart leadership, because .mil blogs aside, the soldier doesn't have squat to say about what use their dedication is put to. I confess to preferring war leaders who've fought themselves, if only so that they viscerally understand the costs they're asking so few to bear.

...in both cases it's still a dumb idea, whatever the personal motivations are.

It's been stated that the op-ed writers were a minority in the military, and that on .mil blogs and elsewhere, the "for" guys outnumber the "against" guys.

This is to be expected, and not just because of preconceived notions or ingrained politics (they count too). The biggest reason is this: Psychologically speaking, none of us are able to persevere through such difficulty without believing on some level. If you're in the military, you don't support the war because you think logically it's a good thing. You support it because you have to ... your wife and kids living out their lives without father or income, yourself baking in some stupid desert for God-knows-why, your colleagues dying ... you are emotionally forced to believe in what you're doing or else you'll simply give up hope and perish. Same goes for your family members back home.

From that perspective, it is especially remarkable when soldiers divorce themselves from this emotional necessity and somehow address the strategic vacuity of this Iraq war on a rational level. Their words are appropriately given extra weight, as were, say, MLK's calls for peace in the face of physical blows against his people. It's easy to talk when it ain't you in the crosshairs.

What you say is true.

With the end of the cold war, the fraction of Americans who have served is declining rapidly. If we use military service as a prerequisite, we're excluding the vast majority of people, which doesn't make sense.

Your points would be better taken if we were drafting people to fight, but we're not.