Like a good Strausso-Trotskyist neocon, I deplore moral equivalence of any shade, particularly that tenebrous, fashionable variety that suggests the United States is now in dress rehearsals for fascism, or that George Bush and Tony Blair are the moral twins of Osama Bin Laden. To my mind, this is the diseased terminus of what, during the cold war, used to pass for the most smirking neutralism about — if not outright sympathy for — the Soviet "experiment." A stupid and shameful and bungled CIA coup in Central America is worth an entire gulag and then some, according to this argument. Dictatorships deserve a persistent and ever-vigiliant single standard.
However, every so often a story or news bulletin about our own government's incompetence or corruption comes down the pike that beg for not-so-free ideological associations. Case in point: In an article titled "Extended Deployments Should Lessen Army Stress, Commander Says," put out by the American Forces Press Service, we're informed that:
Extended overseas deployments affecting soldiers serving in Afghanistan and other locales overseen by U.S. Central Command should help to alleviate the stress on the Army, a senior U.S. officer in Afghanistan told Pentagon reporters today.
"I'm absolutely confident that that's going to work and that'll manage the pressure and the stress on the force," Army Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division's 4th Brigade Combat Team,said during a satellite-carried news conference.
To call this merely "Orwellian" misses the more crucial point that a worthy cause of deposing a regime that specialized in mental captivity and lying has been further tarnished by the recourse to exactly those methods by our own defense establishment. A new low has been reached when we have to add laughable condescension to the demoralization of our overburdened troops.
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