Private Beauchamp & the dogs

The New Republic found itself in the middle of a right-wing assault after editor Franklin Foer published a GI's story about how some of our young and immature soldiers have acted in Iraq. The right evidently thinks that all 170,000 of our soldiers there, dropped into hell with an unclear moral purpose, always channeled St. Francis when they weren't killing insurgents.

Army Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp, "the discredited soldier" who sent those reports to the magazine, has been widely reviled on the right-wing media sites. His three stories — of kids making fun of a disfigured Iraqi woman; of soldiers' finding children's bones; and of soldiers killing dogs for sport — were ridiculed. How could anyone think our boys would do such a thing?

Now comes this, in today's Denver Post:

A young man recently returned from Iraq sat in Barfield's chair while she applied a memorial tattoo.

She'd seen him in her shop before, just a regular kid. But now he told her a disturbing story about a lull between firefights. With no enemy in sight, the soldiers turned their weapons on a dog.

They fired a few rounds, but the dog didn't die. So they fired a few more. Then they ran over it with their armored vehicle, just to hear the bones crunch.

"They had programmed themselves to be hard," Barfield recalls. "The whole thing was about not losing the programming. But he was laughing when he told the story, and it kind of scared us.

Huh. War can harden hearts and damage a person inside as well as outside. Who knew?

Kevin Drum on Iraq & economics

Kevin Drum is a must-see today, both for his post on Iraq:

THE BATTLE OF BAGHDAD....If Tom Lasseter is to be believed -- and I think he is -- the junior officers leading our troops are not sanguine about our prospects in Baghdad. They think that Muqtada al-Sadr's militia has so thoroughly infiltrated the Iraqi army and police force that they're the ones who mostly benefit from our training:

"Half of them are JAM. They'll wave at us during the day and shoot at us during the night," said 1st Lt. Dan Quinn, a platoon leader in the Army's 1st Infantry Division, using the initials of the militia's Arabic name, Jaish al Mahdi. "People (in America) think it's bad, but that we control the city. That's not the way it is. They control it, and they let us drive around. It's hostile territory."

And then for his post, with a graph, on U.S. income volatility. Things have worsened for individual families as the safety net has been dismantled, even though unemployment has stayed about the same over the past half century. Drum writes that "if you do lose your job the odds of a catastrophically long period without work are much greater than in the past. It's one thing to be afraid of losing your job for a few months; it's quite another to (justifiably) be afraid of losing your job for six months or more. Healthcare is part of it too."

Take action on Iraq

On Thursday, MoveOn wants to send 1 million messages to Congress. They'll deliver petition signatures from hundreds of thousands of Americans all over the nation who are opposed to escalation in Iraq. Then, volunteers will call our senators all day to let them know that the people expect Congress to check this imperial president's bloody missteps.

Go to MoveOn to volunteer on Thursday. Tell them that our tax dollars should be used to build healthcare and other goods, rather than sending our young men and women to fight in a misbegotten, unjust war with no hope of success.

Support our troops

In Portland (aka Little Beirut) on Sunday, my daughter Kira bought a thrift-store tee shirt with a map of Iraq next to a map of Michigan, with “Operation Iraqi Freedom” emblazoned across. She wore it to work, and got such strange looks that she ended up putting on a sweatshirt over it. People just didn’t know what to say. Did it mean she was a Bush supporter? Was it meant in irony?
Then at the neighborhood pub last night, a guy at the end of the bar asked her if that was a “support our troops” band on the shirt's arm.
It was, she said.
He thanked her.
He’d recently gotten out of the hospital, and was scheduled to return for his fourth tour of duty next month.
He’d been injured when the Humvee he’d been in hit an IED. He was the only survivor.
He told her that few of the troops still have confidence in either Bush or any rationale for being there.
Kira bought him a beer and asked what she could do.
Send socks and baby powder, he told her. The guys are always short on socks and baby powder.
This war sucks.