(From the diaries. mcjoan)
Josh Marshall has the story of the death, announced today, of Andrew J. Bacevich of wounds suffered as the result of an IED explosion in Iraq. He was the son of retired Army Colonel, military thinker, and Boston University professor of the same name.
The senior Andrew Basevich is a conservative, but one of the few conservatives who has opposed the Iraq war from the outset. He wrote a book title The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War.
Also, he wrote an op/ed piece last year in the Washington Post, quoted by Steve Clemons, in which he said:
Who bears responsibility for these Iraqi deaths? The young soldiers pulling the triggers? The commanders who establish rules of engagement that privilege "force protection" over any obligation to protect innocent life? The intellectually bankrupt policymakers who sent U.S. forces into Iraq in the first place and now see no choice but to press on? The culture that, to put it mildly, has sought neither to understand nor to empathize with people in the Arab or Islamic worlds?
It's a losing proposition to play off the importance or the tragedy of the death of one soldier against another, or of a soldier against the Iraqi civilians of whom Professor Basevich was writing in the Post. And it's wrong to visit the sins of the father on the sons, or the daughters. But the image of the Bush twins partying in Paraguay or at Fashion Week here in New York while Professor Basevich is burying his son and namesake seems to me unspeakably unjust.