onparkstreet

“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”

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“Small Wars Journal has kicked off our first fundraising campaign.”

So to better serve you, the small wars community of interest, we are in the unpleasant but necessary position of coming to you, hat in hand, in an NPR-like scenario. We are counting on your contributions, coupled with support from grants and foundations, collateral income (advertising and referrals), and volunteer contributions of effort and content, to help us do more of what you seem to value and want us to do.

I learn a lot from the SWJ community and the folks that gather in the comments section. Sort of like the Chicago Boyz community and comments section. Hmm – thanks, CBer’s!

Review of Senator’s Son: An Iraq War Novel

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“The sergeant kept the lower half of his body still and raised his flashlight attached under his rifle barrel. He cautiously squeezed the handle grip shining light at his feet. Sure enough, he stood on what the Marines called a burrito wrap. The insurgents quickly planted these IEDs by throwing them out in the street.”

Senator’s Son: An Iraq War Novel by Luke S. Larson

Some months ago, the author (Luke Larson served as a Marine infantry officer and saw action in two tours to Ar Ramadi, Iraq in 2005 and then again in 2007) left a comment on my blog asking me to review Senator’s Son. After I agreed to review the book, he e-mailed me a few sample chapters. Based on what I read, I ordered a copy of the novel.

I finished the book by reading a page here and a page there, late at night, after long days at the hospital. I kept circling back over what I’d previously read, underlining passages and writing in margins, engrossed by the written word:

Golf mobile one pushed to Ramadi Med with the senior corporal and two other badly injured corporals. Rogue and Doc V rounded the corner of the gun truck heading back towards the seven-ton. The only Marine still in constant consciousness was the burned private. The private in his combat boots and boxers wandered in a daze talking to himself. The Marine stared at the lieutenant. His eyes pleaded to him. “Sir, you have to get me out of here.”

It’s a high-wire act of tense action mixed in with hesitant calls home to family, doctrinal discussions on counterinsurgency, stories of suffering Iraqis – told with real empathy, and the absurd teasing humor of young Marines far from home. One mini-monologue by a “been there, done that,” character named Rock had me rolling. Very funny.

The novel does have some problems: the prose can be confusing, there are unnecessary flashbacks, and a framing device that just plain doesn’t work. None of this matters, really. The heart of the book is a page turner, a story well told, and most importantly, an education for the reader.

As Zenpundit says in his review, “As an explanation of COIN, I think the book is a must read for anyone unfamiliar with the subject and the nuanced complexities that COIN entails. The gritty, unforgiving, human suffering and moments of triumph of soldiers waging “pop-centric” COIN that gets lost in powerpoint slides, in the dry abstractions of journal articles and blogospheric arguments far removed from the ground is present in ample measure in Senator’s Son.”

It’s an education I think more people should be eager to undertake – like keeping a kind of faith. The least you can do is read the stories, right?

I encourage you to read this novel. (Thanks for the link Instapundit!)

Volitional causation versus systemic analysis

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Neither in his theory of economics nor in his theory of history did Marx make end results simply the carrying out of individual volition, even the volition of elites. As his collaborator Friedrich Engels put it, “what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.” Economics is about the pattern that emerges. Historian Charles A. Beard could seek to explain the Constitution of the United States by the economic interests of those who wrote it but that volitional approach was not the approach used by Marx and Engels, despite how often Beard’s theory of history has been confused with the Marxian theory of history. Marx dismissed a similar theory in his own day as “facile anecdote-mongering and the attribution of all great events to petty and mean causes.”
 
The question here is not whether most intellectuals agree with systemic analysis, either in economics or elsewhere. Many have never even considered, much less confronted, that kind of analysis. Those who reason in terms of volitional causation see chaos from conflicting individual decisions as the alternative to central control of economic processes. John Dewey said, “comprehensive plans” are required “if the problem of social organization is to be met.” Otherwise, there will be “a continuation of a regime of accident, waste and distress.” To Dewey, “dependence upon intelligence” is an alternative to “drift and casual improvisation” – that is, chaos – and those who are “hostile to intentional social planning” are in favor of “atomistic individualism.”

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

“Under a dusty hospital tent where doctors yell over the roar of jet engines, Dr. John York studied an electronic image of a blood vessel in the neck of a soldier wounded by an improvised bomb. It looked like a balloon ready to pop.”

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“Under a dusty hospital tent where doctors yell over the roar of jet engines, Dr. John York studied an electronic image of a blood vessel in the neck of a soldier wounded by an improvised bomb. It looked like a balloon ready to pop. Too delicate to operate on directly. Dr. York would have to try a procedure that had rarely been attempted so close to a battlefield.” – Alan Cullison, Wall Street Journal

First-rate article in the WSJ. (via Abu Muqawama Twitter feed)

I attended a conference a couple of weeks ago, where I had the chance to hear a few military surgeons discuss their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. Amazing work being done.