Elmer Gantry Needed At Winter Soldier II (Even Feminist Supporters PO'd)

The Iraq Veterans Against the War’s re-enactment of its mentors’ Vietnam Veterans Against the War’s 1971 spectacle is flopping.

From promising riveting testimony from 200 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, then 100, then 50, the three days presented some hard-luck stories, but didn’t present anything remotely more than assertions that some of the possible misfortunes of war argue that the Iraq war is immoral, illegal and, oh, you know the drill of fiery adjectives.

Reading and listening to some selective transcripts, there’s nothing there re: committing confirmed or confirmable atrocities, mostly just some unsubstantiated and obviously partial and slanted "war stories," or hard-luck stories about readjustment, with many admissions of receiving VA and other help. Exceptions (hard-luck) don't prove a rule (narrative that all or most vets suffer mental and life problems, as result of service), and further there is no investigation of what problems these testifiers (I like that word; sounds like a Tent Meeting!) carried into service.

Unlike 1971, the IVAWers don’t have an Elmer Gantry, er John Kerry, with powerful media and Congressional connections, to capture the friendly major media’s (exception at the Washington Post) imagination and attention. Indeed, even an avid supporter of IVAW listening to podcasts of the hearings complained that leftist radio Pacifica didn’t air the hearings. Perhaps too trite and boring even for Pacifica. There not being a draft, neither do the IVAWers have a mass of protesting college students cheering them on, as in 1971, today’s college students being both more insulated and, perhaps, made more cautious by the documentation of their parents’ foolishness.

Critical bloggers who attended Friday’s hearing were so bored or disgusted, they didn’t even return Saturday. One of the best bloggers, offered an “AAR”, (that’s after-action report).

[T]he testimony lacked context - there were no dates or times or places (other than general references) or even participants in some cases….

Although critical bloggers were restricted, “there were news outlets like the Guardian and al Jazeera wandering around without security and writing what they want.” International leftist coverage of the assertions has been widespread.

But to the testimony; War sucks. It’s sucked since the beginning of the invention of the rock as a weapon. Innocent people die in war, and that sucks, too. But not since the beginning of warfare has any Army taken such care to minimize innocent deaths as the United States armed forces. Never. That’s indisputable.

But, the people who testified Friday glossed over that fact….

The blog post, then, discusses the specific non-specificnous of several testifiers.
Nonetheless,

The point of the whole testimony, for the entire day I spent there was that the war is illegal from the get-go. They offered no evidence that the war is illegal - but when there’s room full of aged bobbleheads nodding on cue - who needs evidence?...

That was one of the problems - I was probably one of the youngest people in the room and I’m nearly 53 years old. The audience were a bunch of old hippies who’d never served in the military and had never seen a war outside of the context of the politics of war. They tch-tched their way through the hearings without understanding the pains the military had to suffer to avoid real atrocities. Their only solution to the war was ending it - today with no real thought of the consequences. The only victory they sought was a victory of Democrats over Republicans regardless of what the nation would be forced to deal with when their solution was enacted.

Although,

Almost everyone testified that they were confused as to the ROE - but then they all testified to a measure of restraint they all knew was present. Um, the ROE. The confusion came when they actually had to apply their own common sense in relation to the ROE and their circumstances.

Still, some IVAWers did manage to re-enact one of the accomplishments of their VVAW elders.

The real atrocity stories were being told out by the ashtray, though. I don’t know how many of the IVAW kids I heard relating their tales to the belly-shirt, hip-hugger wearing college aged chickies while I took my smokebreaks. But I don’t want to c***block on any of those guys who might still be laid up with their airhead honeys today - that’d be a neocon atrocity.

Others are working on detailed dissections of the exaggerated assertions by IVAWers. Our experience with 1971 tells us that we cannot let them go unchallenged or wait a generation to prove their speciousness, (also, see) and we won’t.

UPDATE: Even feminist supporters of the IVAW’s cause are ticked off at the vacuousness of Winter Soldier II.

Saturday's hearings opened with the Divide To Conquer: Gender and Sexuality in the Military. From the title of the panel, we were looking forward to this panel….

The panel was an embarrassment….

A panel at Winter Soldiers promises testimony. Testimony is based on what you saw. A witness in a court of a law attempting to 'testify' to what they themselves didn't witness would be reduced to rubble under cross examination. For this panel, such requirements were largely tossed out….