a Gude Cause

[winterbadger]

Bill, since you were speaking about (US) women's suffrage the other day, I thought this link might interest you.

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that looks like it might be quite a memorable event.

[wolfette]

note to self - wear purple and green on 10th October.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Nothing to do with women's sufferage, but have you seen this CJR article on Tom Ricks?

[winterbadger]

I hadn't, but it looks interesting.

*reads...

[winterbadger]

That article, having had a chance to read it now, strikes me as both enlightening and frustrating.

It reads as if it were written by someone with no experience with the military. It treats counterinsurgency as if it were one single doctrine, rather than a type of operation in regard to which there are many, many doctrines. And it reads as if before Petraeus took over no one even knew what counterinsurgency was.

And some of the article is just badly written, or badly edited. The section about Gian Gentile is either incredibly poorly structured or is going out of its way to confuse the reader as to who was where when and saying what about whom. The sentence "The book helped convince Nathaniel Fick, who has served in Iraq and who was named CEO of the Center for a New American Security in June, to enlist." is just atrociously bad writing, as is its placement in the article.

Overall, the narrative of the whole piece seems designed to put Ricks in the worst possible light, twisting and skewing and manipulating facts and perspectives, presenting limited information and citing people with an axe to grind without making any effort to balance their comments.

And it sounds to me as if the author's biggest beef with Ricks is that he's gone from being a critic to being a supporter. Thing is, it doesn't sound as if he was an impartial critic before. He saw something being done badly and said so. Now he sees something being done well (in his opinion) and says so. I see why to someone that might seem like a change but to him not seem like a change at all.

(BTW the way that the author lowercases "COIN" throughout is *really* annoying, and is one of several reasons I get the impression she doesn't know much about the military...)

I should perhaps close by saying I have no particular connection or attachment to Ricks. I think I linked to an article by him at one point, but I don't read him regularly.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I started reading his blog because of a link from you. I like the guy, and I think he writes good stuff.

I think it might be useful if you either left a comment at the CJR website or sent the author a private note explaining what you said above. In my experience the CJR folks are pretty straight shooters, and will stop and think about things if they're wrong about something. I think a well written comment would not go amiss.