Ed At Mac

My radio comrade Ed Morrissey did a little shindig at Macalester College in St. Paul on Monday night.

Ed did a good job, and was, as usual, gracious about his hosts:

I'm glad to report back that no one got devoured tonight and that the evening went very well indeed. As most people guessed, the audience and the panel were (for the most part) highly opposed to my point of view. However, they all treated me rather graciously, even if they did not agree with me on almost anything I said -- save for my remarks about democracy, at least as it applied in the United States.

I won't get into the nitty-gritty of the debating positions. I don't think they would be surprising on either side to CQ readers, and I didn't hear anything tonight I hadn't read before in the Independent and Rolling Stone. (For that matter, they didn't hear anything from me that they hadn't read in the Weekly Standard -- which I hope they read, anyway.) I think all of us made an effort to keep the forum from descending into a tit-for-tat sniping session, and with one silly exception regarding my use of the phrase "one man, one vote", all succeeded.

It is, indeed, good form to be gracious to one's hosts. Had I done the presentation, I would certainly strive to do no less.

But I was not the guest, but a mere audience member, so I'm under no such restriction; Ed's opponents were a joke.

Well, most of them. Phil Steger, a St. Olaf (?) professor and director of "Friends for a Non-Violent World", was articulate and intelligent. He, like most "Peace at all costs" advocates, was (to my perspective) very myopic. In his intro, he spoke very movingly about the questions he got from Iraqi friends during his many pre-war trips to Hussein's nation. I wanted - badly - to ask how many of his friends were Kurds, or Marsh Arabs? How many had had to watch their spouses raped, their parents fed into plastic shredders? How many of his Iraqi friends had had relatives just vanish? That said, he did a generally good job - although, like most "Peace at any cost" activists he is in dubious command of many facts outside his rather rarified ken. Example: asked how to best carry out the war, he responded with an example of a British officer of "The Scottish Battalion" who directed his troops to take extraordinary risks to safeguard civilians during the Brits' counterinsurgency campaign in Yemen in the sixties. Problem: There has never, in the history of the British Army, been a unit with the proper name "The Scottish Battalion". More importantly, the doctrine Steger described did exist, after a fashion; the Brits wrote the book on counterinsurgency operations, and it involved what is by American regular army standards an extraordinary emphasis on the winning of civilian hearts and minds. The real story is a lot more complex - and interesting - than the one-dimensional platitude Steger presented and, to be fair, probably didn't know how to present better.

Less worth the effort was Lou Ellingson, a retired Navy captain and Vietnam Swift boat veteran. While the fact of his service in Vietnam is noted and appreciated, he added little to the argument but 1) "war is bad"-type platitudes and 2) plenty of Bush-bashing snarks (which the audience - largely Volvo-driving, alpaca-wearing ex-hippies and smugly furious Mac kids - guffawed at as if on cue.

Worst of all was Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, U. of St. Thomas Peace and Justice Studies professor. The event - and, I'd suspect, his chair at St. Thomas - seemed to be his platform for gushing conspiracy theories. I tried to record some of them, but the "voice memo" feature on my cheap cell phone didn't work. I'll paraphrase: "We didn't go into Iraq for WMDs. We went there to give American corporations control of the oil". The guy would embarass Michael Moore. If you send your kids to Saint Thomas, tens of thousands of your (and other parents') dollars a year go to this person.

The shorter Phil Steger: "War hurts people. There's never an excuse for it . We need to teach our military to be non-violent".

The shorter Jack Ellingson: "I was in Vietnam. We need to pull out of Iraq, but President Nixon - er, ooops, Bush, ha ha ha - won't let us!"

The shorter Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer: "There's ample documentary evidence - oh, look, there's hardly any time, here! But trust me on this one! - that the war was planned at Halliburton's world headquarters."

So well done, Ed. If I were up there, the temptation to start openly mocking the likes of Nelson-Pallmeyer - as hilarious a caricature of the worst excesses of the soft-humanities academy as I've seen - would have been overwhelming.

Posted by Mitch at September 13, 2006 05:48 AM | TrackBack