CHICKENDOVES

Douglas Kern really deserves some sort of "special kind of dumb" award for this item at TCS:

The problem isn't chickenhawks -- people who support the war but never served in the military, and probably never will.

The problem is stateside armchair philosophers who oppose military action and military policy, even though they never served in the military. The problem is anti-war punditry from intellectuals who think that an IED is a contraceptive and couldn't tell the difference between bounding overwatch and watching Baywatch. The problem is intellectuals who think their education and politically-correct ideology lets them know what the military needs -- better than the military knows it.

The problem is chickendoves.

Oh, come now. The idea that it is people who opposedthe war who are the real problem, whether or not they served or whether or not they happen to ignorant of military jargon, is just fantastically silly. Funny thing, though, you could change Kern's paragraph just slightly and come up with a substantial reason why Iraq is such a mess:

The problem is stateside armchair philosophers [and members of the Bush administration] who [support] military action and military policy, even though they never served in the military. The problem is [pro]-war punditry from intellectuals who think that an IED is a contraceptive and couldn't tell the difference between bounding overwatch and watching Baywatch. The problem is intellectuals who think their education and [stark-raving nationalist] ideology lets them know what the military needs -- better than the military knows it.

That is what brought us to where we are: ideologically driven war planners who refused to listen to the advice of military experts, scholars, and diplomats, many of whom were war supporters themselves, who insisted that troop levels needed to be higher that a post-war plan needed to, well, exist, and that a general familiarity with the realities of Iraqi tribalism and nationalism might help matters.

That aside, I've never been too impressed with the "chickenhawk" argument myself, especially when it's used to disparage anyone supported the Iraq war. The idea that military service should be a prerequisite for any citizen to express support for any military action is, of course, stupid on its face. The chickenhawk charge is rather more pertinent when leveled against people like Tom Delay, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush, all of whom claim to have supported the Vietnam War while at the same time doing everything they could to avoid the combat draft, content to let poorer, less-well connected kids go off and fight and die in their place.

Currently, the chickenhawk issue has come up again as a result of the Juan Cole- Jonah Goldberg spat, in which Cole charged, among other things, that Goldberg should enlist to fight in Iraq since he was a vocal supporter of the war. I actually thought that was the weakest part of Cole's response, which otherwise largely succeeded in revealing Goldberg for the smug, ignorant, over-privileged buffoon he is. But I don't think the chickenhawk charge really means much when applied to someone like Goldberg. And there are more than enough legtimate reasons to dislike him and the other right-wing goofballs.