Loafers on the Ground

James Carroll’s “The New Immorality of Iraq War” [sic] exhibits an ugly disdain for the U.S. military that is common on the John Kerry Left. He cannot imagine our soldiers rebuilding schools and medical clinics; to his kind they can only be heartless robots whose sole approach to any problem is violence. Thus he sputters with disbelief that President Bush would leave our troops in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was overthrown: “bringing order to a post-Saddam Iraq…was not a project for which the US war machine was remotely suited…The initiative should have passed from the Pentagon to a State Department-led program of stabilization and reconstruction, but instead a crudely violent military occupation was begun.”

Mr. Carroll concedes that we need boots on the ground—or rather Italian loafers on the ground. He doesn’t specify however exactly which unarmed social workers the State Department should have sent into Fallujah in 2003 without military support. Given Mr. Carroll’s globalist leanings, I’m surprised he didn’t nominate the United Nations for the job. Oh, wait, I forgot, the UN abandoned its corrupt Oil for Food program after a single car bomb made things too dangerous for diplomacy.