…then write a blog post and remove all doubt.

A few weeks ago, Tom Engelhardt wrote an article for The Nation about the employment of air power in the war on terrorism. I read it, got seriously pissed and then let it sit. I went back and read it again. Still bent. Engelhardt has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. To wit:

war from the air is, and will remain, a most imprecise and destructive form of battle.

Imprecise compared to what? How imprecise? As for destructive…that’s kind of the point, although Engelhardt has no idea the measures taken to mitigate collateral damage.

Third, in human terms, distance does not enhance accuracy. The farther away you are from a target, the more likely it is that you will have to guess who or what it is, based on spotty, difficult to interpret, or bad information, or even outright misinformation; whatever the theoretical accuracy of your weaponry, you are far more likely to miscalculate, make mistakes, mistarget, or target the misbegotten from the air.

Where to begin…? Lets start of with a fundamental misconception that permeates the above paragraph, as well as the rest of the article. Air missions in Iraq (and Afghanistan) are not executed in a vacuum. The vast majority are Close Air Support missions and it is painfully obvious that Engelhardt has no idea what that means: air power in direct support of the troops on the ground. Which means that the ground commander decides if, when and where bombs get dropped. Those warmongering pilots don’t drop bombs at will - they coordinate closely with the ground troops regarding what the target is, where it is and how to minimize collateral damage. There is no guessing and “distance”, at least in terms of how Engelhardt describes it, has nothing to do with it.

Fourth, if you are conducting war this way and you are doing so in heavily populated urban neighborhoods, as is now the case almost every day in Iraq, then civilians will predictably die “by mistake” almost every day [emphasis mine]

A completely unsupportable “prediction” with no factual basis whatsoever.

You can essentially no longer read an account of a skirmish or battle in one of Iraq’s cities in which air power is not called in. This means (see propositions 1-4) a war of constant “mistakes,”…

Wrong, wrong, wrong. “Proposition” does not equal “fact.” Air power is called for a reason: to protect and save the lives of our forces on the ground. And the targets of these strikes—“terrorist suspects”, “insurgents”, “militants” (always identified with “scare quotes” by Engelhardt)—did something to deserve it, like fire RPGs at friendly troops or plant (or detonate) an IED in front of their convoy. Contrary to the worldview of folks like Engelhardt, the Rules of Engagement do not allow the targeting of “militants” just because they looked at you funny. Are mistakes made? Yes, but not for any of the reasons put forth by Engelhardt.

According to Engelhardt, air power—in and of itself—is inherently bad. Nevermind the fact that is much easier, safer, and more accurate to drop a weapon into a house full of “insurgents” then send in a company of infantrymen when the entire house is rigged to explode the instant one of those troops kicks the door in.

Or in Engelhardt’s case, just ignore all the facts. It makes crap like this so much easier to write.

Matthew Yglesias trots out the old chickenhawk argument, calling out John McCain, among others, because his daughter is not in the military. He neglects to mention that McCain has a son in the Marines that just returned from Iraq and another son at the Naval Academy, to say nothing of McCain’s prior service. Actually, ‘neglects’ is the wrong word. He didn’t even know about McCain’s sons until he was corrected by someone else and then posted an “update” to his entry that pretty much shoots down his entire premise.

Important factual error-like thing in the post, Jason Zengerle notes that McCain has a son in the Marines and another in the naval academy. I didn’t know that McCain even had sons. That obviously puts the point about Meghan McCain in a very different context.

Didn’t know? The fact that McCain has a son in the Marines is mentioned in nearly every article about him that even briefly mentions the Iraq war.

I’m so friggin’ tired of the entire “chickenhawk” argument. If only the intellectually weak-minded that employ it would take it to its logical conclusion: you’re not qualified to lecture me about home foreclosures until you show me the notice…for your house. If you think NAFTA sucks, I don’t need to hear it from you unless I see the pink slip. Got a problem with the curriculums in your schools, but don’t have any school-age kids? Find something else to bitch about. And unless your phoning in your newest rant on agriculture subsidies from the family tractor, then don’t bother.

What lazy folks don’t do is bother to argue something on it’s merits. It is just easier to say that people that disagree with you are unqualified to do so.

As I tried mightily to slog through this diatribe about how wickedly misogynistic Hillary is being treated, I stopped immediately upon reading this:

“I pinpoint sexism for a living. You’d think I’d be able to find an example. And I hate to rely on this hokey notion that there’s some woman’s way of knowing, and that I just fucking know. But I do. I just know.”

Well, well. Of course you just know. That’s what you do for a living. If you couldn’t find it, you wouldn’t eat. See also: self-licking ice cream cone.

Another gem:

“The whole ‘Hillary Clinton is a monster’ theme is so virulent.”

Really? Like a virus? No chance whatsoever that her complete lack of integrity has anything to do with it? Or this:

“They’re busy patting themselves on the back for supporting a black man: Aren’t we cool?”

Remember, and file this away because it will come up again if Hillary “wins” the nomination: They are talking about Democrats here. Original link via Instapundit.

The Elsewhere mini-blog howyadoin’ over in the sidebar is actually a separate blog in my Movable Type installation. I use the Multiblog plugin to pull the 15 most recent posts and display them here. A cool feature is Multiblog’s ability to set triggers so that when a new Elsewhere post is published, the main blog automatically updates.

There is one problem with this: when posting with MarsEdit, the trigger doesn’t work. The documentation for Multiblog is not, ahem, the most helpful, but some digging around got me this tidbit from Multiblog creator David Rayners:

MultiBlog does not currently support rebuilding upon posting from an XML-RPC client.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I use MarsEdit because I could easily customize what exactly it puts in the Entry Body field. The javascript QuickPost bookmarklet created by Movable Type opened with the Entry Body field already filled in with <a title="Page Title" href="the.url">Page Title</a>. What I want is the Entry Body filled in with the URL only. Since MarsEdit won’t trigger my MultiBlog rebuilds, I had to go back a find a way to bend the MT bookmarklet to my will.

Some digging around the Movable Type forums showed that other people were interested in modifying the bookmarklet to suite their needs, but not the specific answer to my problem. And the info I did glean was based on an older version of MT. Eventually I found out that the file I needed to tweak was the CMS.pm file located in the /lib/MT/App folder of my MT installation. After some searching, I found what looked like what I needed at line 2256:

$param{text} = sprintf qq(<a title="%s" 
href="%s">%s</a>\n\n%s),
	$bm_link_title,
	$bm_link_href,
	$bm_link_title,
	$bm_text;

Dude, let me say I was about one step away from a duck watching a lap dance in terms of comprehending this. Pearl wizard I am not. Through some trial and error, I changed this snippet of code to the following:

$param{text} = sprintf qq(%s\n\n),
    $bm_link_href

And it appears to work. Now when I select the MT QuickPost Bookmarklet on a desired page to create an Elsewhere post, only the URL for the page is automatically generated in the Entry Body field. The Title and Extended Entry are blank for me to fill in. Again, the Title becomes the link text and the Extended Entry is my witty description. Now when I post an Elsewhere tidbit, Multiblog kicks in and rebuilds the main index page. My awesomeness astounds. Yes, there are probably about 22 easier ways to solve this entire problem, but this worked.

So now I use MarsEdit (and highly recommend it) for main entries such as this one and I click on the MT QuickPost doohicky for Elsewhere posts.