Race and religion don’t matter. Race is just an artificial construct, anyway. Religion is just a private thing. Each individual can just put aside his race and religion when he puts on his public persona to do his duties in our society, like serving in the military in Iraq or in Guantanamo.

If events ever contradict this perspective, just repeat the first paragraph above, only more loudly this time, until you are convinced.

Mr. Auster wrote:
“However, even granting the madness of modern liberalism, how could it be that James “Yussef” Yee’s four-year residence in Syria did not raise some questions before he was assigned as chaplain to the Al Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo?”

That is probably exactly the reason why he was chosen as the most qualified. Talking religion is just a linguistic skill in the big bureacratic-market machine. It has no other consequences, of course; it is just a personal preference picked out of the global market. So you send in the guy with the most experience speaking the language.

Mr. Auster misses the underlying political purpose of the post-modern military. Its purpose is not to defend the United States, as the absence of forces to guard the Mexican border shows. Nor is it to have the most effective fighting force, as the assignment of women to combat billets and the acceptance of homosexuals in the ranks show. As the women in combat, the homosexuals everywhere and affirmative action selection and promotion of women and minorities do show, the post-modern mission is propagation of diversity, multiculturalism and “inclusiveness.” This delights liberals, who hate the thought of forces that might actually kill people or break things. Nor does it really bother neocons (who have no military experience); our most likely opponents are so third-rate that neocons think we can get away with this enormous, morale-sapping waste of time and money.

In this, the armed forces merely mirror the federal government of which they are a part. In the minds of liberals who would transform the world to conform to their preconceptions, the armed forces, because of the discipline that remains, are a very useful rat lab for social engineering. In armed forces with such an underlying mission, the presence of Capt. Yee and SrA. al-Halabi is only to be expected and really nothing for the government to worry about - the armed forces are becoming diverse, all right, and that can only be a good thing. They’ll serve as a model for how the whole society must be diversified and multiculturalized. The process was begun by Robert McNamara (surprise, surprise) for blacks and Puerto Ricans, then accelerated by the feminists, whose first great victory was forcing the service academies to go co-ed in 1976; this has been underway for a long time.

Anyone who thinks the armed forces are immune to the PC pathologies that infest the federal government is naive in the extreme. The sort of person who rises to flag or general rank in such a system is not the sort of person who is likely to protest. Expect more Wesley Clarks, not less (although they will be less male and less white), and don’t forget the brief all those retired generals and admirals filed supporting Michigan’s racial discrimination in university admissions; these are big government guys with big government views. Multiculturalism in assignments is very present at the top ranks of the Iraq effort. Gen. Franks’ successor as C-in-C of Central Command (overall command authority for the Middle East) is Gen. John Abizaid, an … Arab! His deputy on the ground in Iraq is LtGen. Ricardo Sanchez. His rise to three-star rank surely has nothing to do with his surname…

Be sure that the commander-in-chief will not learn the lessons of these incidents. On the contrary, his military obsession (other than posing on aircraft carriers in a flight suit he has no business wearing) is making sure that it is easy for aliens to enlist and ensuring that they can become citizens immediately, rather than having to establish an honorable track record in the service. The Yees and al-Halabis are only what one should expect to find in armed forces whose last two commanders-in-chief have been WJ Clinton and GW Bush. As I have said on this site before, God forbid we should have to fight a war against a serious foe any time soon. HRS

The answer is liberalism’s self-destructive, self-denied philosophy (as the sponsors here propose). And I don’t think liberals have one iota more concern about killing people and breaking things than the rest of us. Indeed, I suspect their concern is less; what else am I to think when the black caucus (during the Clinton presidency) said it would support Clinton NO MATTER WHAT. If anyone doubts this was said, I will search for it on the Net.

On the subject of weakening our military through feminism, Brian Mitchell wrote an excellent book called “Weak Link” that was published by Regnery a number of years ago, in which he documented certain interesting facts such as what happened when our army division in South Korea went on combat alert about 20 years ago due to a border incident with North Korean guards (the mommy soldiers simply grabbed their kids and headed south, AWOL, to get out of harm’s way).

The book is out of print, but an update has been published called “Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster”, available new for $16.59 from buy.com and used for $2.99 from half.com. Amazon also offers a package deal with Stephanie Gutmann’s “The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can Our Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars?”

As Howard Sutherland pointed out, this is all fine for fighting Iraq. As I mentioned in another thread a while ago, fighting Grenada, Panama, or Iraq is not the same as dealing with a massive surprise attack by the North Koreans. Picture such an attack happening tomorrow, while half our forces are tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, and perhaps the smug assumption that “the USA will always win all wars in which it engages” will disappear.

Currently, the military is seen by the left as a jobs program, not a defense force. It would be “unfair” if the money in a jobs program were doled out only to males, wouldn’t it?

“Currently, the military is seen by the left as a jobs program, not a defense force.”

Which fits the paradigm of liberalism. The state exists for the purpose of providing for everyone’s individual needs. It is a provider of goods and services, and citizens are “customers.”

More than just a jobs program, liberals see the military as the ideal arena for social engineering schemes. After all, in the military people have to obey orders. Liberals like having their agenda implemented in a situation where those who oppose it don’t have the same prerogatives to resist it.

Democrats want to turn everything they can get their hands on into a patronage machine - schools, the military, anything. This was what happened to civil rights: no sooner were Jim Crow restrictions removed than politicians recognized that equal treatment before the law had no political value. On the other hand, brokering preferences based on skin color was a great way to build a patronage machine. Never mind that preferences based on skin color totally undermined the fundamental premises.

Pace Mr. Coleman, the PC destruction of the armed forces is not fine for fighting Iraq or for anything else, nor did I say so. My point was that many neocons are rather cavalier about it because they do not understand PC’s effects on a fighting force and they believe American power is so overwhelming that it is not cause for worry. To the contrary, it is an utter disaster. Even if the federal government reduces American military commitments abroad, as I believe it should, and administrations curb their appetite for interventionism, as I believe they should, America needs defending and so do our legitimate interests around the world. Nobody can predict with accuracy what the challenges will be, but to hobble our armed forces through feminism, affirmative action and other panderings to liberalism’s fads is criminal. Think of the political obstacles - perhaps even within the ranks - to assigning to the armed forces what should be their primary mission today: defending our borders. To ask women to do the country’s fighting is evil.

That said, I agree with Mr. Coleman. The books he cites help give an understanding of the problem, although none goes far enough. Brian Mitchell wrote “Weak Link” in 1988. The situation was dire then; it is immeasurably worse today. Still, as a former Airborne officer, Mitchell understood the problem well. “Weak Link” is particularly good about the damage wrought by the way the services co-educated the academies.

Joel is right about the military as social laboratory. Robert McNamara was not the first to use the services (especially the Army) this way, but it became systematic during his tenure at Defense. It has not changed since, Ronald Reagan notwithstanding. HRS

All good points. A small quibble though. How many non-Arab Americans actually speak Arabic - or Korean etc. Zero? We’re in fact stuck with using our immigrant population to compensate for the lack of interest in foreign languages on the part of most Americans.

私わ日本語ができます
(I hope that your browsers can handle that.)

Sure we need to use Arab immigrants for interpreters and other such jobs—but do we also need to use terror-associated Muslim organizations to vet them?

Furthermore, any Muslims working in any kind of sensitive government position, such as being in touch with Jihadi prisoners, must be subject to continuing security checks. Remember that Robert Oppenheimer, a man with past leftist connections (and, as was discovered only very recently, Communist party membership) was subject to constant security surveillance even while he was the director of Los Alamos.

Non-Muslim look-alikes can become fluent in the language, so we need not rely on questionable Muslims to assist in the war.

I am a graduate of the Army Language School (1959)and at that time there were several thousand guys studying the languages of all of our then potential enemies and several of our allies. I studied Korean for an intensive 9 months. I’m sure the ALS (now called the Defense Language Institute) still carries out that mission. Also there is the Mormon missionary program that puts young men and women in foreign countries and prepares them with language study. In fact there is a Utah National Guard unit that is full of linguists who were former missionaries now serving in a variety of places (including Iraq) where linguists are critical. We don’t need to rely immigrants for linguistic tasks. The military has years of experience of teaching white guys how to speak obscure languages.

From experience, I second Mr. Rostkowski. The only danger (as I once observed of a Marine corporal sent to Taiwan to learn Chinese) is that the American goes native. That is no risk at all compared to those inherent in having such as al-Halabi in the Air Force or any service. HRS

I’ve lived in Korea for nine years. I speak Korean quite well, to contribute to the discussion above. A job in government may be in my future. Anyhow, I’d like relate a story from a friend in the US Army stationed here now. He updates personnel records for soldiers all over the peninsula. One day a GI came in and asked to change his file. My friend asked him what exactly he wanted to change. The GI replied, ‘My race.’ He was ‘white’ and wanted to be ‘other.’ The reason is simple: ‘whites’ don’t get promoted; all others do.

Another arrest in Guantanamo:

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20030930/D7TSNJP00.html