I’ve gotta stop going to dinner parties. I hang out with a professional, academic, thoroughly liberal set of Seattleites. Quite comfortably, I should add – until the discussion touches upon our military. At two in a row of recent dinner shindigs my wife and I attended, someone made a comment that essentially asserted a moral equivalence between our soldiers in Iraq and the Islamic suicide bombers. The first time this happened, there were four couples at the dinner table, when the host said “Yeah, they call their suicide bombers ‘martyrs’ and we call our soldiers ‘heroes.’” The guy to the host’s right had done a hitch in the Navy before finishing college. The guy to his left, yours truly, was a former Army officer, the son of a career Army officer, and the father of a young man doing Navy basic training at the time – and we had just finished talking about my son. My host’s righteous liberal revulsion for the U.S. military was so thoroughgoing and blind that it never occurred to him that he was equating his two close friends and their loved ones to someone who would walk into a Tel Aviv coffee shop full of grandmothers minding baby carriages and blow them all to kingdom come.

I call this the “icky-poo factor,” the righteous left’s automatic curled lip of disdain at the sight or mention of a uniformed American soldier. I’ve seen so many manifestations of this liberal abhorrence of military institutions and people, ever since Vietnam. The left never could differentiate between opposing the Vietnam war and opposing war, or opposing warriors. It amounts a sort of Puritanism, which insists that since war is evil and destructive, those who have gone to fight in one are just as evil and destructive. Joel Stein, the L.A. Times columnist who has a talent for plumbing the depths of superficiality in his columns, captured the essence of this attitude with his assertion that our soldiers in Iraq shouldn’t be welcomed or honored in any way upon their return, because they’re Bush’s enablers – these guys laying down their lives for each other in Iraq are “ignoring their morality.” Icky-poo. University faculties raise a fuss about ROTC being allowed on the campus, because the military is evil. Icky-poo. In late September, 2001, a co-worker told me that NYPD officers should be sent to Afghanistan to arrest Osama bin Laden. Not the military. Icky-poo. Here in Seattle the other day, someone entered a motion with the University of Washington Student Senate calling for a memorial plaque to be placed somewhere on campus to commemorate Pappy Boyington, who was a UW graduate. Two of the young, precious and pure stood to object. The University shouldn’t honor a “killer.” The Student Senate then voted the motion down. Pappy Boyington! The Marines’ greatest flying ace! The Black Sheep Squadron! Icky-poo. I once sat at dinner with some Brown University graduate students who were going to be collaborating with me on a DOD-sponsored computer graphics research project. One of them told me that he was bothered by the fact that his research was going to be funded by “the military,” and he asked me how I dealt with that. “The basic question you have to ask yourself,” I told him, “is whether or not you believe that the United States ought to be prepared to defend itself. If you don’t, on principle, then you’re a pacifist – a philosophy I respect but don’t agree with. If you believe, as I do, that the United States ought to be prepared to defend itself, then it’s an easy step to decide that our forces should be as technologically advanced and capable as we can make them.” The conversation went on for a while, focusing on the distinction between having issues with U.S. government policies being carried out by the military versus the question of whether we should have a military. But the memory that really stayed with me was the image of the stunned, open-mouthed expressions on the faces of the four grad students when I had posed the fundamental either-or question. They had never thought about it. They had never thought past the fashionable campus attitude toward the U.S. military: icky-poo.

There was a lot of talk about the “values” factor in tilting the electorate towards Bush in 2004. But after taking a second look at their data, the pollsters came to a consensus that more people who voted to re-elect Incurious George did so because they didn’t trust the Democrats to protect them effectively. Why didn’t they? Well, consider what you see when you look across the Democratic spectrum of attitudes toward the military: On the far left, loud, reverberating “Icky-poo.” Over on the other end, slightly right of center: Jack Murtha. By himself. In the broad center-to-left area in between: dead silence. Except for an occasional, faint icky-poo, not borne of disgust but instead of a squeamish discomfort that comes from knowing that many people are disgusted by this topic, so one must struggle to make one’s point with carefully-chosen euphemisms – or remain silent.

Mostly we remain silent. There are so many issues related to the U.S. armed forces that deserve substantive debate and discussion:

• How large should our forces be, and of what and how large specialized components should they be made up?
• How should they be equipped?
• How should they be trained?
• The question that precedes these: for what missions should our forces be composed, equipped and trained?
• And of course, the ultimate question: under what circumstances should they be sent into harm’s way and under what circumstances should they be withdrawn?

Democratic politicians try to address the last question, of course, because the situation in Iraq is so egregious. But even there, we’re so uncomfortable with discussing military options in any depth that we turn instead to a little political litmus test, a phony either-or choice: everybody bugs out tomorrow versus no, we must remain for some unspecified time in some unspecified posture until some unspecified criteria are met. The “middle ground” is to try not to commit either way. We’re afraid to criticize, so we credentialize. John Kerry is a Vietnam vet with a Silver Star, so nominate him. But don’t let him talk. Keep it vague, anyway, like “I’ll bring in the U.N.” Oh, great, Jack Murtha spoke out – he was a Marine colonel. But gloss over his ideas about redeploying as an over-the-horizon reaction force. Too much detail. Let’s just pretend, along with Fox News and the Republicans, that Murtha said to cut-and-run. Wesley Clark is speaking out – hey, he’s got great credentials. But don’t discuss anything he’s suggesting, even to support it. Let’s just dress him up in his uniform and we’ll all quietly hide behind him. The everlasting shame of it all is that there is so much that needs to be said. I dream of a Democratic politician who would stand up and say

I’m proud of our service people. I’m proud that they’re all-volunteer, proud that they’re so well-trained, immensely proud that they’re so brave and so willing to take on impossible tasks. But why the hell are we giving them impossible tasks? The Bush Administration sent them into Afghanistan after bin Laden and the al-Qaeda, who had attacked the United States and killed 3,000 people – and then they contracted out bin Laden’s capture to a bunch of primitive Islamic tribesmen, who pocketed the money and then helped escort bin Laden into Pakistan. Meanwhile the administration sent the bulk of our troops to Iraq, to invade a country because of a fabricated threat from a dictator whom we had had completely boxed in for over ten years. Furthermore, they sent our soldiers there without adequate body armor, without adequate vehicle armor, and without enough people to control the situation. We’ve put these fine people into a meat grinder of a situation. We’ve lost over 2400 of them already, the Army Reserve and the National Guard are collapsing and the Regular Army isn’t far behind. We’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars, we’ve transformed al-Qaeda from a lunatic fringe group to a movement that spans the Arab world, and the Iraq occupation has provided them with a stream of new recruits who are getting on-the-job training and combat experience at our expense. We can’t just leave overnight; we owe it to the Iraqi people to help them establish a stable situation. But the quickest step toward that stable situation might be a withdrawal of most of our troops out of Iraq’s cities. That needs to be discussed and negotiated. But the present insanity cannot be allowed to continue.

I wish I could hear something like that. But I know I won’t. If anyone ever tried, it would be drowned out by the unified screech from the right of “You’re not supporting the troops” and from the left, chorus after chorus of “Icky-poo.”