This is, after all, Now

You know, thirty years ago or so I read a review of Star Wars (I think it was by Asimov but I wouldn't swear to it) which contained a criticism of the feasibility of the whole X-wing/TIE battle along the lines of: unlike Star Trek, this movie features future pilots fighting in tiny little spaceships that blow up with one hit; who would do that? I recall thinking that someone was mired in WWII, and fighter aircraft that shot at each other with machine guns or took actual projectiles from ack-ack guns... Even at the time, over Vietnam, single air-to-air missiles were taking out planes, and yet there is no problem getting pilots into the cockpits.

Similarly, I remember reading a review (again, I'm not sure by whom) of some movie that included people wearing wrist-communicators - the reviewer announced confidently that people would never walk down the street having private conversations like that. I think we all know how wrong that was, don't we?

My point? People tend to think of things as being the way they were when they were young. In the military, this manifests itself as planning the next war with the last one's weapons and tactics: the Maginot Line, the French at Agincourt, redcoats versus colonials, battlefield tactics used against house-to-house urban insurgents... But it manifests itself in other ways, too. Such as the shrill GOP insistence that any debate in the Senate will send "the wrong message to the president, to our troops and to our enemies," as Rep Shays (R-Conn) said during the debate over whether to debate a non-binding resolution disapproving of the surge.

Uh, guys? This is not World War II. You don't control the whole media, everything the troops are exposed to. This is 2007 - the troops have web browsers, e-mail, cell phones ... I guarandamntee you, they know what's going on back in the States. They're well aware that a majority of Americans don't support this war. Hell, plenty of them don't support it. They don't accept your equation of dissent equals hating them, they are sophisticated enough to know that, sometimes, supporting the troops meaning getting them the hell out of the mess they're in. And even if they weren't, they already know how the country feels about the war.

Refusing to debate it isn't protecting anyone but the administration.