Kos Pulls Maccabee Post Off DKos

Whoa. I was all set to do a follow-up story on the right's response to that post by Maccabee about his LSO friend who thinks a massive strike on Iran is imminent. But kos has removed the link from his site. Earlier, he had a brief post up about how we shouldn't trust everything that confirms our opinions just because it's on the Internet. He said that now the right was making fun of Maccabee, and justifiably so. A few minutes later, Maccabee's post was gone.

Obviously, I don't know what this means or why kos did this, but I am at a loss to understand what was so incredibly unbelievable about what this LSO had to say. The massive air attack on Iran she describes is no different from what the Times of London describes in its Sunday, Sept. 2 edition:

THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

The only thing that's different in Maccabee's piece is the inside picture his friend gives us of the atmosphere where she works:

Something is wrong with the Navy and the Marines in her view. Always ready to go in harms way, Marines rarely ever question unless it’s a matter of tactics or honor. But something seems awry. Junior and senior officers are starting to grumble, roll their eyes in the hallways. The strain of deployments is beginning to hit every jot and tittle of the Marines and it’s beginning to seep into the daily conversation of Marines and Naval officers in command decision.

"I know this will sound crazy coming from a Naval officer", she said. "But we’re all just waiting for this administration to end. Things that happen at the senior officer level seem more and more to happen outside of the purview of XOs and other officers who typically have a say-so in daily combat and flight operations. Today, orders just come down from the mountaintop and there’s no questioning. In fact, there is no discussing it. I have seen more than one senior commander disappear and then three weeks later we find out that he has been replaced. That’s really weird. It’s also really weird because everyone who has disappeared has questioned whether or not we should be staging a massive attack on Iran."

And this, courtesy of Neptunus Lex, since this paragraph was not part of my earlier paste, and Maccabee's original post is no longer available:

“We’re not stupid. Most of the members of the fleet read well enough to know what is going on world-wise. We also realize that anyone who has any doubts is in danger of having a long military career yanked out from under them. Keep in mind that most of the people I serve with are happy to be a part of the global war on terror. It’s just that the touch points are what we see since we are the ones out here who are supposedly implementing this grand strategy. But when you liason (sic) with administration officials who don’t know that Iranians don’t speak Arabic and have no idea what Iranians live like, then you start having second thoughts about whether these Administration officials are even competent.”

And this, from Down With Tyranny! (also a portion of Maccabee's post that I didn't copy and paste earlier):

We are shipping in and assigning every damn Tomahawk we have in inventory. I think this is going to be massive and sudden, like thousands of targets. I believe that no American will know when it happens until after it happens. And whatever the consequences, whatever the consequences, they will have to be lived with. I am sure if my father knew I was telling someone in a news organization that we were about to launch a supposedly secret attack that it would be treason. But something inside me tells me to tell it anyway.

... I have become cynical only recently. I also don’t believe anyone will be able to stop this. Bush has become something of an Emperor. He will give the command, and cruise missiles will fly and aircraft will fly and people will die, and yet few of us here are really able to cobble together a great explanation of why this is a good idea. Of course many of us can give you the 4H Club lecture on democracy in the Mid East. But if you asked any of the flight officers whether they have a clear idea of what the goal of this strike is, your answer would sound like something out of a think tank policy paper. But it’s not like Kosovo or when we relieved the tsunami victims. There everyone could tell you in a sentence what we were here doing.

That’s what’s missing. A real sense of purpose. What’s missing is the answer to what the hell are we doing out here threatening this country with all this power? Last night in the galley, an ensign asked what right do we have to tell a sovereign nation that they can’t build a nuke. I mean the table got EF Hutton quiet. Not so much because the man was asking a question that was off culture. But that he was asking a good question. In fact, the discussion actually followed afterwards topside where someone in our group had to smoke a cigarette. The discussion was intelligent but also in lowered voices. It’s like we aren’t allowed to ask the questions that we always ask before combat. It’s almost as if the average seaman or soldier is doing all the policy work.

Now, I grant you, it's pretty astonishing that an LSO on a supercarrier in the Middle East is being so open about her concerns with the Bush administration's plans for Iran and the totalitarian atmosphere in the military, but it should hardly be surprising that things are the way she describes. I mean, it really shouldn't even raise an eyebrow at this point, but clearly righties have been looking down at their feet continuously for the last four years, to come out with statements like this:

As for all of those “disappearing” senior officers, there are a couple of well-trodden paths to professional ignominy - DUIs and “zipper failures” are among the most common - but no one gets vanished for “questioning whether or not” we ought to attack Iran, or any other country for that matter and if they had, you can be sure we’d all have heard about it by now. It’s also passing strange to hear a former Marine complain that orders come down from the “mountain top”, as though at some time in the cherished past they use to bubble up from the mess decks. But even in such a bizarrely constructed paragraph, it’s hard to plausibly and consistently argue on the one hand that orders aren’t being questioned and that people are being relieved for doing so.

Is this guy for real? People have been getting vanished -- or maybe "banished" is a better word -- in the Bush administration for questioning, contradicting, dissenting, disagreeing with, Bush administration policies on Iraq, on climate change, on warrantless surveillance, on torture, and more. And yes, we have all heard about it by now. If Neptunus Lex hasn't, it's because he's got cotton balls jammed in his ears. And that last sentence is just dense (as in stupid). The reason people aren't questioning orders is because when they do they get canned. You learn not to question orders when you see others losing their jobs for doing so.