I wouldn't call it an ad hominem attack. When it comes to moral principles and military adventures it's a reliable criterion for identifying boasters and their "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" cheap propaganda.

Don,

I'm absolutely not impressed by the usual lofty words of US commentors or some armchair warriors speaking of sacrifice, heroism and other "military virtues", especially if these people have never fired one single shoot and don't knowthing about the reality of war. It's very easy to support the "surge" with harsh words in Internet blogs if you aren't personally affected like members of the National Guard or reservists, some of them 41 years old, whom one-third lacked the M-4 rifles, who are confronted with shortfalls in basic equipment like in night vision goggles and who are faced with the problem of cross-leveling. I don't give a damn about such people like Ray D. and their arguments. If this is an ad hominem argument in your eyes, I take your critizism.

It's no coincidence that the only realistic and right-minded assessment concerning Iraq was represented by the State Department and Gen. Colin Powell. Unfortunalety, but typically for officers, he valued loyality higher than conscience and better knowledge. The new head of the British Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt had the balls to stand up und to call for a withdrawal of British troops in 2006, therefore his soldiers and officers unitely praised him for "telling the truth about Iraq".

So if you get a warm glow when people try to persuade young, idealistic and mostly very naive Americans that's it's a duty for them still to join their military, who made one blunder after the other, to fight a war who is already lost ("the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them", as Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld said) I respect your view. If your Commander in Chief ignores completely the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group report and the New York Post has nothing better to do than to depict the heads of James Baker and Lee Hamilton superimposed onto the bodies of monkeys, with the headline "Surrender Monkeys: Iraq panel urges U.S. to give up.", I can only shake my head. If Bush already is convinced that someone like neocon Frederick Kagan of the AEI is still more qualified to handle the war in Iraq - as you sow, so you shall reap.

But please don't begin to weep and blame other countries about your casualities and the Anti-Americanism and terrorism in the world, but set your own house in order. As Dr. Emile A. Nakhleh, a Senior Intelligence Service Officer and Director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program in the Directorate of Intelligence at the CIA for fifteen years of service, recapitulated the effects of the Iraq invasion in an interview with "Harper's": "I have come to believe that our presence is part of the problem and that we should begin to seriously devise an exit strategy. There's a civil war in Iraq and our presence is contributing to the violence. We've become a lightning rod—we're not restricting the violence, we're contributing to it. Iraq has galvanized jihadists; our presence is what is attracting them. We need to get out of there. The idea of Iraq being a model for the region has also been tossed out the window. [...] We've lost a generation of goodwill in the Muslim world."

Let's turn back time and remember why especially France and Germany were against the Iraq war (seems that some Americans really have a short memory and still believe the crap people like Krauthammer or Applebaum write):

"Led by France and Germany, European countries opposed to using force to disarm Iraq asserted that the case for war had not yet been made. They were skeptical of U.S. arguments directly linking Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and did not view the threat posed by Iraq as imminent — in part, because they believed that the 12 years of international sanctions had limited Iraq’s ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction (12). Thus, France, Germany, and others deemed a contained Saddam Hussein as a threat they could live with, especially given their judgment that war with Iraq would have dangerous and destabilizing consequences. Many Europeans feared that toppling Saddam could further fragment the country along ethnic and tribal lines, and generate instability.

Footnote 12: Many Europeans expressed graver concerns about WMD programs in North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan that have not been subjected to the same degree of international scrutiny. Interviews of European officials, January-March 2003."

Source: [url=http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/44134.pdf]CRS Report for Congress RL31956: "European Views and Policies Toward the Middle East", p. 6[/url]

Sorry, but I can't detect any signs of "America hate", "Anti-Americanism" or a purely populist will to win an election in this assessment. And not to forget the briliant role European media played in uncovering the uncountable lies and manipulations of the Bush administration. On 3rd April 2007 (!) the Washington Post wrote about "How Bogus Letter Became a Case for War. Intelligence Failures Surrounded Inquiry on Iraq-Niger Uranium Claim". Nice investigation, really, but German TV magazine "Frontal 21" uncovered the whole hoax even before the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003. I can fully understand why the people at Medienkritik are always so upset about the SPIEGEL coverage of the US. It's not nice to read in a SPIEGEL interview from Tyler Drumheller, former chief of CIA's Europe division, that he had assured his German Intelligence friends and the German government that the "Curveball" BND source wouldn't be in the Powell UN presentation because of its highly dubious credibility and because very senior officials in the BND expressed their doubts. We all know very well that Drumheller's promise was broken. Drumheller about the Bush administration: "The administration wanted to make the case for war with Iraq. They needed a tangible thing, they needed the German stuff. They couldn't go to war based just on the fact that they wanted to change the Middle East. They needed to have something threatening to which they were reacting."

So is it ungrateful Anti-Americanism if only a minority of Germans actually rate the actual US government as a trustable political partner? I don't think so.

Back in history, it was a time when it really was a question of personal courage for US commentors or politicians to publicly stand for a "dissenting" view. Honor to honor is due - I name just the few I'm aware of: Ike Skelton, Al Gore, Barack Obama, Russ Feingold, Nancy Pelosi, John Spratt and Howard Dean. They were either completely ignored or characterized as "traitors". New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was one of the few sane voices in the major media opinion pages openly arguing that the Bush administration had failed to meet the burden of proof required to justify an attack on Iraq. He also said a glance at the history of the administration would show that, even when the "war" was swiftly won, the aftermath would be costly in matters of both blood and treasure.

The reaction? As the Right Wing Target Number One, he was called "deranged". Krauthammer diagnosed the "Bush Derangement Syndrome", i.e. in the case of Krugman: "Nonetheless, some observers took that to be satire; others wrote off Moyers and Krugman as simple aberrations, the victims of too many years of neurologically hazardous punditry." Krugman was called shrill, gnome-like, disgusting and was threatened with bodily harm in the landslide of hate mail driven by attacks from Bill O'Reilly and others.

So if these commentors and right-wing pundits today don't blush for shame and have no other problem as the unsuccessful search for German Schadenfreude - who really cares about their smearings?