Vlahos pens a touching tribute to Carl Prine<\/strong>, whose heath is suffering from the effects of his service in combat. All of us here at zenpundit.com <\/strong>wish Carl a speedy recovery and return.<\/p>\n A few days after military writer and critic Carl Prine \u2014 whom I did not know at the time \u2014 decided to skewer me on his popular new blog, \u201cLine of Departure,\u201d I got a call from an Army friend stationed in Germany. He saw it, and asked \u201care you alright?\u201d It was that bad.<\/strong><\/p>\n A little over a year later, I find myself emailing Prine, several times in the last few weeks, writing, \u201care you alright?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s pretty bad.<\/strong><\/p>\n ….<\/strong>I don\u2019t think I ever told him this, but Prine\u2019s\u00a0single broadside at my work<\/a>\u00a0helped to sharpen my writing. I was pretty stung at the time, mostly because he couldn\u2019t be dismissed as a fool. To my mind, he was a self-serving heel, but it was clear he was well-read and a good writer, which made it worse.<\/strong><\/p>\n I never responded online, but over the course of the next several months we came to a friendly reckoning and rather smooth path towards mutual respect and encouragement.He\u2019s apologized too many times<\/a>, and given my column at\u00a0Antiwar.com a lot of props<\/a>\u00a0that I don\u2019t think I necessarily deserve but secretly love because LoD is not the typical Antiwar.com audience and it\u2019s nice when we feel we\u2019re getting\u00a0something<\/em>\u00a0across to the people we write about.<\/strong><\/p>\n Plus, it feels good to be defended by someone who shows no quarter to the hucksters and court scribes who helped deliver us into these wars and continue to this day to downplay the failed counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan and the pathetically tepid, mostly wrongheaded state of U.S. foreign policy everywhere else. Our burgeoning collegiality aside, Prine became over the course of his time at LoD one of the good guys, a veteran who obviously loves the military for what it\u00a0could be\u00a0<\/em>and loathes it for what it has been used for, and ultimately for what it has become….<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n American Security Project (Ashley Boyle) –The US and its UAVs: Addressing Legality and Overblown Scenarios<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n This piece was endorsed by the killer of egregious drone-nonsense, Dan Trombly<\/a><\/strong>. I have to agree. Boyle, unlike about 99% of the folks writing internet hysterics about drones, manages to get international law right before starting her analysis.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n While the international community has the right to\u00a0demand<\/a>\u00a0that the US provide a legal foundation for drone strikes, it should be understood that the US has a strategic interest in not providing any such justification. Similarly, the argument that US drone strikes are establishing a\u00a0dangerous\u00a0<\/a>precedent<\/a>\u00a0is reasonable. However, extrapolating this assertion to a scenario of global drone warfare is not only alarmist and distracting, but has no factual basis at present.<\/strong><\/p>\n The matter of legal justification for US drone strikes is straightforward. Critics have long claimed that US drone strikes\u00a0violate<\/a>\u00a0laws on interstate force and sovereignty in that strikes are conducted extraterritorially in non-combat zones.<\/strong><\/p>\n While laws governing the use of interstate force bar the use of force in another nation\u2019s territory at times of peace, under\u00a0Article<\/a>\u00a051<\/a>of the United Nations Charter, a nation has \u201cthe inherent right of individual or collective self-defence [sic]\u201d until the UN Security Council takes action. Article 51\u00a0applies<\/a>\u00a0if\u00a0either<\/em>\u00a0the targeted state agrees to the use of force in its territory by another nation\u00a0or<\/em>\u00a0the targeted state, or a group operating within its territory, was responsible for an act of aggression against the targeting state.<\/strong><\/p>\n These conditions are mutually exclusive; only\u00a0one<\/em>\u00a0must be satisfied to justify a unilateral extraterritorial use of force by a UN Member. In the cases of\u00a0Pakistan<\/a>, Somalia, and\u00a0Yemen<\/a>,\u00a0both<\/em>\u00a0conditions are satisfied: all three countries have consented, explicitly or otherwise, to the US operating drones within their territories, and all three are \u201csafe havens\u201d for groups that have launched violent attacks against the US and US interests.<\/strong><\/p>\n If the US is well within its right to conduct drone strikes within these nations, why, then, does it not simply invoke Article 51 as a means of justification and end the legality debate?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n David Brooks –Why Our Elites Stink<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Brooks gets some of this wrong and drastically underestimates active vice passive corruption eating away at the system bit he gets one critical point right:<\/p>\n ….As a result, today\u2019s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys\u2019 network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership.<\/strong><\/p>\n The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.<\/strong><\/p>\n Today\u2019s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.<\/strong><\/p>\n If you read the e-mails from the Libor scandal you get the same sensation you get from reading the e-mails in so many recent scandals: these people are brats; they have no sense that they are guardians for an institution the world depends on; they have no consciousness of their larger social role.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n That’s exactly correct. An elite with no ethical guidance system are not merely prone to personal vice and policy disaster, they are dangerous to democracy.<\/p>\n ADDENDUM:<\/strong><\/p>\n Peter J. Munson<\/a><\/strong>, USMC Major, SWJ editor and…author!<\/p>\nAdvanced Praise for War, Welfare, and Democracy<\/a><\/h3>\n
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