VA Tech and 'an American particularity'

Shootings

by Adam Gopnik
The New Yorker | April 30, 2007

The cell phones in the pockets of the dead students were still ringing when we were told that it was wrong to ask why. As the police cleared the bodies from the Virginia Tech engineering building, the cell phones rang, in the eccentric varieties of ring tones, as parents kept trying to see if their children were O.K. To imagine the feelings of the police as they carried the bodies and heard the ringing is heartrending; to imagine the feelings of the parents who were calling—dread, desperate hope for a sudden answer and the bliss of reassurance, dawning grief—is unbearable. But the parents, and the rest of us, were told that it was not the right moment to ask how the shooting had happened—specifically, why an obviously disturbed student, with a history of mental illness, was able to buy guns whose essential purpose is to kill people—and why it happens over and over again in America. At a press conference, Virginia's governor, Tim Kaine, said, "People who want to . . . make it their political hobby horse to ride, I've got nothing but loathing for them. . . . At this point, what it's about is comforting family members . . . and helping this community heal. And so to those who want to try to make this into some little crusade, I say take that elsewhere."

If the facts weren't so horrible, there might be something touching in the Governor's deeply American belief that "healing" can take place magically, without the intervening practice called "treating." The logic is unusual but striking: the aftermath of a terrorist attack is the wrong time to talk about security, the aftermath of a death from lung cancer is the wrong time to talk about smoking and the tobacco industry, and the aftermath of a car crash is the wrong time to talk about seat belts. People talked about the shooting, of course, but much of the conversation was devoted to musings on the treatment of mental illness in universities, the problem of "narcissism," violence in the media and in popular culture, copycat killings, the alienation of immigrant students, and the question of Evil.

Some people, however—especially people outside America—were eager to talk about it in another way, and even to embark on a little crusade. The whole world saw that the United States has more gun violence than other countries because we have more guns and are willing to sell them to madmen who want to kill people. Every nation has violent loners, and they tend to have remarkably similar profiles from one country and culture to the next. And every country has known the horror of having a lunatic get his hands on a gun and kill innocent people. But on a recent list of the fourteen worst mass shootings in Western democracies since the nineteen-sixties the United States claimed seven, and, just as important, no other country on the list has had a repeat performance as severe as the first.

In Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, a gunman killed sixteen children and a teacher at their school. Afterward, the British gun laws, already restrictive, were tightened—it's now against the law for any private citizen in the United Kingdom to own the kinds of guns that Cho Seung-Hui used at Virginia Tech—and nothing like Dunblane has occurred there since. In Quebec, after a school shooting took the lives of fourteen women in 1989, the survivors helped begin a gun-control movement that resulted in legislation bringing stronger, though far from sufficient, gun laws to Canada. (There have been a couple of subsequent shooting sprees, but on a smaller scale, and with far fewer dead.) In the Paris suburb of Nanterre, in 2002, a man killed eight people at a municipal meeting. Gun control became a key issue in the Presidential election that year, and there has been no repeat incident.

So there is no American particularity about loners, disenfranchised immigrants, narcissism, alienated youth, complex moral agency, or Evil. There is an American particularity about guns. The arc is apparent. Forty years ago, a man killed fourteen people on a college campus in Austin, Texas; this year, a man killed thirty-two in Blacksburg, Virginia. Not enough was done between those two massacres to make weapons of mass killing harder to obtain. In fact, while campus killings continued—Columbine being the most notorious, the shooting in the one-room Amish schoolhouse among the most recent—weapons have got more lethal, and, in states like Virginia, where the N.R.A. is powerful, no harder to buy.

Reducing the number of guns available to crazy people will neither relieve them of their insanity nor stop them from killing. Making it more difficult to buy guns that kill people is, however, a rational way to reduce the number of people killed by guns. Nations with tight gun laws have, on the whole, less gun violence; countries with somewhat restrictive gun laws have some gun violence; countries with essentially no gun laws have a lot of gun violence. (If you work hard, you can find a statistical exception hiding in a corner, but exceptions are just that. Some people who smoke their whole lives don't get lung cancer, while some people who never smoke do; still, the best way not to get lung cancer is not to smoke.)

It's true that in renewing the expired ban on assault weapons we can't guarantee that someone won't shoot people with a semi-automatic pistol, and that by controlling semi-automatic pistols we can't reduce the chances of someone killing people with a rifle. But the point of lawmaking is not to act as precisely as possible, in order to punish the latest crime; it is to act as comprehensively as possible, in order to prevent the next one. Semi-automatic Glocks and Walthers, Cho's weapons, are for killing people. They are not made for hunting, and it's not easy to protect yourself with them. (If having a loaded semi-automatic on hand kept you safe, cops would not be shot as often as they are.)

Rural America is hunting country, and hunters need rifles and shotguns—with proper licensing, we'll live with the risk. There is no reason that any private citizen in a democracy should own a handgun. At some point, that simple truth will register. Until it does, phones will ring for dead children, and parents will be told not to ask why.

RAND director: Blame ourselves, not Iraqis

Who Lost Iraq?

By James Dobbins
International Herald Tribune | April 17, 2007

 

As Iraqi and American public opinion pushes the United States inexorably toward the exit, a debate over who lost Iraq is already gaining momentum. There is no shortage of culprits.

 

Already the Defense Department is blaming the State Department, and State is blaming Defense.  One top general after another is quoted as saying "there is no military solution to this conflict" — in other words, "don't blame us if we fail."  Soldiers claim, rightly enough, that they are the only ones mobilized for this war, and decry the paucity of civilian experts deployed in Iraq.

 

Diplomats, for their part, argue that they have seen to the drafting of a constitution, organized elections and installed a new Iraqi government. They complain that the military has failed to establish a secure environment in which these democratic institutions can take root.

 

A similar debate is taking place within the U.S. defense establishment between advocates of traditional manpower-intensive counterinsurgency doctrine, like the current commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and those who favor a greater emphasis on "foreign internal defense" — that is, Iraqi forces — like his predecessor, General George Casey.

 

The media are examining their own shortcomings. The New York Times has apologized for its prewar coverage of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Tom Ricks, the Washington Post's senior defense correspondent, has castigated his own editorial page for its early and consistent endorsement of the war. Some TV journalists have acknowledged that their initial coverage of the war focused on dramatic pictures of victorious U.S. troops and gave too little time to what might come next.

 

In Washington, there is a growing consensus among experts that the entire system for managing national security affairs is broken and needs to be revamped. That structure, built around the National Security Council and its staff in the White House, was established in 1947 to handle the incipient Cold War. Something new and much larger is needed, so this argument goes, to successfully marshal all elements of American power for the new long war against Islamist terrorism.

 

Democrats tend to blame the Republicans for failure in Iraq, while Republicans prefer to blame the Iraqis. There is also dissention within the parties.

 

Among Democrats, antiwar activists criticize those who voted for the war, as well as those who continue to resist legislating an end to it. Among Republicans, the neoconservatives blame the conservatives, in particular former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, but also President George W. Bush, for not committing adequate manpower and money to the task.

 

The looming debacle in Iraq has also cast a critical light on U.S.-Israeli relations. Respected academics have complained about the inordinate influence of the Israeli lobby in the United States.

 

Interestingly, there is a similar debate underway in Israel, where some Israelis believe that their country's policies have become too closely linked to those of the United States.

 

In truth, there is more than enough blame to go around. America went into Iraq united to a degree uncommon in U.S. history. Congress authorized this war by an overwhelming majority, something that had not occurred for the Gulf War a decade earlier, nor in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia or Kosovo, all of which were highly controversial.

 

Many leading Democrats thought the intervention in Iraq was a good idea. The press was uncritical, and the American people were hugely supportive.

 

Precisely because responsibility for this misguided enterprise is so widely shared, the temptation to lay the blame on the Iraqis may prove irresistible, and not just for Republicans. We gave the Iraqis a chance, so this argument goes, and if they failed to seize the opportunity to build a peaceful democratic state, whose fault is that?  Yet the Iraqis are what they are.  If they failed to live up to American expectations, shall we fault their reality, or our illusions?

 

The Bush administration, like the American public, now recognizes that the occupation of Iraq was mismanaged. Its response is a determination to do better next time. Many Americans are more likely to conclude that we must not do it at all next time. In fact, both these conclusions are valid. By all means let us henceforth avoid invading large hostile countries on the basis of faulty intelligence with the support of narrow, unrepresentative coalitions.

 

But let us also recognize that not all conflicts are avoidable. Iraq may have been a war of choice, but Afghanistan was not, and both conflicts left America with a heavy burden of nation building.

 

Through the 1990s the Clinton administration slowly learned how costly such missions could be. In Somalia it turned tail at the first sign of opposition. In Haiti it set an early departure deadline, thereby ensuring that any improvements it introduced would be short lived.

 

In Bosnia President Bill Clinton set an even shorter deadline, promising to have all American troops out of the country within 12 months of their arrival. But he was at least wise enough not keep his promise. It was not until 1999 — seven years into his administration — that Clinton finally acknowledged the open-ended nature of the American commitments in Bosnia and Kosovo.

 

It has taken the Bush administration a similar amount of time to learn that nation building cannot be done on the cheap. The surge of troops into Baghdad is a belated acknowledgment that rebuilding a failed state takes an enormous commitment of manpower, money and time.

 

This realization probably comes too late to rescue the American venture in Iraq.  But by succumbing to the temptation to scapegoat the Iraqis for an American failure, we could lose sight of this important, if unpalatable, realization altogether.

 

James Dobbins, a former assistant U.S. secretary of state and special envoy for Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, directs the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation.

Taibbi: 'We love our black/Jew/redneck jokes and... misogyny'

This is the only interesting thing I've read about the ho-hum scandal involving Don Imus. Reading this ought to make you feel at least a little uncomfortable. If we're really going to have a "national dialog" about race and gender and rap music, it ought to go something like this....

THE LOW POST: The Imus Sanction

In a media shitstorm, everyone ducks for the cover of easy moral outrage

MATT TAIBBI | Rollingstone.com

Ultimately, the fact that rappers are now being held accountable for something Imus said shows the bias many people have against hip-hop culture. Hip-hop is often the scapegoat of everything gone wrong in America, but hip-hop didn't slander the Rutgers women's basketball team, Don Imus did, so let's stay on point here...The point is, hip-hop didn't invent cursing, slurs, bad language, sexism or misogyny, though hip-hop like so many other fictional forms of the culture uses this type of language as a form of expression, however problematic it might be. This expression represents the way people in the streets talk. It might not be pretty or politically correct, but it is a unique form of fictional expression that emerges from the minds and mouths of young black men.

-- Dr. Todd Boyd, professor of critical studies at USC, writing for ESPN.com

The most annoying thing about the Don Imus fiasco? The instant it blew up into an absurdly overdone national controversy, we all knew exactly how everyone was going to play it -- or overplay it, as it were.

We all knew that the angry-white-guy columnists of the Townhall.com ilk were going to turn even the previously-hated liberal Imus into a martyr of the political correctness age ("Imus, Political Correctness and the end of America" was Douglas McKinnon's not-at-all-hysterical offering). We knew Al Sharpton would show up, business card in hand, at the back of the ambulance, offering his services. We knew campus feminists would surface en masse to paint Imus as a hatemongering symbol of the old-boy white male power structure that secretly still insists on its power and privilege in American society, his show a daily vulgar wink to fellow members of the Matrix. And we knew -- or at least I knew, since I've personally been through a couple of these media ass-whippings before -- that virtually every editorial denouncing Imus would include a line in there that would read something along the lines of, "And the worst thing is, his so-called 'jokes' aren't even that funny."

Canny observers of the cultural issues underlying the Imus controversy could have also made a few other predictions. The first is that the angry-white-guy crowd would try to turn the tables on Imus' accusers and point the finger at the hip-hop culture that introduced old white liberals like Imus to words like "nappy-headed hos" in the first place. The second is that black intellectuals like the above-quoted Dr. Todd Boyd of USC would use their advanced degrees to find a way to split the necessary rhetorical hairs to repel these attacks, dismissing Imus as a worthless bigot on the one hand while upholding rap and hip-hop as a "unique form of fictional expression" deserving of the broad indulgence we grant to true art forms.

They're all full of shit, all of them. With very few exceptions almost everyone who jumped onto the Don Imus pigpile was a shameless opportunist whose mind was made up years before this incident even happened, and used the occasion of a radio jock stepping in shit to robotically jerk off his constituency for a cheap buck.

First of all, let's just get this out of the way: The idea that anyone in the media world gives a shit about the dignity of women, black or white, is a ridiculous joke. America's TV networks have spent the last forty years falling over each other trying to find better and more efficient ways to sell tits to the 18-to-35 demographic. They make hour-long prime-time reality dramas these days about shopping-obsessed sluts hitting each other with pocketbooks, for Christ's sake. Paris Hilton -- dumb, rich -- gets her own prime-time show. MTV, the teenie mags, the pop music industry, they're basically all an endless parade of skinny, half-naked brainless women selling makeup and jeans to neurotic, self-hating, weight-obsessed little girls.

The idea that NBC -- the company that proudly produced 241 episodes of Baywatch, a show whose two main characters for nearly a decade were Pamela Anderson's tits -- was "offended" by the use of the word "ho" is beyond preposterous. Until this incident, I would have wagered very good money that "ho" would be in the title of at least one NBC-produced reality pilot within the next ten years. You can't see that? Trivia-battling sluts in Ho-llywod Squares? An irony-for-irony's-sake callgirl-improvement show called Pimp My Ho? Would you bet real money that the Paris-and-Nicole vehicle The Simple Life wasn't originally called Whore Acres at some stage of the pre-production process? I sure as hell wouldn't. Programming decisions of the The Bachelor ilk aren't spontaneous mid-show farts by an aging drug-battered brain like the Imus deal -- they're wide-awake decisions, forged in the crucible of number-crunching corporate reflection, to use reactionary images of cheap brainless skanks to sell Fritos and pickup trucks.

The race question is even more ridiculous. Dr. Todd Boyd notwithstanding, there's just no way to talk about the Imus incident without talking about hip-hop and rap culture. Let me just say right up-front that I listen to a lot of rap music. I'm one of those revolting well-off suburban white kids who grew up on PE and NWA and privately mourns the fact that he looks like an idiot in a Starter jersey. I love rap music, always have. But as an adult white male I also know a minstrel show when I see it, and that's what rap has turned into.

Satan himself couldn't have designed a more effective vehicle for marginalizing black culture than modern hip-hop. In the early days rap music was scary social commentary; it was raw and real and it vividly described a violent street culture that white people didn't know about and didn't want to know about. But very quickly rap turned into a multibillion-dollar industry in which the same corporate behemoths who sold us crap like Garth Brooks and boy bands and Britney Spears made massive profits selling a stylized, romanticized version of black misery to white kids in the suburbs.

That was bad enough, but even worse was the way black politicians and black intellectuals so easily bought into the idea that these endless video images of gun-toting, ho-slapping black men with fat wallets, rock-hard tattooed abs and fully-accessorized rides were positive living symbols of "black empowerment" and "black manhood." Like Tupac was the next Malcolm or something.

Yeah, right. Seriously, how dumb do you have to be to not see through this shit? Here you've got the modern-day version of The Man signing big checks to back your record deals and cheering along as all the artistic talent from the black community starts walking around in public wearing one-word stage names like strippers, writing song lyrics featuring preschool-level spelling and primping endlessly for the cameras with gold teeth and swimming pools and pimped-out cars -- all of them absurd caricatures of the capitalist wealth fantasy. How exactly is any of that that different from the minstrel show, the conk and the zoot suit? The black man who can dance and sing, but can't control his urges, can't resist pussy and just can't get enough of what Whitey is selling, can't stop preening in his Caddy...that's innovative? That's empowering?

Bullshit. Rap was real once, but once it became an industry it turned into the same con white people have been playing ever since they set foot in this country. It's a bunch of shiny trinkets for the isle of Manhattan. Here's your Hummer and your bitches, knock yourself out. You need us, we'll be buying the African grain market. Oh, and, thanks for the cap, my kid loves it, he wears it sideways just like you...No matter how catchy the music is, on a deeper level, that's what big-money rap acts amount to now. And the longer the black community eats it up, the more time Whitey is going to have to laugh all the way to the bank, like he always has.

Pop Quiz: Where did the practice of calling all black women, and especially black women who are not actual prostitutes, hos? I seem to remember a line from Boyz n the Hood where some girl complains to Ice Cube about his habit of calling all women bitches. "Oh, I'm sorry, ho!" is the answer. Laughs all around. When the Imus thing hit, we heard Snoop Dogg explain that the difference between rappers using the word "ho" and Don Imus using it is that unlike "old-ass white men" like Imus, rappers are "not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We're talking about hos that's in the 'hood that ain't doing shit." Oh, I get it, Snoop -- you were satirizing the hos and bitches. You obviously checked the crowd to make sure nobody had a degree when you did your "So all the niggaz and the bitches, raise your muthafuckin hands in the air!" act. And it was satire when Ludacris did his thing: "but hos dont feel so sad and blue/cuz most of us niggaz is hos too."

People say that Don Imus isn't funny, but let's face it, there is a joke in all of this. It's a joke on the black community. And the joke is this: white people don't even have to call black people niggers and bitches and whores anymore. They do it for us. From Whitey's point of view that's a hell of a punchline. The mistake Imus made was saying it out loud.

As for the people who say there's no connection between hip-hop and what Imus said, they're out of their minds. Without Ludacris and 50 Cent and "We Luv Deez Hoez," Don Imus doesn't even know what a ho is. The unspoken truth about the Imus story is that there is no difference at all between what Imus does and what Snoop Dogg does. They both get paid to make ethnic slurs. In this case they both use the same one, one stealing from the other. The only difference is that Snoop doesn't know the joke is on him, too.

That is a dark and ugly truth and I suspect that its very ugliness is what so many people were hiding from when they pretended to be "outraged" by Don Imus. Because everyone knows that the issue with Don Imus isn't what he said, but who said it and in what context.

We've got a TV entertainment industry that ritualistically demeans women, a recording industry that makes billions cartoonizing black culture and a radio and film comedy industry that lives almost exclusively off lowbrow racial stereotyping. Guys like Carlos Mencia even use the same jokes over and over, changing words here and there to fit the different stereotypes. (Mencia did "That's like going to Compton and finding the only Hispanic teenage girl who isn't pregnant" and he also did "That's like going to a NASCAR event and finding the only white girl who doesn't have a black eye.") Every comic in America does this shit. It's gone so far that we even make jokes about making jokes about ethnic groups (Sarah Silverman's song about "I love you more than Asian people are good at math" comes to mind). And we get critics to bail out these comics by saying things like "He/she mocks bigotry and stereotypes by ironically embracing them" (the Voice's Michael Musto has used that one before) but deep down inside we all know that's bullshit. I dare anyone to watch tape of Richard Pryor doing his impression of a stuttering Chinese restaurant owner and then tell me with a straight face that Pryor is "mocking Asian stereotypes by ironically embracing them."

Of course he isn't. He's laughing at stuttering Chinese people. And the way Richard Pryor does it, it's funny. If Pryor were still alive and coherent today we'd put him on HBO, where he'd do huge ratings with the very same people who are pretending now to be appalled by Don Imus. Because we love our black jokes, we love our Jew jokes, we love our redneck jokes and we love our misogyny -- we just don't want it all on the wrong network in the wrong time-slot, coming from a white guy, in whose mouth it might very well sound like the bigot in all of us. And when it does pop up in the wrong place, coming from the wrong person, we've got to pull the "I'm shocked, shocked" act and pretend it's a criminal aberration. Because that's much easier than facing the truth about what we just heard.

'Surge' won't be temporary

If you didn't see this coming, then you must not have been paying attention for the past 3 years! The "surge" was just a political euphemism for escalation. It is not temporary. The U.S. military escalation in Iraq will last at least until the next U.S. President is elected.

Analysis: Iraq surge may be extended

By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
Sat Apr 21, 4:46 PM ET

The Pentagon is laying the groundwork to extend the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq. At the same time, the administration is warning Iraqi leaders that the boost in forces could be reversed if political reconciliation is not evident by summer.

This approach underscores the central difficulty facing President Bush. If political progress is not possible in the relatively short term, then the justification for sending thousands more U.S. troops to Baghdad — and accepting the rising U.S. combat death toll that has resulted — will disappear. That in turn would put even more pressure on Bush to yield to the Democratic-led push to wind down the war in coming months.

[But Democratic-led pressure only makes Bush more stubborn, and determined to continue his wrongheaded policies. Bush knows he can't be re-elected, and so he doesn't give a hoot about public opinion or the GOP's chances in 2008. Which is what the military & political analysts haven't managed to figure out by now. -- J ]

If the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki does manage to achieve the political milestones demanded by Washington, then the U.S. military probably will be told to sustain the troop buildup much longer than originally foreseen — possibly well into 2008. Thus the early planning for keeping it up beyond late summer.

[In other words, if the "surge" works, then it becomes permanent. Brilliant! -- J ]

More than half of the extra 21,500 combat troops designated for Baghdad duty have arrived; the rest are due by June. Already it is evident that putting them in the most hotly contested parts of the capital is taking a toll. An average of 22 U.S. troops have died per week in April, the highest rate so far this year.

"This is certainly a price that we're paying for this increased security," Adm. William Fallon, the senior U.S. commander in the Middle East, told a House committee Wednesday. He also said the United States does not have "a ghost of a chance" of success in Iraq unless it can create "stability and security."

The idea of the troop increase, originally billed by the administration as a temporary "surge," is not to defeat the insurgency. That is not thought possible in the near term. The purpose is to contain the violence — in particular, the sect-on-sect killings in Baghdad — long enough to create an environment in which Iraqi political leaders can move toward conciliation and ordinary Iraqis are persuaded of a viable future.

So far the results are mixed, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates said this week during a visit to Iraq that he wants to see faster political progress by the Iraqis. "The clock is ticking," he said, referring to the limited time the administration can pursue its strategy before the American public demands an end to the war.

Gates also said he told al-Maliki that the United States will not keep fighting indefinitely.

[Yeah, we'll keep fighting only until 2010, when and if a Democratic President grows a pair and withdraws our forces. -- J ]

Gates' remarks reflected the administration's effort to strike a balance between reassuring the Iraqis of U.S. support and pressuring their leaders to show they can bring the country together and avert a full-scale civil war.

On Saturday, one American soldier was killed and two were wounded by a roadside bomb southwest of Baghdad, the military said. A separate roadside bombing, in Diwaniyah about 80 miles south of the capital, killed a Polish soldier late Friday.

Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq watcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Friday that even if the Iraqis pass the desired legislation, it probably would take months longer to find out if it proves workable.

"The U.S. should definitely keep up the pressure on the Iraqis, but we should have no illusions," Cordesman said. "Iraqis are driven more by their own politics than outside pressure."

When Bush announced the troop boost in January, administration officials pointedly left unclear how long the extra troops would remain in Iraq. Some, including Gates, suggested that troop levels could be reduced to the previous standard of about 135,000 as early as September — assuming the addition of 21,500 combat troops and roughly 8,000 support troops this spring proved to be an overwhelming success or a clear-cut failure.

Three months later, with troops still flowing into Baghdad, the Pentagon is beginning to take steps that suggests it expects to maintain higher troop levels into 2008 and beyond, yet officials still won't say whether the increase is intended as a short-term move. Some believe the lack of clarity is a mistake because it adds to the strain on troops and their families and it may lessen the psychological pressure on the belligerents.

Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, whose January report on changing the U.S. military strategy in Iraq was largely adopted as part of Bush's new approach to the war, said in an interview Thursday that it appears the administration believes it will have to sustain the troop buildup much longer.

"They seem to be taking the steps that would make it possible to sustain it for longer, which is good," Kagan said. "But they seem to be reluctant to commit to a willingness to do that, which I think is unfortunate."

Kagan says the troops, the Iraqi government and the insurgents all ought to be convinced that U.S. forces will keep up the pressure, particularly in the most contested neighborhoods in Baghdad, for at least another year.

"If I were running the show I would say, 'Look, everyone should assume that we're going to sustain this through 2008 — the Iraqis should assume that, too — and if we can turn it off sooner, then everyone would be happy," Kagan said.

Gen. James T. Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps, takes a similar view. In an interview earlier this month he pondered the thought process of a U.S. commander in Iraq evaluating the way ahead. "In six months, if it's working, is he going to say, 'OK, it worked, now you guys can go home'?" Conway thinks there is a reasonable chance for success, and for planning purposes he is preparing to sustain the troop buildup.

The Marines added about 4,000 to their contingent in western Anbar province, the focal point of the Sunni Arab insurgency. In March the Marines made a little-noticed move that gives them the flexibility to continue at the higher rate in Iraq at least into 2008. They extended the tours of Marines in Okinawa, Japan, which freed up other Marine units in the United States to deploy to Iraq later this year instead of Okinawa.

Also, the Pentagon announced earlier this month that normal tours of duty in Iraq will be 15 months instead of 12 months. Gates said that gives the military the capability to maintain the higher troop levels in Iraq until next spring.

___

EDITOR'S NOTE — Robert Burns has covered the military for The Associated Press since 1990.

No soul searching after VA Tech rampage

A brutal truth: Massacre is just part of everyday life in America

By Rupert Cornwell
April 18, 2007 | Independent Online

It is as if we are on autopilot. The ghastly tragedy swamps the news to the exclusion of all else. There are the heartbreaking stories of a university shattered and of the dozens of victims, their mostly young lives cut short so senselessly. We listen to the grief-stricken remarks of the President, and follow the breathless investigation of the perpetrator's background, his history of mental illness. We share the anguished second guessing about whether his murderous rampage could have been prevented. Yet everything is playing to a script we know by heart.
Virginia Tech, of course, is the worst incident of its kind in US history - and at one level, you would gain the impression from American television that Cho Seung-Hui has literally stopped the world.

He hasn't of course. On Tuesday, in what passes for a relatively quiet news day in Iraq, wire services reported the deaths of 56 people in violence across the country: some of them gunned down, some killed by a suicide bomber, some discovered as decomposed or decapitated corpses. But we heard not a word of that, nor of the trial in absentia in Italy of a US soldier accused of shooting dead an Italian intelligence agent, nor of the report that North Korea may be about to shut down a key nuclear reactor (which would be very big news indeed if true.) And somebody shot dead the Mayor of Nagasaki. But who cares? Instead, nothing but Virginia Tech.

Yet, however exceptional the event, there is something formulaic, even routine, about the coverage. There is no soul searching, no wondering what might be wrong with a society where such things happen so frequently. You hear no new arguments, for deep down there is nothing new to be said.
No detail of the tragedy is too tiny to recount; from where Cho went to high school to the thoughts of the postman who delivered mail, to where the family lived in the Virginia suburb of Centreville (and never met him). Yet America is showing scant sign of addressing the far bigger issue - of whether it is finally time to get serious about gun control.

"Today is the time to focus on the families, the school and the community," Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, said. But, she added, "we must allow the facts of the case to unfold before we talk about policy." Reasonable enough. But if not now, in the white heat of stunned national outrage, when?

For public anger can force unexpected change. Over the course of a long career as a loud-mouthed talk radio host, Don Imus must have made hundreds of offensive remarks. Last week, he made what seemed just another one, about the Rutgers University women's basketball team. Astonishingly, public tolerance at last snapped. In three days, Imus was out on his ear.

Might not Virginia Tech be the Rutgers University joke for the gun lobby, the moment when violence-drenched America says enough is enough? Alas no. Yes, there will be debate, just as after similar awful incidents in recent years, from Columbine High School to the murder of the five Amish schoolgirls last October in Pennsylvania.

But the underlying mood is of disillusioned resignation. So President Bush formulaically speaks of a "day of sadness for our entire nation," and how Americans are "asking God to provide comfort for all who have been affected." It is less certain, however, that a President from gun-toting Texas, who has pursued the conservative vote his entire career, will try to mobilise temporal political forces to render comfort from the Almighty unnecessary.

Keep coming to our world-class universities, was the message to foreign students from Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman yesterday. Virginia Tech was "an aberration". As Donald Rumsfeld infamously remarked of the anarchy of post-invasion Iraq, "Stuff happens".

School shootings happen year in, year out, like tornados in the Midwest in springtime and hurricanes in the south in summer. There will be pressure to step up security procedures on campuses. But that, I confidently predict, will be it. Some even urge more guns, not less. The shooting was proof that "gun bans are the problem, and that Americans should have the rights to defend themselves", according to The Gun Owners of America, a firearms lobbying group. In the meantime, the mighty media river rolls on, washing everything else away. And copycats watch, and wait to choose their moment.

The massacre at Virginia Tech is alarming, not just because of its scale, or that the authorities missed warning signs about Cho Seung-Hui, or that he found it so easy to carry out his terrible mission. The biggest worry is the "copy cat" risk - or rather virtual certainty - that some other student who's feeling depressed or victimised and wondering if life's worth while, will see what happened at Blackburg. And then he'll decide that he too might as well go out with a bang (or more exactly, as many deadly bangs as possible).

The question is not whether, but where, when and how a new outrage will happen. Not, thankfully, at St Edward's University in Austin, Texas, or at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, nor at the University of Oklahoma. The first two received bomb threats yesterday and briefly evacuated their campus. At the third, someone was reportedly seen with a weapon. All three scares were unfounded. But sooner or later, the scare will be real, and more people will die because of America's inability to strip the glamour from guns.