Seems Like a Dressed Up Version of Rush's "Phoney Soldiers" Argument

If Fred is referring to the WaPo op-ed by the group of Army captains, it’s worth noting that none of them has served in Iraq in 2007, and all but one or two served pre-2006, so they hardly are in the best position to know what’s really going on there now.

- - Local Republican Strategist Bill Hobbs, responding to Liberadio's Freddy O'Connell's comments on Army officers who counsel either a draft for or a withdrawal from the Iraq War

And Tennessee Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn is in a better position to know?

The conservative lines against soldiers who oppose the Bush policy in Iraq seem to die the death of a thousand qualifications: rather than listening to military men and women first, the Bush-supporters seem to be forever prejudging them as wrong and cutting them out of the herd based their own random prejudice. That may be good campaign strategy, but it is bad foreign policy.

You can bet that if this war were going swimmingly, administration loyalists would be trotting out every kind of soldier--Iraq experience or no--whom they could find to bolster their case. Instead, with the attitudes toward the Iraq War sour, they seem more interested in discrediting--even in ways better mannered than Rush Limbaugh--any opinion on the war that does not interface neatly with the Bellicose Bushies.

In the end, the argument deconstructs itself: if we can only rely on those soldiers who have served in Iraq after 2006 for setting our policy on fighting future battles, then we should not listen to Bill Hobbs--who has no wartime military service that I know of--either.