Your Straightforward Reading Of The Plain Meaning Of My Words Is Proof Of Your Lack Of Reading Comprehension!

Josh Trevino claims that “[t]here’s little to be done for the reading comprehension of the online left,” and that his bringing up the Boer War was “not to make a policy prescription but to conduct a thought-experiment to demonstrate the insufficiency of the President’s ‘surge.'” Of course, nobody thought that Trevino favored the President’s plan–which is precisely what makes his claim that Bush exists on a “higher moral plane” so transparently idiotic. But is it unfair to claim that Trevino is advocating Boer War-style tactics? As a commenter at TAPPED also notes, obviously not:

• Trevino, first of all, asks us to ignore not only his argument while the tactics used in the Boer War were “cruel” and that “I endorse cruel things in war–to eschew them is folly” but his subsequent claim that Bush is on a “higher plane ” because he realizes that losing is unacceptable. The only logical reading of the post is that, while he doesn’t endorse Bush’s specific plan, he does support Boer War-style scorched-earth tactics: if we can’t lose, and the deployment of cruelty is the only way to win…there’s only one way this argument can go.
• And, of course, Trevino is not writing in a vacuum. Previously, he has written the following: “The ability of a society to see through grinding conflicts like the Philippines Insurrection or the Boer War augers well for its future, lest it lose the mere capacity to conquer, and be susceptible to humiliation by any small power with no advantage save mental fortitude. It is indeed difficult to imagine now the methods that transformed the Philippines for us, and South Africa for the British, from bitter foe to steadfast friend being applied in Iraq. Would that they were.” [my emphasis.] So this is at least the second time he’s made the argument that while the U.S. may not use brutal military tactics, it should. Again, it couldn’t be more explicit.
• And, wait–he’s also written (scroll down to “the road untaken”) that “[c]onceptually, the Algerian-style sealing of Iraqi borders coupled with Boer War-style civilian control measures are workable and even just. [my emphasis]” although “their imposition would mean the implicit repudiation of the very mythos of the war.” Do you see a pattern here? Again, the U.S. probably doesn’t have the fortitude to exterminate all the brutes–but it should.

So the idea that the problem here is a lack of reading comprehension on the part of Trevino’s critics is absurd. At least three times (and who knows how many examples there were be if his primarily online venue still had available archives) he has explictly endorsed the desirability of Boer War style tactics. It is true that he has also said that Bush will be unlikely to use them, but this is beside the point (and, indeed, just makes his support of Bush and initial support of the war incoherent.) The fact that he seems to want to back off from the plain implication of his words isn’t his critics’ problem. If he doesn’t want to be accused of supporting Boer War-style tactics, he should stop saying that he supports them.