1115.org

Last night, Countdown with Keith Olbermann gave us Thomas Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, who has won two Pulitzer Prizes during 17 years of covering the U.S. military. Ricks, author of “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq”, put on a bizarre and unfathomable performance. Here’s the crowning glory, the Parable of the Father with Two Sons:

OLBERMANN: Haditha and Abu Ghraib before it have been dismissed by many as isolated incidents, bad apples. In your reporting for this book, you spoke with more than 100 senior military officers, you had access to about 30,000 pages of official documents. Did your research lead you to that conclusion? Were these the isolated incidents we‘ve been led to believe?

RICKS: It surprised me, because I didn‘t expect to really dwell on abuse when I began writing the book. The more research I did, though, the more of those interviews, the more legal documents I read, the more I saw there was a real pattern of abuse across many units in Iraq, especially early on.

And it wasn‘t just troops behaving badly, it was troops that were not given the tools, conceptual tools, the training, to do the job. So you had guys kind of making it up as they went along.

In the 1st Armored Division, for example, troops were told to deter looters. Some of them decided the best way to do that was to make them cry. So when some soldiers in Baghdad caught a father and his two sons one day, they said to the father, Which of your sons should we shoot? And his father said, as most would, Shoot me, please. They said, You don‘t get to make that choice. And they took one of the teenage sons around to the other side of a truck and fired a weapon past his head. And they made them cry.

That—what those soldiers did was wrong. But it‘s what happens when you put soldiers in impossible positions and don‘t give them the training they need, and the numbers of troops they need to get the job done.

At this point, Olbermann mercifully steered Ricks to other issues.

But since this guy is such an expert on military issues, I wish he would explain why asking soldiers to deter looting puts them in an impossible position. Isn’t the National Guard called upon to do exactly that every so often back home? And how would more troops have helped? But, most importantly, is Ricks arguing that the soldiers of the 1st Armored Division are not trained in the basic rules of war, in the fundamental provisions of the Geneva conventions? Or is he arguing that that basic training doesn’t teach soldiers that it’s wrong to pretend-shoot a son to scare the father?

But perhaps Ricks’ performance is what happens when you take a veteran print journalist, and put him in the impossible position of appearing on a TV show, and don’t give him the training he needs? There is no evidence that Olbermann, or anyone else connected with the show, ever told Ricks: “Try to make sense, okay?”

*Update by Matt 9:00am CDT: Billmon has made a bit of a hobby out of Ricks - Gullible’s Travels and Department of the Bleedin’ Obvious.