Smart

Casualty rate for U.S. troops in Iraq hit a two year high in June 2011.

Some analysts have said that the primary reason attacks on U.S. troops have increased significantly in recent months is because top U.S. officials have been saying publicly that the U.S. military will stay past the Dec. 31, 2011 total withdrawal deadline. One former Iraqi U.N. diplomat said that “U.S. soldiers are likely being targeted more now because there is talk that Iraqi and American officials will try to keep additional troops” past 2011.

Last weekend, Daniel Ellsberg addressed the American Library Association conference in New Orleans where he criticized the President's strategy of gradual troop withdrawal as dishonest can kicking.

"If you say you’re withdrawing from Afghanistan or Iraq, and reduce (troop levels) slowly, the public will be off your back. The people will think … he’s moving in the right direction, which is false. The president plans to be out of Afghanistan fully by 2014. I believe that … is as false as any lie told by (Richard) Nixon or (Lyndon) Johnson."

Ellsberg’s conclusion: "Smart guys can get us into dumb wars and can’t get us out of them."

"McNamara was just as smart" as Obama, he said, "and Johnson was just as smart and Nixon was just as smart, and that didn’t do us any good."

"Smart" sounds like a nice thing to vote for but in reality it's a subjective and meaningless term. Everybody who isn't disabled in some way is adequately intelligent for most human function. Where we get into trouble is when we apply the term "smart" to people who exhibit various personality traits and emotional capacities we happen to like such as patience, empathy, humor, and, of course, the dreaded "intellectual curiosity." So most of what we hear described as "smart" is really just a set of social preferences reflecting particular biases. Many people associate an ability to project decisiveness or assertiveness with intelligence although those qualities are just as likely to indicate sociopathy.

The point is "smart" is, to say the least, a nebulous term. It can even be applied to cunning practitioners of the current anti-intellectual politics aspiring to take charge of the murderous machinery of war just as readily as it can to the pleasing liars who are running it now.