I didn't take that Rolling Stone article the way you and Dennis Perrin did. Where you read Taibbi describing how the soldiers in the unit in which he's embedded do awful yet pointless things with blind young red-white-n-blue enthusiasm you see him glorifying their actions, where I see him anatomizing their sensibilities.
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I understand your sympathies for Taibbi's project, so to speak. I understand because I share it to some extent.
I believe however, that in this instance, he was out of his depth and depended upon nationalistic cliches to get through.
At the beginning of the article, Taibbi asserts:
"To understand the war in Iraq, you first have to understand the people who are fighting it. And the way to do that isn’t to burst in with your head in a point, bitching about WMDs and croaking passages from Arab-history books. Jump in the truck and shut your mouth; get on board, literally and figuratively. In America, everyone has an opinion about Iraq, even me — but if you’re going to take the step of actually going there, you’ve got to give it a chance."
[...]
These are not the words of a man who intends to "anatomize" military sensibilities. He's explicitly stating his intention to leave analysis behind and give the occupation enterprise "a chance."
Furthermore, if, as you say, he was only dissecting and recording the thoughts and actions of US soldiers, there'd be no place for 'clash of civilizations' soap boxing like this:
“This is the place where two existential dead ends have come around in a circle to meet in an irreconcilable explosion of violence — the bureaucratic ennui and intellectual confusion of modern civilized man vs. the recalcitrant, prehistoric fanaticism of Al-Qaeda’s literally cave-dwelling despotic mob. Human history has traveled in two exactly opposite directions for the last thousand years, and the supreme irony is that both paths led straight here, to this insane stalemate in the Mesopotamian desert.”
[...]
This statement, obviously meant to be a grand summing up, is completely stripped of recent historical context. He safely reaches for the metaphysics so as to avoid dealing with the terrifyingly hard questions.
In my own brief review of Taibbi's RS article, I compare his words to Nir Rosen's. Rosen has been in Iraq for three years and ridden with US troops. He's also talked to Iraqis because, as an Arabic speaker, he can and also, because he's brave enough to seek out their words.
Taibbi told us what everyone reading everything from the New York Times to People Magazine must already know: American soldiers are motivated yet confused, destructive yet hopeful.
Rosen is telling us what we desperately need to know: what these gung ho kids are doing, per their orders, out of fear and loathing of and for an entire people.
Not because they're especially evil, but because occupation is ugly by its nature.
Taibbi came no where near this preferring to give us a bargain basement Hunter S Thompson mimic show.
.d.
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