I'm seldom accused of being too kind in my commentary, but maybe I pulled my punch a little on a recent post about Journal Sentinel Managing Editor George Stanley's series of cheerleading articles for the war in Afghanistan.


An online column by Milwaukee Magazine Editor Bruce Murphy makes my comments seem tame.


Murphy calls the series "...at times, embarrassing, and at its heart a boy’s view of war... It’s a comic book view of war, with no room for nuance."


Murphy on Stanley's insistence that we commit to "winning" the war:


Our government’s leadership has spoken, and Obama has set a deadline of 2011 for ending the war in Afghanistan. Stanley proceeds to undercut this idea, telling us every soldier and Marine he talks to wants to stay there as long as necessary to “finish the job.” Well, yes. And football players always want to go for it on fourth down rather than take the safe bet of kicking a field goal. That’s why you have a coach. The American tradition of civilian oversight of the military has long assured that cooler heads on the sidelines determine strategy. But the managing editor of a major American newspaper apparently thinks our soldiers should make such decisions.

There's lots more, and you can read it here, as well as an article Murphy wrote about the Iraq war in 2004, which was spiked by Stanley, presumably because it raised too many troubling questions about how we got there and what we were doing.


Good stuff.