Haditha as a prop for anti war movement
...Marines consider it an insult to be called a soilder. They are Marines or troops. Otherwise . David has several excellent points. Rich Lowry also notes the excitement on the left:We must be wary of those who insist they support the troops yet are eager to believe the worst about them before we have even heard their side of the story.
We must be especially resistant to efforts to extrapolate from this isolated incident the conclusion that a climate conducive to atrocities permeates the entirety of our fighting forces, as happened with Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. The overwhelming majority of our soldiers are honorable, decent and good people who would not and do not participate in such behavior. They are also engaged in a noble and necessary mission, though the longer the war lasts, the more that fact becomes obscured.
The anti-war left has already tried and convicted the accused soldiers. The media have called it a war crime, a massacre and an intentional act to send a message to Iraqis. How they know these things is impossible to divine.
Congressman John Murtha (D-Pa.), who is apparently entitled to make any outrageous statement against the war with impunity because of his military record, is somehow sure -- without the benefit of admissions from alleged perpetrators, and certainly not a trial -- that the incident was "much worse than reported in Time magazine. … Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."
Murtha conveniently expressed his findings in his May 17 press conference, in which, for the umpteenth time, he called for the United States to withdraw its troops from Iraq.
Other anti-war politicians and activists will throw circumspection to the wind and exploit this tragedy, perhaps not out of genuine humanitarian concerns, but to discredit the war. It would be nice to believe otherwise, but their track record of accentuating and exaggerating events to smear the entire U.S. military and its mission is consistent, long and reprehensible.
No matter how this turns out, let's remember the true character of the overwhelming majority of our soldiers.
...We still have not heard the Marines,' who have yet to be formerly charged, side of the story. The enemy in Iraq camouflages himself as a civilian and uses civilian human shields. The issue in this case should be whether and when the people killed should have been recognized as someone other than the enemy, or his human shields. One of the problems with the public perception of this debate is that the media has done a really poor job of describing the wickedness of the enemy we face in Iraq and their daily violations of the Geneva Convention as well as their daily war crimes.
There is an obvious agenda here, aside from the instinctive glee much of the media seem to take in any failing of the U.S. military. Haditha is a chance to drive a stake into the heart of the Iraq war. As Newsweek puts it in its Haditha cover story, “The pressure is likely to grow on the Bush administration to bring home the troops, not just to save their lives, but to rescue their honor and decency.”
The old story line on Iraq was that the Bush administration didn’t send enough troops. The new story line is that it sent too many troops who don’t realize it’s wrong to shoot girls in the head. Unfortunately, Gen. Pete Chiarelli’s decision to give all troops in Iraq “values training” plays into the notion that U.S. personnel are blissfully unaware of the prohibition against murder. This training is redundant and insulting. What’s next? Forums reminding troops not to pillage and wantonly burn and destroy?
No military in the history of the planet has ever been as observant of the rules of warfare and as discriminate in its use of force as ours. But no large organization can be utterly free of weak or evil men. In their rush to find a broader meaning in such horrible events, liberals weirdly attenuate their own ability to condemn the perpetrators.
...
A combat environment presents stresses unimaginable to the civilian, and perhaps no combat is more difficult than fighting an urban insurgency. But tens of thousands of American troops have faced it without going door to door killing people in cold blood. Pointing to Haditha and saying that it means we have to leave Iraq would be a little like pointing to the New York City police officer who sodomized a suspect with a broomstick and saying that the NYC Police Department should exit New York because the stresses on its officers are too great.
If Marines in Haditha did what they are accused of, it’s a terrible crime unrepresentative of the American military. Period.
Murtha's statement is itself contradictory: the Marines "overreacted" and then killed "in cold blood." So which is it, crime of passion or cold-blooded murder? That he doesn't care to decide between the two shows that he is less interested in the facts than he is in casting blame.
ReplyDelete