What war makes the anti war left do
...The anti war left believes that it is so virtuous that it is OK to make up stories that make the war look dehumanizing. This is what John Kerry's "Winter Soldiers" did about Vietnam.Amid these conflicting claims, one issue is not in dispute. When the New Republic did its initial investigation, it admitted that Beauchamp had erred on one "significant detail." The disfigured-woman incident happened not in Iraq, but in Kuwait.
That means it happened before Beauchamp arrived in Iraq. But the whole point of that story was to demonstrate how the war had turned an otherwise sensitive soul into a monster. Indeed, in the precious, highly self-conscious literary style of an aspiring writer trying out for a New Yorker gig, Beauchamp follows the terrible tale of his cruelty to the disfigured woman by asking, "Am I a monster?" And answering with satisfaction that the very fact that he could ask this question after (the reader has been led to believe) having been so hardened and brutalized by war shows that there is a kernel of humanity left in him.
But, oh, how much was lost. In the past, you see, he was a sensitive soul with "compassion for those with disabilities." In a particularly treacly passage, he tells us that he once worked in a summer camp with disabled children and in college helped a colleague with cerebral palsy. Then this delicate compassionate youth is transformed into an unfeeling animal by war.
Except that it is now revealed that the mess-hall incident happened before he even got to the war. On which point, the whole story -- and the whole morality tale it was meant to suggest -- collapses.
And it makes the rest of the narrative banal and uninteresting. It's the story of a disgusting human being, a mocker of the disfigured, who then goes to Iraq and, as such human beings are wont to do, finds the company of other such human beings who kill dogs for sport, wear the bones of dead children on their heads and find similar amusement in mocking the disfigured.
We will soon learn if there actually was a dog killer or a bone wearer. But the New Republic seems not to have understood how the Kuwait "detail" undermines everything. After all, what made the purported story interesting enough to publish? Why did the New Republic run it?
Because it fits perfectly into the most virulent narrative of the antiwar left. The Iraq war -- "George Bush's war," as even Hillary Clinton, along with countless others who had actually endorsed the war, now calls it -- has caused not only the sorrow and destruction that we read about every day. It has, most perniciously, caused invisible damage -- now made visible by the soul-searching of one brave and gifted private: It has perverted and corrupted the young soldiers who went to Iraq, and now return morally ruined. Young soldiers like Scott Thomas Beauchamp.
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When I worked as a communications officer in the 3rd Marine division communications Center in Dong Ha in 1968 for 12 hours a day seven days a week I read every message that came through the center and routed it to the appropriate officer. If, as John Kerry has testified, the atrocities he confessed to were known at every level of command they would have flowed through that message center. Yet there were no such messages. these guys just made up events are reported hearsay war stories for the purpose of hurting the war effort. I think that is what Pvt. Beauchamp's purpose was and that is why TNR published it.
There is no question that war can be a scary hell. It is also hours of boredom broken up by moments of terror. It has its own moments of drama without making things up. Michael Yon and W. Thomas Smith write about war as it is. They can be critical, but at least they are honest. It is writers like Yon and Smith that can give you a real insight to this war.
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