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Thursday, November 18, 2004
Damned If They Do...
The great and wise inhabitants of the Mount Olympian Peace and Press Association are at it again, dispensing their omniscience and impartiality to us mortals. Not that they ever really stop being ‘at it,’ but there are better and worse days, and apparently at the moment, some in the mainstream media think our soldiers shouldn’t act like soldiers. If they do, it’s another Abu-Ghraib-Only-Worse .
At least, that’s the impression I get.
Yes, there are such things as war crimes: John Kerry accused himself of them, after all, and who am I to question his wisdom? The problem doesn’t come in the existence of such a thing or the proper Pentagon response to such a thing, if and when it happens; the problem comes in with our soldiers being required to fight house-to-house gun-battles with Men-become-Orcs while certain Western reporters loom all agog with their video cameras at the delightful prospect of getting some scandalous footage of a ‘war crime.’
I’m surprised the drool doesn’t smear their lenses.
You know, if you put a young man into military training and teach him to kill other human beings for the defense of his country, you can’t expect him to be of the mindset to invite the enemy to join him in doily-lacing when that enemy could very well be pulling the pin on a grenade by way of ensuring himself a no-fault entry to Paradise.
For that matter, I should think that getting shot by a nervous Marine would make for as magnificent an introduction to the afterlife as not, so what’s the problem here? The live soldier’s happy, his team is happy, the dead terrorist’s happy, and the reporter ought to be - unless he wants his 72 virgins too, and feels deprived of the opportunity by a trigger-happy war-monger.
Because, of course, if the Marine doesn’t shoot the devotee of ‘dead’ possum theater, then he and his team and the reporter might well all get blown to bits – whereupon a competing reporter gets to cover the aftermath of that and the administration gets savaged because more young Americans come home in body bags.
There’s nothing like having to fight a war with a gaggle of embedded Wormtongues in tow.
P.S. Six years later. The Treacle Follies:
Rivers may go on forever, but so does political, "intellectual" and soccer-mom magical-thinking; men drown in its self-righteous frothings again and again. Excerpt from the Wall Street Journal via today's NRO, 2/24/10:
John Yoo: In 2005, a Navy Seal team dropped into Afghanistan encountered goat herders who clearly intended to inform the Taliban of their whereabouts. The team leader ordered them released, against his better military judgment, because of his worries about the media and political attacks that would follow.
In less than an hour, more than 80 Taliban fighters attacked and killed all but one member of the Seal team and 16 Americans on a helicopter rescue mission.
An adequate illustration of my above post, I trust?
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