Never forget 9/ll
September 11, 2001: Never forget.....
Come Monday it will be five years since Marian Serva, my good neighbor across the street, got killed by fanatical Islamists. She was their enemy, as were nearly 3,000 other unfortunate American civilians that September 11 morning who were defenseless and, in her case, working in the Pentagon.
The victims were not, in the parlance of war-speak, collateral losses. They were the targets. As we have since learned many times over, the civilians and not the soldiers are these animals’ targets of choice. It’s happened with the suicide bombers and with their crazy brothers who gleefully decapitate the innocents they kidnap.
They hate us because we aren’t like them. And not just Americans but anyone not on their side. Shelby Steele has reasoned it out very well. In a recent Wall Street Journal piece, he wrote:
“…Islamist extremists don’t hate the West because they are oppressed by it. They hate it precisely because the end of oppression and colonialism—not their continuance—forced the Muslim world to compete with the West. Less oppression, not more, opened this world to the sense of defeat that turned into extremism.”
Against such inborn hate, our troops in Iraq get special training in how to avoid civilian casualties. When we have to do door-to-door combat, the most difficult kind of fighting, and it hits Iraqi civilians, it is truly collateral.
Collateral losses used to be of little concern when Americans were literally fighting for our country’s survival. We mercilessly bombed German and Japanese cities to obliterate their war-making industries, and dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to speed the end of World War II. They did. No regrets; they saved countless American lives.
Today we are fighting to save innocent Iraqi bystanders so as to convince them to form a democracy and be our friends. Our troops have to cope with these dual aims like never before. Is it any surprise they don’t always succeed in the heat of battle?
Then along comes congressman Foghorn (aka John Murtha) referring to the infamous Haditha killings in which some Marines in a firefight apparently killed some civilians also.
“They killed innocent civilians in cold blood,” he bawled. If you had just seen a buddy blown apart in battle, would rage have made your blood run cold or hot?
The same 32-year career congressman, later arguing for a “redeployment” of U.S. forces out of Iraq, suggested sending them to Okinawa. So distant, yet so mindful-- that pivotal WWII battle against Japan in which some 2,500 U.S. troops gave their lives (just under the number killed so far in Iraq) when our national population was half of today’s.
Murtha helped turn the Haditha incident into a major rallying cry of antiwar Democrats. The legal charges and countercharges are flying.
I recently read a news account in the Washington Post about the behavior of Marine Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, one of the commanders up the line at the time. The narrative was going fairly objectively until about the tenth paragraph of the page-one story.
Then the reporter, Thomas E. Ricks, turned lefty:
“Commentators likened the incident [at Haditha] to the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre and predicted that it would damage the U.S. effort in Iraq more than the Abu Ghraib detainee abuse scandal had.”
Did Ricks then hasten to add a “however” paragraph, to cover such topics as which commentators were likening and predicting, plus any contrary arguments that may have surfaced to justify the raid?
Are you kidding? This is the Washington Post running with a long, inflammatory news story that is damaging to the U.S. military. The editorial page is, comparatively, more fair and balanced. And in the article itself, there was no qualifying of the status of Ricks as an objective reporter, or the inconvenient fact that he’s written a book, “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.”
Expect this slanted war coverage in the papers to get even more one-sided as we proceed towards November and the election. Most papers have already turned totally antiwar. It’s glaringly obvious.
But do let me change the subject before I start chewing on my keyboard. I need to shake this less than, yes, robust mood. Try these spicy asides:
* Call ‘em “Sue.” The NCAA’s edict against University of North Dakota’s use of the name of its mascot, “The Fighting Sioux,” has prompted the state to sue. The NCAA claimed the name disses native Indians.
* Hillary! “Hillary Clinton called for Americans to save gas by returning to the 55 mile per hour speed limit.”—Jay Leno. Cultural note: Texas has recently upped its maximum speed limit on some Interstates to 80 mph.
* Colleges price gouging. “College tuition fees have risen faster than inflation since 1975…tuition has risen 40 percent since 2000. Students at state schools now pay a whopping average of $12,127 per year, while their private-school counterparts pay $29,026, yet Congress has not hauled university administrators in for a ‘price gouging’ inquisition as they have with Big Oil executives.”--NAM blog
Sadly, I remain unrobust.
Come Monday it will be five years since Marian Serva, my good neighbor across the street, got killed by fanatical Islamists. She was their enemy, as were nearly 3,000 other unfortunate American civilians that September 11 morning who were defenseless and, in her case, working in the Pentagon.
The victims were not, in the parlance of war-speak, collateral losses. They were the targets. As we have since learned many times over, the civilians and not the soldiers are these animals’ targets of choice. It’s happened with the suicide bombers and with their crazy brothers who gleefully decapitate the innocents they kidnap.
They hate us because we aren’t like them. And not just Americans but anyone not on their side. Shelby Steele has reasoned it out very well. In a recent Wall Street Journal piece, he wrote:
“…Islamist extremists don’t hate the West because they are oppressed by it. They hate it precisely because the end of oppression and colonialism—not their continuance—forced the Muslim world to compete with the West. Less oppression, not more, opened this world to the sense of defeat that turned into extremism.”
Against such inborn hate, our troops in Iraq get special training in how to avoid civilian casualties. When we have to do door-to-door combat, the most difficult kind of fighting, and it hits Iraqi civilians, it is truly collateral.
Collateral losses used to be of little concern when Americans were literally fighting for our country’s survival. We mercilessly bombed German and Japanese cities to obliterate their war-making industries, and dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to speed the end of World War II. They did. No regrets; they saved countless American lives.
Today we are fighting to save innocent Iraqi bystanders so as to convince them to form a democracy and be our friends. Our troops have to cope with these dual aims like never before. Is it any surprise they don’t always succeed in the heat of battle?
Then along comes congressman Foghorn (aka John Murtha) referring to the infamous Haditha killings in which some Marines in a firefight apparently killed some civilians also.
“They killed innocent civilians in cold blood,” he bawled. If you had just seen a buddy blown apart in battle, would rage have made your blood run cold or hot?
The same 32-year career congressman, later arguing for a “redeployment” of U.S. forces out of Iraq, suggested sending them to Okinawa. So distant, yet so mindful-- that pivotal WWII battle against Japan in which some 2,500 U.S. troops gave their lives (just under the number killed so far in Iraq) when our national population was half of today’s.
Murtha helped turn the Haditha incident into a major rallying cry of antiwar Democrats. The legal charges and countercharges are flying.
I recently read a news account in the Washington Post about the behavior of Marine Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, one of the commanders up the line at the time. The narrative was going fairly objectively until about the tenth paragraph of the page-one story.
Then the reporter, Thomas E. Ricks, turned lefty:
“Commentators likened the incident [at Haditha] to the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre and predicted that it would damage the U.S. effort in Iraq more than the Abu Ghraib detainee abuse scandal had.”
Did Ricks then hasten to add a “however” paragraph, to cover such topics as which commentators were likening and predicting, plus any contrary arguments that may have surfaced to justify the raid?
Are you kidding? This is the Washington Post running with a long, inflammatory news story that is damaging to the U.S. military. The editorial page is, comparatively, more fair and balanced. And in the article itself, there was no qualifying of the status of Ricks as an objective reporter, or the inconvenient fact that he’s written a book, “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.”
Expect this slanted war coverage in the papers to get even more one-sided as we proceed towards November and the election. Most papers have already turned totally antiwar. It’s glaringly obvious.
But do let me change the subject before I start chewing on my keyboard. I need to shake this less than, yes, robust mood. Try these spicy asides:
* Call ‘em “Sue.” The NCAA’s edict against University of North Dakota’s use of the name of its mascot, “The Fighting Sioux,” has prompted the state to sue. The NCAA claimed the name disses native Indians.
* Hillary! “Hillary Clinton called for Americans to save gas by returning to the 55 mile per hour speed limit.”—Jay Leno. Cultural note: Texas has recently upped its maximum speed limit on some Interstates to 80 mph.
* Colleges price gouging. “College tuition fees have risen faster than inflation since 1975…tuition has risen 40 percent since 2000. Students at state schools now pay a whopping average of $12,127 per year, while their private-school counterparts pay $29,026, yet Congress has not hauled university administrators in for a ‘price gouging’ inquisition as they have with Big Oil executives.”--NAM blog
Sadly, I remain unrobust.
posted by Ben Blankenship at
3:42 PM
