Will The Chickenhawks Come Home To Roost?

If the Pentagon is trying to get the story out early, why? To prepare us for the worst?*

That link at CQ provides a round up of Right-leaning bloggers reacting to early reports out of Haditha. I linked it for that reason, not to suggest Ed at CQ is a chicken hawk. Unfortunately, reading around the Right-leaning blogosphere, it's difficult to conclude some may not prove to be.

RCP offers a similar round up, as does Hot Air.

Pardon the expression, but My Lai my @zz. And if one wants to reflect on My Lai, why not reflect on this.

An American soldier honored for protecting Vietnamese civilians from U.S. troops in the infamous My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war has died.

Hugh Thompson was 62. He succumbed to cancer Friday.

As an Army helicopter pilot in 1968, Mr. Thompson saw the bodies of women and children lying outside the village of My Lai. When he realized that US troops were shooting civilians, he landed his helicopter in the line of fire and ordered his two crew members to train their guns on the Americans.

Mr. Thompson threatened to shoot the U.S. troops if they did not stop, helping end one of the worst atrocities of the war.

His role in what became known as the My Lai massacre of hundreds of civilians was not widely known until years later. In 1998, Mr. Thompson and his crew were awarded the Soldier's Medal for their bravery.

It's a pity this Memorial Day weekend that there isn't a George Patton around to slap some silly SOB's in the head. A friend had to come all the way in from Canada to leave a comment that speaks the truth:

Critics (i.e. the anti-liberation, anti-American left (which unfortunately comprises 30% of your public, 80% of your mass media and 90% of your academia) will exploit this for all it's worth, and more.

Having conceded as torture acts that, for the most part, resembled fraternity hazing, it will be difficult for sane Americans to fight back and demonstrate that these are the acts of a tiny fraction of America's armed forces.

150,000 American soldiers risk their lives so that 28 million Iraqis can have a chance at democracy and your media is about to portray this as - not merely the worst atrocity since Auschwitz- but the essence of America.

This Canadian is praying for my American friends- especially those who risk their lives for our safety- to get though this. You need to start fighting the enemy within.

I'll be damned if I'm going to excuse a political hack like John Murtha who didn't have the decency to allow this thing to play out and let the institutions we know we can trust to do their job. One certainly can't trust Murtha to speak the truth, as he is speaking before he even knows it and manipulating a terrible event for selfish political gain.

Already the reporting of the Washington Post is conflicting and likely sensationalized. I imagine the military is letting it out this weekend to help downplay the impact, or have it land a bit more softly then it might have at the beginning of a news week. But that doesn't mean that this is akin to My Lai - far from it, given the little bit that we do know.

And personally, I have no intention of going on the defensive, or letting the hand wringers win because some few out of hundreds of thousands of brave and noble men and women may have behaved criminally.

It's a war. Terrible things happen, no doubt they have been happening in one form or another everyday. If someone didn't appreciate that in the first place, then they never should have signed on.

And as for those worrying about what the rest of the world is going to think ... you mean that rest of the world whose primary pre-occupation seems to be undermining American power and running us down at every turn?

Frankly, I couldn't care less.

It's a war, war is hell. Good people die and some bad people can even commit crimes ... one's for which they will be held accountable and perhaps even pay with their lives.

Buck the hell up and get ready to move on, because the war is far from over. And the fall-out from this has just begun. Sitting back playing defense and giving ground to a Left and a MSM that was all but if not actually saying this of our fighting men and women long before they had a single shred of evidence to hang their opinions on is not a strategy to win.

Comments

[Stella]

Dan - thank you bringing Mr. Hugh Thompson's heroism front and center where it belongs. I clearly recall the horror of My Lai, but I am terribly sad to say that I never knew about what Mr. Thompson and his crew had done to stop the massacre. I could rant about the fact that the media apparently focused less on him, but I won't - today is a day to focus positive thoughts on a wonderful, heroic man whose behavior represents that of the vast majority of our military personnel. Bless you, Mr. Thompson.

[Rick]

Keep heart; when the dems take over, the MSM will get around to telling us about hospitals, schools and some pretty awesome care package drives that our guys are already doing. Of wounded vets awarding their medals to little girls, rather than tossing them on the Whitehouse lawn. We must remember that the work of the "hate Bush at all costs" crowd is to exploit the worst of America and Americans. To them, America must be destroyed!! Poor things.

[Bryce]

Wars are tough, that is why they should not be declared due to imaginary WMD's and irrational fears, and the opinions of people who have actual combat experience should perhaps be given a little more weight in these situations.

For some reason I don't think "awsome care package drives" make up for murdered children. But that is just my opinion.

[Stella]

...that is just my opinion.
Posted by: Bryce | Saturday, May 27, 2006 at 02:05 PM

Bryce - the care packages, etc. are really symbolic gestures; I would imagine that seeing the smile on the face of a hospitalized child helps ease the pain of a war just a tiny bit. I will not judge Americans who have chosen to risk their lives to save our country; for once I would like people to stop and think - the soldiers did not declare the war!!

[Rick]

"the soldiers did not declare the war!!" Stella, as you can probably see the boys and girls who were thrown into an unwinable war do not matter to people like Bryce. To them it is the soldier's fault regardless.

[Bryce]

I was suggesting that we should listen to the people who fight the war, you know the soldiers who have to fight in an unwinnable war.

[Rick]

So was I...does that make us even?

[Gary Farber]

"I'll be damned if I'm going to excuse a political hack like John Murtha who didn't have the decency to allow this thing to play out and let the institutions we know we can trust to do their job. One certainly can't trust Murtha to speak the truth, as he is speaking before he even knows it and manipulating a terrible event for selfish political gain."

Whoops, your software stripped out all my blockquoting and links.

Ok, the hard way.

I'm curious, Dan, why you make no mention of Congressman John Kline:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/26/world/middleeast/26haditha.html?ex=1306296000&en=73b91e9b81971ba0&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
"Representative John Kline, a Minnesota Republican who is a retired Marine colonel, said that the allegations indicated that 'this was not an accident. This was direct fire by marines at civilians.' He added, 'This was not an immediate response to an attack. This would be an atrocity.'"

Or here:

"Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), a retired Marine colonel, said there was clearly an attempt to cover up the incident by those involved. But he said he did not think the Marine command was slow in investigating.

"'There is no question that the Marines involved, those doing the shooting, they were busy in lying about it and covering it up — there is no question about it,' Kline said. 'But I am confident, as soon as the command learned there might be some truth to this, they started to pursue it vigorously. I don't have any reason now to think there was any foot dragging.'"

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-marines27may27,0,1639956,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Representative Kline is all over tv and other news media commenting on Haditha.

How about Marine Commandant Hagee (same link):

"Hagee left for Iraq on Thursday to sternly remind Marines that harming noncombatants violates Marine policy and numerous laws governing warfare. He plans to give the same message to troops at Camp Pendleton and other Marine bases when he returns."

Why are you not equally vigorously objecting to Commandant Hagee not having "the decency to allow this thing to play out and let the institutions we know we can trust to do their job"?

I'm seriously curious as to how this works, that Murtha can say what he was officially briefed by the Marines, and apparently authorized to say -- the Marines would surely object if he were not, obviously, and it seems quite clear that they asked him to help get the story out -- a story broken by Time magazine in March, not incidentally, about an incident in December, first reported by Time to the Marines in January, and then didn't report to the public for three months, which hardly jibes with some sort of anti-American campaign, and a timeline which hardly suggests anyone is rushing to judgment -- and that endless Marine officials, up to the Commandant, and other Congressional Reps can give identical accounts to what Murtha gave -- which were confirmed by the Marines in the same reports, but somehow Murtha did something wrong, and yet everyone else did a-ok. Murtha, the "hack," also being a decorated former two-term Marine Colonel who fought for his country in two wars, and who long has been the top supporter of the Marine Corps in Congress, which is why the Marine Corps tends to use him to get news out, and to fight for their interests, not incidentally.

How does that work?

[Rick]

Gary The REAL question is: would Rep Kline actually have al the facts or just be running an equally foolish mouth as Murtha?