THIS MODERN WORLD

On the day when Ann Coulter and Pat Robertson finally send the death squads to kill you and me and our families and everyone we know, whose fault will it be? Well, that’s obvious: it will be our fault.

Glenn Reynolds learnedly explains this for us here:

Peter Ingemi writes that the antiwar left has made Haditha morally irrelevant:

There is one aspect about Haditha that seems to be ignored by everybody.

Our press and the anti-American left both in this country and outside of it has been reporting “Hadithas” over and over again over the last three years.

Time and time again our friends have accused us of every possible atrocity that there is to the point that internationally people are already able to believe this or the 9/11 stuff or all the rest.

Because of this, internationally it is totally irrelevant if the Marines actually violated the rules of war. Our foes are going to say that we’ve done things if we do them or not, so the only people that it really matters to will be the people killed (and family) and the people in our own country who support the military.

The real danger is that we who support the war will reach the point that we say “we might as well be taken as wolves then as sheep”. At that point the left can celebrate that they have made our military and those who support it the people they claim we are. Once that happens however any compunction about respecting them will be gone, and remember one side is armed and one is not.

That is a fate that I don’t wish on any of us.

Neither do I.

It would be easy to say this is straight out of Nazi propaganda. So let me say it: this is straight out of Nazi propaganda. If anyone with time on their hands wants to look through this archive, I guarantee you’ll find a dozen statements just like it—the same weepy self-pity and righteous sense of victimization from people with all the power, the same warnings that the powerless are soon going to get what they’ve been asking for FOR SO LONG, etc.

However, in fairness to Professor Reynolds and Mr. Ingemi, I’m sure you could also find this in the propaganda of the Soviet Union, the Iraqi Baathists, the Ottomans during World War I, etc. There are only so many ways to be dangerous authoritarian psychopaths. It’s really not right to expect Reynolds and Ingemi to come up with anything new.

(Via Matt Barganier at Antiwar.com.)

HOLY CRIPES ALMIGHTY: Reynolds has updated the post with this:

Some people, judging from my email, are misjudging — or deliberately misconstruing — Ingemi’s point. Ingemi’s point, as I took it, is that crying wolf leads in the end to moral callousness, as people assume that there’s no point in behaving morally when they’re going to be called monsters anyway. This seems rather uncontroversially obvious to me.

I almost never look at Instapundit, so I actually had been concerned I might have been a little unfair to Reynolds. But, uh, not anymore.

It would take five years to untangle every strand of his Crazy Yarn, so let me just concentrate on this: what kind of person believes it’s “uncontroversially obvious” that human beings work like this? Read that again: “people assume that there’s no point in behaving morally when they’re going to be called monsters anyway.”

You know, Professor Reynolds is welcome to call me a babykiller every day until the sun explodes. Yet somehow I still won’t come to his house and shoot his children.

That’s just the way my species is, here on the planet we call “Earth.”

Given the news about the massacre in Haditha last November, now’s the time to remember Seymour Hersh’s story from October, 2004:

HERSH: I got a call last week from a soldier — it’s different now, a lot of communication, 800 numbers. He’s an American officer and he was in a unit halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. It’s a place where we claim we’ve done great work at cleaning out the insurgency. He was a platoon commander. First lieutenant, ROTC guy.

It was a call about this. He had been bivouacing outside of town with his platoon. It was near, it was an agricultural area, and there was a granary around. And the guys that owned the granary, the Iraqis that owned the granary… It was an area that the insurgency had some control, but it was very quiet, it was not Fallujah. It was a town that was off the mainstream. Not much violence there. And his guys, the guys that owned the granary, had hired, my guess is from his language, I wasn’t explicit — we’re talking not more than three dozen, thirty or so guards. Any kind of work people were dying to do. So Iraqis were guarding the granary. His troops were bivouaced, they were stationed there, they got to know everybody…

They were a couple weeks together, they knew each other. So orders came down from the generals in Baghdad, we want to clear the village, like in Samarra. And as he told the story, another platoon from his company came and executed all the guards, as his people were screaming, stop. And he said they just shot them one by one. He went nuts, and his soldiers went nuts. And he’s hysterical. He’s totally hysterical. And he went to the captain. He was a lieutenant, he went to the company captain. And the company captain said, “No, you don’t understand. That’s a kill. We got thirty-six insurgents.”

Now’s also the time to remember the dismissive reaction to this from U.S. conservatives. Here’s Max Boot writing in the Los Angeles Times:

…in his lectures [Hersh] has spread the legend of how a U.S. Army platoon was supposedly ordered to execute 30 Iraqis guarding a granary.

And here’s the Weekly Standard’s happy chortling:

…maybe you’re an aging lefty icon who got famous reporting the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. And so maybe you’re still milking your notoriety for everything it’s worth. And maybe you’re always imagining another scoop like My Lai, because you’re afraid that on some level you’ve become just another old gasbag on the lecture circuit.

Of course, we still don’t know the truth behind Hersh’s story. But if accurate, it does more than indicate the recent Haditha massacre wasn’t an isolated incident. It suggests it may be fairly common.

Why? Note again the location Hersh gives for the alleged fall, 2004 massacre:

…he was in a unit halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border.

Now, note the location of Haditha, site of the confirmed November, 2005 massacre:

Bob Herbert:

The point of Memorial Day is to honor the service and the sacrifice of those who have given their lives in the nation’s wars. But I suggest that we take a little time today to consider the living.

Look around and ask yourself if you believe that stability or democracy in Iraq — or whatever goal you choose to assert as the reason for this war — is worth the life of your son or your daughter, or your husband or your wife, or the co-worker who rides to the office with you in the morning, or your friendly neighbor next door.

Before you gather up the hot dogs and head out to the barbecue this afternoon, look in a mirror and ask yourself honestly if Iraq is something you would be willing to die for.

There is no shortage of weaselly politicians and misguided commentators ready to tell us that we can’t leave Iraq — we just can’t. Chaos will ensue. Maybe even a civil war. But what they really mean is that we can’t leave as long as the war can continue to be fought by other people’s children, and as long as we can continue to put this George W. Bush-inspired madness on a credit card.

Start sending the children of the well-to-do to Baghdad, and start raising taxes to pay off the many hundreds of billions that the war is costing, and watch how quickly this tragic fiasco is brought to an end.

At an embarrassing press conference last week, President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain looked for all the world like a couple of hapless schoolboys who, while playing with fire, had set off a conflagration that is still raging out of control. Their recklessness has so far cost the lives of nearly 2,500 Americans and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis, many of them children.

Among the regrets voiced by the president at the press conference was his absurd challenge to the insurgents in 2003 to “bring ’em on.” But Mr. Bush gave no hint as to when the madness might end.

How many more healthy young people will we shovel into the fires of Iraq before finally deciding it’s time to stop? How many dead are enough?

This is a beautiful rant by Jamison Foser of Media Matters:

At this point, you’d have to be blind to miss the pattern. Every prominent progressive leader who comes along is openly derided in the media as fake, dishonest, conniving, out-of-the-mainstream, and weak. We simply can’t continue to chalk this up to shortcomings on the part of Democratic candidates or their staff and consultants. It’s all too clear that this will happen regardless of who the candidate or leader is; regardless of who works for him or her. The smearing of Jack Murtha should prove that to anyone who still doubts it.

Meanwhile, any conservative who comes along is going to be praised for being strong and authentic and likable.

The rest, of which there is quite a lot, and is all worth reading, is here.

The only part I disagree with is the very end:

…for years, the media has employed a double-standard in covering progressives and conservatives…it can’t go on.

First of all, the corporate media has ALWAYS employed this double-standard, not simply “for years.” And of course it can go on. What would stop it?

Of all the things that drive me crazy about my progressive compatriots, it’s this belief that you can change the corporate media with accurate criticism of it. They believe at some point the people within the media will realize they’re wrong, and their behavior will improve.

This is insane. The corporate media is the way it is because it exists to make as much money as possible. It doesn’t exist to give people an accurate picture of the world. It doesn’t exist to provide jobs for honest journalists. On rare occasions it will do both. But mostly it won’t, because the need to make as much money as possible usually conflicts with everything good.

Waiting for this to change is like waiting for Santa Claus to bring us presents. But Santa Claus won’t ever bring us presents, because THERE IS NO SANTA CLAUS.

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