Haditha

I heard Murtha over the weekend again spouting off in public and speculating on the as yet incomplete investigation of a possible unjustified killing of 15 Iraqi citizens in Haditha.

I'd been tipped off to this story a couple of months ago, that it was coming out and that it wasn't going to be pretty. I believe (sadly) there's a good chance that the core of the story is true -- that 15 Iraqis who probably shouldn't have been targeted were deliberately shot and killed. If true, this is a terrible thing indeed by anyone's (well, except an Islamist's) standards.

There are several possible scenarios ranging from mistaken identity and delayed realization that led to the killing of any witnesses to just an absolutely berserk-o "cold blooded" killing rampage.

Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that the worst is true. A relatively small group of Marines, for whatever reason, criminally went out looking for Iraqi blood -- any Iraqi blood. The worst. Criminals in the Marine Corps. (Again, I'm not saying this was the case, but we're going to assume for this argument that it was.)

In a perfect world, once the incident was discovered by the Marines, the Marines would pull those Marines out of combat and stick them in the brig while they investigated, and perhaps disclose the incident and the fact that there was an investigation going on to the public.

If something like this happened in peacetime, that's probably what would hapen.

But this isn't peacetime, and it isn't a perfect world. The United States has enemies both outside and inside our borders who salivate for isolated incidents such as this to use as encictments of the entire military, the Bush Administration, and the war itself. And Murtha is one of them, along with an alarmingly large part of the Democratic party base.

Never mind the other 130,000 troops who are good and decent people who actually care about the Iraqi citizens they are protecting with their lives, who are struggling to make Iraq better, to make it work in spite of all of the problems they face, whether they agreed with the initial invasion or not.

Nope, to the enemies on the left, it's Bush Lied, Blood for Oil, Halliburton, Bush-is-Hitler, Hegemony, Industrial-Military Imperialism, and every unfortunate, gory detail is held up behind a magnifying glass as "proof" that evil intent that goes "all the way to the top" is behind all of this.

I watched a lot of stuff this weekend on the History Channel -- a large portion of it was "Band of Brothers" -- a 10 part detailing the experience of Easy Compnany of the Army's 101st Airborne in WWII. Just as bad stuff happened in that war. We had good soldiers and bad -- mostly good, but some undoubtedly very bad soldiers.

Stuff like this happens in wars. It's not right. This is not an excuse. We should punish those responsible for these things. But to whine about coverups is to misunderstand the nature of war, especially in the instant information age. The propaganda war is at least as important as the actual fighting. The Islamists know this and admit it openly and freely. Unfortunately, Americans such as John Murtha are on the same side of the propaganda war as the Islamists, and that doesn't bode well for America.