A Pilgrim’s Digression

When a writer titles a piece “The truth about…” you can safely guess that what follows is chock full of the writer’s opinions. Everyone wants their opinion to be accepted as truth. Some people make a career of passing off opinion as truth, like the con man who thrives by passing fake hundred dollars bills to unsuspecting store clerks.

Thus Michelle Malkin’s column, today, is titled The Truth About Haditha, and as one might expect there is little truth in what she writes and lots of opinion.

Since March, when Time magazine first reported the story, there has been a storm brewing over charges that several marines murdered about two dozen Iraqis, including women and children, following an IED attack in the Iraqi town of Haditha. I make no claim at knowing “the truth” about what occurred at Haditha. However, my opinion about the Haditha incident is that when the final military report is released in the next week or two, in terms of its destructive, demoralizing effect, Haditha is going to make Abu Ghraib look like a Boyscout jamboree.

To some extent, Michelle Malkin’s rationalizations and attempts to cast doubt on what the hated “mainstream media” is reporting about Haditha can be seen as an understandable response to something that is going to be extremely painful for the American people to hear: on November 19, 2005, some marines murdered Iraqi civilians–women, children, cripples, and the elderly–apparently out of vengeance for the loss of one of their own.

And yet, much of what Malkin writes is not merely a consciously defensive gesture meant at warding off the great pain to come. For Malkin, the defense of the indefensible is instinctual. Among Conservatives generally, the defense has begun quietly; but I guarantee once the military releases its findings, other apologists will join Malkin in going to great lengths to either justify what these particular marines have done, or else to discredit and verbally assault all those who dare utter a word in reproach to the soldiers in question or America in general.

In her very first sentence, Malkin has already begun sharpening her ad hominem knives by referring to Congressman John Murtha as John “Cut and Run” Murtha. Then she goes on to trot out the old O.J. defense, “Innocent until proven guilty.” Her use of such a fatuous argument is almost too banal to merit comment, except that she has probably derided Democrats for the same sloppy thinking. The American public is perfectly free to, in Malkin’s words, “render a verdict” or not, and there is no shame in reading the papers and blogs and over the course of time, coming to an opinion about a topic.

I’ve just never been particularly persuaded by those who scream “innocent until proven guilty” when some beloved person or cherished idea is under assault. Just as people who claim to know the truth about something rarely do, so people who insist on reserving judgement until “all the facts are in” have probably already made up their minds. At the very least, they have made up their minds to ignore the facts and defend whatever position they took to begin with.

Malkin also introduces irrelevancies into her argument, in order to cloud the issue with emotion. In an apparent nod to the “truth” mentioned in her title, Malkin writes:

I also know this: Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, the Marine who was killed by a roadside IED (improvised explosive device) that day, followed a proud family tradition of military service…One of his fellow Marines said Terrazas’s body was split in two by the bomb explosion that rocked his Hummer while on patrol that morning.

To my mind, it is simply not relevant that Terrazas “followed a proud tradition of military service” or that his body was ripped apart by the bomb. Terrazas was the victim of an unrelated murder. If Malkin wants to argue that the Marines were temporarily insane because of the death of their fellow soldier, she ought to hire Alan Dershowitz or some other famed, leftist defense attorney to defend the accused marines. Temporary insanity is one of the most ridiculously abused defenses available to a defendant.

It remains to be seen whether or not Haditha was the hottest battlefield in Iraq that day, as Malkin contends. According to the New York Times, initial reports were that the 24 civilians were killed by a roadside bomb. The claim at the time was not that the victims were hit in crossfire, nor that they were bombed accidentally from the air, accidents typical of the fog of war. Therefore the claim that the victims were blown up by an insurgent bomb must have been an outright lie on the part of the marines initially reporting to their superiors about the incident. This suggest that the “fog of battle” defense won’t fly, either.

As it turned out, a military investigation concluded in February that “among the pieces of evidence that conflicted with the marines’ story were death certificates that showed all the Iraqi victims had gunshot wounds, mostly to the head and chest” (Military inquiry said to oppose account of raid).

If you get close enough to someone to put three rounds center of mass, you are close enough to determine that you are shooting a woman, a baby, or a crippled old man. Battlefield or not, marines are trained to cooly and calmly deal with the stress of battle and make decisions that do not result in dead women and children. Thus the idea that these killings were accidental or the result of terrorist action seems unlikely at this point, based on what military investigators have already found.

Malkin then goes on to state another irrelevant but, as she says, “incontrovertible fact”:

There are countless numbers of anti-war zealots on the American Left rooting for failure. They believe the worst about the troops. They’ve blindly embraced frauds who’ve lied about their military service and lied about wartime atrocities. They’ve allied themselves with socialist kooks and coddled murderous dictators. They are looking for any excuse to pull out, abandon military operations and reconstruction, and impeach the president.

They insist on giving suspected foreign terrorists more benefit of the doubt than our own men and women in uniform. And that, I know, I am not willing to do.

How this has any bearing on the issue at hand is beyond me. Even if true that the left is “rooting for failure,” just because the left supposedly want to “believe the worst about the troops” is no reason to defend murderers or malign those who speak out against the murderers. It’s almost as if she is is saying, “Since the Left is ready to believe the worst, we must put our blinders on and believe only the best.”

In a way, that has been the attitude of the Right since the beginning of the war in Iraq.

Finally, in her last comment, Malkin not only departs from the truth, but she takes a red eye flight to Wonderland when she states, “And I will remind you that while the murder of civilians is and remains an anomaly in American military history, it is the jihadists’ way of life.”

Which part of this specious argument to deal with first. Let’s take the last premise, “It’s the jihadists’ way of life.” Again, this is irrelevant. The Japanese were murderers, too, in many ways far more vicious than the Islamic terrorists we face today. During the occupation of Nanking, Japanese soldiers used Chinese men and male children for bayonet practice, and what they did to women and girls was infinitely worse. No one would seriously claim that therefore the Allies had the right to murder Japanese civilians in similarly barbaric ways. Malkin suggests exactly that; or at the very least, she suggests that somehow the crimes of these marines are somehow mitigated by the evil of the enemy they face.

While I am on the subject of World War II, let’s address Malkin’s point that “the murder of civilians is and remains an anomaly in American military history.” Apparently, Malkin does not consider dropping a bomb from the air to be murder. Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki…maybe those bombings were necessary–I am not disputing that–but what else is it but murder when you knowingly drop massive, incendiary bombs on a civilian center?

If you read Paul Fussell’s book, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, he recounts how much like today’s Pentagon, which asserts with confidence that its bombs are so accurate they never hit an unintended target, during WWII the military asserted much the same thing. In 1945, it was a new kind of bomb sight that supposedly rendered bombing so accurate; but the bombardiers who actually used the sight and did the bombing knew that it was likely they were killing an untold number of civilians each time they released a payload.

Fussell also relates stories of what even Malkin would consider murder: for example, soldiers in the Pacific who were so deeply bitten by hatred for the Japanese that they executed Japanese soldiers who surrendered.

The murder of civilians is an “anomaly” in the American military? Come on, Michelle. Grow up. Conservatives are the ones who are supposed to be tough as steel; tough enough to shrug at civilian casualties in war. Conservatives are the ones who remind us that war is hell, and that we on the left are a bunch of sissies for worrying about “collateral damage,” as dead civilians are known in military parlance. Some Conservatives (Michael Savage) have even argued that it is necessary to be even more brutal in our prosecution of war, if we are to truly intimidate and defeat the terrorists. Conservatives know as well as anyone that the murder of civilians has been a prominent feature of war since time immemorial.

Just yesterday, in a story titled Letter on Korean War Massacre Reveals Plan to Shoot Refugees, The Washington Post reported that in 1950, with approval at the highest levels of Government, the United States Army committed a mass murder of hundreds of North Korean refugees trying to escape to the South. In a rather ironic twist of fate, the company that followed orders and initiated this slaughter was George A. Custer’s own 7th Cavalry regiment. The massacre at No Gun Ri was kept secret for fifty years, until 1999. The reason such acts seem anomalous is that for one thing, the government tries very hard to keep such shameful incidents from ever coming to light, and for another thing, the American people willingly participate in ignoring such stories because no one wants to believe that it could ever be true.

Perhaps one of the most terrible consequences of what those marines did in Haditha is that now, the media is going to start asking “How many other Hadithas are there?”

When Malkin finds out the answer to that question, she might have to spin us a new definition of the word “anomaly.”