Haditha? No Big Deal, Say Neocons
Robert Dreyfuss
June 7, 2006
Okay, it’s not surprising that the neoconservatives are scrambling to convince us that the massacre in Haditha is no big deal. But some of them have done so with, shall we say, a little too much enthusiasm. Keith Olbermann of MSNBC has already slammed Bill O’Reilly of Fox News for having compared the Haditha murders to the slaughter of captured German SS soldiers in World War II. Problem is, Olbermann noted with bitter sarcasm, the truth is that the SS killers slaughtered the 84 U.S. troops, not the other way around! (Thanks to Alternet, you can watch it here.)
Also on Fox, a Fox News host cited the fact that Haditha is on the cover of both Time and Newsweek this week, and asked "Are the news media rushing to judgment?" Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, had written in an editorial that there is entirely "too much liberal hand wringing" about the murders. On Fox (again, thanks to Alternet, you can watch the whole thing), he said:
Some decent liberals are spending much too much time hand wringing over this incident, which they say overshadows the decent things our troops are doing in Iraq, and a lot of the people who want us to lose in Iraq are obsessing about this story. They can barely contain their glee at this story. And I do think that for both Newsweek and Time to put this on the cover—we don’t know what happened yet, it’s one incident in a war, and how often have they put United States soldiers on the cover in the last three years? … And this is the time to put United States soldiers on the cover, with comparisons in the text to My Lai? It’s offensive really. And that’s what the U.S. media is using Haditha to do. … It’s not as bad as VN, obviously. No one is accusing Iraqi vets when they come back of being baby-killers….
Well, Bill, I for one as doing exactly that: accusing some Iraq vets of being baby killers, since that’s what the facts tell us.
Meanwhile, over at the American Enterprise Institute, Reuel Marc Gerecht blames President Bush for the fact that there aren’t more atrocities. Don’t believe me? Here’s the text:
Truth be told, however, if American forces were more aggressively engaged in a real counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq--where our primary objective would be to secure Iraqis and their homes from insurgent and sectarian threat--we would have seen more American abuses. Successful counterinsurgencies are always ugly and morally challenging. What is so sad in Iraq is that the civilian losses caused by the U.S. are not compensated by a larger American military effort to secure the country from holy warriors, insurgents and sectarian militiamen who live to slaughter innocent civilians and Iraq's chance for a more humane, democratic future. President Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and their General John Abizaid, not any Marines at Haditha who ran amuck, are responsible for this far darker tragedy. |
