NYT Joins DNC With Haditha Editorial

[Annie]

I read the editorial last night, there is too little interest lately to make it worth my time to do something like this, but I was glad to see it done:

http://donsurber.blogspot.com/2006/06/hard-look-at-haditha-editorial.html

Sunday, June 04, 2006
A Hard Look at A Haditha Editorial

The NY Times' lead editorial today is a delicious example of early 21st century elitists saying one thing, meaning another. I shall interpret it as we go along:

The apparent cold-blooded killing last November of 24 Iraqi civilians by United States marines at Haditha will be hard to dispose of with another Washington damage control operation. The Iraqi government has made clear that it will not sit still for one, and neither should the American people.
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The contradiction of "apparent cold-blooded killing" is a desire by the writer to appear to be fair while basically accepting the worst, unproven fears.

This affair cannot simply be dismissed as the spontaneous cruelty of a few bad men.
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Blame Bush for everything.

This is the nightmare that everyone worried about when the Iraq invasion took place.
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This is the nightmare hoped for by the I-told-you-so-crowd. Hmm. Didn't we destroy the Chinese embassy when we bombed Yugoslavia into submission? Yea, bad shit happens in war.

Critics of the war predicted that American troops would become an occupying force, unable to distinguish between innocent civilians and murderous insurgents, propelled down the same path that led the British to disaster in Northern Ireland and American troops to grief in Vietnam.
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The writer hopes readers forget that critics of the war also predicted 10,000 Americans would die trying to capture Iraq, that chemical weapons would be used against us, that American cities would be lit up like Christmas trees ... actually, I do not recall a Northern Ireland prediction.

The Bush administration understood the dangers too, but dismissed them out of its deep, unwarranted confidence that friendly Iraqis would quickly be able to take control of their own government and impose order on their own people.​

Interpretation: "The Bush administration understood the dangers too, but dismissed them out of its deep, unwarranted confidence that friendly Iraqis would quickly be able to take control of their own government and impose order on their own people." Hey, the editorial ain't 100% wrong.

Now that we have reached the one place we most wanted to avoid, it will not do to focus blame narrowly on the Marine unit suspected of carrying out these killings and ignore the administration officials, from President Bush on down, who made the chances of this sort of disaster so much greater by deliberately blurring the rules governing the conduct of American soldiers in the field.​

Screw the truth: Let's get Bush.

The inquiry also needs to critically examine the behavior of top commanders responsible for ensuring lawful and professional conduct and of midlevel officers who apparently covered up the Haditha incident for months until journalists' inquiries forced a more honest review.​

Is Torquemada busy?

So far, nothing in President Bush's repeated statements on the issue offers any real assurance that the White House and the Pentagon will not once again try to protect the most senior military and political ranks from proper accountability.​

Hope the readers forget that everyone in the Abu Ghraib mess is being prosecuted; if you say things like "again" people will think it happened before. One of the more dishonest passages in a dubious piece.

This is the pattern that this administration has repeatedly followed in the past — in the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib, in the beating deaths of prisoners at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and in the serial abuses of justice and constitutional principle at Guantánamo Bay.​

This is the pattern NYT editors hope the public will see instead of the actual go-to-jail and hard-labor prosecutions.

These damage control operations have done a great job of shielding the reputations of top military commanders and high-ranking Pentagon officials.​

The truth has done a good job of protecting the brass, darn it.

But it has been at the expense of things that are far more precious: America's international reputation and the honor of the United States military.​

Let's blame decades of anti-American sentiment on Iraq.

The overwhelming majority of American troops in Iraq are dedicated military professionals, doing their best to behave correctly under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Their good name requires a serious inquiry, not another deflection of blame to the lowest-ranking troops on the scene.​

Let's pretend we support the troops by blaming their bad actions on Rumsfeld.

What we now know about the events last Nov. 19 in Haditha, a town in Anbar Province in western Iraq, the violent epicenter of the Sunni Arab insurgency, essentially boils down to this: A roadside bomb struck a Humvee traveling in the vicinity, killing one of the marines on board, and sometime later 24 Iraqi civilians were gunned down, many in their homes. The victims included women, children and grandparents. We know this not through the original Marine Corps report on the incident, which claimed that all the Iraqi deaths resulted from the bomb and an exchange of gunfire with insurgents. We know it because reporters from Time magazine began challenging inconsistencies between eyewitness Iraqi accounts and the Marine Corps version.
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My Lai, My Lai, My Lai. As in Vietnam, let us will forget the 24,000 civilians killed by the other side with IED.

We still do not know how high up the Marine Corps chain of command the original cover-up went, nor do we know how the president, the defense secretary and other top officials responded when they first learned of the false reporting.
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But we will blame the president anyway, for what is the purpose of making this the lead Sunday editorial -- a newspaper's most important editorial in the week -- if not to stretch a problem into an impeachment.

Americans need to be told what steps are now being taken, besides remedial ethics training, to make sure that such crimes against civilians and such deliberate falsifications of the record do not recur.​

Never mind that Americans already are being told this and the Marine chain of command already reprimanded three officers for false reports.

It should not surprise anyone that this war — launched on the basis of false intelligence analysis, managed by a Pentagon exempted from normal standards of command responsibility and still far from achieving minimally acceptable results — is increasingly unpopular with the American people.​

The NYT writer's use of "false intelligence analysis" rather than "false intelligence" is dishonest but allows a Upper Manhattan version of the fish-rots-from-the-head metaphor.

At the very least, the public is now entitled to straight answers on what went wrong at Haditha and who, besides those at the bottom of the chain of command, will be required to take responsibility for it.​

Not that the NYT would ever accept such an account from the military. Maybe Joe Wilson can go to Niger and find out what really happened.

posted by DonSurber