Support the troops? I support only those who are NOT supporting the exploitation of the Iraqi people, and those who do not allow the war profiteers to carry on with their death and destruction all for the sake of an opulent lifestyle. I do not support those who are supporting a criminally insane and treacherous foreign policy. However I, as the mother of a slain soldier, will do anything I can to support all of them by working to shorten their stay in an unwelcoming country, and bring them home from the quagmire that their so- called commander in chief forced them into.
Emphases mine. Finally the mask begins to slip, just as I thought it might. Let’s see if the nutroots take this as their cue, coming as it does from a woman with “absolute moral authority,” to “refine” their own much-ballyhooed support for American soldiers. Thanks to Dan of MoveOnAndShutUp for the tip.
Watch our Vent today if you haven’t yet. Meanwhile, Newsweek wonders: were the Marines in Haditha hopped up on goofballs?
The wife of a staff sergeant in the 3/1 battalion, who declined to be identified because she doesn’t want to get her husband in trouble, told NEWSWEEK that there was “a total breakdown” in discipline and morale after Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani took over as battalion commander when the unit returned from Fallujah at the start of 2005. (Chessani’s friends in his Colorado hometown defended him as a dedicated, patriotic, religious Marine.) “There were problems in Kilo Company with drugs, alcohol, hazing, you name it,” said the woman. “I think it’s more than possible that these guys were totally tweaked out on speed or something when they shot those civilians in Haditha.”
Bad news all around, especially for the media. Unless Bush was the Marines’ dealer, what good is the story to them now?
Sounds like it’s B.S. anyway:
But Lucian Read, a freelance photographer who spent seven months with Kilo Company, both in Fallujah and Haditha, did not see warning signs. “Their morale wasn’t bad, it was more fatalistic; this is the grunts-get-screwed-every-time,” he said. “They were not happy, not pleased, but not angry, either,” Read said. “Nothing they ever did or said even hinted at this kind of event. I never saw it coming. No one saw it coming.”
Don’t miss Goldstein today either, as he’s busy changing Andrew Sullivan’s diapers.
Update: Spiegel has a slideshow related to Haditha. They slip a shot from My Lai in there for context.
Does a German publication really need to go that far afield for photos of piles of dead civilians?
Update: Hitchens on Haditha:
There is no respectable way of having this both ways. Those who say that the rioters in Baghdad in the early days should have been put down more forcefully are accepting the chance that a mob might have had to be fired on to protect the National Museum. Those who now wish there had been more troops are also demanding that there should have been more targets and thus more body bags. The lawyers at Centcom who refused to give permission to strike Mullah Omar’s fleeing convoy in Afghanistan—lest it by any chance be the wrong convoy of SUVs speeding from Kabul to Kandahar under cover of night—are partly responsible for the deaths of dozens of Afghan teachers and international aid workers who have since been murdered by those who were allowed to get away. If Iraq had been stuffed with WMD warehouses and stiff with al-Qaida training camps, there would still have been an Abu Ghraib. Only pacifists—not those who compare the Iraqi killers to the Minutemen—have the right to object to every casualty of war. And if the pacifists had been heeded, then Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein would all still be in power—hardly a humanitarian outcome. People like to go on about the “fog” of war as well as the “hell” of it. Hell it most certainly is—but not always so foggy. Indeed, many of the dilemmas posed by combat can be highly clarifying, once the tone of righteous sententiousness is dropped.
