Betsy Newmark, yesterday: [1]
Mackubin Thomas Owens [2] had a great column yesterday in honor of Veterans Day. He noted the proclivity of those in the media to treat those in the military as either victims or monsters. He notes that since the Vietnam War the storyline from the left about American military is that serving in an unjust war warped the consciences of the soldiers to the extent that they regularly committed atrocities. The narrative started in Vietnam, but now is being continued for the war in Iraq [3].
TNR gave the game away by admitting that the point of the series penned by Beauchamp was to illustrate “the morally and emotionally distorting effects of war.” In doing so, TNR was reinforcing the left-wing stereotype that has shaped popular opinion about soldiers since the Vietnam War [4]: that they are dehumanized animals.
According to the conventional wisdom passed down from the anti-war left of the Sixties and Seventies and absorbed by the press — even those too young to remember it — Vietnam brutalized those who fought it. At first vilified by the anti-war left as war criminals and baby-killers, American soldiers soon evolved into victims—victimized first by their country, which made them poor and sent them off to fight an unjust war, then victimized again by a military that dehumanized them and turned them into killers. Beauchamp provided TNR that pre-approved narrative, facts be damned. This was Vietnam redux.
We remember well what critics of the Vietnam War said about the troops. In his infamous 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry [5] said they had acted “in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan,” that they had “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads,” and done worse to civilians in the ravaged south. Kerry’s organization,
And now in Iraq, the media chooses to focus more on stories, substantiated or not, of atrocities rather than heroism.
Would anyone have believed such a story about World War II and the “greatest generation?” Of course not, but many in the media have been willing to believe that U.S. servicemen in Vietnam were capable of any atrocity. This predisposition lives on today. Here’s our old friend, John Kerry, last year on Face the Nation. American troops, said Kerry, were “going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the — of, of, of historical customs, religious customs . . .”
And who can forget the bilious Rep. John Murtha (D., Penn.), a vociferous critic of the war, who claimed that Marines in Haditha had “killed innocent civilians in cold blood,” long before an investigation had been completed. Murtha contended that the incident “shows the tremendous pressure that these guys are under every day when they’re out in combat.” Murtha subsequently went further, claiming that the shootings in Haditha had been covered up. “Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long? We don’t know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command.” As readers may know, the Haditha prosecutions have largely unraveled.
In both Vietnam and Iraq, news stories about soldiers have been largely negative. But heroism and sacrifice were far more prevalent in Vietnam than atrocities, and the same holds true today. The TNR-Beauchamp affair illustrates just how little things have changed since Vietnam. In April of 2005, Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith, U.S. Army, became the first soldier in the Iraq war to be awarded the Medal of Honor. He was killed in action when his outnumbered unit was attacked by Iraqi forces at the Baghdad airport on April 4, 2003, and is credited with saving hundreds of lives. Yet as Robert Kaplan observed in a piece in the Wall Street Journal that “according to LexisNexis, by June 2005, two months after his posthumous award, [Smith’s] stirring story had drawn only 90 media mentions, compared to 4,677 for the supposed Quran abuse at Guantanamo Bay, and 5,159 for the court-martialed Abu Ghraib guard Lynndie England.
Yeah, well, It’s certainly not a phenom limited to the press. Let’s not forget, for example, Ron Paul doing the same thing as Murtha. [6]
But clearly, what we’re witness to here is the filter through which the left and the press….Not totally separate entities, by any stretch… view the world. Nobody could possibly do what these guys and gals do without either being duped or being a monster, or both…. so they’d have us believe.
The idea that fighting a war is the right thing to do under some conditions, that some things are worth fighting for, is something which cannot be found in their handbook. The irony is that so many of them are so violent while pursuing their anti-war activities.
But to see them as Betsy clearly, and correctly, does…
Our military are not victims brutalized into committing war crimes. The overwhelming majority are brave men and women honorably serving with courage and humanity.
…would be to negate their own position. It would cause them.. nay, force them, to engage in actual thought… something which is to be avoided at all costs, since it might cause them to admit they’ve been wrong all this time.
Apparently, the consequences of that admission, to their self image, is of greater import to them than the damage their position is doing to those of us out here in the real world. It’s called “Self centeredness”. Or, “Selfishness” in short.