By Arnold Ahlert (Archive) · Sunday, March 25, 2012
The Left uses the killing of civilians in Afghanistan to attack the military and U.S.
Sergeant Robert Bales stands accused of murdering 16 Afghans, including 9 children. Many top American military officials, including Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, have intimated that even the death penalty “could be a consideration” should Bales be found guilty of the crime. On cue, the Left has used this tragic incident as an opportunity to impugn the entire military and the nation, claiming the killing is on par with My Lai and is representative of our servicemen and women generally.
CNN blogger Stephen Prothero exemplified this dementia perfectly in a recent piece titled “My Take: It takes a nation to make a massacre” in which he spells out who is really at fault. “It takes a country to make a man do these things, and we were his country,” writes Prothero. “We U.S. citizens voted for the presidents who sent him into combat and for the Congress that appropriated the money for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” If Bales is found guilty? Prothero suggests that “each of the rest of us should spend a day sitting in front of our local jail. There we should confess to our respective gods ‘our sins, known and unknown, things done and left undone’ (as the Book of Common Prayer puts it). Then we should write a letter to the wife and children of Sgt. Bales asking for their forgiveness too.”
Prothero then reflexively descends into one of the prevailing themes that inevitably emerges when an American soldier is accused war crimes: comparisons to Lieutenant William Calley and the massacre at My Lai that occurred during the Vietnam War. Calley’s crimes were indeed horrific, but Counterpunch writer Jeff Sparrow uses them, along with Neil Shea writing for Democracy Now, not merely to condemn Bales, but soldiers in general, who need “a protective layer of hatred to perform what [is] asked of them.” He then takes on America itself, which has ostensibly normalized “torture against (mostly Muslim) detainees; the construction of secret prisons to detain Muslim prisoners indefinitely without charges or trial; the routinisation of assassinations and other extrajudicial killings of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen; and, most of all, deaths of (by the most conservative reckoning) hundreds of thousands of people, most of them Muslim, in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere.”
His conclusion is that the war against Islamic terror has “created a new audience who wants to never leave the gun, an audience no longer shocked by atrocity but increasingly prepared to celebrate it.” Completely missing from Sparrow’s article, however, is a single word on the far greater — and continuing — atrocities committed by the Taliban and other jihadists across the world, which our military has sacrificed enormously to prevent.
Shea himself continues with another trope made popular during the Vietnam war: American soldiers straddle the border between sanity and psychosis. “I met up with a group of soldiers who were the first I had ever come across who made me feel pretty nervous about what I was going to see while I was with them,” he writes. “And I spent a few days with them and came to just really understand that they had gotten to the edge of violence, as we understand it, in Afghanistan, and they seemed ready and capable of doing some pretty bad things. I didn’t actually witness them do anything too terrible, but the way that they talked and the way that they acted toward Afghan civilians and animals and property in the country was sort of stunning to me…Many of these guys seemed like they had reached the end of their rope in terms of stability and controlling their aggression.” That’s a rather remarkable conclusion for a man who “didn’t actually witness” our troops doing anything wrong.
At least Shea was somewhat restrained. Benjamin Busch’s Daily Beast article on the issue warns that the murders allegedly committed by Bales allow “for the possibility that any one of us could go insane at any time, and that every veteran poisoned by their combat experience could be on edge for life.” He too takes Americans as a whole to task, noting that our “national disinterest” in “distant events” is unsurprising because “we are a people known more and more for our selfish distractions than for our awareness.”
The article continues to recount numerous odious journalistic rantings against our living heroes in uniform as he builds his case of the Left’s hatred of our Military. Clearly, the liberal media and those they venerate look down their noses at all those who daily put their lives on the line, the First-Responders, the Border Guard, and all 5 branches of our uniformed military.
Such odious characterizations of our nation and our soldiers are malicious nonsense. That so many detractors use William Calley as a basis of comparison to Robert Bales inadvertently reveals the overwhelming integrity of America’s fighting forces: one must reach 41 years into the past to find a soldier to whom Bales can be compared. As for the larger context, the “widespread” atrocities attributed to Vietnam troops by the left actually totaled slightly more than one-hundredth of one percent of the number of soldiers who served there.
Furthermore, the psycho-soldier meme, or the claim that virtually every American soldier suffers from post traumatic stress disorder (PSTD), or simply teeters on the edge of psychosis, is also undone by the reality that out of the more than one-half million soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan only one has committed an alleged massacre in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
What about the idea that multiple tours caused Bales to commit the atrocity? While it is likely his defense lawyer may employ that reasoning in an effort to get Bales acquitted, there are 51,270 soldiers, active duty, reserve and retired, who, like Bales, have been on four or more deployments, and another 81,000 with three deployments. All of them have somehow managed to avoid committing mass murder, no doubt to the consternation of those so quick to paint an isolated incident with the broadest of broad brushes.
As long as threats to America’s national security exist, America’s fighting forces will be called upon to defend the nation. And as the American left’s long history of smearing American soldiers indicates, they will spare no effort to portray those fighting forces a horde of bloodthirsty barbarians, barely clinging to sanity, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority our troops have performed with courage and valor. Their current poster boy is Sergeant Robert Bales, one of the precious few bad apples among literally millions of men and women who have served our nation with honor. That the American left chooses to focus on the exception rather than the rule reveals far more about them and their pernicious agenda than it does the American military.
………….. READ MORE HERE
We need another wave of Patriotism to sweep across our land as it did after 9/11. Every car, truck, and home had an American flag flying proudly from it. People understood America’s greatness was not in her Towers but in the people who built the towers and cleaned the towers and worked in the towers and dreamed of a safer tomorrow, but did not back down from the ugliness of human hatred. To accuse our military of returning that hatred is not only unjust, but ignorant!
Related reading:
Obama’s Political Expediency Is Hurting Our Nation
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The brave, wandering knight sat atop his gallant steed drifting through the thick forest. He sought not a battle, nor the glory one imagines, but the quiet of a soft green clearing. He’d been riding for days, or maybe weeks. He was no longer certain, but the fighting was done, for now, and he sought a moment’s repose.
On the trail of an escaped villain, he easily followed the trail of blood. The villain was wounded, how badly, he could not tell. Miles he followed the broken branches and footprints into the forest, but no villain did he find. He did happen upon an old campfire, though, with the carcass of an animal still on the spit. Not warm, but not there long enough for the wild things to apprehend it. 
Determined, he broke the string of his thought with purpose. He dare not imagine a pack of villainous lions prowling across the landscape unchecked. “All this time I was wrong!” He cried out tot he heavens in mourning for those, his companions, whose lives had been forfeit. He stood quietly and gazed into the forest. Perhaps, he had dumbly stumbled upon his destiny. Perhaps, he, too, would meet up with others to share his burden lest he be another in the broken string of heroes bringing villains to justice.
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