Freedom's Fidelity

Thursday, November 18, 2004

Missing Context

"Wellington once observed that 'nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.' Nothing about it is nice; but better them than us."
-Wretchard

Much is being made made by the MSM, Al Jazeera, Al Reuters, etc of a Marine who shot and killed a wounded insurgent in Fallujah. The incident should be investigated, as it is, to ensure that the rules of engagement were followed. That said, why is the media so outraged by this incident when a similar act was committed by a former presidential candidate and sitting senator? Via InstaPundit comes this twist:

Patrolling the Bay Hap River, Kerry and his crew discovered they were about to be ambushed by a Vietcong soldier who had just popped up at the shoreline with a loaded rocket launcher in his hands. With the VC about to fire, Kerry crewmate Thomas Bellodeau shot and wounded the attacker, saving the entire boat.

Only then did Kerry leap to the shore to chase the wounded enemy down - finishing him off behind a hootch.

When critics suggested that Kerry's actions that day were something less than heroic, they were hooted down by the press.

Certainly the as yet unnamed Marine in Fallujah deserves, if not the Silver Star, the same slack the press cut Kerry.

That's an amusing perspective, here's mine:

According to some World War II letters from soldiers, German snipers regularly killed American soldiers before running out into the open surrendering. Often times, the Allied soldiers who had just seen their brothers die decided that it was not quite time for the killing to end. Many of these snipers were young boys, no more than 14 years old, yet they were killing machines - Hitlers's youth. In one instance, after taking one of these boys prisoner, the general/sergeant whatever in charge beat the boy to death with the butt of a sniper rifle, the same rifle that killed several allied troops earlier that day.

Such is the horror and corrupting influence of war. But there is an evil in the world, one that is nearly unfathomable to those of us living inside civilization, and it is the daily reality that our Marines live in the midst of. In the process of taking back Fallujah these Marines have uncovered hostage slaughterhouses, torture chambers in mosques, and bodies missing feet. I'll leave the reader to speculate if the feet were cut off before or after death. Fallujah is a place where a female aid worker who had made Iraq her home for the last 30 years was kidnapped and executed, a place where insurgents come out waving surrender flags and then open fire, a place where civilians, ambulances, and mosques are used as cover by insurgents. A place that has become the backdrop of a constant stream of beheading snuff films. This cannot be viewed through the lens of everyday American life. And oh yeah, here is what the brave warriors of jihad do to those oh so dangerous middle aged women:

FALLUJAH, Iraq (AFP) - The body of a blonde-haired woman with her legs and arms cut off and throat slit was found lying on the street in Fallujah, a notorious enclave for hostage-takers, marines said.

"It is definitely a Caucasian woman with long blonde hair," said a military official, who cut open a cover that had been over the corpse.

The gruesome discovery was made as the marines moved through the south of Fallujah, hunting out the remaining die-hard rebels after a week of fierce fighting to regain control of the city.

"It is a female... missing all four appendages, with a slashed throat and disembowled, she has been dead for a while but only in this location for a day or two," said Benjamin Finnell, a hospital apprentice with the Navy Corps, who had inspected the body.

An AFP photographer embedded with the marines said the woman was wearing a blue dress and her face was completely disfigured.

The marines said she appeared to have been on the street for about two days.

There is an unbelievable evil lurking just beyond our horizon, kept at bay by young men who have an all too clear concept of what darkness and cruelty really is. Because they understand and fight it over there, we are spared from it over here. Or do you think the men that perpetrate such atrocities would just stop and return to civilization if we left? The young marine in question was shot the day before and had seen soldiers in his company killed and wounded by booby trapped dead bodies and wounded insurgents playing possum, as happened in this instance:

Marine Lance Cpl. Jeramy Ailes, 22, of Gilroy was killed Monday in Al-Fallujah by small arms fire. "They had finished mopping up in Fallujah and they went back to double-check on some insurgents. From what we gathered, somebody playing possum jumped up and shot him,'' said his father, Joel Ailes, who learned of his death Monday evening. "It's extremely hard."

... His first time in Iraq, Jeramy Ailes gave $10 to each child he came across because he knew it would feed their families for 30 days. This time, he asked his family to mail as many soccer balls as they could. His family sent 300 balls, and Jeramy Ailes' platoon handed them out to children.

Joel Ailes warmly remembered the last conversation he had with his son last month, in which Jeramy Ailes recounted how he had come across a large man walking with a 12-year-old girl carrying a huge bale of straw on her back. His son, who spoke and read Arabic, exchanged words with the man. And, for the next seven miles, his son carried the girl on his back and the man carried the bales of straw. "That was my son," Joel Ailes said.

Yet this heroic young man will get nary a mention from those truth seekers at Al-Jazeera. In this context a snap life or death decision was made, a murderous thug ended up dead and a Marine avoided the sad fate Jeramy Ailes could not.

And the media and the Arab world is outraged that a man fighting on the side of the disemboweling jihad is no more. Al-Jazeera needs their feet sawed off.

UPDATE: Vinod points to some other news from Fallujah that deserves more coverage.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A must MUST! read letter from a Marine on the subject.

posted by Paul  permalink | |