If there were any hope of salvaging our efforts in Iraq before, this should destroy it. We could stay for the next hundred years or pack up and leave tomorrow; it would not matter.
Destroying Fallujah in order to save it was not bad enough. Blasting mosques to rubble was not bad enough (regardless of the necessity). No, none of that was so horrible that we could not overcome it - eventually. A marine killing an unarmed, wounded "insurgent" inside a mosque while being filmed by an embedded TV crew; there is just no way for BushCo. to talk - or fight - their way out of that one. It doesn't matter if the soldier(s) responsible and every officer in their chain of command is court martialed and hung in public, we have lost the "hearts and minds" of every Iraqi and every Muslim in the world.
It's horrible enough that our soldiers would be put into such a situation; it's even worse that the winking and nodding at abuses at abu Ghraib and GITMO and other undisclosed detention areas have created a climate where the soldiers in the field believe that this sort of thing will be overlooked. We were supposed to have learned this lesson, along with so many in Viet Nam. Every training session I ever had in the course of 10 years in the Army that dealt with enemy wounded or POWs stressed that they were to be medically treated, segregated and sent to the rear for further treatment and interrogation.
We have lost this war with a single gunshot caught on video tape.
Pack our soldiers up and ship them home, there is now less reason than ever to expend them in this horrible war of aggression.
Iraq is lost.
No comments:
Post a Comment