SLIMING THE QUAKERS, PART 2: Last week Michelle Malkin and Little Green Footballs characterized candlelight vigils by the Quakers marking the milestone of 2000 military deaths in Iraq as "parties." Today, the MilBlog Blackfive follows them into the gutter: "There are two groups that will celebrate and use George Alexander's sacrifice. The morally bankrupt anti-war movement. And Al Qaeda." I find this rash of posts suggesting that anti-war activists "celebrate" the deaths of American soldiers to be both tragic and telling.
Tragic, because it represents a descent into depraved, gutter-level slander as a form of argumentation, and it is a profoundly un-American approach to a most American of activities: dissent. Telling, because it means these bloggers have nothing left to justify the deaths of Americans in Iraq but desperate and transparent attacks on those who want our troops home.
Regular readers know this issue is personal for me. I did what many of these war-supporting bloggers (MilBloggers excluded) have never done but are eager to encourage others to do: I fought the "terrorists" in Lebanon as a young man. I defended my family against the Syrian military and helped lay the groundwork for the "Cedar Revolution." I was in Beirut when we lost hundreds of brave Marines. I experienced the horrors of war in the Middle East, the rivers of blood in the streets. And because I knew the hell we were sending our young men and women into, I marched in opposition to the Iraq invasion.
I did it for one basic reason: I believed that our government was lying about the rationale for war. If we send courageous Americans to die in a foreign land, the moral underpinning MUST be rock solid. Airtight ethical justification for war is essential if we want to maintain our moral standing, our dignity, our humanity. In a word: America isn't America if we lie our way into war. There's no better way to undermine the sacrifice of our military men and women than to deprive them of the purity of purpose that undergirds their mission.
Earlier I linked to a post on Pre$$titutes called "The Great Vindication Of The Anti-War Movement." In part, it said, "In case the world hasn't noticed, the events of the past few months have vindicated the millions of people in the U.S. and around the world who protested the Iraq invasion on the basis that it was being justified by lies and that it would lead to a long, bloody struggle.
"It's fascinating - and disturbing - to listen to pundits deconstruct the inner workings of the White House Iraq Group, to have Bush Sr.-era stalwarts like Brent Scowcroft break with the administration, to watch the New York Times implode over Judy Miller's neo-con cheerleading, to see the Plame scandal come to a head.... three years late.
"What's so breathtaking (yet so predictable) is that in all the retroactive analysis, the hand-wringing, and the grudging acknowledgment of the mess that Iraq has become, the fact that the outcome of this grand misadventure was predicted by anti-war demonstrators goes unmentioned. It didn't take foreign policy experience or national security expertise or top-secret Intel briefings for the anti-war movement to know, unequivocally, that the Iraq invasion was a hyped-up, over-sold war. It was crystal clear from day one what Bush, Cheney, Condi, Rummy, Colin, et al were up to..."
The post goes on to say, "War-happy wingers 'supported the troops' with bumper stickers and jingoism, slandering anti-war protesters as traitors. In their contorted logic, wanting troops in the line of fire is a good thing and wanting them home with their families is bad."
Bottom line: If Malkin, LGF, and Blackfive think opponents of the Iraq war are "celebrating" the deaths of American troops, let them answer the basic paradox of their position, namely, how is it that wanting our troops NOT to die is worse than wanting them to remain in the line of fire?
http://daoureport.salon.com/synopsis.aspx?synopsisId=a59686bd-18a2-45f9-9c63-1af5486c7c49
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