It’s amazing to see the lengths to which conservatives will go avoid criticism of any aspect of this war.

I don’t have a subscription, so perhaps this article gets better after the introduction. I sure hope so. Because if the first four paragraphs are the thesis, it’s uncannily stupid.

And one can only assume that National Review ran it in response to the very public video of a U.S. solider shooting a wounded combatant in Fallujah. Which makes it even stupider.

Ledeen’s intro goes like this: If a British infantryman named Henry Tandey not shown mercy to a wounded World War I soldier named Adolph Hitler and instead killed him, the world would be a better place. Ergo, we shouldn’t be so judgmental about killing the wounded in war.

Okay…

Couldn’t you say the same thing about abortion? Gosh, if Hitler’s mother had only aborted him as a fetus…

… therefore, we should encourage more abortions, to stave off more Hitlers!

Frankly, I don’t think that that U.S. soldier in Fallujah needs much defending. He was fighting an enemy that’s known to fake death, to hide explosives in the bodies of the dead, even to detonate the corpses of civilians to kill U.S. troops. He was in a mosque the enemy had used as a military base, a mosque once thought secure, but that he’d returned to because of reports it had been used again by rebels. War is ugly. War is nasty. War is hell. I don’t blame him.

Of course, that’s why you only engage in war when it’s absolutely necessary. Because Abu Ghraibs and Fallujahs happen. Massacres happen. Men in dire straits do horrible things. And in today’s wars, those things get made public. That’s particularly true when the war you’re waging could potentially inflame an entire region, race, or religion of people to the point of wanting to kill you, and where no matter how careful you are to wage a careful, cautious and just war, the worst images to emerge from the war will be the ones held up as emblamatic of everything you’ve done, by people who are eager to exacerbate that inflamation.

And you know what? The Arab world won’t be reading Michael Ledeen’s Machiavellian explanation why shooting the wounded sometimes, in the grand scheme of things, upon reflection, can be a swell idea.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 21st, 2004 at 4:13 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.