First things first. Thanks to a slew of explanatory emails and posts from other blogs, I’m now convinced that the Independent article I linked to last week on the use of white phosphorous was erroneous, on several counts.

That said, I’m not going to apologize for linking to it. I’m also not going to accept the charge that linking to it was some how indicative of my contempt for the military, or the people who serve in it. I think I’ve been clear on this site that despite my opposition to the war in Iraq, I hold no animus for the individual people fighting it. In fact, I’ve taken care to note exactly how careful the U.S. military has been to avoid civilian casualties, despite my position that no casualties were necessary in the first place. A few other emailers cited my recent column on the way the military brass has treated Pat Tillman in conjunction with my linking to the Telegraph article as proof that I, in the words of one charming fellow, “like to shit on America.” Well, no. I had nothing but praise for Tillman as a hero when he joined the military. And I noted his loss with regret, despite some nasty aspertions from the crasser corners of anti-war libertarian land.

I don’t think it’s the least bit unpatriotic to take note of an article in a mainstream newspaper that’s commonly known to be pretty midde-of-the-road (to the right of the Guardian, to the left of the Telegraph) and express (a) outrage if accounts of abuses by the U.S. military are true, and (b) hope that the charges aren’t. It’s not as if I picked this up from Kos or the Democratic Underground. I linked to it. Several people convinced me it was inaccurate. So I’m now posting that it’s inaccurate.

I still believe the U.S. military is the first in the history of man to fight the way it does: Going out of its way, to the point of endangering its own fighters, to avoid endangering civilians. That said, shit happens. And given that the military is fighting for us, on our behalf, and with our symbolic blessing, not only do I not think holding it to that standard is unpatriotic, I think it’s unpatriotic not to. The fact that shit happens is also a pretty good reason to be sure that when you do go to war, it’s for the right reasons. Abu Ghraib didn’t surprise me. Get a couple of hundred thousand mostly men together to fight and bleed and die thousands of miles away from anything that’s familiar to them and, yes, you’ll see pockets of evil and depravity. What’s particularly regrettable is that it — and all that anti-U.S. backlash that came with it — happened in the course of an unnecessary war.

All of that said, let me put about a thousand miles of distance between myself and the opinions wrongly attributed to me in the comments of this Tom Palmer post. The Sapienza post Palmer links to is disgusting. Holding U.S. troops to a high moral standard is one thing. Wishing them dead is something entirely fucking different. There is no — zero — common ground between my position on the war and Sapeinza’s, other than that we both apparently wish the U.S. weren’t in Iraq.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 13th, 2005 at 5:29 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.