Predicted Response

It didn't take long for the predicted righty responses to surface, and it may have taken less time than I thought since I didn't wade into Redstate and its ilk until this afternoon. A sample comment from Redstate:

At americablog there are posters acting like it is an appropriate response to American's "torturing" prisoners.

That's an interesting misreading. The Americablog comments I've read so far are acting like it's a predictable response, but I have yet to find anyone who thinks torturing (or "hideously torturing," in case drawing-room variety torture isn't heinous enough) captured American soldiers is appropriate. The consensus is grief for the men's families and continually growing outrage at the administration's refusal to adopt a timetable for getting the hell out of there.

And wait for it, waaaaaiiiit for it... oh, never mind, you don't actually have to wait for it after all. As expected, we also immediately had:

What they won't tell you is that to desert Iraq would be to dishonor their deaths, and to throw away what they were fighting to accomplish.

By this logic we will never, never leave Iraq until the very last man dies. To borrow the White House's favorite nautical metaphor for this desert hell, "staying the course" dead into the path of a hurricane sacrifices the ship and all hands for no purpose other than the captain's ego. "What they were fighting to accomplish" was thrown away a while ago when the adminstration failed to consider and plan for the likelihood of post-Saddam sectarian conflict, whether you want to call it civil war or not. It was thrown away when they failed to adjust patrol protocols and tactics to deal with IEDs, which created an atmosphere of even more paranoia and fear than normal combat does, and when the chain of command failed to control the boots' reactions to seeing their buddies randomly blown into bits while riding in under-armored vehicles. It was shot all to hell when Abu Ghraib was tacitly condoned, when white phosphorous was used on Fallujah, when soldiers abused detainees and marines shot innocent children in retribution and airstrikes accidentally blew away families rather than the insurgents in the house next door.

My brother came back alive and physically sound from Baghdad two years ago, before things really started to go to shit. If he hadn't, I wouldn't be beating the drums for more young guys to go and die themselves just because he did, out of some twisted logic telling me that his death could only make sense if thousands more lost their lives in service of the same hopeless cause.

I'm not going wading any more today. I'm sick enough to my stomach as it is without reading more tripe about how the "leftist media" are making this look worse than it really is by publishing pictures of the dead men intended to make them look as young as possible, and by talking about how much their families will miss them. The cluelessness of the people those kids thought they were fighting to defend is part of the tragedy too.