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The lead story in the New York Times Sunday opinion section is “A Hard Look at Haditha”. This article is the culmination of years of hatred for the U.S. Military by a bunch of intellectually vacant elitists who have been desperately looking under any rock they could find to draw parallels between their counter culture Vietnam roots and the war in Iraq.

Think I am being too harsh in my opinion? Let’s dissect the Times piece a bit more closely.

The apparent cold-blooded killing last November of 24 Iraqi civilians by United States marines at Haditha will be hard to dispose of with another Washington damage control operation. The Iraqi government has made clear that it will not sit still for one, and neither should the American people. This affair cannot simply be dismissed as the spontaneous cruelty of a few bad men.

[Webloggin translation: The cold blooded killings that we’ll call alleged for legal reasons are yet another in a long line of Washington cover-ups. This is a wide ranging problem where an overwhelming number of troops have been instructed and lead to wantonly kill innocent Iraqi men, women and children.]

You might want to note that the word alleged has already been dropped by the Daily Times in Pakistan, see Haditha not “another Washington damage control operation”: NYT. It is quite clear that the detractors of the United States overseas know where to search when they want to find anti-American sentiment in the U.S. press. The New York Times editor couldn’t even bring himself to spell Marines with a capital M.

The Times smear job continues:

This is the nightmare that everyone worried about when the Iraq invasion took place. Critics of the war predicted that American troops would become an occupying force, unable to distinguish between innocent civilians and murderous insurgents, propelled down the same path that led the British to disaster in Northern Ireland and American troops to grief in Vietnam. The Bush administration understood the dangers too, but dismissed them out of its deep, unwarranted confidence that friendly Iraqis would quickly be able to take control of their own government and impose order on their own people.

[Webloggin translation: We told you it that it would be another Vietnam. The U.S. troops can’t help themselves because they are a bunch of stupid pro-war mongering zealots. The Bush administration didn’t care about the dangers to innocent Iraqi’s anyway. It would have been much better if we just sat by silently while Saddam filled the mass graves, trained terrorists, emptied water basins and paid off our counterparts at the U.N.]

The NY Times does Offer a Solution; Sling More Mud, Indict Everyone from Bush on Down:

Now that we have reached the one place we most wanted to avoid, it will not do to focus blame narrowly on the Marine unit suspected of carrying out these killings and ignore the administration officials, from President Bush on down, who made the chances of this sort of disaster so much greater by deliberately blurring the rules governing the conduct of American soldiers in the field. The inquiry also needs to critically examine the behavior of top commanders responsible for ensuring lawful and professional conduct and of midlevel officers who apparently covered up the Haditha incident for months until journalists’ inquiries forced a more honest review.

[Webloggin translation: Now that we have a bona-fide massacre we can definitively say that Iraq is another Vietnam. We shouldn’t stop at investigating the Marines; we should impeach Bush, arrest Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld for war crimes trial in an International Court, shut down Haliburton and pull out of Iraq. We should also interrogate every officer that has ever set foot in Iraq and put each and every one of them killers on trial. We are great journalists. While we are at it lets give ourselves a pat on the back; it takes a special idiot to draw such ridiculous parallels.]

How about this for a hard look? The NY Times has been a willing mouthpiece for those who hate this country for years. The terrorists who have come to Iraq are the same group that attacked us in 9-11, they are the same ones who have been planning and hatching terrorist activities across the globe for decades, and they are the same ones who plan to fight this war with the help of newspapers like the NY Times. The terrorists understand all too well that the American left is more than willing to play the part of mouthpiece for the modern day Goebbels of Al Qaeda.

The Times editor is careful to sprinkle in a few bones of support for the military. I can only imagine that this is with a little wink and a nod to their fellow comrades who know better. After all, it is important to say you support the troops while you indict them for crimes against humanity. Anything less might be interpreted as anti-Military bias.

These damage control operations have done a great job of shielding the reputations of top military commanders and high-ranking Pentagon officials. But it has been at the expense of things that are far more precious: America’s international reputation and the honor of the United States military. The overwhelming majority of American troops in Iraq are dedicated military professionals, doing their best to behave correctly under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Their good name requires a serious inquiry, not another deflection of blame to the lowest-ranking troops on the scene.

Bulls**t. Suddenly the NY Times is worried about the reputation of the military?! This sounds like a typical Bill Keller piece. What happened to the “This affair cannot simply be dismissed as the spontaneous cruelty of a few bad men.” line? The press has been treating the alleged events at Haditha as the rule rather than the exception. This is what professional journalists call responsible reporting.

Over a million troops have served in Iraq, putting their lives on the line to help the Iraqi’s build a viable democratically elected government. The incidents that have been substantiated in combination with what has been alleged have been few and far between in the Grand picture. Yet the American left is leading the charge against our own forces as if this is an everyday occurrence; a forgone conclusion.

So I must ask again, why would anyone want to support the favorite newspapers of the left? In the world of anti-American values and beliefs there are followers and there is the NY Times. It is time to make a choice.

Update: Mark Steyn at the Chicago Sun Times had a different take on Haditha with “Events at Haditha don’t change need for victory“. He is critical of the Times and the rest of he left in a very well written article that points out how differently Cindy Sheehan is being treated than most any other parent of a slain soldier. He also notes the way the left is so desperately trying to re-create Vietnam. “This is Vietnam, it’s a quagmire, we can’t win, and the longer we delay losing and scuttling and getting the hell outta there, the more wicked things we will do. And, lookie here, whaddaya know, here comes the Sunni version of the My Lai massacre.”

Steyn closes with the following thought. ” A superpower that wallows in paranoia and glorifies self-loathing cannot endure and doesn’t deserve to.” This is right on the money.

Others Blogging on the MSM Smear Job Against the United States Military

• More on Hot Air : Haditha: If Bush isn’t responsible then the terrorists have already won
• Michelle Malkin : ‘HADITHA Hyperventilation’
• Don Surber: A Hard Look at a Haditha Editorial
• Michelle Malkin : ‘THE HADITHA TAR BRUSH’
• California Conservative : Haditha: Rushing to Judgment
• Slapstick Politics :Colorado Marine’s Career Ended By Haditha Deaths?
• Morning Coffee : Haditha, Human Rights Watch and CNN
• The Only Republican in San Francisco : New York Times: Bad things are bad

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