Ted Rall is at it again. His latest tripe, The 10,000th Haditha, is a misanthropic collection of rambling smears against the U.S. military.
Rall is no stranger to making controversial statements. His inability to feel anything other than loathing for the nation that spawned him is pathetic. Rall wails and gnashes his teeth and complains:
But The System is even less responsive to protest now than it was during Vietnam. State-run media made fun of antiwar activists as tattooed neo-hippies, called them treasonous and refused airtime to Administration critics. When is the last time a hard-hitting opponent of the Iraq war showed his or her face on national TV? Those of us who raised our voices against this war from the start, having fruitlessly complained about stories of battlefield abuse reported by the European media, are suffering from marginalization fatigue.
What state run media? Last I heard, the media was largely controlled by people who share Rall’s doom and gloom, self-loathing outlook. Marginalization fatigue? I’d call it marginal intelligence syndrome.
Most of the world’s population–including virtually every Muslim and about a third Americans–always believed that the war against Iraq was a genocidal attempt to intimidate the Muslim world and extort its oil at gunpoint. They don’t see a difference between Haditha and the thousands of other Iraqis killed by U.S. forces since 2003. Because the entire exercise was morally bankrupt from the outset, sold and perpetuated with countless lies, all of the 200,000-plus civilians and Iraqi soldiers who have died–whether by bomb or by bullet–were effectively murdered by the U.S. military.
Rall conveniently ignores the definition of genocide in his attempts to inflame his readers. Genocide is the systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group. Rall doesn’t mention who his imagined genocide is against, because there isn’t one taking place. There is no systematic attempt by the United States to eliminate any group inside Iraq, other than al-Qaida, which is a murderous ideologically motivated group of terrorists.
Rall also conveniently neglects to make any mention of a man named Saddam. From Wikipedia: as president, Saddam ran an authoritarian government and maintained power through the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) and the Gulf War (1991). Saddam’s government repressed movements that it deemed threatening, particularly those of ethnic or religious groups that sought independence or autonomy. While he remained a popular hero among many Arabs for standing up to Israel and the United States, some in the international community continued to view Saddam with deep suspicion following the 1991 Gulf War.
Rall is being completely intellectually dishonest and picking and choosing his quotes carefully, finding the most disgruntled Arabs he can to thrust into the public eye.
The morality-come-latelies still don’t understand that nothing good will ever come out of the U.S. war against Iraq. Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that massacres of civilians by U.S. soldiers do “not happen very frequently, so there’s no way to say historically why something like this might have happened.” Actually, similar incidents have taken place in every war, including World War II. Pace’s statement is either a dazzling display of ahistorical ignorance or a bald-faced lie–take your pick. Pace adds that if some of his men committed an atrocity at Haditha, they “have not performed their duty the way that 99.9 percent of their fellow Marines have.”
That’s not what the Iraqis say.
Rall, of course, picks and chooses his Iraqis carefully in order to craft a lie. That lie is that the United States military is running around Iraq wantonly killing innocent people at will. The truth, and I won’t let you forget it, Mr. Rall, is that religious zealots are the ones doing the lion’s share of that sort of thing in Iraq these days. They’re stirring up centuries old rivalries and hatreds. They’re bombing places of worship, and hiding inside them. They’re the ones committing genocidal acts, pulling people off of buses and shooting them dead based on their ethnicity or religion.
You, Mr. Rall, are encouraging them to continue doing so with your loathing of those who defend you and your disingenuous presentation of what you want others to believe about Iraq. If the country spirals into chaos, it will be because people like you – those intellectually dishonest artists who smear the canvas with the broadest of brushes, obfuscating and tarnishing the truth while good men and women sweat and toil to try and bring Iraq into the community of nations where people such as yourself are suffered to sit in a comfortable chair in an air conditioned office saying whatever they want to say without fear of being murdered for it.
Mr. Rall, I will defend your right to rant like an idiot. However, it’s obvious to me that you have never had to make a life or death decision in the middle of tremendous stress, or you wouldn’t rush to judge. The reason you’ve managed to eke out such a comfortable existence free from any real hardship is because of my fellow troops. Please, come spend time with troops in Iraq before you further damn us all with your caustic words and your overly dramatic 10,000 completely imagined massacres that never were.