The Media’s War On Iraq

Military 15 Comments

An op-ed in the Knoxville News, by David M. Lucas. (Because it’s behind subscriber wall, I’m republishing it in its entirety).

As I read the letters in a recent Sunday Perspective section which were, for the most part, very anti-war, I could not help but feel a great deal of frustration and sadness for the people who wrote them and those who share their views. The letter writers said things such as, “This war is almost a carbon copy of the Vietnam War,” “Bush lied to America,” and my favorite, “Let’s support our troops. Bring them home.”
These are some of the most ridiculous statements I have read in over a year. Why in over a year? Because I just returned home after spending 367 days patrolling the streets in downtown Baghdad with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division.
To address the first point of this being a carbon copy of the Vietnam War, I will only ask if the letter writer served in either Vietnam or Iraq. If not, then he has no basis for his opinion except what he has read in the press or seen on TV as to what either is really like.
I know that the war my men and I fought is a totally different war than the one I see being reported by almost the entire media. There are a few exceptions to this, but they are generally overwhelmed by the massive anti-war/anti-Bush crowd.
“Bush lied to America” is not only false, but it is laughable. Every single major intelligence agency in the world agreed that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Virtually every politician, regardless of party affiliation, agreed that he had them and went on record as saying such.
Did he have them or not is a question that will take a long time to answer, due to the many possibilities such as destroying the WMD, moving them to Syria or that they never existed in the first place. I don’t pretend to know the answer, but I do know that Saddam needed to go, and the world – especially the United States – is a better and safer place without him in power.
“Let’s support our troops. Bring them home.” Please don’t ever say those words again. Nothing is so disheartening to our troops who are in harm’s way than to hear our own citizens say things like that.
On June 16, 2004, I willingly said goodbye to my wife and parents in a parking lot at Fort Drum, N.Y., not knowing if I would ever see them again. I don’t expect any kinds of praise for this or special thanks because that is my job, and I knowingly volunteered for it. I never would have done that if I did not believe that I was defending this great country of ours and all those in it.
Many people will think this is just defending the president, but I will tell you that I would never risk my life for somebody else’s ideas if I did not hold them myself. That being said, I am a soldier, and I will do my duty to my country every time, no matter what the personal cost.
As I said before, there are two different wars being fought: the war in Iraq and the war being reported in the media. Very few times are the great things that are being done in Iraq reported on because they do not grab the headlines or the ratings that casualties do.
One of the biggest exceptions I have seen is the News Sentinel. I know because the paper plastered my face across the front page of the paper several months ago when my men rescued two kidnappers and freed two Egyptian nationals who had been abducted the day prior and were on their way to being beheaded. While this was a great day for us, it was certainly not the first time we had helped Iraqis or other innocent people.
After one particular suicide car bomb went off, killing nearly two dozen people and destroying several civilian homes, my platoon helped a family out by bringing wood to board the windows that had been blown out and brandishing brooms to clean up the rubble caused by the blast. I can assure you that those people were glad we were there, and we were more than happy to help, even though our efforts were not known to anyone outside that family and my platoon.
On another occasion, we were able to put two generators into a town that had never had steady power before, and we gave a reliable source of energy to over 300 homes. That story was never reported in the United States.
What was reported was another suicide bomber who blew about 150 meters from a site that my battery was tasked with protecting. This particular bombing was aimed at the Jordanian Embassy, which was located a couple hundred meters down the road. The bomber was successful in killing himself, one embassy guard and a family of seven who lived across the street from the embassy.
So I spent Christmas morning helping to recover the bodies of the mother and her six small children. In fact, this story was so spectacular that my picture was taken by an Associated Press photographer at the site, and it was on the cover of newspapers all over the world. Why this story and not a story of one of the hundreds of good deeds that took place all over Iraq at the same time? Because “Nine Dead in Bombing” will sell more papers than “Platoon Helps Innocent Bombing Victims.”
I will wrap this up by saying that you are entitled to your beliefs, and you should believe in whatever you want, but don’t pretend to know what you are talking about just because you have watched 30 minutes of CNN the night before. Go and talk to the people who have been there – not the people who make assumptions from a TV studio – and then form your opinion based on facts.
Don’t pretend to support troops by trying to undercut their efforts at the same time. Just go to bed at night and pray for their safety and thank God that they are there to protect you and your family, no matter your beliefs.

Via Instapundit.

15 Replies to “The Media’s War On Iraq”

  1. Liberals and lefties say pull out of Iraq and maybe the deadly fundamentalist killers will go away.
    WAKE UP! Any retreat will simply fuel their mad determination. It will add fuel to the fire.
    Pressure must be increased not lessened.
    Pull-out will condemn citizens to suffer under the iron grip of Al-Qaida where meek behaviour is enforced by weekly hangings in the public square.
    Women will be forced back to silent slavery wrapped from head to toe in fabric and not permitted to hold a job.
    Children will be mind programmed through constant daily rote to hate democracy, commerce and constructive work.
    Woe to us if we allow fundamentalist robot training of children who then grow into robot adult enforcers of the mean iron fisted Osama Bin Laden lifestyle.
    Rather than retreat, it seems reasonable to penetrate and deflate their evil cause by stealth in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, Turkey and a dozen other places.
    I am a peacenik. Anyone who can think must realize that a safe and free community to live in must be paid for. Otherwise there are greedy bullies who will take over. They prefer to live in palaces of luxury while enslaving us peaceniks under the rule of terror by the bullet.
    Simply put, those who are running Al-Qaida training camps are producing killer robots without any values reference of their own. This production of unthinking killers is the worst possible crime against all humanity.
    These factories must be stopped at all costs. There will be no future for a free world if Killer camps are allowed to produce an endless supply of chaos robots.
    No, the war to stop Al-Qaida killer camps is just beginning and it can not end anytime soon. There can be no pull-out if freedom is to survive.
    If Liberals and Lefties know a short cut to stopping Al-Qaida Killer Camps, they have a moral duty to make it known. 73s TG

  3. It always amazes me when the leftie media harp on the WMB’s as being the ONLY reason why the Countries of the Willing liberated Iraq. The lefties picked up on that at the very beginning of the Liberation, and of coarse that became the ONLY headline, when is fact there were 18 resolutions that the Bagdad butcher refused to comply with, and all of this going on under the TRUCE of “Dessert Storm.” The “Butcher” broke all the rules in the book during the “truce”, and when he kicked out the weapons inspectors the last time, that was the straw that broke the proverbial and the Countries of the Willing moved in. The WMD’s were only one of EIGHTEEN resolutions that were broken, and though there have been only “pieces” of WMD’s discovered, it is common knowledge that the majority of the WMD’s were trucked out two weeks before the Liberation. Example 40 tons of gas found in Syria. The butcher himself was a “weapon of mass destruction” with the gassing of 300,000 Kurds, and thousands of his enemies. The leftie media put the WMD’s on the front page, still have it on the front page with no mention of the other 17 resolutions that were broken or that the butcher broke the TRUCE, and of coarse having no right wing media for rebuttal, both in the press, and electronic media, they have got away with the charade. The blogs, and the right wing talk shows have tried to right the situation, however it is a huge task with such a powerful left wing media. All we can do is spread the truth ourselves. “Weapons of mass destruction” is such a BUZZ word, that it buries any words in the other 17 resolutions. However this will be a long drawn out affair if the powers that be do not “declare war on Terrorism” therby allowing internment camps to be built as we did in ww 2. As long as we allow quizzlings, and traitors to roam loose in the counties, this war could go on forever, and as long as we fight a so-called “politically correct” war, we are only digging our own graves. For instance, surround Falluja with razor wire, drop leaflets on Fallujua, give them 48 hours to get out, and level Falluga with the big bombs, and then ask the question “who wants to be next?” We either kill millions of them to stop the blood flowing or they kill ALL of us, we either kill or be killed, and the sooner the better.And this misrepresentation of labelling “civilians” and the “innocents” is a farce. There are no civilians in time of war, just those that pull the trigger and those that supply the military might for the trigger pullers. In this inhumane act of terror there are not even any uniforms distinguishing “soldiers” from “civilians”, so they all have to be treated as “soldiers”. If there are any so-called “civilians” they can get the hell out of there, Camels or Donkeys run “petrol free”, and there are many places the “innocents” can go to get out of the war zone. The only thing the headchoppers respect is “power”, and that alone will drive any moderate Islamic groups to step in to stop this needless slaughtering of innocent people. Jail all militant leaders , and use the same rules we did in ww 2 “loose lips sink ships” and wharehouse the loose lips and the sooner the better, otherwise millions will die for nothing.
    Stephen ww 2 vet.

  4. A Soldier’s perspective on the war

    Kate over at Small Dead Animals has posted in interesting op-ed piece from the Knoxville News written by a returning soldier

  5. A thousand sheep are afraid of one wolf. One wolf is not afraid of a thousand sheep.

  6. Q: How do Iranian Muslim torturers break their captives?
    A: Show them images from the Koran.
    GITMOGITMOGITMOGITMO
    Iran acknowledges widespread human rights violations in its prisons
    TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – In an unprecedented report, Iran’s hardline judiciary acknowledged widespread human rights violations in prisons, including the use of torture, state-run media reported Sunday
    http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2005/07/24/1145621-ap.html

  7. A cover for a retreat from Iraq?
    >>>>>>>>>> freerepublic.com
    Zarqawi Dilutes Iraq Network, Leads New Al Qaeda Offensive in Europe, Middle East(Uh-Oh)
    Posted by CHARLITE
    On 07/24/2005 5:42:54 PM PDT � 1 reply � 3+ views
    DEBKA FILE.COM ^ | JULY 23, 2005 | Editors
    On July 15, DEBKA-Net-Weekly 214 reported that al Qaeda was diluting its Iraq force for a major terror offensive in Europe and Middle East engineered by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and on its recommendation. The countries targeted were named as Britain, Italy, France, Denmark, Russia � with the UK and Italy at the top of the list; and, In the Middle East, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Zarqawi in one recent release: Israel is in our sights � and very soon. Al Qaeda�s ability to carry out tightly coordinated strings of attacks very close together in different…

  8. ‘Support our troops, bring them home’?

    1st Lt. David Lucas has a different take on those who say the best way to support the troops is to bring them home:

  10. Dispite what the MSM would have us believe, George Bush and the people around him are not idiots. The decision to go into Iraq was “nuanced”. The reasons for the invasion were many and varied; some of them explicit, some of them tacit, and still others beyond our ken and understanding.
    Here’s an example:
    I maintain that one of the unstated reasons for going into Iraq was a comunication problem. For years the West has been saying to regimes like Iraq “Look you can’t behave like this.” And for years these regimes have been nodding over lunch at the UN and responded “Yes, yes, you are absolutly right.” Now the Coalition of the Willing holds a gun to the temple of these regimes and says “You cannot behave like this.” And now they respond “Of course, why didn’t you say so?”
    But how can you spin this. How can you play this in the media without you are portrayed as a belligerent blow hard. You can hear the MSM screaming, “The US and others redefine translation”, “George Bush’s new era of diplomacy” etc. This is why the reasoning behind the Iraq invasion boils down to WofMD. And it works for the Chorus.
    A final thought. I am sickened, disheartened, and revolted by those who revel in the failures of the occupation. Those dour and unhopeful souls who tut tut when inocent men, women and CHILDREN are murdered in the name of a fanatical fantasy. Those who take a sick and depraved satisfaction from these tradgedies, because it proves in thier mind how wrong George Bush was. Where is the hope for a better world, not only for themselves but others half the world away? Where is the compassion, sympathy, and “feeling of pain” they so proudly maintain is theirs and theirs alone? They are losing their humanity because of their hatred for a single man! WTF?

  11. The commentors may want to read this post. I have finally started documenting what it was like to be indoctrinated into the Muslim community in Ontario. Part of the process was to provide propaganda material, which I’ve posted. More will be linked to the text a little later on, as it was getting late. Note, all of this stuff is true. It is hard to get the Salafist doctrine/propaganda books. The “Jihad” was in progress well before 9/11 folks.
    It is my belief that Canada won’t experience a “terrorist” attack as a Muslim state is already in the process of seeding in Ontario. It won’t be in my lifetime, but as the demographics increase, so does the dogma, unless Michael Bryanct, the Minister of the Attorney General realizes that we actually have a Constitution to protect! It will make a little more sense if the previous days posts are read
    http://www.habamusrodentum.blogspot.com

  12. Fight, Protest, or Get Out of the Way

    If you can’t spare the change or the time, get some exercise and kick the $#!% out of the next person that says “support the troops, bring them home.” (I’m joking; you don’t have to do it until they lose control of their…

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