My Lai means different things to the different people. I still remember the Life magazine cover with Lt. Calley on it. To the left, it was big news, because it was emblematic of the war, and validated their belief that US soldiers were wanton baby killers, and that they’d finally gotten caught in the act. To others, it was big news because it was so anomalous and out of character for American troops. The actions of Hugh, and others, who put an end to it when they discovered what was going on (and the fact that Calley was court martialed) would seem to me to be much stronger evidence for the latter thesis than the former.
But the myths of My Lai continue to permeate thought and discussion of the war that we’re in now, almost four decades later, and were a backdrop to John Kerry’s despicable 1972 Senate testimony that was in itself part of the context of last year’s campaign, even if many wanted to brush it under the carpet.
“Neither the Americans nor the Shiites have any benefit in doing this. It is Zarqawi,” said Khalid Saadi, 42, who came to the hospital looking for his brother, Muhammed. Saadi said he hoped that sympathies in the city, considered a hotbed of support for the Sunni Arab insurgency, would turn against al-Zarqawi’s faction.
The question I have is, is this really news, or is it just the first time that AP has found it worth reporting?
Robin Burk has a disturbing story from France. They are at war, from without and within, and don’t even realize it. They watch the barbarians violently ravish their women, and they do nothing.
It goes without saying that selling anti-Christian iconography to European fashionistas is a brave an act as reducing the food pellet allotment to your pet hamster; a true act of bravery would be yanking the dead wildebeest out of a lion
…but an interesting one. A mass graveyard from one of history’s most famous and monumental military disasters.
The stunned, frozen and starving spectres who had managed to stagger to Vilnius, many of them to end their days there, had come from all over French-occupied Europe. Eventually, at most some 20,000 soldiers – of the 400,000 who’d marched into Russia at midsummer – finally recrossed the Niemen into Poland. They were meant to rejoin Napoleon, but he’d already gone ahead to Paris to give the news of the catastrophe, and to raise new armies. Men could easily be replaced, but not horses. Tens of thousands of soldiers had died in Russia, but it was because of his lack of cavalry that Napoleon was eventually defeated by Austria, Prussia, Sweden and Russia, in 1813.
It’s grisly, and sobering reading for those who act as though our casualties in Iraq are anything but trivial on any rational historical scale (though of course devastating, as are all such, to the affected families and loved ones). By any historical measure, Iraq is in fact a dramatic success, considering the accomplishments and relative loss of life of both our own troops and innocent civilians.
The president claims that congressional authorization for military action against Al Qaeda, together with his inherent constitutional powers, make such action lawful. There is some plausibility to that claim but until tested in the courts it is impossible to give a definitive opinion about it…
…it is likely that at the first, broadest stages of the scan no human being is involved — only computers. Finally, it is also possible that the disclosure of any details about the search and scan strategies and the algorithms used to sift through them would immediately allow countermeasures by our enemies to evade or defeat them.
If such impersonal surveillance on the orders of the president for genuine national security purposes without court or other explicit authorization does violate some constitutional norm, then we are faced with a genuine dilemma and not an occasion for finger-pointing and political posturing.
If the situation is as I hypothesize and leads to important information that saves lives and property, would any reasonable citizen want it stopped? But if it violates the Constitution can we accept the proposition that such violations must be tolerated?