Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Re: Private Second Glass    [Stephen Spruiell]

At this point, if TNR's defenders engage this story at all — and providing they don't simply accuse military investigators of coercing Beauchamp into recanting — we are likely to see sarcastic outbursts about how "this definitively proves that our troops are, to a man and woman, angels."

No blogger following this story ever made that assertion, as far as I'm aware. What we have argued, repeatedly and in other contexts, is that our counterparts in the Iraq debate have lost all perspective with their focus on American "atrocities" as opposed to Al-Qaeda atrocities. Demand for evidence of the former is so high — and documented abuses so relatively scarce — that we have ambitious aspiring writers willing to lie and exaggerate in order to get published in prestigious national journals, and the editors of those journals willing to believe even the most dubious accounts of wrongdoing.

Compare this state of affairs with the relatively scant attention paid to the unspeakably evil acts of the men who would take hold of Iraq. Take, for instance, the complete lack of interest on display in the media when war correspondent Michael Yon reported, with pictures and on-the-record sources, the existence of an entire village wiped out by Al-Qaeda. If the perspective in the Western media were not totally skewed the other way, perhaps we'd see our aspiring writers rushing to Iraq to make up stories about Al-Qaeda brutality. Then again, one hardly lacks real examples.

08/07 09:51 AMShare