Haditha

So Mai Lai has come to the desert. Marines of all people. Very sad in all respects.

But let's look at the similarities: the insurgents are indistinguishable from the "normal" people. That is, in the neighborhoods where IEDs are used against the military, the people, the inhabitants KNOW who did it -- but do not cough up the insurgents because: (a) they are afraid; or (b) are insurgents or sympathizers. So either way, Iraqi and US military personnel die. The Viet Cong were the same: they hid amongst the civilians with the threat that entire families would die if they were given up. But according to the liberal press, that is OK: the press does not report on the brutality of the insurgents (VC), only our brutal and inhuman responses. It is OK for the enemy to kill out of hand any locals who defy them, but we, the civilized, must behave ourselves. That is tying one hand behind our back and hopping on one foot trying to combat a fully capable and ruthless enemy.

Not to say that a massacre of locals is permissible. No. Never. But what can someone do to force the locals to give up the cretins that did it? To fail to address this is to conceed victory to the enemy by virtue of their excessive brutality. Saddam managed to keep a lid on this because whole neighborhoods knew that EVERYONE would die unless the culprit was given up. Not that we should do this, but our failure to put enough pressure on the insurgents in Vietnam caused our loss. Sure if the insurgents came out in the open, they'd get their ass kicked: they are not soldiers, they are not even brave: they are guerilla terrorists.

Let us not forget 1945-1947 in Germany. If a French soldier got killed by a sniper in a German village, the French engaged in "pacification" of that village. That meant that peopled died. Same in the Russian, US and English sectors. You can bet the Russians were even more brutal about it than the others. But eventually the Germans became tired of dying for a defeated regime and started taking matters in their own hands - preventing attacks, killing their own discontents.

Enter 2006 ... the same still holds, but now the press is leading the attack to prevent pacification -- perhaps rightly so. Pacification was OK in 1945 because we hated the Germans (and Japanese). But we don't hate the insurgents -- and this is a fatal flaw. You see, they hate us. With a passion. They attacked us -- don't be confused about our invasion of Iraq, the people doing the killing are motivated by religion, not mere turf (though we are told that we are soiling holy Islamic land by being there). This insurgency IS about 9/11. It is about Afghanistan. It is about Syria stirring up trouble. It is about Iran wishing to establish another theocracy.

The Marines that snapped should be punished -- they broke rules of engagement and we cannot comment to the extent that "murder" was committed, yet. Nor do we know how they may have been provoked, or led into the situation whereby they committed this attack. The IED was set off by someone. Someone saw it being placed: it was between houses. Nobody warned the Marines that it was there: they wanted the Marines to die. In this case, the Marines took revenge: a very Middle Eastern concept, no?

But you will not hear any liberal press coverage pointing these things out.