The Fantasies of the Left

Facilitated by the New York Times (as usual).

Yesterday the Times lead editorial was about the Marine incident in Haditha and the corresponding military investigation.

To sum up the incident, Marines were attacked by insurgents in Haditha by a roadside bomb, and a Marine was killed. Following the attack, 24 Iraq's were killed - the Marine's claim by military action in defending themselves, and the media claim by "cold blooded" vengeful murder. The investigation is ongoing, and we know the results of what really happened soon.

The Times would like you to believe that it's all George Bush's fault, and that the war in Iraq is a miserable failure. Here are their methods:

This is the nightmare that everyone worried about when the Iraq invasion took place. Critics of the war predicted that American troops would become an occupying force, unable to distinguish between innocent civilians and murderous insurgents, propelled down the same path that led the British to disaster in Northern Ireland and American troops to grief in Vietnam.

Method - compare Iraq to every unpopular or failed military action in recent history; include references to "proven right" previously unknown assertions by "critics;" claim that the US military is unable to distinguish between combatants and Iraqis - something they do literally every day.

Now that we have reached the one place we most wanted to avoid, it will not do to focus blame narrowly on the Marine unit suspected of carrying out these killings and ignore the administration officials, from President Bush on down, who made the chances of this sort of disaster so much greater by deliberately blurring the rules governing the conduct of American soldiers in the field.

Method - blame George Bush for the incident (assuming it's true); make completely false and unproven allegations that military officials have "blurred the rules" of military engagements in Iraq.

This is the pattern that this administration has repeatedly followed in the past — in the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib, in the beating deaths of prisoners at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and in the serial abuses of justice and constitutional principle at Guantánamo Bay.

Method - rehash every former military scandal in 5 years (which amounts to three); claim that one of these three incidents ("abuses" at Guantanamo) is as bad as the other two (which include "interrogations" by reading Harry Potter and listening to Christina Aguilera...)

It should not surprise anyone that this war — launched on the basis of false intelligence analysis, managed by a Pentagon exempted from normal standards of command responsibility and still far from achieving minimally acceptable results — is increasingly unpopular with the American people.

Method - making the same false assertion over and over (that the war has failed to accomplish "acceptable results") in the hopes that people will begin to believe it.

The New York Times and modern leftists have one purpose and one only: discredit George Bush and his administration through any means necessary - through claiming the war has "failed" and the military is poorly governed and murderous.

The Times won't stop at just slandering the troops. It will keep getting worse until they go bankrupt...