February 11^th

Mona Charen holds forth today about “borrowed valor.” Her intent is to castigate Brian Williams for “misremembering” events in the Iraq war some eleven years ago. Williams, as everyone on the face of the planet must know by now, described an Iraq journey in a helicopter as incurring much more enemy fire than it actually did. Charen and other members of our war party have joined in bringing this braggart to heal.

Charen goes on to complain of liberals not appreciating the sacrifices of troops during the Viet-Nam war. That’s quite true; they often didn’t. Then she quotes Reagan as saying, “Ours was in truth a noble cause.” That was seen as evidence of Reagan’s approaching senility, and it might have been. That war was the end product of a nation caught in an anti-communist hysteria; our leaders were pandering to a paranoia they encouraged. We had a draft so unpopular that many of those eligible simply left the country rather than submit to it. That didn’t happen in WW 2 nor did it in the Korean War. It was hard to convince anyone that Vet Nam posed an existential threat to this country—except perhaps for Ms. Charen.

One of the most notorious events of that war, not mentioned by Ms. Charen, was the killing of about four hundred unarmed men women and children, many machine gunned as they lay in a ditch. The fall guy for this was Lieutenant Calley. He claimed he was just obeying orders. (You would think that machine gunning people lying in a ditch would resonate with Ms. Charen but perhaps she isn’t familiar with the execution methods of the third Reich.) Others higher up in the chain of command were exonerated. The Army at that time was desperate for officers and had lowered their standards for OCS. The result was Calley and his ilk. Calley had nothing to worry about because Nixon gave him a “get out of jail free card.”  Ah, to have friends in high places! Make no mistake here; many men served honorably in that war and they were often lumped in with the Calleys when they left the service.

Then there is Iraq: Bush’s war of choice. Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudi citizen yet the visiting Saudi royalty were allowed to fly home when all other non-military flights were grounded. (Again, to have friends in high places.) Then the Bush-Cheney regime invades Iraq because Iraqis are working on “weapons of mass destruction.” Well, after 9/11 we had to invade somebody didn’t we, Ms. Charen? That war, which had its Abu Grave showing us torturing a captive with his genitals wired up to a battery made us no friends in the middle-east and lost support at home, right wing warriors naturally excepted. Other events helped as well, Haditha, for example. In Haditha we had four Marines executing over twenty old men, women and children they found in a house after their unit took casualties from a nearby IED. That doesn’t win over hearts and minds, does it Ms. Charen?

Then Ms. Charen apparently believes that Secretary Kerry is still vulnerable to a continuation of swift-boating. The original swift-boaters have added the term to our vocabulary to mean the false accusation of a veteran for political gain. I guess Ms. Charen is ready for round two. One characteristic of these extremists like extremists everywhere is that they never give up.