…by Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, who provides us with an emotional inside glimpse of Marines in action in Fallujah. Filkins clearly had empathy for men at war that Kevin Sites didn’t. Reading Filkins’ account of the Marines being shot by fascist jihadis (this site is now an ‘insurgents’-free zone) masquerading in the uniforms of the Iraqi Army makes it clear what a cheap propaganda artist Sites is. These Marines were moving through a killing field in which their adversaries were busy beheading people in blood-filled execution rooms. How are the Marines supposed to act? If that particular wounded jihadi had been being playing possum, faking like those “uniformed” Iraqi Army soldiers, Sites and his buddy from NBC, not to mention everyone else in the room, would have been blown to smithereens.
It’s obviously my turn of mind, but these self-righteous “anti-warriors” like Sites often make me think of the concentration camps. How would they have dealt with that most horrible of horrors from the vantage point of their soi-disant idealistic world view? Wretchard was obviously thinking the same way today when he wrote on the Belmont Club:
If Hitler was altogether more evil than we can conceive, he arose from a time and circumstance which few if any can still remember. Any comparisons between the 1945 and 2004 are likely to be inexact. Those who point to the shooting of Jihadi in Fallujah by a US Marine as evidence that America is drifting into Nazism would do well to remember that in 1945, American troops who arrived in Dachau were so disgusted by what they saw they executed hundreds of SS guards on the spot.
UPDATE: An extraordinary letter home from a Marine in Fallujah contains this excerpt –
It is incredibly humbling to walk among such men. They fought as hard as any Marines in history and deserve to be remembered as such. The enemy they fought burrowed into houses and fired through mouse holes cut in walls, lured them into houses rigged with explosives and detonated the houses on pursuing Marines, and actually hid behind surrender flags only to engage the Marines with small arms fire once they perceived that the Marines had let their guard down. I know of several instances where near dead enemy rolled grenades out on Marines who were preparing to render them aid. It was a fight to the finish in every sense and the Marines delivered.
Read it all. This one is not to be missed.
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