Shooting Gallery War

That so-called liberal media is making trouble again. You'd think they'd just swallow whole the maladministration's line and report that magically peace has broken out, and schools are being built, in Iraq. They just keep stumbling into facts, which have a liberal bias.

Watching the report yesterday of Martha Raddatz about the book she has just published, "The Long Road Home" (on CSpan) I saw a picture she had managed to find, of the patrol that went out into Sadr City. The soldiers rode in the back of essentially a pickup truck, open to fire from beside and above. Several were killed. They were sitting ducks.

I read the book review in today's NYTimes;

Sometimes the level of detail is astonishing, as when she writes that sewage in the streets was so deep it would splash into the turret of a Humvee, or when a man watches his own knuckle explode. The soldiers’ treatment of Iraqi children is particularly tough: When a kid shouting “Mister! Mister!” runs beside an American truck with a bomb in a Coke can, the soldiers’ compassion is beyond its breaking point. They shoot to kill.

Ms. Raddatz concludes that one platoon’s position of being “ambushed, unprepared, bloodied, and alone” is now our nation’s. And she, like the Woodruffs, delivers searingly vivid evidence of the toll our soldiers pay.

[emphasis added]

Some of those dying soldiers must have realized that they were nothing but targets in a shooting gallery, the victims of their country's abysmal carelessness. They were underequipped and the planning totally insane. In a light open truck in the middle of a large open space, surrounded by enemy with high-powered rifles, they died. They should never have been put in that position. The event came to be called Black Sunday, April 4, 2004, the day Cindy Sheehan lost her son.

Most of those vehicles turned out to be disastrously vulnerable, since it had been thought that bringing tanks into Baghdad would undermine the concept of friendly peacekeeping.

Six years into the war, the Gang That Can't Shoot Straight is finally starting to use diplomacy instead of throwing away soldiers' lives. Hopefully the war criminals have learned a little something about the combat they have never experienced, themselves. If they can't show better sense in the table version of this war of theirs than they have in the combat version, we're not going to get out of it any time soon.

No wonder it's being called The Long War.