The Hard Left On Barbarism

Normally I enjoy reading commentaries in Common Dreams, a left-leaning publication, because they're so fun to pull apart. But not today. Today I read Norman Solomon's column in yesterday's Common Dreams, and I'm not sure where to start. It's so discouraging.

Solomon starts out well:

The Baghdad bureau chief of the New York Times could not have been any clearer.

"The story really takes us back into the 8th century, a truly barbaric world," John Burns said. He was speaking Tuesday night on the PBS "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," describing what happened to two U.S. soldiers whose bodies had just been found. Evidently they were victims of atrocities, and no one should doubt in the slightest that the words of horror used by Burns to describe the "barbaric murders" were totally appropriate.

But then he makes his Left turn:

The problem is that Burns and his mass-media colleagues don't talk that way when the cruelties are inflicted by the U.S. military -- as if dropping bombs on civilians from thousands of feet in the air is a civilized way to terrorize and kill.

When journalists maintain a flagrant double standard in their language -- allowing themselves appropriate moral outrage when Americans suffer but tiptoeing around what is suffered by victims of the U.S. military -- the media window on the world is tinted a dark red-white-and-blue, and the overall result is more flackery than journalism.

It's refreshing to find a publication that faults the mainstream media--especially the New York Times--for being too pro-American military. But I wonder if Common Dreams had this same kind of editorial when President Clinton dropped bombs on civilians in Kosovo from thousands of feet in the air. I don't remember hearing any outrage, but I didn't read anything in Common Dreams back then.

I'm not really sure what Solomon would prefer that we do to deal with Islamofascist terrorists. Would targeted assassinations be acceptable? Obviously, we can't do anything the would result in non-combatants getting injured, because that would make us torturers just like the terrorists:

Based on the available evidence from Abu Ghraib to Afghanistan to Guantanamo, anyone who claims that U.S. foreign policy does not include torture is disingenuous or deluded.

Reporters for the New York Times and other big U.S. media outlets would not dream of publicly describing what American firepower does to Iraqi civilians as "barbaric."

An eyewitness account from American author Rahul Mahajan, during the U.S. attack on Fallujah in April 2004, said: "During the course of roughly four hours at a small clinic in Fallujah, I saw perhaps a dozen wounded brought in. Among them was a young woman, 18 years old, shot in the head. She was having a seizure and foaming at the mouth when they brought her in; doctors did not expect her to survive the night."

Rahul Mahajan is described as, "a leader of Peace Action and the National Network to End the War Against Iraq," by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting.

We hear that of course the U.S. tries to avoid killing civilians -- as if that makes killing them okay. But the slaughter from the air and from other U.S. military actions is a certain result of the occupiers' war.

Fine. I won't argue that we try to avoid killing civilians, though nobody says that makes killing them okay. I will argue that our soldiers often put themselves in harm's way in order to avoid civilian casualties--something that military forces from other countries in other wars have not done.

But if you want to talk about "slaughter from the air," let's talk about 9/11. And if you want to talk about "barbaric," and killing being okay, then let's go into a little more detail about just what happened to our two kidnapped soldiers. Malott's Blog describes it this way:

Yesterday afternoon I was listening to The Peter Heck Show as Mr Heck described how those two young soldiers were tortured and killed in Iraq... How their arms were twisted from their sockets and their eyes were gouged out... How they were emasculated... And had their hearts cut from their bodies. I stopped what I was doing and sat down.

Here's the difference between us and them. Here's what makes what they do "barbarism:" The animals who tortured our soldiers enjoyed it. They took pleasure in the screams and the pain of our soldiers. They relished the horror we would feel when we found out what they did. And they would do it again and again and again.

Yes, civilians die during war. It's the nature of war. We don't like the deaths. We try not to do it. But if we were to follow Solomon's approach and give peace a chance, we would be handing Iraq--and eventually the world--over to the true barbarian monsters who wantonly torture and kill. And the civilian death toll would make the numbers from our War in Iraq pale into insignificance.

We must continue to fight, and we must win. And Norman Solomon will eventually reap the benefits of the fight for his freedom and safety that he refuses even to acknowledge.