thedrifter
05-13-05, 04:49 AM
05.12.2005
From The Editor
The Ambush at Home
By Ed Offley
With Operation Matador at full swing across northwestern Iraq this week, it's probably safe to say our Marines have not caught all of the news from home. I'm glad for that. They would not be encouraged to learn that a concerted effort is underway to portray all of them as mentally unbalanced killers.
Consider just one unit: The Marines of 1st Platoon, Lima Company were pretty busy on Sunday and Monday as they battled crazed Arab jihadists in house-to-house fighting in the Iraqi town of Ubaydi, about 15 miles east of the Syrian border. As a reporter from The Washington Post embedded with the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment described the fighting:
"Screaming 'Allahu Akbar' to the end, the foreign fighters lay on their backs in a narrow crawl space under a house and blasted their machine guns up through the concrete floor with bullets designed to penetrate tanks. They fired at U.S. Marines, driving back wave after wave as the Americans tried to retrieve a fallen comrade."
"Through Sunday night and into Monday morning, the foreign fighters battled on, their screaming voices gradually fading to just one. In the end, it took five Marine assaults, grenades, a tank firing bunker-busting artillery rounds, 500-pound bombs unleashed by an F/A-18 attack plane and a point-blank attack by a rocket launcher to quell them."
"The Marines got their fallen man, suffering one more dead and at least five wounded in the process. And according to survivors of the battle, the foreign fighters near the Syrian border proved to be everything their reputation had suggested: fierce, determined and lethal to the last."
(Update: In two separate combat incidents this week – the house-to-house fighting and an IED attack on an amtrac vehicle – one squad from Lima Co. lost six Marines killed and 15 wounded, The Washington Post reported today.)
What is happening along the upper Euphrates River valley is a straightforward military operation. U.S. military commanders in Iraq are attempting to destroy a network of training camps and safe houses in the remote desert area that have been used to funnel in a steady stream of radical Muslims who are killing themselves, Iraqis and American troops with suicide bombs.
The stakes are high. As several experts told The Washington Times, the upsurge in fighting in Iraq is more and more looking more like a showdown with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda followers than a battle primarily against Saddam Hussein loyalists. The savage escalation of suicide bombings across Iraq shows the terrorists' intent and ongoing capability. "If they fail in Iraq, Osama and his whole crew are finished," retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, a military author and analyst, told the Times.
More than 1,000 of our brave Marines have gone in to do the hard fighting. They have endured IED traps, mortar attacks and enemy fixed positions with no reported complaint. They have lost comrades but have not had time to pause and grieve. After hours of fighting and a brief interval to rest and reload, they have resumed the fight again, fearing the next shots from a concealed jihadist ambush.
But it's the ambush here at home that I want to talk about.
From Hollywood to the pages of The New York Times and other liberal publications, we are seeing evidence of a new, deliberate campaign to turn the American people against the troops. After years of virulently opposing the war in Iraq while giving lip service to support for our men and women who are doing the fighting and dying there, a growing number of cultural and political luminaries have apparently now decided that the only way they will prevail is to turn the American people against their own sons and daughters in uniform.
Iraq may not be Vietnam, but the anti-Iraq activists have turned to the playbooks of the Vietnam anti-war movement to paint all of our troops with the same black tar (see my earlier column, "A Big Problem or a Big Lie?" DefenseWatch, March 31, 2005).
Consider Times film critic Caryn James' encomium to a raft of new anti-war movies and TV shows that are in production this spring ("Critic's Corner," May 11, 2005). Ms. James, who counts herself as a spiritual kinswoman of Hollywood's two geopolitical experts, Michael Moore and Tim Robbins, begins with an overview of our nation's wars and the symbolic veterans as portrayed by Hollywood:
"Every war inspires its emblematic screen heroes, from the stoic World War II veterans of 'The Best Years of Our Lives' (1946) to the paraplegic Vietnam veteran who gains a political conscience, played by Jon Voight in 'Coming Home' (1978). Now, in a just completed film called 'Harsh Times,' Christian Bale is a veteran for our time. He plays an Army Ranger who returns from Iraq so haunted by what he has done, so psychologically scarred, that he turns to criminal acts back home."
There you have it in a nutshell: All World War II veterans were "stoic" and deserved our support. Vietnam veterans were crippled victims or psychologically unbalanced killers. So, too, the veterans of the post-9/11 era will all come home too "psychologically scarred" to function in society and will turn to violent crime. But there's more:
"Such problems resonate with particular sharpness in [the new movie] 'Brothers,' about a soldier, Michael, who leaves his wife and children to fight with the United Nations forces in Afghanistan, and his ne'er-do-well brother, Jannik, who stays home and tries to pull his life together. Before going into combat, Michael tells his men, 'If any of you doubt that we're doing the right thing, wait till we get there,' but that hint at politics is quickly dropped."
"Soon Michael is believed to be dead, and Jannik becomes the emotional mainstay of his brother's family. But the audience knows that Michael has been taken prisoner, and that he commits horrors beyond what he imagined possible. When he returns, he is haunted by ghosts he is unable to talk about, and explodes in episodes of violence."
continued........
From The Editor
The Ambush at Home
By Ed Offley
With Operation Matador at full swing across northwestern Iraq this week, it's probably safe to say our Marines have not caught all of the news from home. I'm glad for that. They would not be encouraged to learn that a concerted effort is underway to portray all of them as mentally unbalanced killers.
Consider just one unit: The Marines of 1st Platoon, Lima Company were pretty busy on Sunday and Monday as they battled crazed Arab jihadists in house-to-house fighting in the Iraqi town of Ubaydi, about 15 miles east of the Syrian border. As a reporter from The Washington Post embedded with the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment described the fighting:
"Screaming 'Allahu Akbar' to the end, the foreign fighters lay on their backs in a narrow crawl space under a house and blasted their machine guns up through the concrete floor with bullets designed to penetrate tanks. They fired at U.S. Marines, driving back wave after wave as the Americans tried to retrieve a fallen comrade."
"Through Sunday night and into Monday morning, the foreign fighters battled on, their screaming voices gradually fading to just one. In the end, it took five Marine assaults, grenades, a tank firing bunker-busting artillery rounds, 500-pound bombs unleashed by an F/A-18 attack plane and a point-blank attack by a rocket launcher to quell them."
"The Marines got their fallen man, suffering one more dead and at least five wounded in the process. And according to survivors of the battle, the foreign fighters near the Syrian border proved to be everything their reputation had suggested: fierce, determined and lethal to the last."
(Update: In two separate combat incidents this week – the house-to-house fighting and an IED attack on an amtrac vehicle – one squad from Lima Co. lost six Marines killed and 15 wounded, The Washington Post reported today.)
What is happening along the upper Euphrates River valley is a straightforward military operation. U.S. military commanders in Iraq are attempting to destroy a network of training camps and safe houses in the remote desert area that have been used to funnel in a steady stream of radical Muslims who are killing themselves, Iraqis and American troops with suicide bombs.
The stakes are high. As several experts told The Washington Times, the upsurge in fighting in Iraq is more and more looking more like a showdown with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda followers than a battle primarily against Saddam Hussein loyalists. The savage escalation of suicide bombings across Iraq shows the terrorists' intent and ongoing capability. "If they fail in Iraq, Osama and his whole crew are finished," retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, a military author and analyst, told the Times.
More than 1,000 of our brave Marines have gone in to do the hard fighting. They have endured IED traps, mortar attacks and enemy fixed positions with no reported complaint. They have lost comrades but have not had time to pause and grieve. After hours of fighting and a brief interval to rest and reload, they have resumed the fight again, fearing the next shots from a concealed jihadist ambush.
But it's the ambush here at home that I want to talk about.
From Hollywood to the pages of The New York Times and other liberal publications, we are seeing evidence of a new, deliberate campaign to turn the American people against the troops. After years of virulently opposing the war in Iraq while giving lip service to support for our men and women who are doing the fighting and dying there, a growing number of cultural and political luminaries have apparently now decided that the only way they will prevail is to turn the American people against their own sons and daughters in uniform.
Iraq may not be Vietnam, but the anti-Iraq activists have turned to the playbooks of the Vietnam anti-war movement to paint all of our troops with the same black tar (see my earlier column, "A Big Problem or a Big Lie?" DefenseWatch, March 31, 2005).
Consider Times film critic Caryn James' encomium to a raft of new anti-war movies and TV shows that are in production this spring ("Critic's Corner," May 11, 2005). Ms. James, who counts herself as a spiritual kinswoman of Hollywood's two geopolitical experts, Michael Moore and Tim Robbins, begins with an overview of our nation's wars and the symbolic veterans as portrayed by Hollywood:
"Every war inspires its emblematic screen heroes, from the stoic World War II veterans of 'The Best Years of Our Lives' (1946) to the paraplegic Vietnam veteran who gains a political conscience, played by Jon Voight in 'Coming Home' (1978). Now, in a just completed film called 'Harsh Times,' Christian Bale is a veteran for our time. He plays an Army Ranger who returns from Iraq so haunted by what he has done, so psychologically scarred, that he turns to criminal acts back home."
There you have it in a nutshell: All World War II veterans were "stoic" and deserved our support. Vietnam veterans were crippled victims or psychologically unbalanced killers. So, too, the veterans of the post-9/11 era will all come home too "psychologically scarred" to function in society and will turn to violent crime. But there's more:
"Such problems resonate with particular sharpness in [the new movie] 'Brothers,' about a soldier, Michael, who leaves his wife and children to fight with the United Nations forces in Afghanistan, and his ne'er-do-well brother, Jannik, who stays home and tries to pull his life together. Before going into combat, Michael tells his men, 'If any of you doubt that we're doing the right thing, wait till we get there,' but that hint at politics is quickly dropped."
"Soon Michael is believed to be dead, and Jannik becomes the emotional mainstay of his brother's family. But the audience knows that Michael has been taken prisoner, and that he commits horrors beyond what he imagined possible. When he returns, he is haunted by ghosts he is unable to talk about, and explodes in episodes of violence."
continued........