David Hoppe

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:: Don't attack the soldiers

Remember who put them there
By David Hoppe

When the news about the killing of 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha and an alleged cover-up found its way into American public consciousness, apologists for President Bush's war were quick to try and place limits on how the rest of us would think and talk about the story.

The first thing they did was to suggest that it was best not talk about it at all. The demands of military justice, they said, made it impossible for the Marines or, for that matter, Donald Rumsfeld, to comment on an on-going investigation. But the inadequacy of this approach was soon apparent. The existence of a videotape, not to mention an ever-growing array of witnesses, Iraqi and American, meant the story wouldn't just go away.

And then there was that question of a cover-up. Refusing to talk about what happened in Haditha only made suspicions worse.

So the supporters of the president resorted to Plan B: They put the focus on the soldiers. This method was tried and true. It worked pretty well to defuse outrage over the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. To date, 11 soldiers have been convicted of crimes in connection with the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners, the latest being Army Sgt. Santos A. Cardona, a dog handler, who on June 2 was sentenced to 90 days hard labor for dereliction of duty and aggravated assault.

If, said the president's apologists, what the soldiers were accused of doing in Haditha was true, that was terrible, terrible and punishment was in order. In the meantime, they said, everyone should stop attacking the soldiers for what they did and, besides, as pundit Carol Platt Liebau put it on the The Huffington Post : "It's also worth noting that our soldiers liberated 25 million Iraqis from Saddam Hussein's murderous regime. That means American soldiers freed more than a million people for every one that was wrongly killed (if that, indeed, is what happened)."

For the most part, the media has been willing to play along with this approach. In the first place, hardly anyone worth listening to has been boorish enough to attack the soldiers. Instead, what we've seen is a barrage of psychologizing columns and articles about the truly awful kinds of stress associated with fighting a guerilla war in a hostile landscape where friends and enemies look the same.

In the privacy of their gated communities, the president's supporters must be delighted. While the media natters on about the soldiers' actions and the trials that undoubtedly await some of them, hardly a word has been spent on the people who put those soldiers in Haditha in the first place.

You don't hear much about Paul Wolfowitz, the man who said U.S. soldiers would be greeted as liberators and that Iraq was "a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon." President Bush appointed him head of the World Bank. Douglas Feith isn't in the news these days either. He was in charge of creating the documents that showed the supposed ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. He's at Harvard, writing a book about how to fight terrorism.

Here in Indiana , of course, we hear a lot about Mitch Daniels - he's our governor. But between 2001 and 2003 he was director of the Office of Management and Budget, the man who released initial estimates about the cost of the Iraq war. He called the war an "affordable endeavor" and said that estimates that it might cost as much as $100 to $200 billion were "very, very high." Today the cost of the war is approaching $1 trillion.

And what about George Tenet? He was director of the CIA, and even though his agency told him there wasn't sufficient evidence to accuse Saddam of having weapons of mass destruction, he told the president this was a "slam dunk case." Then he issued a statement drafted by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby taking responsibility for the false statements Bush made about the Iraqi threat in his 2003 State of the Union address. President Bush awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Condoleeza Rice is doing fine. Although, as National Security Adviser, she blew off at least two CIA memos stating that the evidence behind Iraq 's acquisition of uranium for bomb making was weak, she supported going to war because, she said, "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." President Bush made her Secretary of State.

Then there's Vice President Dick Cheney. He said Iraq may have had a role in 9/11, that "it was pretty well confirmed" that hijacker Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officials. He also said Saddam was "in fact reconstituting his nuclear program." A year ago he told Larry King: "I think they're in their last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

President Bush is at the center of this circle. "If there is wrongdoing, people will be held to account," he said about Haditha. He said the world would see "a full and complete investigation."

Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli instructed his subordinate officers in Iraq to train soldiers in "core warrior values," a course which will include a slideshow. All soldiers will be required to undergo the training in the next 30 days.