DefendtheDefenders.
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Three years ago, I was leading Marines in Fallujah. Two years ago, with lawyers that many of you helped pay for, I walked into a courtroom at Camp Lejeune to face off against prosecutors in a fight for my life.
Today, I am back in the fight, and ask for your help in defending a team of true American heroes. Drawn from the elite ranks of "Force Recon," the hand-picked men of Marine Special Operations (MARSOC) are literally the best of the best, and instead of being honored they are being investigated for simply doing their job. Our commandos became the latest victims of rushed judgment and political posturing when they were accused of using "excessive force" to defend themselves during a suicide car-bomb triggered ambush targeting the Americans because some purportedly innocent Afghanis got caught in the cross-fire. But that day on March 4, 2007 in the town of Bati Kot, Afghanistan, our Marines became the victims of more than just suicide bombers, they were caught in the teeth of a thoughtfully engineered media ambush that has ensnared them, and by extension the U.S., in the Taliban's fight to wrest control of Afghanistan from the Karzai government.
The Taliban was banking on world opinion arriving at the simple and "obvious" conclusion that our men were responsible for the tragically inevitable loss of life consequent to commandos responding as they are trained to do when faced with the kind of attack that days later would kill nine troopers from the 82nd. The story, neatly packaged for global media consumption, made the April, 15, 2007 cover of The New York Times with the accusatory headline: "Marines Actions in Afghanistan Called Excessive." Not the first time they've gotten it wrong. The paper has a history of incendiary finger pointing that, put mildly, is at odds with the realities of ground combat. For example, last year they decried Task Force Black's methods as extreme (NYT, 3/19/06:"Task Force 6-26: A Grim Portrait of U.S. Abuse"). Of course, the Times never acknowledged that three months later (as a result of those methods) one of the most notorious terrorists in the world, Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, was brought to justice by the very same men of TF Black.
Even if our enemies have become adept at using the all-to-willing American media as a weapon to weaken our national resolve, how can a rational person simply assume that if innocent life was lost, our men did something wrong during that March 4 incident? Illogically high expectations about pinpoint accuracy and target discrimination in a fire-fight are the fantasy of armchair-academics and videogame players. Men on the ground know that war is sloppy and rough. Combat is not a noun or a place that you are "in," but rather a verb, a thing that you "do" to other people. Principally, combat is imposing your will on the enemy by violence of action and the ugly truth is that the process kills all kinds of people: good ones, bad ones, and yes, even our own. When our expectations of success and precision are unrealistic it threatens not only our service men, it emboldens our enemy, and it breaks our will to stand and fight. Suggesting that these highly trained and seasoned Marines acted indiscriminately is preposterous for two key reasons: the first is what we know about the threat that they faced; the second is what we know about the caliber of these Marines.
The threat from suicide attacks and other terroristic activities in Afghanistan has been covered extensively by Alisa Tang's writings for the Associated Press, who has recorded the massive surge in violence there, noting, "The Taliban and other militant groups are committing war crimes by targeting Afghan civilians, killing nearly 700 last year according to a report issued [on April 16, 2007] by Human Rights Watch." Wow. That's not a DoD statistic or some talking-head general, that's the NY-based rights group that also reported that, "of at least 350 bombings, 136 were suicide attacks. Eighty were on military targets but they killed nearly five times more civilians than security personnel." Compare 136 suicide attacks in 2006 with only 21 the year before and only six the year before that. What explains the exponential growth? What explains four suicide bombings last week on May 5, 2007 with only two security personnel killed? There is no military objective being achieved in attriting their own forces and wasting resources, but they are creating pressure on the government with every civilian slaughtered.
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Originally Posted by gabosaurus
