Tuesday, November 23, 2004

the inevitable fallout

I've intentionally refrained from addressing this incident, till I found a link via Easy Bake Coven to the reporting source, Kevin Sites.

Something that has been running through my head though, that won't leave me alone so that I'm just gonna burst until I say it. Maybe this is stating the obvious, maybe this will just outrage those people on the left who want to condemn this soldier outright, and those people on the right who want to go into automatic defensive mode and threaten anyone who has the "audacity" to respond to this tragic incident with outrage and shock... but the bottom line is this:

Horrible, horrible things happen in war. And that is just small consolation to those poor frightened wounded old men in that mosque, and small consolation to the soldier who also obviously reacted in defensive fear to what he perceived was an ultimate threat. This is not an attempt to make any viable justification for what happened nor is it an intention of trying to minimize the complexity of situations and circumstances that surround the nightmare that is Iraq.

But... horrible, horrible things happen in wars. And the ULTIMATE RESPONSIBILITY for anything and everything that happens, particularly during one as questionable as this one, belongs squarely with the man who declared it.

That anyone can blame anyone else, really, is just - it just flat out feels wrong. War is Hell. Our soldiers have been thrown in, unprepared and overtaxed, and the strain is no doubt going to begin surfacing everywhere. Meanwhile, this administration has, through this war effort, created thousands of enemies and insurgents in an unstable Iraq and while these insurgents begin their infiltrations, thousands of innocent civilians, the ones that this administration insists they are "liberating" are caught in the middle.

This is not Kevin Sites fault; it is not the fault of those poor old men in the mosque and it's not the fault of our soldiers. The fault lies with this administration. If anyone wants to lay blame, lay it there. Because that is just exactly where it belongs.
Posted by etherealfire :: 1:13 AM :: 0 Comments:

Post / Read Comments

---------------oOo---------------