Rules of Engagement

From Lt G at Kaboom – an encapsulated insight into how we are letting lawyers and back office idiots endanger our troops:

… the Iraq War has become so PC, so cluttered, so trigger-shy five years into the war, that any round fired – no matter how justified or understandable at the time of the incident – yields paperwork inquiries and scrutiny more fitting of a Senate Judiciary Committee report. Staff monkeys have found new purpose in this combat zone as Monday morning quarterbacks, conducting investigations with omnipotent spotlights to cut through the fog of war days after the storm passed.

I didn’t want to spend the next decade at Fort Leavenworth cutting stone, and certainly didn’t want any of my men to do that, either. Maybe that’s what would have happened if I had ordered them to shoot then. Maybe not. Anything now is just surmising, reflecting back with the benefit of hindsight on decisions made in mere seconds during a black tempest of confusion. We employed proper rules of engagement, just like we’re taught to by the Army lawyers hired to teach us how to avoid jail-time and war crimes and sensationalized scandals reported by a clueless, leaching mass media to an equally clueless public addicted to shock and awe. For every Abu-Ghraib there are hundreds of stories like this; unreported acts of trepidation brought on by the castigation of our combat operations in the name of nation building.

So Haditha and Abu-Ghraib have served their purpose for the leftists and the media. It comes as no surprise that we have very intelligent people in our Army and none of them wants to have their name splashed all over the media and even if they are exonerated know that their honor will be be-smirched forever.

So how many men have died for the media? There’s lots of leftist media types who will go to their graves with blood on the hands and on their souls. I only hope they receive the appropriate punishment for their denigration of the people who allowed them to sleep safe in the beds at night. And that the souls of those they had a hand in killing torment them forever.