The neocon war has become a left-liberal war

This is hard to believe, but it appears our forces in Iraq are operating under rules that require them to act like police arresting criminal suspects instead of soldiers fighting an enemy. Maureen C. writes:

Today (Thurs) on TV’s Washington Journal, I watched a former Asst Sec of Defense for Reagan being interviewed. His name was West. After visiting Baghdad, he said that he learned that the troops and the Iraqi police were most distressed by the U.S. army policy of “catch and release” there. In other words, if there isn’t enough evidence to convict the enemy in a court of law, the Marines have to release the enemy soldiers right away—or at the most the enemy is detained in prison only for four months—and then released.

West said that a lawyer accompanies each unit!! He said that the Marines told him that, for example, they saw three Iraqi insurgents setting a roadside explosive and chased them into a house; when the Marines got inside the house, there were four men there, not just the three—and the Pentagon lawyer with them said that they didn’t have a “case” and they had to let all four go free!!

In other words, West is telling us that the U.S. IS CONDUCTING A WAR UNDER THE RULES OF A CRIMINAL PROSECUTION. IN EFFECT WE ARE READING THE ENEMY SOLDIERS THEIR MIRANDA RIGHTS!! We are turning our soldiers into policemen—and putting their lives at risk by preventing them from killing the enemy—by sending lawyers with them into the field. Has ever a war been conducted like this? Has ever a war been won like this?

Also, the former Reagan (1981-83) Asst Secretary West said that the U.S. generals are letting the enemy soldiers out of prison after four months, because they don’t want to have to oversee the care of prisoners who can’t be convicted—and end up being prosecuted themselves like the general who was in charge of Abu Ghraib prison!!

In other words, the PC Administration and Pentagon Lawyers have turned even our Army Generals into SuperBureaucrats whose main goal is protecting their careers. The Generals know that the war is OVER and LOST and the Generals’ main concern is safeguarding their next promotion by avoiding contact with the hundreds of Pentagon lawyers in their midst looking for trouble. The Generals are not primarily concerned with prosecuting a war in a way that defends their young soldiers’ lives but their own careers.

It is beyond belief that a lawyer is being assigned to each combat unit. What sort of a war is this? The U.S. Army is treating a WAR as if it is conducting a CRIMINAL TRIAL!!

My mind cannot even wrap around this idiocy.

LA writes:

As I always say, neoconservatism tends to mutate into left-liberalism. We fought the war not on the assumption that we were defeating an enemy, but on the assumption that we were liberating people who were just like us, people who wanted democracy. That was the first level of unreality, the neocon level of unreality. But once neoconservatism has abstracted you from concrete reality, there is nothing to hold you to reality and you keep going deeper and deeper into the unreal.

The neocon war cancels out the idea of war, of us and them, because all people are like us and we’re just there to liberate them. So there is no enemy to defeat. There are remaining elements that oppose us, but they are not real enemies of us, they are “enemies of freedom.” They may be benighted people who deserve to be put in their place, but they are not an actual enemy.

Once you’re liberating human rights instead of fighting a war, the people who oppose you are not enemies but criminals. And since the governing model for this whole thing is everyone’s equal rights, the criminals have rights too. But if they have rights, and we’re fighting them, their rights have to be protected from us, even as we’re in the act of fighting them. We have become the putative oppressor, who must be watched over by a strict procedural regime to make sure we do not take away anyone’s rights.

In conclusion, the neocon “war” to liberate universalist human beings morphs into a left-liberal “war” aimed at protecting the rights of Iraqis from ourselves, a “war” in which terrorist suspects can be shot at and arrested only under strict rules of police procedure, with each Marine squad accompanied by its own little JAG.

We all remember that disgraceful incident before the war in Afghanistan when Tommy Franks at the last minute called off a hit on the Taliban leader Sheik Omar because “My JAG says no.” That apparently has now become the template for the entire military, down to the squad level. “Sarge, I’ve got a clear shot at the Al Qaeda guys in that house who just fired an RPG at our convoy, can I hit them?” “Wait a sec, I’ll ask my JAG…. Nope, she says we can’t do it.”

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David H. (there are two David H.’s at VFR) writes:

Your conclusions are the exact reason that the American government will not use nuclear weapons in warfare, even if the enemy uses them on us. “Conservatives” have completely adopted the idea of nation-building and “democratizing” nations (when is the last time they called a nation an “enemy nation”?). Since “liberation” is—to many neocons—the only legitimate reason for war, they have created an ideological wall against actually punishing enemy populations. Unless they have a major unprincipled exception, they cannot ever use weapons that will inflict massive non-combatant casualties. I believe the enemy knows this, and such abhorrence of weapons of mass destruction by liberals (who after all run our government) will make the use of a nuclear weapon in the United States much more likely. (I am aware that terrorists are often suicidal, but the nations who support them are usually not and might think twice if a guarantee of nuclear annihilation awaited them). And when did punishment and elimination of threat become unacceptable motives for warfare? Perhaps the only way a nuclear weapon will ever be used again (was Sept. 11 not cause enough?) is if one is used within the United States, AND the liberal government becomes more terrified of the American people than the terrorists (or the unprincipled exception). I pray that it will not come to this, but with open borders, our best and brightest (the soldiers) being sacrificed for idiotic liberal “ideals” and an emboldened enemy (cries of “Islamophobia” can destroy lives and fortunes, constant threats of law suits, the traitorous media, and government appeasement of both terrorists and Iran), I am utterly pessimistic.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 01, 2006 12:07 AM | Send