Putting a face on the war
Ben Shapiro writes of a conversation he had with three servicemen in a Los Angeles restaurant.  The main problem they see with coverage of the war: Americans don’t, in general, have a face to associate with the war.
The only faces of this war that Americans are seeing are the faces of tortured detainees at Abu Ghraib or of crying Iraqi children as tanks roll through to fight terrorists. The only pictures of American soldiers Americans see are headshots of the wounded or killed, or pictures of caskets. It’s no wonder that support for the war is at an all-time low, despite the fact that Saddam Hussein has been deposed and captured, despite the fact that Iraqis have turned out in the millions to vote, despite the fact that rape rooms and mass murders have been stopped.
We are not led to think highly of our soldiers, either. If they’re not viciously abusing prisoners or flushing korans down toilets, they’re drones with room-temperature IQs (and we’re not talking Celsius, not Fahrenheit!)
Maj. Sukut cited an incredibly offensive interview he saw on Chris Matthews’ “Hardball” (MSNBC) with actor/comedian Richard Belzer. In that interview, Belzer claimed that asking troops in the field what they thought of the war was “bulls—,” since it “doesn’t mean [a soldier is] a brilliant scholar just because he’s there. You think everyone over there is a college graduate? They’re 19- and 20-year-old kids who couldn’t get a job,” Belzer sneered.
Shapiro’s response: He plans to devote space in his colums to giving faces to the people who are fighting in Iraq. His first target: Major Tim Marshall of the 3rd Infantry Division.
He has two degrees from Vanderbilt University, and his father is a vice president at Lincoln Financial Group. Not quite the picture of someone who had no option but soldiering.
Read the rest of it.
| More from Karl Lembke
Stumble It!
