Paranoia Writ Small

In and of itself, “Shock Troops”, one of a series of “Baghdad Diaries” published by The New Republic, is not very significant. Many of the “facts” related by the diarist are almost certainly fictions, but they are trivial fictions, portraying military misconduct of a low level kind, far distant from Abu Ghraib or Mylai or the atrocities that Islamofascist propagandists allege that American soldiers routinely commit in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Were I the allocator of resources on the right side of the blogosphere, I wouldn’t have devoted a farthing to effort to examining the truth of falsity of the diarist’s stories. But the dexterospherists have no central command. Bloggers familiar with conditions in Iraq expressed doubts about the anecdotes’ veracity. All of the evidence that is now accessible, both that gathered by blogs like Confederate Yankee and the findings of the Army’s own investigation, discredits the diarist: Parts of his accounts, such as hot rodding maneuvers by Bradley APC’s, are implausible on their face, and no one has come forward to corroborate any of the believable bits.

At this point, the debate about whether the reported incidents occurred is too one-sided to be interesting. There are, however, a couple of points that are worth dwelling on. In its way, what would otherwise be hardly a kerfuffle reveals much about the current state of our country’s armed forces and of the portion of our political class that constitutes the “loyal opposition”.

The Duke of Wellington, whose opinion of his troops was summed up in the phrase “scum of the earth”, would barely have blinked, and certainly would not have bothered to order an inquiry, had he been informed that British redcoats had mocked cripples, killed wild dogs for sport, or shown disrespect for corpses. Our military’s intolerance for such actions is an amazing anomaly in the history of warfare. More amazingly, instead of giving the commanders credit for an extraordinarily humane and civilized standard of war making, we civilians take it for granted, then carp at every deviation from a norm that no past army could match. We ought to be filled with admiration for soldiers who can both outfight any other force on earth and mitigate, to the extent that mitigation is possible, the brutality of combat. Were there ever knights sans peur et sans reproche, men for whom ballads should be composed and chansons de geste recited, American infantrymen are they.

The New Republic takes a rather different view. As its editors’ latest apologia makes clear, they believe that the U.S. Army, for the sake of suppressing Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp’s “revelations”, has intimidated witnesses, hidden evidence, coerced the diarist to recant, blocked third party inquiries, and officially orchestrated leaks of distorted information. There’s not the proverbial scintilla of evidence for any of those accusations. They simply form TNR’s presumptions about how Americans in uniform will act. Nothing that the military does will change those idées fixes. The investigations of Abu Ghraib and Haditha, vigorously conducted and resulting in prosecutions (since shown to be largely unwarranted in the latter case), don’t shake the certainty that the United States Armed Forces operate in a manner reminiscent of the Mafia.

The New Republic is not, let’s note, the Daily Kos. It is supposed to typify the most thoughtful, fair-minded and rational segment of contemporary liberalism. Yet it shares the central, paranoid premise of the Angry Left: that its ideological opponents engage in dark conspiracies against it, conspiracies so well hidden that no proof of their existence is needed. Claiming that the Army has somehow obscured all evidence in favor of the Baghdad Diarist is less inflammatory than, say, Air America’s speculations that one of its presenters was mugged by right wingers out to silence her or that Blackwater set the California wildfires, not to mention Pete Stark’s declaration that our soldiers die in Iraq for George W. Bush’s amusement. Less inflammatory, but just as twisted. If Franklin Foer and his colleagues are representative of the respectable Left in this country, “respectable” has lost its meaning.