re: #246 LudwigVanQuixote

Well that’s an excellent point and whole debacle at Abu Ghraib exemplifies that. Truth be told, those soldiers were idiots and deserve the punishment they got. And it’s truly quaint how the left rallied behind that to vilify our military and fuel anti-US sentiment too.

I may have jumped on you unfairly after misunderstanding you. I certainly don’t disagree with anything you just said. I simply believe that there is a vast disconnect between conventional wisdom and what the reality of this war and who we’re fighting is.

My personal opinion is that the media alone has ruined our ability to wage war successfully. First, by giving a minute-by-minute, blow-by-blow update of how brutal war is to a civilian public who will never truly understand. Second, by saturating the world with an isolated event (abu ghraib) that truly does make us look bad, while giving little to no mention of the DAILY humanitarian deeds and missions performed in afghanistan and iraq, not to mention the rest of the world.

While I was in Bagram, the Afghani’s brought us a little boy who had a congenital heart defect which would have, with 100% certainty, have killed him before the age of 5. We arranged to have the boy (and mother) flown to America to have life-saving heart surgery performed, and flown back to Afghanistan. So while conventional wisdom says our enemy will judge us by our character and act accordingly, it’s simply not the case. To my knowledge, not a single taliban or al qaeda fighter has rescued an american after blowing him or her up with a roadside bomb.