New Series: Useful Idiots

I know, I know. A new series when I haven't even really paid off the previously promised series'? I'm trying folks. I really am. There's a What We are Dealing With post in post-production and several Spyware posts in the can. Where's the trust?

In any case, here are a couple of video presentations from a former soldier who was deployed to Iraq. He has now turned State's and is playing puppet for the Not In Our Name loons. While I have no new or particularly insightful reasons to question soldier-turned-conscientious objector Aidan Delgado's claims about what he saw in Iraq, Michelle Malkin and others do.

I guess where I come down on it, is that even if Delgado's charges about soldiers breaking Coke bottles over Iraqi civilians' heads, scooping the brains out of detainees' heads and lashing Iraqi children with antennae are 100% accurate, there can be no doubt that this isn't mere reporting of facts on the ground. At best Mr. Delgado is cherry-picking his war stories and telling them incompletely or out of context. We know that bad things happen in all wars. Even during the heroic struggles of World War II, we know that some Americans crossed the line and tortured prisoners, were inhumane to civilians and killed innocents. But it seems to me that Mr. Delgado is spinning his story to justify his own cowardice and confusion. In a rather telling part of one of the videos, Delgado states that it wasn't until he was in Iraq and "saw the faces" that all of the "hell of war" really dawned on him. This son of a diplomat then went on to state that it wasn't until then that he realized that many of the Iraqi prisoners were "poor and uneducated without much choice but to fight, just like us." As if that were the point.

As Socrates suggested, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Even more so when your lack of examination turns you into a useful idiot.