Lethal Brilliance

"Robert MacNamara was the brilliant number-cruncher who served for seven years, but got snared in the Vietnam War. Donald Rumsfeld is the brilliant bureaucratic fighter who served almost six years but got snared by a war in Iraq."

Those were the words of Steve Inskeep as he began his interview with David Halberstam today on Morning Edition. I hate to tell Inskeep, but neither of these mass murderers got snared in their brilliant wars - the ones who were snared were the countless civilians and thousands of soldiers who perished under their genius.

We now know that between 426,369 and 793,663 civilians have needlessly died in Rumsfeld's Iraq experiment, but to find the "crunched numbers" of civilians killed in Vietnam took a bit more searching. However, sources seem to agree on a figure between 2 and 4 million people. How one can call such monsters brilliant is outside of my moral universe.

I've come to expect such moral depravity from Inskeep, but he wasn't alone; David Halbertam had some unsavory comments on why Operation Iraqi Freedom is a losing prospect. "Right now, every night on Arab TV, in the Arab world, with Arab spin, in Arab language, there is the taking of the film of what’s going on there and the spin in an anti-American way so that we are profoundly affecting future generations in that area, making them think a) that we are aggressors, Christian aggressors and b) that we are weak Christian and weak and incompetent Christian aggressors. It’s a twofer and they’re both bad."

Halberstam has a thing about Arabs, doesn't he? It's amazing how those Arabs can spin our unprovoked war of agression against Iraq into making us look like the agressors. And to think they spin our crusader President and Christian warrior generals (Boykin and Mattis) into looking like Christian agressors is a real accomplishment? Next thing you know is they'll take the photos and videos shot by our troops and make it look like we torture people!

Halberstam does show his soft side when he talks about considering "the child." He is refering to the US soldiers sent to kill and be killed in Iraq and recalling that each one is someone's child. I would agree with that sentiment, but he doesn't make a peep about the Iraqi children who are shot, burned, blasted, malnourished, etc. by the US Iraq war.

There is something horrible about this kind of exceptionalism that puts a premium on American lives while treating those we kill as unworthy of even mentioning, much less counting.