As Liberals are Quick to Remind Us, Generalizations are Bad, unless Liberals are Using Such

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Last week, a U.S. army sergeant seemingly killed 16 Afghan civilians in cold blood. It’s fair to say, even if you are an anti-war and anti-military Liberal, that this is clearly not standard procedure nor what any of the U.S. military branches trains. In short, it was probably the work of a person who was deranged; something that happens, rarely, in military combat theatres.

This comes on the heels of a video of U.S. Marines urinating on dead Taliban which circulated on the web.  Both actions were unacceptable and the perpetrators must be punished, although their magnitude is clearly far different.

Yet this proves to be instructive as to both our nominal enemy, the Taliban and Islamist Extremists, as well as those opposed to virtually any and all U.S. military involvement anywhere in the world, usually Liberals in this country and the west.

To Liberals, this latest event is is another example of the U.S. military gone off the tracks and playing imperialist conqueror.  Not at all.

The vast majority of U.S. military personnel, in all theatres, are highly professional and act such way; we’d hear otherwise, immediately, if such was not the case.

But Liberals, in a contradiction of their own rationale that generalizations are a bad thing, implicitly paint a broad portrait that all military actions are of the same or similar moral plane and intrinsically tied to those who commit atrocities while in uniform. At a minimum, Liberals peddle the narrative that military actions create and foster the environment for such wrongful, if not horrific, acts. Would Liberals be quick to judge Great Society initiatives if an inner-city youth committed criminal acts?

As for the radical Islamists who have condoned violence against civilized people of all sorts as well as participated in such, the double-standard is resounding. When they commit murder, they blast it over any medium they can and both claim full responsibility and are proud of it. There has yet to be an apology for the murder of of any of the innocent victims of 9/11 or any remorse shown for the barbaric beheading of, amongst others, journalist Daniel Pearl. This is in stark contrast to the thorough investigation, denunciation, and punishment that the U.S. will mete out on those involved in this incident.

And as mentioned prior, it is hard to imagine the Taliban ever giving a Christian or other religious burial to a captured high-level leader of the U.S. if they ever had to inter the body yet that is exactly what the U.S. did with Osama Bin Laden (see “Marines Pull a “Taliban”……Sort Of”, January 16, 2012).

The pity is that this country has a President who doesn’t believe in the Afghanistan operation, let alone any other. So we will not get a clear and forceful response to the often opportunistic criticism that the U.S. will get over this. That alone should be reason for any voter to not support Mr. Obama in the ballot box.

As the investigation of this matter transpires, it is likely that the U.S. will be best judged not by the actual incident of a renegade but how it responds to such.

-I.M. Windee