| Wednesday, November 17, 2004 |
14:21 - Double-double with grilled onions and extra hippie
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Yesterday morning I was driving up to Ukiah to pick up my folks for a shuttle maneuver to an early flight this morning. I stopped in for lunch at the In-N-Out Burger in Mill Valley, the one with no drive-thru and no outdoor seating, so a single diner is always forced to share a table with some other lone traveler who couldn't shoulder his way to the counter where people sit with their drinks and wait for their burgers to appear.
Next to me, on my left, was a young couple—college-age, it seemed. The guy was directly to my left, so I didn't get a good look at him beyond the baseball cap and hooded sweatshirt; the girl, diagonally across from me, had that skinny, pinched, stringy, beaded-hair sort of look that always seems to accompany a steely look in the eye and a torrent of truly bewildering words, the kind that no amount of research can prepare you for.
I guess they must have been co-workers or something, because they clearly knew each other well enough to be eating at In-N-Out, but they didn't know each other well enough to have discussed each other's political viewpoints yet. I was witness to the unfurling of two opposed positions entrenching themselves in increasingly raised voices over a couple of burgers.
The immediate subject was the prisoner shooting incident in Fallujah. The guy said that he had some friends who were over in Iraq, and he knew them—they wouldn't just kill someone out of hand for no reason. He said a good many other things, things that led me to believe that he's been paying a good deal of attention to news sources other than what's on broadcast TV at six: he said that in his opinion the mainstream media is unhelpfully biased against the war and actively harming our efforts by covering every possible negative angle like paparazzi. He even said that in war, there are some occasions where censorship is necessary in order to win.
She didn't like this at all. There's nothing that should ever be censored, she said. The news media "are all controlled by... America," she haltingly growled, as though she wanted to say something else instead of that final word. (The guy tried to interject questions about Reuters and Agence France Presse, but was interrupted.) In her opinion, the war is fundamentally unjust because "you don't fight a war to liberate a country, so that's a pile of sh-- right there." (I guess give me liberty or give me death was just a suicide note.) And she then told the guy that she'd been listening to an interview—where, she didn't say—in which the interviewee told of Westerners who had gone to Iraq to help reconstruct, and who were told harrowing tales of oppression and horror at the hands of the Americans, tales which they pleaded with the Westerners to take back with them and tell us. In particular, she related a lurid story (one of many, she said, that never show up in the hopelessly biased pro-war press) that went as follows:
An Iraqi family was on their way home from dinner after dark. On the highway between the city where they'd eaten and where they lived, they saw a pair of headlights approaching. They pulled over to give the approaching vehicle room; but suddenly it swerved, stopped, blocked the road, and a bunch of American soldiers jumped out of what was clearly a Humvee. They then without warning emptied their guns into the family's car, killing the father, the mother, wounding one of the kids (who escaped and crawled off the road and out of sight), and then proceeded to steal the father's wallet, the mother's jewelry, and the young daughter's earrings right out of her ears.
The guy to my left made some conciliatory noise like "Yeah, well... there will always be horror stories." Which, of course, made the girl triumphantly ski away on a tangent about how this proves we don't hear enough bad stories about what goes on in Iraq, and how we're told an overly rosy story about our actions there. It was at that point that I finished my burger and got up to leave; actually I wasn't quite done, either, but I wanted to get out of there before I jumped in myself to the guy's defense.
Why in the hell would American soldiers murder and rob an Iraqi family? What possible motive could they have? Iraqis aren't rich people; it makes no sense whatsoever to say that the soldiers in question would have accosted a passing family on their way back from the Baghdad Applebee's with the hope of committing some random murder and stealing a child's earrings. I mean, am I totally off-base here? Or does something smell funny about this story? I can only assume it was originally related by the kid (or whoever it was) who escaped; could he possibly not be telling a perfectly accurate account? Or is it possible that there are two sides to this story?
We all remember what happened with that incident about a year ago when the soldiers in the Bradley stopped a pickup truck and searched its passengers at a nearby bridge, with the result that one of them fell in and died, leading to a huge scandal that got the whole unit pretty heavily punished, as I recall. (It didn't just get hushed up.) And of course there's always Abu Ghraib for people who hunger for good dirt against our military to suck on. (I don't recall the Zionist-controlled media covering that one up, somehow.) It seems to me that for someone to believe unquestioningly this one-sided story, with no corroboration or indeed logical consistency, reveals an insatiable desire to believe only the worst about us and the best about anyone opposed to us, and an endemic lack of critical thinking. It's the same lack of logic that says Katherine Harris rigged the 2000 election by changing just enough voter registrations to make the election too close to call, rather than by making it one-sided enough not to be suspicious; it's the same lack of logic that says Diebold would set up its electronic voting machines for a clear Bush win by, uh, making it possible for an army of cloak-and-dagger hackers to physically break into every one of them across the country (especially in Ohio) and seed them with enough Bush votes to put him just ahead; it's the same lack of logic that says Bush "lied" about WMDs in Iraq by following the same intelligence that everyone else had in the 90s, and yet forgot to plant some WMDs for our soldiers to "find" after the invasion so as to retroactively justify it instead of subjecting himself to a carton of facial egg. I guess that really shouldn't surprise me these days, and it doesn't, frankly—it's just hard to hear it coming from across an aisle two feet away and not to be able to confront it. And to have to listen to it apparently being successful in browbeating the poor guy into submission.
Of course if incidents like this are actually happening, they're horrible and reprehensible; if they're happening with any frequency at all, and betray anything widespread about the things that motivate our soldiers in general, then it would vastly change my beliefs about said soldiers and their honor and the standards to which they're held. But so far I have no reason to believe that such a story, even if it existed only in rumor form, would not have made it to the headlines of the evening news within hours; or that there's any reason to believe these stories at all without any corroborating evidence to belie the logic under the accusation.
None of the charges the Left levels these days seems to hold up to Occam's Razor. As I've said a number of times here and in e-mail, my credo is that if a theory depends on a perpetrator of some misdeed being both an evil genius and an incompetent fool, then it's not a plausible theory—especially if the facts can equally well be explained by perfectly innocuous means. You get to pick either "evil" or "incompetent"—not both. Picking both just means your brain's going to be spinning in the mud until next Election Day.
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Brian Tiemann
