[Shadow_Group] Fw: JINSA Report #451 A JINSA Contest

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JINSA
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202-667-3900
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November 19, 2004

JINSA Report #451

A JINSA Contest

"Chicken Hawk" is a derisive term sneeringly applied by anti-military 
types to people who have not served in the armed forces but who 
nevertheless understand the utility of military force in service of 
American national security ends.  It has been applied to some in the 
Pentagon, in fact, who are responsible for our forces in Iraq and 
Afghanistan.

It is a clever turn of phrase.  Wrong, but a clever turn of phrase.
We are not that clever, so we're turning to you, our readers.

We are holding a contest for an appellation for those who have never 
supported our troops but who publicly castigate soldiers in the field 
for doing their jobs.  Those who have not served in the military but 
insist they know how it "should" be done. Those who have never found a 
military action that they could support, but insist they know a "war 
crime" when they see one – and who see one in every military action. 
Those who claim to support our soldiers if not their war – and then use 
their access to the media to make the soldiers' jobs harder by an order 
of magnitude.  Those who took a single moment out of 10 days of non-stop 
fighting in Fallujah and offered it up as propaganda for the enemies of 
a single Marine, all the Marines and all the troops fighting for a free 
Iraq.

Those people need a name.  We will publish the best ones you send us.

But there are other people who need a name.  What can we call people in 
the American military and civilian hierarchy who should have leapt to 
the defense of the Marine who shot a military aged man in a bunker 
during a battle, but who hid instead behind the promise of an 
"investigation"? Are they afraid to say that all over Iraq (and the PA 
territories) mosques can no longer be considered holy because they are 
routinely used as military installations, and that shooting from 
mosques, schools and hospitals is routine?  Why didn't they say 
booby-trapped bodies – living and dead – have been found in Iraq and 
there was no reason for any Marine to believe a wounded man was "safe"? 
  Why didn't they say that just the day before, a booby-trapped corpse 
had killed the Marine's buddy?  Why didn't they talk about the mutilated 
body of a blond woman found in the streets of Fallujah, and other 
mutilated bodies found by the troops – making it extremely unwise to put 
idealism ahead of a soldier's personal safety, given the realities of 
this battlefield?

In Fallujah, and elsewhere in Iraq, we have seen butchers whose 
depravity knows no bounds.  They kidnap aid workers, blow up women and 
children, and have no respect for human life or religion – even their 
own. We have thrown young Americans into that furnace and asked them to 
do the almost impossible – to fight that enemy and retain their humanity 
and uphold the standards of conduct of the American armed forces.

Some soldiers have done and will do things for which they should and no 
doubt will be sanctioned by their superiors. Some might have done them 
in Fallujah.  But no one should be allowed to take 15 seconds of film 
with no context as an excuse to ruin one soldier or all of the soldiers. 
  Give us a name for people who try.




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