Today in the Wall Street Journal:

Semper Fi
The story of Fallujah isn't on that NBC videotape.

Thursday, November 18, 2004 12:01 a.m.

Some 40 Marines have just lost their lives cleaning out one of the world's
worst terror dens, in Fallujah, yet all the world wants to talk about is the
NBC videotape of a Marine shooting a prostrate Iraqi inside a mosque. Have
we lost all sense of moral proportion?
The al-Zarqawi TV network, also known as Al-Jazeera, has broadcast the tape
to the Arab world, and U.S. media have also played it up. The point seems to
be to conjure up images again of Abu Ghraib, further maligning the American
purpose in Iraq. Never mind that the pictures don't come close to telling us
about the context of the incident, much less what was on the mind of the
soldier after days of combat.




Put yourself in that Marine's boots. He and his mates have had to endure
some of the toughest infantry duty imaginable, house-to-house urban fighting
against an enemy that neither wears a uniform nor obeys any normal rules of
war. Here is how that enemy fights, according to an account in the Times of
London:
"In the south of Fallujah yesterday, U.S. Marines found the armless, legless
body of a blonde woman, her throat slashed and her entrails cut out.
Benjamin Finnell, a hospital apprentice with the U.S. Navy Corps, said that
she had been dead for a while, but at that location for only a day or two.
The woman was wearing a blue dress; her face had been disfigured. It was
unclear if the remains were the body of the Irish-born aid worker Margaret
Hassan, 59, or of Teresa Borcz, 54, a Pole abducted two weeks ago. Both were
married to Iraqis and held Iraqi citizenship; both were kidnapped in Baghdad
last month."

When not disemboweling Iraqi women, these killers hide in mosques and
hospitals, booby-trap dead bodies, and open fire as they pretend to
surrender. Their snipers kill U.S. soldiers out of nowhere. According to one
account, the Marine in the videotape had seen a member of his unit killed by
another insurgent pretending to be dead. Who from the safety of his
Manhattan sofa has standing to judge what that Marine did in that mosque?




Beyond the one incident, think of what the Marine and Army units just
accomplished in Fallujah. In a single week, they killed as many as 1,200 of
the enemy and captured 1,000 more. They did this despite forfeiting the
element of surprise, so civilians could escape, and while taking precautions
to protect Iraqis that no doubt made their own mission more difficult and
hazardous. And they did all of this not for personal advantage, and
certainly not to get rich, but only out of a sense of duty to their
comrades, their mission and their country.
In a more grateful age, this would be hailed as one of the great battles in
Marine history--with Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Hue City and the Chosin
Reservoir. We'd know the names of these military units, and of many of the
soldiers too. Instead, the name we know belongs to the NBC correspondent,
Kevin Sites.

We suppose he was only doing his job, too. But that doesn't mean the rest of
us have to indulge in the moral abdication that would equate deliberate
televised beheadings of civilians with a Marine shooting a terrorist, who
may or may not have been armed, amid the ferocity of battle.





I would also urge you to read the book "Black Hawk Down" by Mark Bowden.

Finally, Christian, I find it amazing that you condemn this incident while
remaining silent on your country's military conduct in Cote d'Ivoire.


Denys

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