Barack Obama Meet John Kerry

When John Kerry appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, he said this about US soldiers in Vietnam:

"[W]e had an investigation at which over 150 ... veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia …. [T]hey told stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads ... randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan …. [W]e are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions …."

Last week in New Hampshire, Barack Obama said this about our soldiers in Afghanistan:

"Asked whether he would move U.S. troops out of Iraq to better fight terrorism elsewhere, [Obama] brought up Afghanistan and said, ‘We've got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.’"

Let me see if I understand what Obama said: Because we do not have enough troops in Afghanistan, the soldiers we do have there are just bombing villages and killing civilians; i.e., they are committing war crimes.

John Kerry has said he was not accusing our soldiers with these comments; he was talking about what the people in charge were making them do. I am sure Obama would say something similar, but it doesn’t work. Following orders, or being forced to do something by circumstances, is not an excuse when what you are doing is wrong. (I’m surprised Obama, a former law professor, has not heard of a place called Nuremberg.)

In any case, the important thing here is not what Obama said. The important thing is what this says about the mindset of the person who said it. It is a mindset whose default position seems to be that US soldiers do bad things, whose initial reaction to a claim that our soldiers did something wrong seems to be to accept it as true. It is the same mindset that automatically believed the kind of things reported in The New Republic because that is what they think of our soldiers. (See here and here.)

Compare this statement to what Obama would say about poorer people. As a liberal Democrat, as a former community organizer, is there any doubt that Obama’s initial reaction to accusations against poorer people would be to reject them and disbelieve them? Of course, because those are his kind of people. He knows them. But when it comes to our soldiers, his reaction is apparently different.

Obama’s advisers know that what he said in New Hampshire is not the kind of thing he should be saying (at least not in that way), and they will work with him so he avoids making similar statements in the future. But at least we have had a chance to find out what he really thinks about our soldiers, about what his real mindset is, when he is talking without a script.*

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* It is possible that Obama just does not have enough experience to realize what he was saying, but since he has told us that judgment is more important than experience, it cannot be that.

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AP Report August 14
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070814/ap_on_el_pr/obama_afghanistan_fact_check;_ylt=AlHfShG7KOBGnRTRQd1kD62yFz4D

THE FACT CHECK:

A check of the facts shows that Western forces have been killing civilians at a faster rate than the insurgents have been killing civilians.

The U.S. and NATO say they don't have civilian casualty figures, but The Associated Press has been keeping count based on figures from Afghan and international officials. Tracking civilian deaths is a difficult task because they often occur in remote and dangerous areas that are difficult to reach and verify.

As of Aug. 1, the AP count shows that while militants killed 231 civilians in attacks in 2007, Western forces killed 286. Another 20 were killed in crossfire that can't be attributed to one party.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai expressed his concern about the civilian deaths during a meeting last week with President Bush.

Bush said he understands the agony that Afghans feel over the loss of innocent lives and that he is doing everything he can to protect them. He said the Taliban are using civilians as human shields and have no regard for their lives.

"The president rightly expressed his concerns about civilian casualty," Bush said of Karzai. "And I assured him that we share those concerns."

[Pat Allen]

Let me thank the Obama campaign, or whoever was commenting on their behalf, for their response (see below) to my post. The speed at which they did it was impressive.

Three comments on the response: First, as others have said, it was interesting how quickly the Associated Press issued this press release in support of the Obama campaign. Just another example of the objective, non-partisan mainstream media at work.

Second, the number of casualties is not the point, even assuming the Associated Press can keep an accurate count of civilians killed by terrorists in Afghanistan. The point is Obama was effectively saying, even if he will now claim he did not mean it that way, that our soldiers, because we do not have enough troops in Afghanistan, are bombing villages and killing civilians without justification.

Third, the preprogrammed response from or behalf of the Obama campaign did not address my third and most important point, which was his mindset. In my opinion, that point still remains.