Who needs Axis Sally, Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw Haw when Tom Freidman has an Op-Ed piece in a major American newspaper?

Is Tom Friedman an absolute bleeding eejit?

Can he not tell the difference between "have died" and actively "killed."

Ok, read it again, does refer to the 26 as cases of suspected murder.

OJ's point obviously holds tho.

Is this to be the new line? It's now a quagmire, it's not Vietnam, we're winning/won, but we're just as bad as they are and Rummy/Condi/Bush/Cheney need to resign?

Friedman seems to exhibit symptoms of some uniquely liberal bi-polar disorder from week-to-week, column-to-column.

George W. I executed deserters. Could you imagine if that happened today?

George WI executed deserters. Could you imagine if GWII did that?

As many have noted before, if a huge truck bomb went off on 43rd Street, the NYT would be calling for the deaths of all terrorists (and possibly all Muslim terrorists).

If 26 is accurate, that is about 1 every 7 weeks (since 9/11). I'll bet the ratio for inmates in US prisons and in jail awaiting trial is much higher than that.

The left will grasp at anything to snatch an American defeat from the jaws of victory, but, as with Abu Ghraib, I just don't think this worries the average American. If they can get enough traction in the media, they can get the left into another frenzy of freak show demonstrations. Of course those demonstrations just turn the public against them, again negating their influence, so, who cares. Tom will be back next week with an article praising the progress in the region.

Even a dufus like Tom Friedman.

Thank you for mentioning the 41st--my grandfather served three years with the 186th Infantry regiment of that (then) Division in New Guinea, the Phillipines, and then in occupied Japan, specifically being part of the force which occupied Hiroshima.

My grandfather was a deeply and intently religious man; a Baptist Sunday school teacher if that further clairifes the picture. He was an infantryman, serving (with his civilian experience as a hunter) as a scout on numerous patrols in the war and spent time in situations where I have little doubt he killed or by his actions, numerous men.

While that did not weigh lightly upon him, he was always cognizant of the fact that in those situations it was always "him or me". He was a man with an unparalled reputation for veracity and, by his own reckoning, one of the reasons they did not take many prisoners was simply the nature of the Japanese fighting man, who simply _would_ not surrender. The fight for Biak island, now an Indonesian beach resort, was particularly gruesome, as the Japanese used Biak as a lab for defense techniques later perfected on Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

That said, he always regretted as a horrific necessity the bombing of the Japanese cities. He regretted that we were compelled to hasten the war's end by the devastation of a civilian population, as opposed to simply slaughtering all military targets, but, again, he did not shirk from the fact that it likely spared his life, and therefore, was preferable to the alternative.

As a humane man, the deaths of prisoners in US custody would concern him, especially if such _were_ acts of deliberate murder. The deaths of 26 terrorists in the field, he would view as necessary and desirable, albeit regrettable in the sense of the fact that a human life was taken. Our enemies may call us butchers but we know the truth. The ability to differentiate between an act of murder and killing the armed enemy in the field is what seperates us from the thugs and truly squalid butchers we now oppose.

http://www.41stdivision.com/

Glory to the memory of the Sunset men--the fighting Jungleers who set the Rising Sun; thanks be to God that such men existed.

cornet:

The notion that the Japanese they killed hadn't surrendered to them is quaint, but improbable.

Nuts.

war is serious, friedman isn't. i never read him for the simple reason he is neither entertaining nor informative, just wrong and boring. thank goodness he works for the ny times otherwise some people might accidentally take him seriously.

Similar point - the recent 2 yr anniversay mark brought out the anti-war types. A lot of yelling and screaming about the 1500 lost so far. Every death is a tragedy but this number is extremely small compared to Vietnam, Korea, WWII, etc.

A lack of historical context seems to be standard for most liberals these days. And yes Friedman is a doofus who somehow obtained the title of Foreign Policy guru when most of what he writes is nonsense.

if a huge truck bomb went off on 43rd Street, the NYT would be calling for the deaths of all terrorists

Don't be so sure. They'd more likely do a Zapatero and call for our immediate surrender.

"The notion that the Japanese they killed hadn't surrendered to them is quaint, but improbable."

And mayhap it was a rationalization. Moreover, he could only speak for his own behavior and that of the squad under his immediate supervision, not that of others. And, as I said, it was _one_ of the reasons. My grandfather's first words of Japanese (which he later acquired a fair amount of)he learned were the commands to instruct enemy troops to surrender. As he himself would tell you, yes, there were men who would not take prisoners--due in large part not merely to their antipathy to the Japanese, but also due to the fact that it was a routine Japanese policy of concealment of weapons--esp. grenades--for later use which was a persistent hazard to the life of any American captor. Fort this reason, he and other scouts who were charged with bringing in enemy for interrogation and factfinding, learned how to tell Japanese troops seeking to surrender to disrobe so that they might know they were sincere in their intention and not packing concealed weapons.

I heard the tales of the man in his company who pried the gold teeth from the skulls of Japanese dead, I heard of the American mail plane shot down by friendly fire, of the Japanese soldier whose dead hand burnt to the barrel of their air-cooled Browning .30, of the jungle rot, of the sores, the malaria, of the atrocities their enemy committed against the American dead, of the IJA boobytrapping of their own wounded, and of the destruction of Hiroshima.

Having seen all that and being so candid about it all why lie about that one thing and not one other thing in your life? He wasn't much of a rationalizer. The Jungleers were bad boys to mess with, but butchers? Let's remember which side hung that label on them.

cornet:

Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying they should have done differently, just that there's one likely reason they brought in fewer prisoners.

I've had this discussion with a Marine who fought in the Pacific. They shot prisoners and he made no bones about it. They didn't have enough food for themselves, and certainly weren't going to suffer more in order to share with enemy soldiers.

I'm just thankful you posted that link, oj. The number of Americans who realize we even had US Army units in the South Pacific is pitifully slim. One of the common gripes of MacArthur's boys was that they did their fair share of the fighting and dying but the Marines got all the glory.