This has got to be the quote of the day — maybe the week, maybe the month. After agreeing all around on FOX News’ Special Report tonight that there was “nothing there, there” in the 400k documents dumped by WikiLeaks on Friday (a massive release of classified reports that martyr-hero-analyst Juan Williams deemed “unnecessary and mischievous”), neoconservative war hawk Charles Krauthammer said, “the overall the impression I got was how restrained the United States was.”
Charles Krauthammer
Yeah, I’m sure to Mr. Krauthammer, the killing of 681 civilians, including 50 families and 30 children — non-insurgents all — in their cars, at manned checkpoints, over a five-year period is pretty restrained (only 120 actual insurgents were killed at checkpoints in that same period, by the way). It’s pretty hard, however, to read the emerging individual stories of what actually happened and think “restraint” had anything to do with it.
But I guess the Americans were showing tremendous restraint when they turned over all those Iraqi prisoners to Iraqi military torture chambers that make the latest “Saw” installment look PG-13. They could have questioned their “orders” to ignore the abuse because international laws and the laws of humanity certainly prohibit torture — but our soldiers showed restraint (which is pretty impressive considering how many “Christians” there are filling the evangelical church services on any given forward operating base these days). They also showed great restraint in not questioning their Iraqi brothers doing the torturing — many of whom were part of the deadly U.S trained Wolf Brigade, so you could say there was some familiarity there. But the Americans followed orders and looked the other way. Restraint.
Sarcasm aside, just what might be “unrestrained” in Mr. Krauthammer’s world? — I am afraid to find out.
