Over at Two-Headed-Monster we had a unique discussion on the recent atrocities in Iraq. Lots of people are talking about it, including two city newspapers.

The Arizona Republic in Phoenix Arizona and
The Boston Globe.

Its ironic how different these two editorials are.

First, from the Arizona Republic:

Barbaric acts against GIs have no equivalent

Jun. 22, 2006 12:00 AM

Enough with Abu Ghraib. Enough with the self-loathing hand-wringing over the killers harbored in comfort at Guantanamo Bay. Enough with the still-unproved condemnations of U.S. Marines at Haditha.

Two U.S. Army soldiers, Pfc. Kristian Menchaca of Houston and Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker of Madras, Ore., have been found dead at the hands of the still-potent terrorist insurgency in Iraq.

Not just dead, but tortured, we are told. Their unrecognizable bodies dumped at a roadside that had been wired with bombs. According to an Iraqi military spokesman, the soldiers “were killed in a barbaric way.”

The two young soldiers – both had been in Iraq but a few months – had been captured at a checkpoint on June 16 in an attack that killed a third comrade, Spc. David J. Babineau of Springfield, Mass.

If we are to properly understand – and fairly condemn – the revolting moral equivalencies that have sprung up regarding “violence begetting violence” in Iraq, the shocking deaths of Pfcs. Menchaca and Tucker would seem a proper place to start.

It is not the policy of the U.S. military to torture enemy combatants, certainly not to the point that DNA tests become necessary to determine which disfigured corpse is which. It is not the policy of the U.S. military to behead captured enemies. Water-boarding and sleep deprivation strike us as bad and likely unproductive policies. Disfiguring torture and beheading strike us as the acts of barbarians and monsters. There is equivalence in this?

Whatever one’s judgment about the legal rights of enemy combatants held at Guantanamo, drawing parallels between isolated American excesses in a cruel war and such joyously celebrated “policies” of terrorists is just beyond the pale.

Two days before the abduction of the two GIs, the “right hand man” of al-Qaida’s deceased beheader-in-chief, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a U.S. airstrike. Known as al-Qaida’s “religious emir,” Mansour al-Mashhadani also played a key role in the terrorists’ “media operations,” according to USA Today.

Media operations . . .

The sort of “media operations” conducted by the late emir involved promoting the activities of an insurgency umbrella group known as the Mujahideen Shura Council, which includes al-Qaida in Iraq.

That “council” has noted on its Web site that the two U.S. soldiers had been “slaughtered” by the apparent successor to Zarqawi. “With God Almighty’s blessing, (Zarqawi successor) Abu Hamza al-Muhajer carried out the verdict of the Islamic court,” which called for the soldiers to be murdered.

In the twisted logic of terrorists, in short, the brutal murder of two soldiers is not something merely to be celebrated, but an act that should be spun to the media.

It is an affront to the dignity of Iraqis to absolve such horrific, self-celebrated barbarism by suggesting or even implying that such acts are simply retaliation against the American “Crusader.”

The murders of Pfcs. Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker weren’t retribution. They weren’t “equivalent” to anything.

They are disgusting acts of barbarism.

And now from the Boston Globe:

Misreading a battle

June 22, 2006

THE BLOODIEST US battle of World War II was on the mind of Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, when he defended President Bush’s Iraq policy over the weekend. The comparison doesn’t fit. Americans were united behind a common policy in World War II, and the administration needs to acknowledge that its war in Iraq has confused and divided the country.
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“The president understands people’s impatience — not impatience but how a war can wear on a nation,” Snow said on CNN. “He understands that. If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, `Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?’ ”

A massive German offensive surprised the US First Army in Belgium on Dec. 16, 1944. But General George Patton’s army moved up from the south, and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s forces counterattacked from the north. Nineteen-thousand Americans died — the worst American toll of the war — as the allied armies thwarted Hitler’s last attempt to avoid defeat. Nobody had to take a poll during that battle; it was over in a month.

Perhaps Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic minority leader in the House, started Snow thinking about the battle when she mentioned her uncle, who was one of those 19,000. The country that Johnny D’Alessandro, her uncle, defended knew that victory was assured despite the temporary setback in Europe. One cannot say the same for Americans today as the Iraq war grinds on.

Pelosi was speaking against an administration-supported resolution that expressed support for President Bush’s conduct of the war. The Democrats have difficulty uniting behind an alternative to the Bush war policy. But the debate over the war is cheapened by the administration’s insistence that anything less than full support is synonymous with “cut and run.” The savagery of the Iraqi resistance was shown by the murder of two US soldiers this week, but it is not a threat to the United States on par with the Nazis, who controlled most of Europe.

“This is a war unlike any other because we are dealing not with a national force where you can count your victories in terms of winning on the battlefield,” Snow said on CBS. “There’s no Battle of the Bulge . . . there’s no marching into Berlin. Instead, what you have is an amorphous enemy.” Indeed it is, and Americans need to know how long Bush expects the troops to face this difficult foe.

The election campaign this year ought to be dominated not by the faux patriotism of 2002 and 2004, but by a debate free of demagoguery over how to extract US troops without leaving Iraq in chaos. The Battle of the Bulge, bloody and hard-fought, was far less complicated than the ethnic, religious, economic, and ideological divisions exposed by the conflict in Iraq.

These two lines are the most telling:

The murders of Pfcs. Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker weren’t retribution. They weren’t “equivalent” to anything.

The savagery of the Iraqi resistance was shown by the murder of two US soldiers this week, but it is not a threat to the United States on par with the Nazis, who controlled most of Europe.

Its no secret to Jeremy-Gilby-dot-com readers that The Editors of Jeremy-Gilby-dot-com align more with the former statement than the latter.

It not astonishing to me the difference in opinion. But sometimes one has to read it to realize how polarized the extreme right and the extreme left are.