Boston Globe: Iraq Insurgents Just Like Our Founding Fathers

I wonder if the MSM ever gets tired of trying to make evil look good? And if they aren't trying to make evil look like good, they are trying to soft peddle evil with a they-are-really-just-like-us analysis of evil’s actions. Such is the case today in the Boston Globe wherein writer H.D.S. Greenway equates Iraqi insurgents to being just like America's founding revolutionary generation.

In 'Surge' doomed to final failure, a badly garbled reading of history is foisted upon an unsuspecting reading public that culminates with H.D.S. Greenway boiling down the entire American Revolution to the claim that British soldiers were a "conquering force" in the Colonies and the Colonists were mad at them for it.

And so conquering foreign soldiers will be resisted in Iraq, as they have always been everywhere down the centuries. In early April 1775, the British governor of Boston sent John Howe out to gather intelligence in that hotbed of insurgency now called the western suburbs, but then the Anbar province of its time. Howe met an old man cleaning his rifle who looked too old to hunt game.

The old man said he expected foreign soldiers -- "a flock of redcoats" -- would be arriving soon, and he thought they would make good targets. Arrive they did, and with them the American revolution that in many states degenerated into civil war. The British soldiers were mostly of the same race and religion as the people they fought, but they were by then foreigners, and eight years later they were gone.

This simpleminded "gotcha" point that H.D.S.Greenway seems to imagine he has stumbled upon makes a mush of what really happened in 1776 and before to cause the American Revolution. Apparently H.D.S. Greenway is unaware that the British didn't "conquer" the Colonists because the colonies were part of the territorial possessions of Great Britain in the fist place. Putting down an insurrection is quite different than conquering and the British were not truly "foreigners" – Revolutionary rhetoric aside-- even to most American citizens. Unwanted, yes, but “foreign”? Not really. In truth, many U.S. citizens felt they were being truer Englishmen than the Brits were being.

He also seems unaware of the many decades of deteriorating political ties and governmental debacles that preceded the Revolution, causing it to erupt.

In the final analysis British troops in early America and the Revolutionary era hardly lends an apt comparison to U.S. troops in Iraq today.

And did you notice the they-are-just-like-us touch there when he said that the “western suburbs” were the “Anbar province of its time”? Nice touch, don’t you think? Utterly false, but nice touch just the same.

I also found it interesting that the “r” in Revolution was not capitalized in the on-line version. It should have been, but was not. Is this just editorial ignorance, or did they mean to demean the American Revolution?

But, in any case, we shant let facts and grammar get in the way of Greenway's gymnastic back bending to twist the American Revolution into an example that would be "just like" Iraq, shall we? Nor will we allow reality to get in the way of his desire to advocate for a precipitate pull out of American troops from Iraq.

Nor should we allow truth to get in the way of Greenway saying that it is US troops, not the insurgents, that is the cause of the unrest in Iraq.

When the president and surge proponents talk about restoring law and order to Baghdad, they underestimate the fact that it is the very presence of American soldiers themselves who are sparking the resistance...

Spurring his bout with runawayitis, Greenway was quite taken with the picture from Iraq he saw a while back.

The photograph shows four American soldiers, dressed in full, intimidating battle gear, around the periphery of a Baghdad living room. In the center, on the carpeted floor, lies a collapsed woman in a traditional black dress... A man, identified as her son, is holding her in his arms. His feet are bare, as if he were caught by surprise..."

While Greenway's "His feet are bare, as if he were caught by surprise" was a nice novelistic flourish, it is nonsense, of course. Muslims take their shoes off when entering their homes, so bare feet would not be uncommon indoors in an Iraqi household!

But, leave it to a denizen of the MSM to make a complex situation simplistic and to mislead readers with a picture to buttress his agenda.

In any case, H.D.S. Greeway's is just another example of an MSM that isn't capable of either telling a balanced and truthful story, or of any historical analysis.

I wonder if the H.D.S. of Mr. Greenway's name stands for "He Doesn't See"?