Charles Laurence spins up a vortex

Reading the Sunday papers always leaves me hungering for articles from real journalists but todays Sunday Mail outdoes itself carrying an article by Charles Laurence under the heading “How the Iraq war is destroying America’s fighting men” I couldn’t link to the article in the Sunday Mail but found it in a similarly low grade newspaper, The Daily Mail He quotes 240 of the 665 cases of military indiscipline in Iraq and Afghanistan involved drugs and alcohol. Let’s see now……with about 1,500,000 US GWOT veterans that calculates out at 1 in 6250 troops have been involved in drugs. I would say my North Brisbane suburban area has a far worse drug related crime rate than the 240 for the area and that is with only about 50,000 people. He comes up with some real crime;

To get an idea of how deep into depravity some of these men have sunk, here is just one of the sex offences: in March, 2006, a group of men – again from the 101st Airborne Division – gang-raped a 14-year-old girl, and then murdered her and her family.

In one case as long ago as May 2004, when President Bush was declaring ‘victory’ and the vast majority of Americans were still cheering him on, Private Justin Lillis got drunk on illicit whisky on his base in Balad, stole a Humvee and went on a rampage, shooting up a residential neighbourhood with his M16 rifle, before taking pot shots at the guards on the entrance to his own base.

Unquestionably depraved but there will always be bad eggs in any basket. One depraved crime doesn’t point to a whole army as depraved.

He quotes Seventy-three of those 240 cases were the most serious yet known from these two wars: murder, rape, robbery and assault.

Just a question: how many of these 73 cases were rape and murder and how many were robbery and assault. Lumping them together makes a mockery of statistics and as the Left have claimed, playing music too loud in a cell constitutes assault or torture.

Another remarkable statistic can be no co-incidence: a record number of women soldiers – as many as one-third of the total returning from tours in Iraq – are coming home pregnant.

They are mostly young, fit people. What does Laurence expect them to do when not on patrol – go to prayer meetings? Take along woman to a war zone and it’s going to happen…human nature.

For years, the Pentagon has banned the taking of photographs of returning coffins, while President Bush has refused to attend funerals because honouring the dead was deemed bad for public relations.

The President hasn’t ‘refused’ to attend funerals at all. He has done what all presidents have done and that’s run the country. If he was to attend funerals he’d spend one day every week doing so

It all points to another shocking statistic: almost one in three of troops returning from the Iraq and Afghan fronts in need of health care are wounded not in the body, but in the mind.

The younger the soldiers, the greater the incidence of post traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, alcoholism and drug addiction. This third compares with 10 per cent of Vietnam veterans – survivors of a war so far considered to have produced an unprecedented number of mental casualties.

That is simply wrong. Stats for the Vietnam War indicate about 30% had symptons of PTSD and that nearly 19 percent still suffer from the disorder. These stats are from a Harvard University report and not some Veteran’s group. There are other factors involved here; one is a certain percentage of PTSD suffering has been caused by the general rejection of the troops by the media (such as this report) and their campaign to treat them as inferior veterans simply because they fight terrorists or in my time, communists. Another factor is that Veterans and Veteran’s Affairs departments now recognize PTSD whereas before it took Vietnam Veterans 20 odd years to get the disorder recognized. The Iraq veterans are being diagnosed as they return home. Ther is no question that the events descibed by Charles happen in a war. An army is a reflection of society with all it’s faults and no one expects every soldier to be an angel. To take some isolated stats and spin them negatively only points out the obvious. To misrepresent stats as he has done only points out another obvious fact – he is biased against the US and Bush for ideological reasons making anything he says as just static in the background of a complicated problem. Still, it is the Sunday papers.