The Dehumanizing Impact of Hating the Troops

Our Left supports our troops. They say it all the time.

Yet they always seem ready to believe our troops are monsters. The recent allegations made by a purported Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp that he and his fellow soldiers abused Iraqis as a result of being exposed to the horrors of war are a case in point. The allegations seem to be false.

Most charitably for The New Republic which published these allegations, the incidents took place in Kuwait before the soldiers had a chance to be dehumanized by war. They might just have been jerks.

Of course, that is not an insurmountable problem, either. The Left is fully capable of thinking any troops are dehumanized whether or not they are combat veterans. Last week, in a story on NPR about child abuse and neglect in the military, the anti-military bias of the report was clear. One expert, while noting that of course the military doesn't teach troops to abuse children, said that increased child abuse and neglect was natural since the military taught its people the value of violence to solve problems.

As one who was taught by our Army the value of violence to kill enemies, I can vouch for the fact that I was not trained to view my children as the enemy.

And though the NPR reporter didn't seem to notice it, the very story itself reported that child abuse and neglect in the military is actually much lower than in the civilian world! It was only when a unit deploys--when those violence-loving soldiers are away from the children--that rates of abuse or neglect go higher than the civilian rate. That would be when the children are cared for by the non-military spouse.

But such facts in their own story did not interfere with the hit piece on our troops.

Certainly, the stress on the remaining caring parent must be addressed. But this is not the result of our military culture. A culture that values defending the innocent from bad guys is a good thing.

But stories like this reflect the anti-military bias of our Left. Their support for our troops is quite shallow and is eroding rapidly. As those poor troops continue to "betray" the Left by actually winning this war and believing in the justice of our fight, our Left will turn on the troops for failing to lose the war as good victims and proto-Genghis Khans should.

The dehumanizing impact of anti-war will become more and more evident as the election gets closer.