Sensational and difficult news from Iraq

What to make of the New Republic's Baghdad Diarist? - By Phillip Carter - Slate Magazine

I haven't read these dispatches in New Republic, and in fact the first I read about this was yesterday when I was linking the Michelle Malkin Blog, which clearly is one of the Right Wing columnists that this article mentions, albeit not directly, who is attacking these articles. I tend to agree with his viewpoint that in war bad things happen. And surrounded by those bad things on a daily basis can take it's toll. And we may never know the whole truth of some of these stories. One of the things about Iraq is that it seems unlikely that there will be a My Lai or anything quite like that because of the intensity of the news coverage. But that doesn't mean that the soldiers will not do things that would be considered beyond the norm in any other situation. It just means that the public is more likely to hear about it.

I think that the most important issue is that we as a country do not paint the troops as a whole with the same brush as we did the Vietnam era soldiers. And that we avoid the cliches that became so much a part of Vietnam lore, even though they were eventually proved wrong in most cases.