Will wingnut Steve Beren apologize for calling our troops bloodthirsty homicidal maniacs?

Posted by Joshua Holland at 6:50 PM on November 2, 2006.

Steve Beren is a low-rent David Horowitz wannabe; he was an anti-war activist during the Vietnam war, he organized for the Socialist Workers' Party until 1990 and then he became a born again Christian in the mid-1990s and started moving rightward. The September 11 attacks then pushed him into the fringes of the eliminationist set, where he now enjoys life as a raving Islamophobic wingnut with no regard whatsoever for reality.

He's running as a Republican -- of course -- to represent Washington state's 7th Congressional District. Next Tuesday he'll be toasted by Jim McDermott, who's never won less than 70 percent of the vote in any of his nine previous House races. Next Wednesday, Beren will go back to his work for an Internet marketing firm and hopefully we won't be hearing anything more from him.

In the meantime, he appears to have worked a snippet from an article of mine, in which I quoted McDermott, into his latest stump speech.

Of the GOP's latest attempt to distract, he bloviates:

[John] Kerry's comments come as no surprise, but they do reflect an antagonism, arrogance, and elitism to those who protect our freedoms.

Of course, in the campaign of my opponent, Jim McDermott, the same negative attitude to our troops has been evident... Late last year, antiwar blogger Joshua Holland quotes Congressman McDermott as saying:

"As long as our troops are there they're going to be a continued irritant in the situation, partly because, and this is a very important point, the troops are just kids put into a foreign land where they don't know who the enemy is and they don't know the language. So they protect themselves and innocent Iraqis get killed, and that fans the fires of the insurgency."

I have quite a different view. My campaign platform states: "Support our troops and their mission. Remain firm in the war against international terrorism. Combat terrorism at its roots by spreading democracy through the Middle East..."

There's a lot I can say about this. First, there's just the sheer gall of such a light-weight -- a guy who's never held public office and certainly has no foreign policy experience -- criticizing McDermott, who's been right about Iraq at every turn. Don't forget that it was Jim McDermott who said in 2002 that there were absolutely no WMDs to be found in Iraq, and that Bush was intent on "mislead[ing] the American public" into war. It was McDermott who tried desperately in the early months of 2003 to convince Saddam Hussein to document the destruction of his WMD programs in order to head off the war, only to be told by Iraq's ambassador to the UN that it was no use because "the decision to attack us has already been made."

Then there's this nonsense about how Beren wants to "remain firm in the war against international terrorism" and "combat terrorism at its roots by spreading democracy through the Middle East." Of course, the only terrorists in Iraq before the invasion were in the Kurdish-controlled Northern territories and they were ideological allies of the Bush administration, as dedicated as Paul Wolfowitz was to Hussein's overthrow.

I could also discuss Beren's sadly persistent delusion that we have a snowball's chance in hell of "spreading democracy" in Iraq, where Shiite militias have infiltrated the security forces, Sunni insurgents have Baghdad surrounded and even the Pentagon knows full well that the country is sliding into chaos. In an attempt to gain a little legitimacy, Prime Minister Maliki this week "ordered" the Americans to lift roadblocks around Sadr City and abandon the search for one of our troops, and then he "ordered" us to release a top aid of anti-American cleric Muqtada al Sadr. Yesterday, the Parliament was scheduled to meet but not enough lawmakers showed up for the session to form a quorum.

In other words Steve Beren is saying, in no uncertain terms, "I am completely divorced from reality." With 88 percent of Americans favoring either the complete withdrawal of troops or at the least a major "change in strategy," Beren should put his desire to stay the course in Iraq on a bumper sticker. Because the last thing we need in DC is yet another hack who is too blinkered by ideology to even acknowledge the reality on the ground.

But that's not what's so disturbing about Beren's statement. What's really troubling is Beren's willingness -- even eagerness -- to insult our heroes in Iraq for petty partisan gain.

Because the indisputable fact is that hundreds if not thousands of unarmed Iraqis have been killed by U.S. troops at checkpoints, in house-to-house searches and in the streets of places like Baghdad and Fallujah. It happens every day, and the Pentagon doesn't deny it. Senior British commanders have publicly questioned the U.S.'s focus on "force protection" over protecting civilians. Just last week, the Pentagon acknowledged that U.S. forces had killed three firemen responding to a fire set off by an insurgent attack. Journalists have been shot, and NBC news showed footage of an injured Iraqi being killed by Marines last year.

Jim McDermott knows that in the military, as in any large organization, there's a tiny minority of people who are violent and unstable. But he sees the vast majority of our troops as young, well-meaning Americans who were "put into a foreign land where they don't know who the enemy is and they don't know the language." Sometimes, in those circumstances, when "they protect themselves," sadly, "innocent Iraqis get killed."

McDermott blames the civilian leadership in Washington -- Rumsfeld and Bush and the rest -- for creating those circumstances. They started the war, they fired general Eric Shinseki for saying the U.S. would need hundreds of thousands of troops to create stability and they decided to go in on the cheap. It was Washington that decided to sack -- but not disarm -- the Iraqi army, it was Washington that couldn't get the electricity and water running and it was the civilians in Washington that told those troops that they were in Iraq to get revenge for 9/11.

But Steve Beren rejects that. He dismisses the idea that at all those checkpoints and in all those house searches where innocent Iraqis died, the troops were "just frightened kids" put in a confusing situation "where they don't know who the enemy is," and he denies that they were just trying to protect themselves. Beren apparently believes that they're all a bunch of bloodthirsty killers -- that all of those shots were cold and calculated and fired in anger rather than in fear and confusion.

Beren's so eager to avoid any accountability for the stuffed suits in DC that he's willing to put all of the blame on the individual troops in the field -- young Americans who will already be traumatized enough for doing what they felt they had to do in the heat of the moment without politicians like him calling them monstrous murderers on the campaign trail.

What's even more disturbing is that he's saying this at a time of war. Our enemies are clearly listening, and all this kind of politicking does is embolden the terrorists and demoralize our troops. It's one thing to criticize, but this kind of rhetoric is nothing short of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Some would call it treasonous.

So, the question is: will Steve Beren apologize to those Americans who are putting their lives on the line for suggesting that they're inhuman, bloodthirsty maniacs who kill indiscriminately?

Here's the Beren campaign's contact information:
info@berenforcongress.com
(206) 240 - 1841

Feel free to let Steve Beren know that you're sick and tired of the right's knee-jerk anti-Americanism and reflexive hostility towards our troops and that you demand an apology.

PS: Writing this post has shown me just how easy it is to be a self-righteous, ethically-challenged right-wing attack poodle. It's good work if you can get it.

Tagged as: wingnuts, mcdermott

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.