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In addition to working as a paid technical consultant to the Bavarian Illuminati, Ben serves as webmaster to The Oberlin Review, which sits at the very heart of the liberal media.

Calipari and Sgrena 11:29AM EST Monday, 3/7/2005 [link to this item]

Following the death of Nicola Calipari, Yglesias weighs in on checkpoint killings in Iraq:
The policy in place here, like most American policies about such matters, is designed first and foremost to keep our troops as safe as possible. It's a very understandable policy -- a military needs to take care of its own. And, again, it's entirely understandable that the men and women manning these checkpoints prefer to err on the side of caution. They'd like to survive their tours in Iraq, and I would too if I were in their place. It's entirely normal and appropriate for the American government to put somewhat more value on American lives -- particularly the lives of people who've volunteered to serve their country in combat -- than on those of foreigners.

The trouble seeps in, however, when the U.S. military starts acting as the de facto government of Iraq. For all the same reasons that Americans tend to care more about our fellow citizens than about the residents of other countries, Iraqis are going to have little sympathy for a policy that reduces the risk to American lives by increasing the risk to Iraqis. It's not a policy that any truly independent government would agree to see implemented on its soil, and Iraqi acquiescence to the policy is a token of the extent to which the new regime remains dependent on U.S. support.

The right seems to be focusing on the unlikelihood that the US would intentionally target Sgrena, while completely ignoring the issues that her story, regardless of her obvious bias, raises. To Glenn Reynolds' credit, he does link to a Kaus post getting at the same thing as Yglesias, but uses most of his as an excuse to paint leftists as conspiracy theorists, when most of the blogging out there on Sgrena seems to focus on her side of the story and ask: "What if?", a perfectly reasonable question that should be answered through an impartial investigation. If, as is most likely, there was no conspiracy to kill Sgrena, the results of an organized inquiry could only serve as good public relations for the US (as would inquiry into the killings of Iraqis in similar situations).

Rather than engaging in knee-jerk red-bashing, the right could also ask whether it is possible that Sgrena's somewhat contradictory accounts of the shooting emerged more as a result of trauma than hatred for America. Whether you like her politics or not, this is a lot for a person to go through:

It's not important how many shots were fired. I know that they are also saying this: that if it really had been a rain of bullets nobody would be here to tell about it and, instead, both I and the major who drove the car are still alive. I can tell you that I found handfuls of bullets on the back seat and a dead man on my body. All of this in a zone close to the airport, supercontrolled by the Amercians.
Meanwhile the dumb right, personified by Middle East expert Jonah Goldberg, seems a little more interested in Planet of the Apes and the Simpsons than this.

-Ben | Comments
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