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July 29, 2004
More on Moore
Michael Moore, a master of artful editing, was a guest on Bill O'Reilly's show earlier this week, insisting that the show run without being edited. On the show, he repeatedly asked O'Reilly "So would you sacrifice your child to secure Fallujah? I want to hear you say that." It was a ridiculous challenge and O'Reilly reacted as most parents would - offering himself in place of his child, replying "I would sacrifice myself".
This was sent to the NRO Corner by a parent of a soldier who fought in Fallujah today:
My son is a Ranger who just returned from Iraq where he spent months kicking in doors in targeted raids against terrorists in the worst parts of Iraq. He joined the Army at the end of 2002 when it was clear that the invasion would probably happen. As a former paratrooper myself, I am proud of my only son beyond words.When a parent loses a child engaged in some activity such as mountain climbing or skydiving, they always seem to say something like, 'Well, he died doing what he wanted to do." We accept that. After all, who are we to judge? Well, my son wanted to be a soldier. He wanted to follow a family tradition. He wanted to serve his country. He wanted to do his share. He wanted to be a warrior. He is doing what he wants to do.
Since my son has actually seen significant combat in Fallujah and ar Ramadi, I have had to contemplate the unthinkable: what if he is killed? It is a horrible thought but one that cannot be avoided. This brings me to Moore's stupid question: 'Would you sacrifice your child for Fallujah?' The answer of course is, 'Hell no!' My first thought is to quote Patton, 'The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.' This is, of course, the main point, isn't it?
"Beyond that, I would point out that it was my son's decision to join the Army, the infantry, the paratroopers and the Rangers. He did it on his own because he wanted to. If he - God forbid - is killed doing what he wants, I will say, 'Well, he died doing what he wanted to do.' Why would anyone be less willing to accept that answer from me than from the grieving parents of a child who was killed in the pursuit of mere recreation?
"I guess the relevant point here is that my son is a proud, honorable soldier. He chose that path and am proud of him. He is fighting for what he believes in. Obviously Moore has absolutely no understanding of this type of deep moral commitment. He should not speak for me or my son. He certainly should not exploit the deaths of these heroes for his own gain. And to your point: yes, I loathe him."
Posted by Deb at July 29, 2004 08:23 AM
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Comments
This is a great post.
Moore's comments were an insult to the troops, in my opinion. Given that we have a volunteer military, none of our troops are serving abroad without first having joined our Armed Forces. He acts as thought the individual members of our military were too stupid to know what they were doing when they signed up.
Furthermore, repeatedly referring to our men and women in uniform as "children" also is an insult. They aren't children any more than Moore himself is, chronologically, and in many cases less so in other ways.
I fully sympathetize with O'Reilly's parental response, but i think he should have added: "I certainly do not support sending small children like my own into combat, but if one of my children were to enlist at age 18 or older, I'd be darned proud of their decision."
Posted by: Amy Ridenour at August 8, 2004 04:23 PM
Like a fascist, Michael Moore asks Bill O’Reilly: ‘You would sacrifice your child to secure Fallujah?’
It was no surprise that Michael Moore, cinematographer for fascism, pulled out the sharpest tools of tyranny when he asked Bill O’Reilly on July 26, "You would sacrifice your child to secure Fallujah?"
Appeal to selfishness. You want to keep your child, don’t you?
Apply the terror. Imagine your child dead. You want him dead for Fallujah?
Ignore the real monster. Saddam Hussein held the world record among living dictators for deaths by genocide, wars and state-ordered murders. His repression, tortures and political executions had not stopped. Don’t say a word. Shhhhh!
The totalitarian keeps his air-tight grip on power through the regular appeal to selfishness and the constant application of terror. Moore knows the routine perfectly. Selfishness and terror: The carrot and stick of fascism.
When the secret police pull an innocent neighbor’s family from their house in the middle of the night, the fascist counts on you to calculate the benefits of claiming your unfortunate neighbors’ things (selfishness) and the risks of your being arrested next (terror).
The fascist also counts on you to find nothing, such as basic humanity, to weigh against the cruelty you have just witnessed.
Moore used the devices expertly in his movie "Fahrenheit 9-11," in which he shamefully exploits the grief of Lila Lipscomb, a Flint, Mich., woman who lost her son, Sgt. Michael F. Pederson, on April 2, 2003, in the Iraq invasion that removed Saddam from power.
Moore wants us to ask only, Was "Bush’s war" worth the death of Lila’s son? Moore might even let us ask, Was Saddam worth the death of Sgt. Pederson?
Asked in Moore’s vacuum, it’s easy to answer, "No." War is a deadly dangerous thing, and should never be fought over trivialities. Saddam alone wasn’t worth anyone’s death. Beyond that, parents might be willing to let a son take the risks of war, but, even for a good cause, no sane parent would let a son go to battle if it were absolutely certain that son would be "sacrificed."
But contrary to Moore’s protestations, the struggle between repression and freedom isn’t a choice between your son living a full life and your son dying for nothing. Moore knows this, but he deals dishonesty instead.
In the 2003 Iraq invasion, the battle wasn’t simply to remove or capture Saddam. It was to stop what Saddam was doing. It was to bust open his closed police state. In keeping with U.N. Resolutions 688 and 1441 and common sense, the invasion was to end the Baathist regime’s regular atrocities, its countless other human rights abuses and its repeated violations of international law.
Americans weren’t risking their lives simply because President Bush didn’t like Saddam, and not even because Saddam tried to kill Bush’s father in April 1993. They were risking their lives to liberate 25 million Iraqis and to begin building the conditions for a peaceful Middle East.
In asking O’Reilly, "You would sacrifice your child to secure Fallujah?" Moore posed the Iraq question as a choice between leaving happy, harmless Iraq alone and killing your child. That would be an easy choice, if that were the real choice.
Moore: So you would sacrifice your child to secure Fallujah? I want to hear you say that.
O’Reilly: I would sacrifice myself —
Moore: Your child — It’s Bush sending the children there.
O’Reilly: I would sacrifice myself.
Moore: You and I don’t go to war, because we’re too old —
O’Reilly: Because if we back down, there will be more deaths and you know it.
Moore: Say ‘I, Bill O’Reilly, would sacrifice my child to secure Fallujah.’
O’Reilly: I’m not going to say what you say…. That’s ridiculous.
Moore: You don’t believe that. Why should Bush sacrifice the children of people across America for this?
Of course, asking, "You would sacrifice your child to secure Fallujah?" is as simple-mindedly dishonest as asking, "Would you sacrifice your child to secure Bastogne?" or "Would you sacrifice your child to secure Iwo Jima?" or "Would you sacrifice your child to secure Inchon?"
As insignificant as those locations might seem individually, securing each one was part of a larger military action serving the goals of ending repression, stopping aggression, and defending and expanding freedom. In each case, American troops were ordered to assume risks because ignoring the enemy was even riskier – if not to the Americans themselves, to others. And most Americans just happen to care about others.
In the real world, the question of war is a matter of weighing the risks of military action against the risks of inaction. It’s a matter of asking, Will this violent action end something more deadly and terrible? Will we have a decent chance of replacing the enemy’s cause with something much better? And what is likely to happen if we don’t act?
If a fascist’s bloody record is concealed, as Moore conceals it in his film, then a reasonable reaction is impossible. If all we knew of Iraq is that its children smile and fly kites, and we knew nothing of the grand brutality of Saddam’s regime, we might conclude that, in invading Iraq, some of our loved ones would die and kill for nothing.
But Saddam’s police state was almost always at war, with its neighbors and with its own people. And most of the deaths Saddam caused were inflicted, not by weapons of mass destruction, but with conventional arms and old-fashioned methods.
When Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990, it wasn’t the first time he had started a war of aggression. He had done the same with his September 1980 invasion of Iran, which led to eight years of fighting and 1 million dead. On top of that futile war and the general terror of his police state, Saddam attacked Iraqi minorities whom he found out of favor. In 1988 alone, he destroyed hundreds of Kurdish villages and killed as many as 100,000 Kurds, at least 5,000 of them with mustard gas.
Jennifer Pederson, Lila Lipscomb’s daughter, was a soldier in the first President Bush’s Desert Storm coalition, which ejected Saddam’s army from Kuwait in February 1991. That coalition did not remove Saddam’s regime from power. Instead, it forced Saddam to agree to cease-fire terms, and then it went home.
THE MISTAKE OF 1991. As things turned out, the 1991 cease-fire was an awful mistake. Saddam had promised to stop repressing his people, to end support for terrorists, to return 600 Kuwaiti and other prisoners of war, and to cooperate fully and immediately with U.N. arms inspectors in the destruction of weapons of mass destruction and other illegal arms. Saddam met virtually none of the cease-fire terms.
When the Shiites in southern Iraq rose up in 1991 against Saddam’s regime, Saddam sent in his secret police, who rounded up anyone suspected in the uprising and massacred an estimated 200,000 people.
That was a real cost of not taking the military action all the way to Baghdad in 1991.
The United Nations imposed sanctions on Iraq to encourage Saddam’s compliance with the U.N.-backed cease-fire terms. Saddam still did not comply, and the sanctions hurt the Iraqi people much more severely than Iraq’s fascist regime. The U.N. Oil-for-Food program was supposed to relieve shortages of food and medicine, but Saddam stole billions of dollars from it. Some humanitarian agencies reported that, as a result of the chronic shortages, as many as 1 million Iraqis died from 1991 to 2002.
When Iraqis complained publicly about Saddam, they had their tongues cut off if they were lucky. Many saw their relatives tortured ("Would you sacrifice your child for Basra?") and were forced to name other malcontents before they themselves were executed.
Those were the real costs of not taking the military action all the way to Baghdad in 1991.
Saddam never ceased fire on the Iraqi people. Under U.N. Resolution 688, part of the cease-fire terms, he had a mandate to stop repressing and otherwise mistreating his people. That order was rare in the history of the United Nations, which generally is too diplomatic to complain about a dictator abusing his own people.
In spite of that order, the tortures and dying continued under Saddam.
THE MISTAKES OF 1937 AND 1939. Because most of the world did nothing about Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, millions would die. Most of the killing could have been stopped.
Because most of the world did nothing about Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, millions more would die. Most of the killing could have been stopped.
Pearl Harbor finally drew the United States into both fronts in 1941, and the tide turned against the totalitarian Axis. But what if there had been no Pearl Harbor? How far could Tojo and Hitler have gone?
Because the first President Bush didn’t send Jennifer Pederson to remove Saddam in 1991, the second President Bush had to send Michael Pederson to remove Saddam in 2003. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands died unnecessary deaths, and many more lived through unspeakable horrors.
That’s the truth Michael Moore refuses to tell. He demands that you choose between your child’s life and Bush’s whimsical assault on kite-fliers. Ultimately, Moore’s story is that it just isn’t worth the risk to even one American to fight a tyrant who tortures and murders non-Americans by the hundreds of thousands.
Moore: Would you sacrifice—just finish on this. Would you sacrifice your child to remove one of the other 30 brutal dictators on this planet?
O’Reilly: Depends what the circumstances were.
Moore: You would sacrifice your child?
O’Reilly: I would sacrifice myself — I’m not talking for any children — to remove the Taliban. Would you? … Would you? That’s my next question. Would you sacrifice yourself to remove the Taliban?
Moore: No. I would be willing to sacrifice my life to track down the people that killed 3,000 people on our soil.
In other words, Moore would not support the United States removing any brutal leader anywhere, unless that leader were an "imminent threat" to Americans, or more specifically, unless he already had killed Americans.
Moore opposed toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan, which mercilessly repressed the Afghan people and which gave al-Qaida its safe harbor as Osama bin Ladin planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Moore would "sacrifice" his life "to track down the people that killed 3,000 people on our soil." I doubt Moore would go even that far. The way Moore twists words, he’d quickly define "the people that killed 3,000 people on our soil" as the 9-11 hijackers, and they’re already dead.
But even if Moore died capturing Osama bin Ladin and his 100 closest associates, how would that make the world much safer when it’s left with regimes like the Taliban and Saddam’s Baathists?
How would that prevent another rich Islamofascist from setting up shop in Afghanistan and picking up right where Osama left off? Under cover of the Taliban’s dictatorship, the new al-Qaida easily could top the old al-Qaida’s atrocities, and we’d never see the "imminent threat" until it hit us.
And what would Osama’s capture do about Saddam, the dictator who already had killed American soldiers in 1991, and who was continuing the violate the 1991 cease-fire? Nothing.
How would Moore free the Afghans and Iraqis from their brutal regimes? How would he let these Muslims claim their right to democracy and freedom? He wouldn’t.
Under Moore’s bigoted ideology, Americans may defend only Americans, and only very directly. There again is the appeal to selfishness. Help yourselves and no one else. There again is the appeal to terror. You would sacrifice your child to remove a brutal dictator?
Moore is too selfish, cowardly and racist ever to risk his life for someone else’s freedom or for a lasting peace. He insists on keeping the dictators secure in their sadistic pleasures.
Fortunately, other Americans are willing to put their lives on the line for the cause of life and liberty, and their unselfishness doesn’t stop at the borders. When an enemy is known to have killed and enslaved hundreds of thousands and more, democracy’s soldiers accept the risk of battle, if not with pride, at least with the understanding that they’re fighting for a better future for the human race.
The full liberation of Iraq requires that each American soldier, Marine, sailor and airman take some risks to let democracy take root in Iraq. That’s something worth the risks, worthy of sacrifice, and those killed and wounded for that noble cause are heroes, not suckers, as Moore tries to argue.
I DON’T GETCHA, MISTER. Moore would do himself some good to view a real motion picture classic, "The Best Years of Our Lives," released in 1946. In one scene, set in an American drugstore just after World War II, a bitter old man tells a young sailor who had lost his hands in battle, "It’s terrible when you see a guy like you that had to sacrifice himself - and for what?"
"And for what?" says the sailor. "I don’t getcha, Mister."
The bitter old man says the Germans and Japanese really had nothing against the United States, but America was deceived into war, "sold down the river … by a bunch of radicals in Washington." The movie’s reaction to that slander is one Moore should see.
In the Iraq war, Sgt. Michael Pederson wasn’t a sucker who sacrificed himself for nothing, or for a bunch of sinister radicals. He was a hero, just as his sister was before him.
He might have complained about the inconvenience of going to war. He might have been skeptical about the motives for ousting Saddam. But he took the risks, flew into battle and played a vital role in ending fascism in Iraq. He cleared the way to liberation. Just a week after Sgt. Pederson’s death, Saddam was out of power.
I believe that, deep down, Lila Lipscomb knows her son was a hero. He was a true American for speaking his mind. He did his job bravely. His life was not wasted. He brought freedom to others who never had it.
Moore won’t accept the truth that free people have an obligation to aid the oppressed, that America had a duty in Iraq to respond to the million-plus screams that Moore couldn’t hear and to the million-plus tears that he wouldn’t capture on film.
Selfishness and terror make Moore rich. Why would he ever change?
Frank Warner
SEE ALSO: http://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2004/07/in_michael_moor.html
In Michael Moore's face: Bill O’Reilly forgets WMDs weren’t only justification for Iraq’s liberation.
SEE ALSO: http://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2004/08/in_bill_oreilly.html
In Bill O’Reilly’s face: Michael Moore falsely argues that popular uprisings can end totalitarianism.
Posted by: Frank Warner at September 20, 2004 12:02 PM
An Honest US Marine
Confirms Fallujah Disaster
And Lashes Back At David Hackworth
From GE News
12-19-4
Read this honest marine's words carefully, what the Iraqi resistance and several other foreign (non-Arab) agencies have reported about Fallujah 2 battle is correct.
Here is an honest United states Marine talking about the first night of Fallujah 2 and later on in the battle:
Responding to Dave (Hackworth):
"To Dave - you are a liar i am a usmc-cpl. station at camp pendleton and i lost 18 good friends in the fullujah operations. the soldier that wrote this letter, failed to mentioned the grad rocket booby traps that injured and killed over a 500 (Marine) troops on the night of the iniatial offense. support forces failed to provide blocking support for the corp and we were ambushed severely and took heavy casualties. you should be ashamed of yourself, because it sounds like a reporter wrote the letter instead of a soldier.
And i notice the letter was never addressed to a loved one, dave! the next time you think of lying to the public consider the families at camp pendleton ca. who would be glad if this story was true...but know that it isn't because hundreds of their dead loved ones came home in a coroners bag. and, oh, by the way, those 2-7 cav pussies conducted a tactical retreat on the 4th day of battle, leaving leavig the 1st-2nd-(mef)to fend for themselves, leaving the insurgents in control of 60% of the city."
Posted by: concerned at December 20, 2004 04:09 AM
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Posted by: qwewq835ACBE7 at November 21, 2011 04:24 AM