Trashing the trashers who trash the trashers who trashed the trasher that trashed the military? Convoluted? Yes! Inaccurate? No! Let me explain.

In Harper's Magazine an article dated yesterday (August 24, 2007) and authored by Scott Horton (What is it with these fellows named Scott? Except Scott Johnson of Powerline of course!) appears that takes on the neo-con publications and news sources that have trashed The New Republic's reporting by one Scott Thomas (in real life, the husband of a TNR Staffer Scott Thomas Beauchamp). Thomas wrote an article of dubious (nay, not dubious, outright falsehood it seems) truth regarding the depredations by members of his unit in Iraq. I've reported on this in the past (here and here and my blogging partner Woody here, and others here and here and from fellow Munuvian Ace of Spades HQ here). Horton begins his trashing of the neo-cons thusly:

Over the last two weeks there was a flap over a piece published in The New Republic by an American soldier in Iraq named Scott Beauchamp. He described a number of gruesome scenes, some of which did not portray his fellow soldiers in the best of light. The piece drew ferocious blow-back from the Neocon war party, whose hallmark is complete control over the news on the ground and from the front ranks in Iraq. They viewed the report as a violation of their sacred monopoly and were determined to destroy Beauchamp and to lash out at The New Republic.

I have no idea whether Beauchamp’s story was accurate. But at this point I have seen enough of the Neocon corner’s war fables to immediately discount anything that emerges from it.

I've bashed the Republicans and conservatives often enough so that I can honestly say that I think I can tell a scoundrel when I read one, but if seems if Mr. Horton lacks that particular ability. He relates a situation where he says that he is personally knowledgable about mis-reporting in the "neo-con Corner."

One example: back last spring, when I was living in Baghdad, on Haifa Street, I sat in the evening reading a report by one of the core Neocon pack. He was reporting from Baghdad, and recounted a day he had spent out on a patrol with U.S. troops on Haifa Street. He described a peaceful, pleasant, upscale community. Children were out playing on the street. Men and women were out going about their daily business. Well, in fact I had been forced to spend the day “in the submarine,” as they say, missing appointments I had in town. Why? This bucolic, marvelous Haifa Street that he described had erupted in gun battles the entire day. In the view of my security guards, with which I readily concurred, it was too unsafe. And yes, I could hear the gunfire and watch some of the exchanges from my position. No American patrol had passed by and there were certainly no children playing in the street. This was the point when I realized that many of these accounts were pure fabrications."

But, I digress.

What’s interesting about this whole affair is not the Beauchamp story, but the response to it from William Kristol, the Weekly Standard, and their quite amazing ability to exercise total command and control over the public affairs operations at the Pentagon throughout the process.

Horton then brings up Jonathan Chait as a witness for the prosecution:

The best volley in this exchange so far was fired yesterday by Jonathan Chait. He titles his piece “The Thuggery of William Kristol” and he goes straight for the jugular:

Offering up [Kristol’s] interpretation of why TNR would publish such slanders, he concluded, in an editorial titled, “They Don’t Really Support the Troops”:

”Having turned against a war that some of them supported, the left is now turning against the troops they claim still to support. They sense that history is progressing away from them–that these soldiers, fighting courageously in a just cause, could still win the war, that they are proud of their service, and that they will be future leaders of this country.”

In just two sentences, this passage provides a full summary of the decrepit intellectual state of neoconservatism. First, there is Kristol’s curious premise that tnr only published this essay because we have “turned against” the war. If Beauchamp’s writings were tnr’s attempt to discredit the war, why would his first contribution describe a pro-American Iraqi boy savagely mutilated by insurgents? For that matter, why would we work to undermine the war by publishing a first-person account on the magazine’s back page rather than taking the more straightforward step of, say, editorializing for withdrawal?"

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