Lets hear it for the Marines

Janan Ganesh writes in the Time Online:

THE MOTTO of the US Marine Corps is Semper Fidelis, or “always faithful”. And faith is exactly what the Western media eschew in their relentlessly cynical coverage of the American Armed Forces, which plunged to a new nadir last week with the outrage at a Marine who shot dead an injured and unarmed Fallujah terrorist. Their determination to portray the Americans as trigger-happy louts and the Iraqi terrorists as mere “rebels” slanders the former, sanctifies the latter and betrays everybody who trusts journalists to be objective. Each American transgression is covered exhaustively and reproachfully, while triumphs, such as the trouble-free elections in Afghanistan and the reconstruction of Iraqi infrastructure, are treated as background noise. The torture of a few dozen prisoners in Abu Ghraib, for example, received far more attention than the restoration of the Marsh Arabs’ homeland.

I am glad that our nation, and the Marines are held to a higher standard. That is a good thing. It is not so good when the standard become so high that every possible infraction is used as evidence that the mission is a failure or lacks moral legitimacy. Mistakes will be made, even by good people trying to do good things. That is an unfortunate fact of war. It is not however, an excuse to do nothing.