A "don't miss" at Mudville Gazette

I visit Greyhawk and his Mrs. at Mudville Gazette at least once a day. Here's another example of why: Greyhawk’s latest post, “A Vicious Circle.”

Greyhawk first tells us about a journalist who was nearly shot and killed by American troops at a checkpoint in Baghdad. He then quotes from the journalist's report:

Afterward I asked their captain how close they had come to killing us. He still had the safety off his M-16, his finger still curled around the trigger. He twitched it imperceptibly. "That close," he said. Had I not been there, but just my Iraqi colleagues or had the driver panicked and reversed or even had they been just a little farther away, no doubt I would not be writing this now. An ending that unfortunately many Iraqis have already suffered, shot at checkpoints and roadstops by jumpy troops, mistaken for possible suicide bombers, bombed by aircraft with faulty targeting information. All those things have indeed happened.

But how often, really? The answer: not very often, in fact. And not nearly often enough to make the 150,000 U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq the leading scourge of Iraq's civilians. That dishonor goes, hands down, to the insurgents. Even one incident is bad, of course, and there have been many. But civilian killings by U.S. troops are not nearly as common as the critics of the war in Iraq would like us to believe. It has become an article of faith among them that American troops have been slaughtering Iraqi civilians indiscriminately, and that one of the consequences of the war has been an unconscionable loss of life among the civilian population. It just isn't true.

I was surprised to learn for whom the journalist works and where his report appears.

The journalist's report and Greyhawk's commentary are outstanding.

And there's much more to the post. It's a "don't miss." The link's here.