The Ugly, Pockmarked, Troop-Hating Face of the Anti-War Left

Aug, 2010

The Washington Post reports on the anti-war left and who they have adopted as their latest hero – the US Army soldier believed to be at the heart of the traitorous WikiLeaks scandal (via Memeorandum):

For antiwar campaigners from Seattle to Iceland, a new name has become a byword for anti-establishment heroism: Army Pfc. Bradley E. Manning.

Manning, a 22-year-old intelligence analyst, is suspected of leaking thousands of classified documents about the Afghanistan war to the Web site WikiLeaks.

[…]

Yet, since his arrest in the spring, Manning has become an instant folk hero to thousands of grass-roots activists around the world, some of whom are likening the disclosure to the unauthorized release of the Pentagon Papers or the anonymous tips that helped uncover the Watergate scandal.

Neither Manning nor his attorney have commented on the WikiLeaks dump — and WikiLeaks has not identified Manning as its source. But chat logs released by an online confidant suggest that the intelligence analyst was as disturbed by U.S. foreign policy as many of the strangers now supporting him.

[…]

Phillip Bailey, an Italian IT specialist living in Croatia, set up a Facebook page to support Manning after he learned of the case. In less than a week, the page had more than 6,000 members.

“When I read [Manning] had been arrested, I knew I had to do something to help the guy,” Bailey said. “For me, he has done something really incredible. He did something brave, with a big risk.”

Like Bailey, Mike Gogulski, a U.S. citizen living in Slovakia, has never met Manning. He has, nevertheless, set up the Bradley Manning Support Network, a Web site devoted to the cause.

“The story grabbed me,” Gogulski said. “It seems to be a new kind of cause. You’ve got a charismatic young whistleblower being linked to what I’ve heard called the story of the decade.”

Although most of those who contact the Web site are in the United States, Gogulski said he has also received calls from Spain, Germany, Canada, Australia, Italy and Britain.

The group co-coordinating Gogulski’s campaign, Courage to Resist, has developed a line of Manning memorabilia, replete with images of the boyish-looking private. There are “Save Bradley Manning!” badges, posters and T-shirts. The products’ tagline: “Blowing the whistle on war crimes is not a crime.”

Jeff Patterson, head of Courage to Resist, said the group has set an initial goal of $50,000 to support Manning’s defense and has already raised $33,000.

The campaign extends beyond the Internet. More than 100 supporters gathered at a hastily organized rally Sunday in Quantico, where Manning is being held at the Marine Corps base. Another took place Thursday night in Oklahoma City, the capital of his home state. Plans are being drawn up for an international day of solidarity.

Andrew Burgin, spokesman for Britain’s Stop the War Coalition, said that whoever disclosed the classified material to WikiLeaks had done the public a favor.

Try as I might, I can’t wrap my mind around this disturbingly warped way of thinking. Let’s see – the people hurt and endangered the most out of this, outside of our troops of course, were the hundreds of Afghan informants who were exposed in the process of this “public favor.” Their lives are now at serious risk as enemy forces in Afghanistan have already issued rallying cries for their slavish followers to hunt down anyone named as aiding US and allied forces.

What do informants do? For the clueless nutjobs on the anti-war left, they are brave souls who risk life and limb to get valuable information to our troops in the battlefield in order to assist them in defeating the murderous Islamofascists who have planted their collective feet into Afghan soil fur purposes of murder, mayhem, and domination. When our troops get that valuable information, it can lead to some major captures/arrests/detentions – or obliteration, depending on the type of information received. This, in turn, aids in speeding up the process of, you know, winning so that eventually a majority of our men and women in uniform can return home, and in the process sets it up to where Afghans can be in charge of their own respective destinies.

By “outing” informants, which is what guttersnipes like Julian Assange and Manning have gleefully done, this slows down the process, ensuring that not only are our troops are there longer – which is the exact OPPOSITE of what the anti-war crowd wants, but also makes their jobs that much harder and puts them – and those who covertly help them – at greater risk of getting hurt, maimed, or killed because they don’t have every single scrap of information they need that will be crucial to their success.

Anti-war types like to claim they “support the troops but not the war.” I don’t think so, not when you consider how what they do almost always has negative, disastrous consequences for the those who volunteered to serve and to, in effect, take a bullet in the battlefield for all us back home in the name of freedom, even the contemptible armchair nitwits who have made it their mission to make their lives a living hell – at the risk of either injury and/or death. So no, these so-called “peace lovers” don’t support the troops, and they certainly do not give a rip about “peace.” They are the enemy. And I see very little difference in that type of enemy and the in-your-face enemy our troops face on the battlefield.

Throughout the last 10 or so years, we’ve seen marches, movements, protests, deliberate targeting – in some cases violent targeting – of military recruiters, defacing of military property, etc, all in the name of “bringing the troops home”- but in reality, these movements are not about the troops at all. It’s about shaming America for people who hate this country and want to turn it into something our Founders never intended for it to be. It’s also about shaming George W. Bush because they view Afghanistan and Iraq as “Bushs wars” … and if the anti-war movement can in any way influence the war outcome negatively, they will – purely out of vicious hatred for a man who didn’t always get it right, but who always tried to do the right thing by our troops and our country.

The only difference between those who protest against war now and those who protested back during ‘nam is that they don’t have to go out onto the streets and do it en masse like they used to, in order to “get the word out.” They can use their computers to effectively spit into the faces of our bravest and brightest. Outside of Islamofascists themselves, I can’t think of a more despicable bunch than those who would engage in such self-centered, destructive tactics at the expense of the lives of so many innocent people. As I’ve said before: Different wars, different spitting tactics, but the same message: we do not support you.

Cross-posted from the Sister Toldjah blog.