Wizblog

Echoes Reverberate

Buckets of bandwidth have been used up already in reaction to the New York Times feature story on the "deadly echoes" of war now playing out on the streets of the heartland as Iraq veterans return home. The paper has devoted 7000 words (in Part 1 alone) to a roundup of violent misdeeds by Iraq veterans (121 in all), generating lots of "human interest" but precious little context or meaningful analysis, much less any linkage between military service and violent behavior.

And it hasn't taken long for the back-of-the-envelope number crunching to begin, prompted in part by the outrage of people whose experiences with returning Iraq veterans doesn't resemble the portrait of gut-wrenching death and heartbreak in the Times story. Ralph Peters was among those digging down for some numbers early on:

The Times did get one basic fact right: Returning vets committed or are charged with 121 murders in the United States since our current wars began.

Had the Times' "journalists" and editors bothered to put those figures in context - which they carefully avoided doing - they would've found that the murder rate that leaves them so aghast means that our vets are five times less likely to commit a murder than their demographic peers.

Click and read the basis for Peters' calculation, but whatever you do, don't miss Iowahawk's brilliant riposte (I heard it called too real to be true parody) to the Times piece. The product of the time and research of one blogger in a few days would appear to compare favorably to that of the nine reporters the Times had working on "Deadly Echoes". See also a follow-up post by Iowahawk.

Mark Steyn is trenchant and funny, as ever:

As usual, the Times stories are written in the fey more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone that’s a shoo-in come Pulitzer time: “Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.”

“Patchwork picture,” “quiet phenomenon”… Yes, yes, but exactly how quiet is the phenomenon? How patchy is the picture?” The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan either “committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one.” The “committed a killing” formulation includes car accidents.

Thus, with declining deaths in theater, the media narrative evolves. Old story: “America’s soldiers are being cut down by violent irrational insurgents we can never hope to understand.” New story: “Americans are being cut down by violent irrational soldiers we can never hope to understand.” In the quagmire of these veterans’ minds, every leafy Connecticut subdivision is Fallujah and every Dunkin’ Donuts clerk an Abu Musab al-Zarqawi with an annoyingly perky manner.

Bob Owens pulled together lots of the relevant violent crime statistics writing here at PJM, and also at his own blog. Interesting too, that Bob is also busy these days writing the final chapter in the story of a previous media attempt to propagandize with a misleading (okay, utterly fictional) portrayal of the degradation of the U.S. soldier by the ravages of war. See recent Beauchamp document dumps here, here, and here.

John Dilulio at the Standard has more numbers.

And I'll wrap it with an excerpt from Ralph Peters follow-up column The New Lepers

The purpose of Sunday's instantly notorious feature "alerting" the American people that our Iraq and Afghanistan vets are all potential murderers when they move in next door was to mark those defenders of freedom as "unclean" - as the new lepers who can't be trusted amid uninfected Americans.

In the more than six years since 9/11, the Times has never run a feature story half as long on any of the hundreds of heroes who've served our country - those who've won medals of honor, distinguished service crosses, Navy crosses, silver stars or bronze stars with a V device (for valor).

But the Times put a major investigative effort into the "sensational" story that 121 returning vets had committed capital offenses (of course, 20 percent of the cases cited involved manslaughter charges stemming from drunken driving, not first- or second-degree murder . . . ).

Well, a quick statistics check let the air out of the Times' bid to make us dread the veteran down the block - who the Times implies has a machine gun under his bathrobe when he steps out front to fetch the morning paper. In fact, the capital-crimes rate ballyhooed by the Gray Lady demonstrates that our returning troops are far less likely to commit such an offense.

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To a darkly humorous degree, all this reflects the Freudian terrors leftists feel when confronted with men who don't have concave chests. But it goes far beyond that.

Pretending to pity tormented veterans (vets don't want our pity - they want our respect), the Times' feature was an artful example of hate-speech disguised as a public service.

Plus one of Iowahawk's posters:

Posted by dan at January 22, 2008 11:03 PM