A JINSA Contest

“Chicken Hawk” is a derisive term sneeringly applied by anti-military types to people who have not served in the armed forces but who nevertheless understand the utility of military force in service of American national security ends. It has been applied to some in the Pentagon, in fact, who are responsible for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is a clever turn of phrase. Wrong, but a clever turn of phrase. We are not that clever, so we’re turning to you, our readers.

“Chicken Hawk” is a derisive term sneeringly applied by anti-military types to people who have not served in the armed forces but who nevertheless understand the utility of military force in service of American national security ends. It has been applied to some in the Pentagon, in fact, who are responsible for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is a clever turn of phrase. Wrong, but a clever turn of phrase. We are not that clever, so we’re turning to you, our readers.

We are holding a contest for an appellation for those who have never supported our troops but who publicly castigate soldiers in the field for doing their jobs. Those who have not served in the military but insist they know how it “should” be done. Those who have never found a military action that they could support, but insist they know a “war crime” when they see one – and who see one in every military action. Those who claim to support our soldiers if not their war – and then use their access to the media to make the soldiers’ jobs harder by an order of magnitude. Those who took a single moment out of 10 days of non-stop fighting in Fallujah and offered it up as propaganda for the enemies of a single Marine, all the Marines and all the troops fighting for a free Iraq.

Those people need a name. We will publish the best ones you send us.

But there are other people who need a name. What can we call people in the American military and civilian hierarchy who should have leapt to the defense of the Marine who shot a military aged man in a bunker during a battle, but who hid instead behind the promise of an “investigation”? Are they afraid to say that all over Iraq (and the PA territories) mosques can no longer be considered holy because they are routinely used as military installations, and that shooting from mosques, schools and hospitals is routine? Why didn’t they say booby-trapped bodies – living and dead – have been found in Iraq and there was no reason for any Marine to believe a wounded man was “safe”? Why didn’t they say that just the day before, a booby-trapped corpse had killed the Marine’s buddy? Why didn’t they talk about the mutilated body of a blond woman found in the streets of Fallujah, and other mutilated bodies found by the troops – making it extremely unwise to put idealism ahead of a soldier’s personal safety, given the realities of this battlefield?

In Fallujah, and elsewhere in Iraq, we have seen butchers whose depravity knows no bounds. They kidnap aid workers, blow up women and children, and have no respect for human life or religion – even their own. We have thrown young Americans into that furnace and asked them to do the almost impossible – to fight that enemy and retain their humanity and uphold the standards of conduct of the American armed forces.

Some soldiers have done and will do things for which they should and no doubt will be sanctioned by their superiors. Some might have done them in Fallujah. But no one should be allowed to take 15 seconds of film with no context as an excuse to ruin one soldier or all of the soldiers. Give us a name for people who try.