Stan Goff's blog, Feral Scholar --
http://stangoff.com has an excellent critiques of the Sunday New York Times titilating article on the recent tax-payer supported arrival of "exotic dancers" in Haditha. As Stan points out,
What can't be overlooked, what the Times and the military are not overlooking so much as leaving unsaid, is the city where this little featurish lap-dance is taking place. Haditha is the location of the revenge-massacre by the Marines last year of 24 Iraqi civilians.
more beneath the fold
Stan continues,
You wouldn't have gone to My Lai in 1970 to write about the latest war-time innovations in agriculture knowing what had happened there in 1968. Similarly, you don't go back to Haditha a year after its massacre and focus gazes and laughs on the underfolds of girls' thighs and the overfolds of soldiers' turgidity ("they had to be reminded not to leave their weapons behind"). You go back, as long as you're going back, in the same way that you might to New Orleans a year later, with a minimum degree of soberness and remove. The Times' story instead reads--and forgive the word, but this is no Sunday morning feature--as a fuck-you valentine to Haditha and its people.
Stan doesn't just direct his attention at the Times, but also at the military,
There's also the cultural dimension of the story, demolishing as it unwittingly does any notion that Americans are in Iraq to respect local norms in any way (not that local norms are defensible: but again, we're going on what the military claims to be spreading and respecting). "Why do they hate us"? Look at what you're parading on your plywood stages in Iraq while your men are rampaging through Iraqi streets, protecting what they're destroying and calling it "stabilization." Is the military that oblivious? Doubtful. There's tactical idiocy--the inability to read a local culture in order to better tame it. But this is purposeful idiocy. This is sticking America's boot up Iraq's rear. It is doing to Iraq what the Times story does so well: adding obscenity to injury and reveling in the spoils.
This is just a sample. Goff's blog deserves a much wider audience. A former member of Delta force, he has become a leading figure in the movement of military families against the war. Many of his blog diaries deal with the relationship between militarism and womens oppression. His writings are a welcome challenge to the simplistic "Support Our Troops, Bring Them Home" rhetoric taken up by so many progressives desperate to prove their patriotism. Goff is an unabashed anti-imperialist with the experience and credentials to back up his critiques.