three makes a trend

Going to John Cole again, I find the heartwrenching story of a member of a Navy SEAL team in Afghanistan in 2005 who came across some Afghan goatherders, let them go instead of killing them on the spot, and then were ambushed by the Taliban, presumably because of a tip-off by the goatherders. In retrospect, he wishes his team had murdered the goatherders, and is angry at the American left for forcing his hand at the crucial moment.

“Look at me right now in my story,” Mr. Luttrell writes. “Helpless, tortured, shot, blown up, my best buddies all dead, and all because we were afraid of the liberals back home, afraid to do what was necessary to save our own lives. Afraid of American civilian lawyers. I have only one piece of advice for what it’s worth: If you don’t want to get into a war where things go wrong, where the wrong people sometimes get killed, where innocent people sometimes have to die, then stay the hell out of it in the first place.”

Mr. Luttrell is correct. There was no good reason for us to go there in the first place. We should have stayed the hell out, then many innocent people would not have died and he would not have been tortured, shot, and blown up.