Web and news searches at Google, as well as a search at the Associated Press's national site, indicate that there is very little interest in the establishment press in getting the reactions of current and former U.S. soldiers who defeated enemy forces in Ramadi during last decade's Iraq War to the loss of that city to Islamic State forces.
Sadly, that's not surprising. As usual, Fox News is doing work the rest of the press refuses to do. This morning, Debbie Lee, whose son Marc Alan Lee, the first Navy SEAL killed in the Iraq War, died at Ramadi, appeared on Fox & Friends. Video, plus an excerpt from a rare exception to the establishment press's indifference at the Daily Beast, follow the jump.
First, the video:
Key points:
- Lee is sick and tired of the administration's "flippant attitide," perfectly illustrated in White House Press Secretary's defensive "Are we going to set our hair on fire?" reaction to an apparent question about the seriousness of Ramadi's loss.
- Despite the loss of a city of 400,000, the Pentagon has no plans to review its strategy. Lee questions whether the strategy is really to fail.
- She also decried the apparent lack of concern for the bloodshed and brutality which have followed.
At the Daily Beast, Michael Daly spoke with Lee. Here is some of what he wrote on Tuesday (bolds are mine):
My Son Died for Ramadi. Now ISIS Has It.
Debbie Lee says she’s sickened that the city her son sacrificed his life defending has fallen—and furious at the Joint Chiefs chairman’s insistence Ramadi is ‘not symbolic in any way.’
Nine years after Marc Alan Lee became the first Navy SEAL killed in the Iraq War, his mother sat watching TV images of the black flag of ISIS flying over the city where her son died.
“Gut wrenching,” Debbie Lee said on Monday. “The sacrifices that were made, the blood that's been shed.”
... the path and pace of the fight as set by the government of Iraq is generally to abandon its U.S.-supplied weapons and flee. That was again evidenced in Ramadi over the weekend.
“It is sickening to me,” Debbie Lee said.
... Now that Ramadi has fallen these nine years later, his mother should not be the only one who is sickened.
Hopefully, Debbie Lee can take some comfort, admittedly limited, in the fact that she is indeed not the only one sickened by our government's betrayal of the victory its soldiers won in 2008.
Posters at NewsBusters have noted three different times the broadcast networks' reluctance to air any form of criticism of the Obama administration's decision to take U.S. tropps out of Iraq when it did or the Pentagon's strategy (assuming one exists) for turning things around.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
