Leftist media, congressmen, and elitist groups have already committed premature evaluation concerning the role of members of the Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment.  The left and our drive—by media have already pronounced our troops guilty of murdering 24 men, women, and children last November 19, at Haditha, a farm town in the Upper Euphrates Valley.  And this includes not just Kilo Company, but all Marines and the entire chain of command. 

Sadly, they have convicted our military of all charges prior to any trial, and much worse, two weeks before the completion of either the investigation or the collection of any indicting or exculpatory evidence. 

The fact that some of these leftists served in the U.S. military does not qualify them either to judge a priori our troops innocence or guilt or to set national security policy and military procedure any more than would have the prior military service of John Wilkes Booth or Benedict Arnold.

However, let's suppose for a moment the troops of Kilo Company are guilty of the killing of innocent civilians as alleged by the senile and decrepit old gray lady, the New York Times, and her lapdogs in the mainstream media.  Does that mean the members of Kilo are guilty of murder according to just war theory, the Geneva Convention on War Crimes, or ethical standards?  Hardly.

What is really needed in regard to any alleged 'atrocities' by our troops is for our leaders to be educated about just war theory, to state its principles clearly to our people, and to stand up for standards in international forums including the laughable U.N.'s considerations regarding alleged war crimes.  Three principles of just war theory are particularly relevant to Haditha.

The first principle of just war theory is that the cause must be morally right in that it opposes a great injustice to one's own people or to other innocents.  The cause in Iraq was unquestionably just due to Saddam's continuing efforts to:

 attack our pilots who enforced his agreement to air restrictions that ended the '91 Gulf War;

 torture to death in the most horrific manner an average of 300 innocent Iraqis a day;

 pay suicide bombers world—wide to attack innocent men, women, and children;

 aggressively develop WMD's;

 have the highest echelon of his military run at least four training camps where virtually every Islamic terrorist organization in the world including al Qaeda were trained how to make and implement WMD and other terrorist attacks against the west; the cause was indisputably just. 

The left counters this argument that the war is just (1) by repeating ad nauseum their mantra that the U.S. in the war has killed between 15,000 and 38,000  Iraqis (depending on which leftist you are reading), and (2) by ignoring the fact that most of the Iraqi deaths are due either to the terrorist insurgents attacks of civilians or to terrorist insurgents who are killed by U.S. troops in defense of those civilians.  Almost comically, one leftist writer this past week noted that the number of Iraqi deaths that he blames on our military includes an unusually large number of deaths among the citizens of  Fallujah!  Imagine that!  It is sadly puzzling why Fallujah in particular was so victimized for abuse by our troops. . . at least it is to the mindless left.

However, even if it were true that U.S troops were responsible for, say, 45,000 Iraqis during the 3