Colonel Weasel

Colonel Steele–the underwhelming company commander reviled by the Delta Force in Blackhawk Down--has hidden behind his legal rights and sold out his men in an Iraqi war crimes prosecution. Nut-case that Hamdania’s Sgt. Hutchins was, at least he’s going the distance on a trial without hurting his subordinates in a plea deal, even though he clearly bullied his subordinates into murdering a random Iraqi and covering it up. Hutchin’s remaining sense of honor, though too feeble to get him to plead guilty, at least contains some basic loyalty to the men he (illegally) ordered to commit war crimes.

Steele, by contrast, is a terrible human type, the careerist with bad judgment and no sense of loyalty to his men, as the War Nerd explains so deftly:

If I could dig up any dead American CO for Iraq, it’d be [Nathan] Forrest. Because we’re in a war that makes Bloody Kansas look like Smallville — the Cleanflix version of Smallville, edited for Mormons. Instead of Forrest, we’ve got Steele — and when the Army brought him up for a reprimand for violating those insane ROE, Steele did what you’d expect from a Bush-era American: tried to weasel out of it, saving his own ass while setting his men up for life sentences in a military prison for doing what he’d told them to do.

After a bunch of 101st GIs gave sworn statements that Steele had told them to shoot every man they found on this island, Steele said “through his lawyers” that he did not use “specific language” to that effect. That’s a new one OJ’s lawyers never thought of: the Vagueness Defense: “Oh, uh, I might’ve hinted, you know, that they should sort of pepper’em a little, wing a few civvies, light up the odd grandpa, you know, the way you do, but I never specifically said in so many words that they had to kill EVERY man on the island…”

What is it these days? We’re up to our ears in guys like Steele–the worst of both worlds. We used to have warriors and cowards and you could tell the two breeds apart — but now we’ve got these sick flip-floppers who are all blood and slaughter when they’re giving the orders, then crawling behind their lawyers’ backs when they’re called on the carpet.

I’m not calling Steele a plain old battle-dodging coward. He’s the newer kind of coward, the ones who are brave enough facing enemy fire but piss their pants at the thought that their precious career might be in danger . . .