I agree...

I can give the President the benefit of the doubt and say that he does not favor placing innocents or allies in harm's way, but I also believe that ANYTHING that makes Republicans look "bad" right now is a good thing for him... and these "facts" (which they are not) released in these leaked documents are all geared to make those that support (now or in the past) the Iraq and Afghan conflicts look "bad".

I'm no fan of spin, but if it needed to be done with less than two weeks to election day, then the spin should be that this Administration has no vested interest in stopping the leaks or punishing those responsible, and the President's lack of attention to the issue is ample evidence of that.

As tragic as the information that is determined to be accurate in the leaked documents may be... the question remains: how much worse could it have been had nothing been done to remove the regimes of both the Taliban and the Ba'athists. How many more thousands would have died at the hands of Hussein or bin Laden? How many more dissidents in Kabul or Baghdad would have been tortured or killed? How much more repression and tyranny would these people have had to suffer?

Again, I am firm in the belief these deaths (purportedly documented in the leaked papers) are NOT the fault of the American military, until such time as they can be determined to be such under every letter of the laws of the United States. They are, in fact, the fault of the Taliban and/or Saddam Hussein through the conscious and deliberate choices of their policies and actions. The unfortunate but very real fact that civilians face danger and hardship in a war-time environment is ever present, and these civilians were placed in that situation by the tyrannical regimes that we removed, and NOT by the actions or policies of the United States government or the US military and its allies. That is true today, just as it was in 1945 when we TOLD the Imperial Japanese government that city after city on the main islands of Japan would be destroyed until that government surrendered unconditionally to the Allied forces, or when the civilian populations of Georgia and the Carolinas suffered at the hands of General W T Sherman as he marched 135,000 Union troops across the Confederacy to the sea, and then north towards Virginia. These "governments" could have ended the risk to civilian populations at any time... but chose not to do so. Thus, the burden or responsibility lies with the leadership that allowed the suffering to happen in the face of inevitable defeat.

Our President's lack of response to this issue is (in my eyes) tantamount to approval of the agenda behind the Wikileaks actions... and that is damn unfortunate.