Daniel Henninger on the Haditha Publicity Bonanza

Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal explains how the Haditha incident contributes to the declining support for the Iraq deployment:

Haditha is indeed the new Abu Ghraib. What this most importantly means is that any U.S. military action overseas now, no matter its level of justification, can be taken down by the significance assigned to events by the modern machinery of publicity. This explains why the U.S. commanders in Iraq announced yesterday that all soldiers in the next 30 days would take what the headlines are calling "ethics training." Of the some 150,000 U.S.-led troops there, Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the U.S. combat commander in Iraq, said "99.9% of them perform their jobs magnificently." Yes, and 99.9% of them, after all they've been through, will deeply resent the clear inference they lack "core values." Is that different than standard "Corps values"?

Henninger goes on to note that it's unbearable that the 99 percent of service personnel who perform honorably are soiled by the media's repetitively negative reporting.