Okay, first of all, lemme make it clear that the title is a joke. For the two or three of you who haven’t kept up with Kos’ “screw them” remark, here’s an excellent rundown. For those too lazy to click, it’s basically this : In response to a post about the deaths of four Americans in Falujah last week, Kos said the following :

Every death should be on the front page… That said, I feel nothing over the death of mercenaries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.

Needless to say, this has caused the political world (at least, the online portions of it) to go apeshit. Conservatives have convinced advertisers to pull their ads from his site, liberals have been scrambling to distance themselves from the remark, and the emotional nature of it all has made it difficult for people on either side of the aisle to discuss this thing rationally.

Like so many disagreements, this one is as semantic as it is emotional. Rather than boil this down to a simple “Kos is wrong/right” situation, I think we need to separate this into two parts : what he said and how he said it.

What Kos said (or at least tried to say) was that the privatization of war is a disturbing trend. This is a point he made much clearer in the initial explanation of his remarks :

I was angry that five soldiers — the real heroes in my mind — were killed the same day and got far lower billing in the newscasts. I was angry that 51 American soldiers paid the ultimate price for Bush’s folly in Iraq in March alone. I was angry that these mercenaries make more in a day than our brave men and women in uniform make in an entire month. I was angry that the US is funding private armies, paying them $30,000 per soldier, per month, while the Bush administration tries to cut our soldiers’ hazard pay. I was angry that these mercenaries would leave their wives and children behind to enter a war zone on their own violition.
. . .
Back to Iraq, our men and women in uniform are there under orders, trying to make the best of an impossible situation. The war is not their fault, and I will always defend their honor and bravery to the end of my days. But the mercenary is a whole different deal. They willingly enter a war zone, and do so because of the paycheck. They’re not there for humanitarian reasons (I doubt they’d donate half their paycheck to the Red Cross or whatever). They’re there because the money is DAMN good. They answer to no one except their CEO. They are dangerous, hence international efforts (however fruitless they may be) to ban their use.

On this front, I totally agree with him. What’s more, it seems that the use of mercenaries is a tactic that the Bush administration is using to hide the true costs of the Iraqi war. He knows that if he tried to call in a few more thousand troops he’d pretty much lose all the military support he has, so it’s much easier to just hire a bunch of rent-a-soldiers with his $87 billion than admit to the American people that his war is a quagmire. But here’s the question : if our soldiers only allegiance is to money, what’s to stop our oil-rich enemies from outbidding us in the middle of a battle?

How Kos said this is what’s so disturbing. It wasn’t just that these four mercenaries were killed, but that their bodies were dismembered, burned, and put on display. This isn’t the anonymous rocket attack story that the media is tired of reporting. This is (pardon my freedom) fucked up. To put it lightly, Kos’ remark was completely tactless. But isn’t that what blogs are all about?

I don’t see this as a situation wherein Kos is “showing his true colors” or any crap like that. He got a little emotional and carried away. This doesn’t strike me as any different than remarks most of us have probably made while having a few drinks with friends, arguing with a loved one, etc., other than the fact that it’s all in print. If you wanted to comb through my archives, I’m sure you could find something I wrote that makes me look like an insensitive asshole (but I’d like to think that I’m not one).

In short, everyone should just calm down a bit and try not to read too much into the reactions by either side of this debate. Just because someone is offended doesn’t mean that they approve of sending hired guns into a war zone, and just because someone agrees with Kos doesn’t mean that they’re celebrating the murders of Americans.