Goldberg and Guthrie

Jonah Goldberg posts the following letter from a "retired Army guy" on The Corner:

Jonah, It's an Indian fight -- a violent and bloody struggle against an enemy without morals or values as we understand them, and a way of life alien to us. In an Indian fight they took scalps; now they take heads. The US Army fought the Indians on this continent for 115 years; the British Army and Colonial militias had fought them for 150 years before that. The War on terror is going to be long and bloody, and fought on many fronts. It won't be won in the next four years, but it could be lost.

I don't even know how to begin to comment on this. To argue that "Indians" were "an enemy without morals or values as we understand them" is beyond ignorance. Indians were fighting to protect their home: a value we could understand, but chose to ignore. The Indians chose to believe Europeans and Americans when they signed treaties with them: a value that we understood, but chose to ignore. The crime perpetrated on these people was on a scale beyond anything that Osama Bin Laden could dream of accomplishing. If this war really is the same as that one, then we're on the wrong side.

Of course, this war is nothing like that one, but it's disturbing that a prominent conservative would approvingly post a letter that says that it is.