Tim Robbins is busying lying about our troops and essentially calling them mass-murderers…

“We’ve killed over 400,000 of their citizens.” That’s what actor Tim Robbins thinks U.S. troops have been doing in Iraq. He made the claim last week in an appearance on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

He’s wrong, of course. American soldiers have not been slaughtering 300 Iraqis a day for the last four years. Even for one of Hollywood’s most feculent personalities, this is an appalling slander of U.S. troops.

The Iraq Body Count is an antiwar website that tallies all civilian deaths in Iraq as reported in the news media. Theirs is a comprehensive count that seeks to hold the United States and Britain accountable for a wide range of civilian deaths. As explained at iraqbodycount.org: “The count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks). It also includes excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion.”

The antiwar group’s “maximum count”? At the moment, 77,555. That’s one-fifth the number concocted by Robbins’s overactive imagination.

...and director Brian DePalma has made a movie about one incident of a soldier acting like a criminal which he claims shows what’s really going on in Iraq:

The film is based on the story of a brutal rape and murder of a young Iraqi girl and the killing of her family at the hands of four American soldiers. Sgt. Paul Cortez, who has admitted his role in the attack, was sentenced earlier this year to 100 years in prison. Most Americans who read about this brutal crime probably understood that most soldiers don’t behave this way. DePalma does not. “The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people,” he said last week.

Here’s my question: Has either Robbins or DePalma actually been to Iraq to see what’s going on?  Have they spoken to Iraqis who are glad to be out from under Saddam’s thumb?  Have they spoken to the soldiers on the ground who they so casually slime with their exaggerations and unfair story-telling?

Something tells me they haven’t.  Or that if they have they’re ignoring what they saw heard.  I won’t say that things are going perfectly in Iraq, that we haven’t made mistakes or even that there isn’t a lot of tragedy in that country.  But we should all agree that wild-eyed partisan back-stabbing isn’t good for anyone.