NationStates Jolt Archive

The article is based on interviews of US soldiers who served in Iraq.


These combat veterans, some of whom bear deep emotional and physical scars, and many of whom have come to oppose the occupation, gave vivid, on-the-record accounts. They described a brutal side of the war rarely seen on television screens or chronicled in newspaper accounts.

[...] Dozens of those interviewed witnessed Iraqi civilians, including children, dying from American firepower. Some participated in such killings; others treated or investigated civilian casualties after the fact. Many also heard such stories, in detail, from members of their unit. The soldiers, sailors and marines emphasized that not all troops took part in indiscriminate killings. Many said that these acts were perpetrated by a minority. But they nevertheless described such acts as common and said they often go unreported--and almost always go unpunished.

[...] "I mean, you physically could not do an investigation every time a civilian was wounded or killed because it just happens a lot and you'd spend all your time doing that," said Marine Reserve Lieut. Jonathan Morgenstein [...]

[...] Veterans said the culture of this counterinsurgency war, in which most Iraqi civilians were assumed to be hostile, made it difficult for soldiers to sympathize with their victims--at least until they returned home and had a chance to reflect.

"I guess while I was there, the general attitude was, A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi," said Spc. Jeff Englehart, [...]

Fighting in densely populated urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and the deaths at the hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents.

Many of these veterans returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the US government and American media. The war the vets described is a dark and even depraved enterprise, one that bears a powerful resemblance to other misguided and brutal colonial wars and occupations [...]

"I'll tell you the point where I really turned," said Spc. Michael Harmon, 24, a medic from Brooklyn. He served a thirteen-month tour beginning in April 2003 with the 167th Armor Regiment, Fourth Infantry Division, in Al-Rashidiya, a small town near Baghdad. "I go out to the scene and [there was] this little, you know, pudgy little 2-year-old child with the cute little pudgy legs, and I look and she has a bullet through her leg.... An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and the baby got hit. And this baby looked at me, wasn't crying, wasn't anything, it just looked at me like--I know she couldn't speak. It might sound crazy, but she was like asking me why. You know, Why do I have a bullet in my leg?... I was just like, This is--this is it. This is ridiculous."

Much of the resentment toward Iraqis described to The Nation by veterans was confirmed in a report released May 4 by the Pentagon. According to the survey, conducted by the Office of the Surgeon General of the US Army Medical Command, just 47 percent of soldiers and 38 percent of marines agreed that civilians should be treated with dignity and respect.

[...] The mounting frustration of fighting an elusive enemy and the devastating effect of roadside bombs, with their steady toll of American dead and wounded, led many troops to declare an open war on all Iraqis.

Veterans described reckless firing once they left their compounds. Some shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold along the roadside and then tossed grenades into the pools of gas to set them ablaze. Others opened fire on children. These shootings often enraged Iraqi witnesses.

[...] We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photographs, that some soldiers had so lost their moral compass that they'd mocked or desecrated Iraqi corpses. One photo, among dozens turned over to The Nation during the investigation, shows an American soldier acting as if he is about to eat the spilled brains of a dead Iraqi man with his brown plastic Army-issue spoon.

"Take a picture of me and this motherfucker," a soldier who had been in Sergeant Mejía's squad said as he put his arm around the corpse. [...] The scene, Sergeant Mejía said, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins.

[...]"You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall. You have junior-level troops, PFCs [privates first class], specialists will run into the other rooms and grab the family, and you'll group them all together. Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds and you make sure there's no weapons or anything that they can use to attack us.

"You get the interpreter and you get the man of the home, and you have him at gunpoint, and you'll ask the interpreter to ask him: 'Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda, anything at all--anything--anything in here that would lead us to believe that you are somehow involved in insurgent activity or anti-coalition forces activity?'

"Normally they'll say no, because that's normally the truth," Sergeant Bruhns said. "So what you'll do is you'll take his sofa cushions and you'll dump them. If he has a couch, you'll turn the couch upside down. You'll go into the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you'll throw everything on the floor, and you'll take his drawers and you'll dump them.... You'll open up his closet and you'll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it.

"And if you find something, then you'll detain him. If not, you'll say, 'Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.' So you've just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you've destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes."

[...] "I just remember thinking to myself, I just brought terror to someone else under the American flag, and that's just not what I joined the Army to do," he said. [...]

Sergeant Bruhns, Sergeant Bocanegra and others said physical abuse of Iraqis during raids was common. "It was just soldiers being soldiers," Sergeant Bocanegra said. "You give them a lot of, too much, power that they never had before, and before you know it they're the ones kicking these guys while they're handcuffed. And then by you not catching [insurgents], when you do have someone say, 'Oh, this is a guy planting a roadside bomb'--and you don't even know if it's him or not--you just go in there and kick the shit out of him and take him in the back of a five-ton--take him to jail."

[...] "You can honestly see how the Iraqis in general or even Arabs in general are being, you know, kind of like dehumanized," said Specialist Englehart. "Like it was very common for United States soldiers to call them derogatory terms, like camel jockeys or Jihad Johnny or, you know, sand ******."

According to Sergeant Millard and several others interviewed, "It becomes this racialized hatred towards Iraqis." And this racist language, as Specialist Harmon pointed out, likely played a role in the level of violence directed at Iraqi civilians. "By calling them names," he said, "they're not people anymore. They're just objects."

[...] Sergeant Flatt was among twenty-four veterans who said they had witnessed or heard stories from those in their unit of unarmed civilians being shot or run over by convoys. These incidents, they said, were so numerous that many were never reported.

Sergeant Flatt recalled an incident in January 2005 when a convoy drove past him on one of the main highways in Mosul. "A car following got too close to their convoy," he said. "Basically, they took shots at the car. Warning shots, I don't know. But they shot the car. Well, one of the bullets happened to just pierce the windshield and went straight into the face of this woman in the car. And she was--well, as far as I know--instantly killed. I didn't pull her out of the car or anything. Her son was driving the car, and she had her--she had three little girls in the back seat. And they came up to us, because we were actually sitting in a defensive position right next to the hospital, the main hospital in Mosul, the civilian hospital. And they drove up and she was obviously dead. And the girls were crying."

[...] Iraqi physicians, overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, published a study late last year in the British medical journal The Lancet that estimated that 601,000 civilians have died since the March 2003 invasion as the result of violence. The researchers found that coalition forces were responsible for 31 percent of these violent deaths, an estimate they said could be "conservative," since "deaths were not classified as being due to coalition forces if households had any uncertainty about the responsible party."

"Just the carnage, all the blown-up civilians, blown-up bodies that I saw," Specialist Englehart said. "I just--I started thinking, like, Why? What was this for?"

"It just gets frustrating," Specialist Reppenhagen said. "Instead of blaming your own command for putting you there in that situation, you start blaming the Iraqi people.... So it's a constant psychological battle to try to, you know, keep--to stay humane."


(link (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/hedges))

Just in case some people still aren't aware of what's going on... I can't believe there isn't continuous outrage about this in the US. If this were France, the French people as a whole would be out in the streets constantly, hounding our government until they bloody well reacted to it. :(

The article is based on interviews of US soldiers who served in Iraq.



(link (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/hedges))

Just in case some people still aren't aware of what's going on... I can't believe there isn't continuous outrage about this in the US. If this were France, the French people as a whole would be out in the streets constantly, hounding our government until they bloody well reacted to it. :(

Sure they would (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=32276)

I'm not defending this and I really think that the actions of soldiers in Iraq go a long way to providing support for insurgents but this is what soldiers do.

They're under huge amounts of stress, they're under constant fear of being killed, maimed and more and have daily examples to back up that fear.

Again, no defense, it's appalling but this was the problem all along - the US army is simply not trained for civilian control.

Sure they would (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=32276)

World Net Daily is the media which reported that "eating soya makes you gay", and sells t-shirts which say "Hang all journalists" and "Nuke Mecca". I tend not to take them very seriously. :rolleyes:

I'm not defending this and I really think that the actions of soldiers in Iraq go a long way to providing support for insurgents but this is what soldiers do.

They're under huge amounts of stress, they're under constant fear of being killed, maimed and more and have daily examples to back up that fear.

Again, no defense, it's appalling but this was the problem all along - the US army is simply not trained for civilian control.

Indeed. All that's very true. But as long as what's happening remains unknown to the majority of the public, there's even less hope of anything changing.

If this were France, the French people as a whole would be out in the streets constantly, hounding our government until they bloody well reacted to it. :(

Well, you see, in the USA they like to fellate the military who they rabidly, despite all reason and reality, want to claim "protect their freedoms and liberties". When these atrocities committed by their armed forced are reported they claim they're "isolated incidents" by a few "bad seeds" and that their boys are "good", dammit. Or they simply won't care. Or they'll simply say "war is bad" and "our boys are under stress" and somehow think that that's an acceptable explanation and then go on not caring, because it's not like it's people from the USA that are subject to the atrocities anyway.

Every time something new surfaces, which is basically almost weekly nowadays (perhaps not in the USA, though, because they and their media like to ignore these things), they still cling to the same claim of them being isolated incidents, that just somehow keep happening over, and over, and over again... because the truth of the matter - the widespread and high-frequency nature of the atrocities committed by their armed forces - does not chime well with the national (BS) mantra of "doing good in the world".

Barringtonia some rapidly right-wing conservative website does not prove anything apart from your bias.

It's sad to see the US military has so little regard for international law, and morality in general, if they did they would pursue and prosecute said offenders.

World Net Daily is the media which reported that "eating soya makes you gay", and sells t-shirts which say "Hang all journalists" and "Nuke Mecca". I tend not to take them very seriously. :rolleyes:



Indeed. All that's very true. But as long as what's happening remains unknown to the majority of the public, there's even less hope of anything changing.

Yeah, apologies for World Net Daily, I was simply fairly sure that if I typed in French military atrocities I'd come up with plenty of counter-evidence, poor choice of clicking on my part but there's plenty more.

I think it is reported - in most countries, the Abu Ghraib photos would have been sealed away.

Again, this is no defense but all armies are thuggish and commit horrendous atrocities. All armies are used by governments to their own ends and all governments use propaganda to get the public on their side.

You'd think a 20th century of the worst excesses of violence and carnage would provide a lesson but I doubt it.

Barringtonia sorry to disappoint but saying 'France does it' isn't a legitimate counter-argument to US-military atrocities, nor does it make it somehow less horrible.

Barringtonia some rapidly right-wing conservative website does not prove anything apart from your bias.

It's sad to see the US military has so little regard for international law, and morality in general, if they did they would pursue and prosecute said offenders.

Hello pot, kettle calling.

Compared to you I'm Themis herself

You'd think a 20th century of the worst excesses of violence and carnage would provide a lesson but I doubt it.

Despairing, isn't it?

Barringtonia sorry to disappoint but saying 'France does it' isn't a legitimate counter-argument to US-military atrocities, nor does it make it somehow less horrible.

In all fairness, I don't think that's what he was trying to say.

Barringtonia sorry to disappoint but saying 'France does it' isn't a legitimate counter-argument to US-military atrocities, nor does it make it somehow less horrible.

Honestly - it was to counter-point the claim that if this happened in France it would cause a massive outcry. People all over are often too apathetic to truly get emotionally and physically involved in changing things if it doesn't really affect them personally - people often feel that 'well, it's war' and are simply more interested in the latest football results to do anything about the many atrocities that go on in this world.

Please read the context - I'm not defending anything.

Hello pot, kettle calling.

Compared to you I'm Themis herself

wow, ad hominem and non-argument in one post.

The article is based on interviews of US soldiers who served in Iraq.



(link (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/hedges))

Just in case some people still aren't aware of what's going on... I can't believe there isn't continuous outrage about this in the US. If this were France, the French people as a whole would be out in the streets constantly, hounding our government until they bloody well reacted to it. :(

I don't think anyone takes http://www.thenation.com/ any more seriously than they would http://www.frontpagemag.com/ on reporting fact.

My, sounds quite a lot like the testimony during the Winter Soldier testimonials given during the Vietnam war. Funny, those were 'sworn' testimony about atrocities in Vietnam...by 'soldiers' who had never been in Vietnam...or had ever been soldiers.

But of course, such a thing couldn't happen again now could it?


Interesting, I didn't know that bad language and restraint fell under the catagory of 'Atrocities'. Heavens, every police depatrment in the United States, England, and the civilized world is guilty of these atrocities then! And, good grief! Racist language being used about a group of people that are trying to kill you? For shame upon those soldiers, for shame!

And accepting casuilites and trying to rationalize disturbing occurances? My god, we'd better start prosecuiting Doctors, Nurses, Paramedics, EMTs and Firefighters if that's a horrible offense against the public! Just for starters!

Surely you can do better than that? I mean come on, if you're willing to come up with stories like that the least you can do is make them a little spicier. You know, mass murder, raping babies, skinning children, butchering corspes for demonic rituals, and eating the corpses grandparents in front of their families.

This happens in any guerrilla war or war against an insurgency. It happened in Vietnam, in Chechnya, and it's happening in Iraq now. (And those are just a few modern examples.)

The problem is that the US refuses to acknowledge it in any sense, not even making a "war is hell and they do what they need to do to survive" sort of acknowledgment. Thus Americans keep whistling as they put another Support Our Troops bumper sticker on the Chevy...

Until the US cuts its Defense Spending by 60% or more, it will be a slave to the Military-Industrial Complex and a sickening, oblivious culture that lives on fear and the belief that our bombs and soldiers are somehow being used to "fight for our freedom."

Maybe China will have to kick our ass before we get the message that war doesn't solve every problem.

My, sounds quite a lot like the testimony during the Winter Soldier testimonials given during the Vietnam war. Funny, those were 'sworn' testimony about atrocities in Vietnam...by 'soldiers' who had never been in Vietnam...or had ever been soldiers.

But of course, such a thing couldn't happen again now could it?


Interesting, I didn't know that bad language and restraint fell under the catagory of 'Atrocities'. Heavens, every police depatrment in the United States, England, and the civilized world is guilty of these atrocities then! And, good grief! Racist language being used about a group of people that are trying to kill you? For shame upon those soldiers, for shame!

And accepting casuilites and trying to rationalize disturbing occurances? My god, we'd better start prosecuiting Doctors, Nurses, Paramedics, EMTs and Firefighters if that's a horrible offense against the public! Just for starters!

Surely you can do better than that? I mean come on, if you're willing to come up with stories like that the least you can do is make them a little spicier. You know, mass murder, raping babies, skinning children, butchering corspes for demonic rituals, and eating the corpses grandparents in front of their families.

Yeah, what a bunch of whiners! Shooting at kids? Desecrating corpses in front of grieving loved ones? Systematically humiliating and terrorizing the population with unfounded search and seizure? Zzzzzzzzzzz. Wake me up when we reach Jeffery Dahmer-mets-Pol Pot levels of depravity. Until then, it's just boys being boys and/or Americans Making the World Safe for Democracy. (*Covers eyes and plugs ears, sings "lalalalalala"*)

That information is sad. The US administration needs to realize that they have to pull out of Iraq, and also train their forces in occupation and civilian control duty, or start to realize that said duties are better performed by other parties than their own troops.

The US needs to culturally educate and train its forces. They take any jackass off the street that can pass a couple exams then stick them in Iraq underfunded and poorly equipped with an already existing prejudice against Arabic people and then they are attacked because other jackass' lack of cultural acceptance led them to attack Arabic people and it all spirals down from there.

People who went into military at 18 usually are culturally ignorant morons who have that reinforced by other people, the military fraternity, and the people they are sent off to make humor-the-politicians war with.

This might be somewhat of an odd realization, but does anyone see the parity between America's "Oh, just an isolated incident" and Japans "We never took sex slaves in our adventures in Asia"

While this is terrible and I in no way condone it.

Let me take a very right wing/conservative/probably real controversial stance on this.

This is war. War is shit and terrible things happen in war, always. There is/was/always will be a 100% chance of this happening when war happens. Soldiers will kill civilians, it sucks but there really isn't anything we can do about it. Especially in a guerrilla war where the line between soldier and civilian is very thin if not non-existent sometimes you kill a civilian because you think they are a soldier which sucks sometimes they got caught in the cross-fire which sucks. Sometimes you lose you're head and do something stupid and it hurts civilians which sucks. No matter what civilians die.

Point being: Yeh this sucks but there is no solvency so deal with it by mourning and praying for the war to end or the unfortunate people who lost their lives in this conflict.

This is war. War is shit and terrible things happen in war, always. There is/was/always will be a 100% chance of this happening when war happens. Soldiers will kill civilians, it sucks but there really isn't anything we can do about it. Especially in a guerrilla war where the line between soldier and civilian is very thin if not non-existent sometimes you kill a civilian because you think they are a soldier which sucks sometimes they got caught in the cross-fire which sucks. Sometimes you lose you're head and do something stupid and it hurts civilians which sucks. No matter what civilians die.

No. You are Wrong. In the future no one will ever be hurt by war. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_%27Em_Sock_%27Em_Robots)





:D

I don't see how USian troops are acting any differently from any occupying army in the history of human warfare.

I think there is more accountability in the modern US Army than there has been in previous armies, and I would bet that the abuses that do occur are less widespread than in previous armies. However, only a fool would think no US troops are currently raping, stealing, killing and otherwise abusing their power.

Please note: I am not saying that all US troops are doing this, or even a majority, but I do think the article accurately describes the actions of a minority of US soldiers.

While this is terrible and I in no way condone it.

Let me take a very right wing/conservative/probably real controversial stance on this.

This is war. War is shit and terrible things happen in war, always. There is/was/always will be a 100% chance of this happening when war happens. Soldiers will kill civilians, it sucks but there really isn't anything we can do about it. Especially in a guerrilla war where the line between soldier and civilian is very thin if not non-existent sometimes you kill a civilian because you think they are a soldier which sucks sometimes they got caught in the cross-fire which sucks. Sometimes you lose you're head and do something stupid and it hurts civilians which sucks. No matter what civilians die.

Point being: Yeh this sucks but there is no solvency so deal with it by mourning and praying for the war to end or the unfortunate people who lost their lives in this conflict.

War is war and shit happens, especially in war. These practices which arise in many combat zones should definitely taken into account in any decision to enter war. That said, there is absolutely no moral justification for simply accepting these occurrences to happen.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely: and few powers are more absolute than the power provided by a gun in the chaos of a war-zone. Consequently, governments that send their forces abroad should do everything they can to limit the power of these soldiers. For example, soldiers should receive a strenuous moral training besides their combat training; any, even limited, abuse of power should have consequences; the military leadership should be severely punished if they try to cover-up incidents and these incidents or civilian complaints should be carefully examined by independent agencies; governments should set an example to uphold international laws and human rights. Any government sending its forces abroad, without taking stringent measures to limit power abuse, becomes directly responsible for these “incidents”.

I don't see how USian troops are acting any differently from any occupying army in the history of human warfare.

I think there is more accountability in the modern US Army than there has been in previous armies, and I would bet that the abuses that do occur are less widespread than in previous armies. However, only a fool would think no US troops are currently raping, stealing, killing and otherwise abusing their power.

Please note: I am not saying that all US troops are doing this, or even a majority, but I do think the article accurately describes the actions of a minority of US soldiers.

I would not compare US accountability to previous armies, but rather to the level of accountability that can be expected from a liberal democracy, striving to bring “peace and democracy”. Compared to this level the US is doing quite poorly, and therefore should do much better. Both from a moral and utilitarian point of view.

just 47 percent of soldiers and 38 percent of marines agreed that civilians should be treated with dignity and respect.



That's what I find worrying in the long term. No mental distinction between innocent and guilty, right and wrong.

You know what amazes me? There are NO pictures/video of these supposed acts. When I was over there, damn near every person in my Battalion(2/8) had a camera, video camera, or cell phone capable of taking pictures, and yet I STILL don't see the photographic evidence. Sounds to me like a buncha shit.

Bottom line - we need to get out of Iraq.

And quit invading foreign countries.

And drop this bullshit worship of soldiers too.

But you know what? not a single one will happen. Because oh, "We have to complete the mission." And hey there's that "War on Terrorism." And soldiers are "defending our freedom" and "doing their duty." And also, there's the Simpson's movie.

You know what amazes me? There are NO pictures/video of these supposed acts. When I was over there, damn near every person in my Battalion(2/8) had a camera, video camera, or cell phone capable of taking pictures, and yet I STILL don't see the photographic evidence. Sounds to me like a buncha shit.

Is absence of evidence now evidence of absence?

I guess you probably think it was a missile that hit the Pentagon too. After all, the Pentagon has damn near hundreds or even thousands of security cams everywhere, yet all we get is one blurry, inconclusive half a frame? Sounds to me like a buncha shit!

You know what amazes me? There are NO pictures/video of these supposed acts. When I was over there, damn near every person in my Battalion(2/8) had a camera, video camera, or cell phone capable of taking pictures, and yet I STILL don't see the photographic evidence. Sounds to me like a buncha shit.

You don't think highly of US army/Marine intelligence levels do you?

Fair enough I guess, but I don't think even they are dumb enough to video themselves committing such acts. Maybe that's just me.....

This is war.
No it's not. This is a "nation building," peace keeping, occupation exercise.

Just because the American media and idiots in government feeding the idiots at home sound clips tack "war" on to everything does not mean it is war. Who are we ate war with in Iraq? Terrorists? How do you qualify being at war with "terrorists"? Maybe we are at war with the Iraqi civilians, because it isn't the government seeing as how we pretty much are the government.

This is war. War is shit and terrible things happen in war, always. There is/was/always will be a 100% chance of this happening when war happens. Soldiers will kill civilians, it sucks but there really isn't anything we can do about it. Especially in a guerrilla war where the line between soldier and civilian is very thin if not non-existent sometimes you kill a civilian because you think they are a soldier which sucks sometimes they got caught in the cross-fire which sucks. Sometimes you lose you're head and do something stupid and it hurts civilians which sucks. No matter what civilians die.
You've summed up why I hate elective war quite well.

Is absence of evidence now evidence of absence?



Guilty until proven innocent?

You know what amazes me? There are NO pictures/video of these supposed acts. When I was over there, damn near every person in my Battalion(2/8) had a camera, video camera, or cell phone capable of taking pictures, and yet I STILL don't see the photographic evidence. Sounds to me like a buncha shit.

"Down on the ground! Wait! Lemme get my cell phone camera out first!

. . .

Shit! I have to hold a gun with two hands! *smacks forehead*"

Guilty until proven innocent?

That has nothing to do with the quoted post

The quoted post was talking about the existence or non existence of evidence not the guilt of someone. The two are tied together but not the same.

Oh well, the US didn't create this mess.
Europe did, maybe a good 100 years ago?
~
After WW1, each of the allied countries except the US decided to split the Ottoman Empire into little shards, sorting them by race. However, the Kurds were not given their own little country, and instead were left to wander in the rest of the Middle East.

As each country was simply a territory of a European victor and then were suddenly let go without any true government -- it's no surprise that there is so much chaos. This war might be over if some European countries fess up and realize that they should fix their wrongs, and not insult the US while they cleaned up most of their silly messes.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely: and few powers are more absolute than the power provided by a gun in the chaos of a war-zone. Consequently, governments that send their forces abroad should do everything they can to limit the power of these soldiers. For example, soldiers should receive a strenuous moral training besides their combat training; any, even limited, abuse of power should have consequences; the military leadership should be severely punished if they try to cover-up incidents and these incidents or civilian complaints should be carefully examined by independent agencies; governments should set an example to uphold international laws and human rights. Any government sending its forces abroad, without taking stringent measures to limit power abuse, becomes directly responsible for these “incidents”.

You know what I like that solvency mechanism. Not 100% there will still be incidents but there is a good chance it will help. Pity it will never happen though because one of the main points of basic training is to unlearn that killing is evil so to start teaching moral rules just won't happen.

However, the second part could actually happen in reality and probably could work quite well. Though somebody needs to tell the government...

Oh well, the US didn't create this mess.
Europe did, maybe a good 100 years ago?
~
After WW1, each of the allied countries except the US decided to split the Ottoman Empire into little shards, sorting them by race. However, the Kurds were not given their own little country, and instead were left to wander in the rest of the Middle East.

As each country was simply a territory of a European victor and then were suddenly let go without any true government -- it's no surprise that there is so much chaos. This war might be over if some European countries fess up and realize that they should fix their wrongs, and not insult the US while they cleaned up most of their silly messes.

The Europeans saw the fire burning and decided to leave it alone, hoping it would burn itself out. They probably should have tried to put it out, but along came the USA and just poured petrol on it instead. Real clever.

Yeah, what a bunch of whiners! Shooting at kids? Desecrating corpses in front of grieving loved ones? Systematically humiliating and terrorizing the population with unfounded search and seizure? Zzzzzzzzzzz. Wake me up when we reach Jeffery Dahmer-mets-Pol Pot levels of depravity. Until then, it's just boys being boys and/or Americans Making the World Safe for Democracy. (*Covers eyes and plugs ears, sings "lalalalalala"*)

Can you be my friend? :D

Find a better source that has the article and get back to us on it. Id love to see these so called "veterans" that they asked these questions to, it couldnt be all those people with a grudge because they couldnt make it past BCT, or they got kicked out of the service for some reason now could it? That has happened before, and would seem as if it is happening again.

Find a better source that has the article and get back to us on it. Id love to see these so called "veterans" that they asked these questions to, it couldnt be all those people with a grudge because they couldnt make it past BCT, or they got kicked out of the service for some reason now could it? That has happened before, and would seem as if it is happening again.

I'm sure Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, and all the other plethora of abuses are all lies and fabrications as well. Now, I'm not sure you understand sarcasm, so I feel obliged to tell you: I am being sarcastic.

The US needs to culturally educate and train its forces. They take any jackass off the street that can pass a couple exams then stick them in Iraq underfunded and poorly equipped with an already existing prejudice against Arabic people and then they are attacked because other jackass' lack of cultural acceptance led them to attack Arabic people and it all spirals down from there.

People who went into military at 18 usually are culturally ignorant morons who have that reinforced by other people, the military fraternity, and the people they are sent off to make humor-the-politicians war with.


Please, do share more of this "expert" knowledge you seem to have of the workings of the US Military. :rolleyes:

And of course nobody wants to hear our side of the story. Just a bunch of bashing our troops. America is evil blah blah. Same thing you hear every day on general.

I'm sure Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, and all the other plethora of abuses are all lies and fabrications as well. Now, I'm not sure you understand sarcasm, so I feel obliged to tell you: I am being sarcastic.

Sure, there are terrible abuses that go on in Iraq, and other places, and I am sure that more will happen and the criminals who commit these acts should be punished to the fullest. Are there real shitbags who slip through the cracks and get into the military? Yes, and this is unfortunate and frustrating. However, the article makes it sound like, and many users on the board have the opinion, that the overwhelming majority of servicemembers are filthy scumbag criminals. This is simply not true, I will say this once again, and Im quite sure it will fall on the deaf ears of the NSG crowd, but the majority of servicemembers are good people just like anyone else. As I said before, a miniscule fraction of our soldiers, airmen, marines, and sailors are shitbags who dont deserve to serve our country.

And of course nobody wants to hear our side of the story. Just a bunch of bashing our troops. America is evil blah blah. Same thing you hear every day on general.
I am sorry, but the things the article describes are evil by any sense of the word, aggravating or mitigating circumstances may exist, but that doesn't justify murder and other atrocities. The US needs to stop treating the military like they are God's chosen or something.

I am sorry, but the things the article describes are evil by any sense of the word, aggravating or mitigating circumstances may exist, but that doesn't justify murder and other atrocities. The US needs to stop treating the military like they are God's chosen or something.

Nobody on here is justifying these atrocities, if in fact they did all happen, I am sure that some of them did, than I hope that the members involved are jailed, you are right that there is no excuse.

It does not however give the people on this board the right to group all soldiers together as shitbags, and criminals, as the people who commit these acts are but a tiny minority.

I would not compare US accountability to previous armies, but rather to the level of accountability that can be expected from a liberal democracy, striving to bring “peace and democracy”. Compared to this level the US is doing quite poorly, and therefore should do much better. Both from a moral and utilitarian point of view.

From a moral standpoint, I'm in complete agreement, but from a pragmatic view, I don't see how it can be done.

Part of me thinks it's hardwired into the human psyche. Get enough young males of the tribe together, send them into the territory of the neighbouring tribe, and they will heed the instinctive call to kill all the other hominids that aren't breeding age females. These unfortunate women get raped.

One can see the obvious evolutionary advantages.

Then there's the near total lack of accountability for the governments that are involved. Think about it: there is a chain of accountability in the US (and any other) army that extends from the lowest footsoldier all the way to the head of state; i.e. each person has to account for his (sorry for the gender specific pronoun, but in this case it's very likely true) behaviour to his superior officer. Nowhere on this long chain is it in anyone's best interests to admit to this sort of behaviour, or to admit that they allowed those under their command to do this sort of stuff.

Combine these two things together (evolutionary behavioural traits and lack of vested interest) and you get a system that is very resistant to the accountability that is so crucial to a liberal democracy. The only accountability we will get from the current system are those soldiers who are brave enough to come forward with their stories. I think confessing to these atrocities is a difficult yet necessary thing these soldiers are doing, and I support them in this.

So, what's the solution? Well, if we change the government but we don't change the army, then these things will continue to occur but we will have some accountability. But if we change the army we stop the atrocities from occurring and we don't have to change our government.

We change the army by radically increasing the number of females in combat units. I think we'll still see a lot of 'collateral damage', but the number of rapes will probably go down. War and gender is a complicated issue.

Ah, the glories of fighting a counterinsurgency, this sort of stuff is to be expected over time, as any good and decent psychological studies on the matter studies have shown. Both sides dehumanize each other, in order to make it easier to kill each other. Not only does this process result in the dehumanization of the insurgents themselves, but the group from which the insurgents spring and and return to before and after attacks: Civilians. That they get caught up in the conflict, and as the occupying troops experience a whole cornucopia of emotions, ranging from frustration to stress, they begin to no longer differentiate between the fish and the sea.

It's a damn, fuckin' tragedy.

Nobody on here is justifying these atrocities, if in fact they did all happen, I am sure that some of them did, than I hope that the members involved are jailed, you are right that there is no excuse.

It does not however give the people on this board the right to group all soldiers together as shitbags, and criminals, as the people who commit these acts are but a tiny minority.

Well you can say they are a tiny minority, but to be honest we'll never know will we, brutality and murder in the military (in Iraq) could be massively widespread, and we wouldn't really know. The fact is, the military being so closed-minded, having it's own legal system, opposed to transparency and accountability measures from without stops any kind of reasonable analysis coming of this. The military will simply close ranks, and the entrenched 'military can do no wrong' will prevent any further scrutiny. I would love to believe you when you say it's a tiny criminal minority, but we don't know that, and until the military gets proper civil scrutiny we will never know, and that's the kind of thing that builds distrust of the military as a 'closed body'.

The Japanese 'quasi-military' dealt with this quite well, and if you want to find a military that was more closed, more atrocious and chauvinistic, look no further than the Japanese military. After WWII their solution was to make the 'military' a totally civilian body, the officers are just civilians and they aren't technically soldiers, just special civil-servants, that means they are subject to the same laws etc of any ordinary citizen, and has allowed great transparency and accountability measures.

I'm one of the most vehement Bush/Cheney haters on this forum, and I'm on record as thinking that everything they have done since launching the first shot at Baghdad has been a war crime for which they should be prosecuted, BUT:

1) I do not like The Nation as a source because their bias is obvious, shrill, unedited by their own editors, and often unreasoning, imo. So I will not take the content of their article as pure fact, but will assume it is spun to suit their editorial bias.

2) However, that does not mean I dismiss all of it. The fact is, the article tells us nothing new, and whatever content can be matched to information from other sources over the years may be taken as fact.

3) Based on facts as they have been reported over the years of this war, yes, it is true that war crimes have been and are being committed by US troops in Iraq. Such crimes always occur when the combat and tactical leadership of a military are incompetent, as is definitely the case here. One cannot expect the troops on the ground to universally be better at running a war than their commanders are. However, I do not believe that such crimes are the operating norm among the troops on the ground.

4) HOWEVER, and most important, IT DOES NOT MATTER IF THE ATROCITIES ARE WIDESPREAD OR NOT. All it takes is one Abu Ghraib + one Haditha multiplied by the astonishing corruption and incompetence we have already seen from the Bush admin, to plant in the hearts and minds we claim to be trying to win over the firm notion that Americans poison wells and eat Muslim babies for fun. In the circumstances Bush created and perpetuates, anything that looks even remotely hinky or confusing is going to be grist for the mill of accusations against the US. And in the chaos we are nurturing over there, it is impossible for us ever to prove that these things did not happen, in the eyes of the people who matter -- i.e. those who have not become terrorists yet. EDIT: My point is, that in these circumstances, 5 atrocity reports become 20, which a week later becomes 50, and so on, and the accusers have a nice, thick, horrifying fog to point at and yell, prove it didn't happen like we say.

5) The fact that The Nation, rabidly anti-Bush, can gather enough fact to put together this polemic is merely an example of how badly Bush's policies have screwed the Iraq pooch. After Abu Ghraib, a competent commander would have cracked down on his own forces to make sure this kind of thing did not happen again. Bush's stupidity has done the opposite and, by neglect, allowed lawlessness to seep through the US forces -- much like Rumsfeld's "boys will be boys" attitude towards the lawlessness immediately following the fall of Baghdad.

6) As for why Americans are not rioting in the streets about this, two possible reasons: a) Americans are not really the rioters that the French are, and b) most Americans do not want to believe that their own children could be doing this.

And as Muravyets has reminded me, poor leadership also plays a key role in developing the proper psychological stressors for the potential for events like what are being described. The Bush Administration has offered no oversight, no rules and no effective strategy to the troops, who are essentially being told by the administration to "Go out there and do your job". Which is all well and dandy, except for the fact that the Administration has failed to tell them what their job is.

Well you can say they are a tiny minority, but to be honest we'll never know will we, brutality and murder in the military (in Iraq) could be massively widespread, and we wouldn't really know. The fact is, the military being so closed-minded, having it's own legal system, opposed to transparency and accountability measures from without stops any kind of reasonable analysis coming of this. The military will simply close ranks, and the entrenched 'military can do no wrong' will prevent any further scrutiny. I would love to believe you when you say it's a tiny criminal minority, but we don't know that, and until the military gets proper civil scrutiny we will never know, and that's the kind of thing that builds distrust of the military as a 'closed body'.

The Japanese 'quasi-military' dealt with this quite well, and if you want to find a military that was more closed, more atrocious and chauvinistic, look no further than the Japanese military. After WWII their solution was to make the 'military' a totally civilian body, the officers are just civilians and they aren't technically soldiers, just special civil-servants, that means they are subject to the same laws etc of any ordinary citizen, and has allowed great transparency and accountability measures.


I can assure you that it is in fact a minority, I know for a fact that none of the men I served with did anything of this nature, as can most servicemembers you ask. You are considering joining the ADF, well, the Australians are not angels at war either, however, it is a minority of Aussies that have done bad things. Same with the Brits, Canucks, and everyone else at war right now, and who have ever been at war, a minority of criminals give bad names to the majority of servicemen, and then the people of NSG gladly eat it up, because they refuse to believe that any soldier of any country can possibly be a decent human being.

Originally Posted by Article
just 47 percent of soldiers and 38 percent of marines agreed that civilians should be treated with dignity and respect.
That's what I find worrying in the long term. No mental distinction between innocent and guilty, right and wrong.

I agree, this is the worst part of it, and it is also, I think, the result of bad command, bad training, and bad leadership from the President down. It is the responsibility of the officers and commanders to train the troops on how to deal with civilians, how to think about what they are doing, and about the military laws they are expected to obey. Considering the training US soldiers receive, I do not believe that you can have this many soldiers thinking this way unless they are either specifically trained to think this way, or this way of thinking is ignored during training -- clearly something that would lead to wholesale violation of military, US, and international law, and every drill sargeant should know that.

EDIT: Possibly every drill sargeant does know it, but I somehow doubt Bush does.

People who went into military at 18 usually are culturally ignorant morons who have that reinforced by other people, the military fraternity, and the people they are sent off to make humor-the-politicians war with.

Thank God I'm the miniority! :mp5:

Just for all you to know, there are groups of people who will pay vets to say they saw widespread killings and other BS. Some former service memebers will do anything if they feel they got screwed over by the government. Some people will also just say stuff for money.

It does not however give the people on this board the right to group all soldiers together as shitbags, and criminals

You keep talking as if people here are actually doing that.

Since when did publicising the horrendous atrocities committed by some become an indictment of the whole?

You keep talking as if people here are actually doing that.

Since when did publicising the horrendous atrocities committed by some become an indictment of the whole?

It never has and never will.

Unfortunately this is indicative of what is being discussed. To criticise one single soldier seems to be interpreted as "bashing our brave boys" and goes against the general glorification of the military which seems so ingrained in US society nowadays.

Just for all you to know, there are groups of people who will pay vets to say they saw widespread killings and other BS. Some former service memebers will do anything if they feel they got screwed over by the government. Some people will also just say stuff for money.

As there are people who pay for the opposite I am sure.

I think the issue with what the mercs are doing is more of one than what the proper US military is up to, seeing as whereas there's at least some deal of culpability for one's actions in the proper military, the mercs can basically do as they please, which is a bit worrying.

Especially since they can't be tried by international law, and the whole thing's simply a huge grey area.

Yeah, what a bunch of whiners! Shooting at kids? Desecrating corpses in front of grieving loved ones? Systematically humiliating and terrorizing the population with unfounded search and seizure? Zzzzzzzzzzz. Wake me up when we reach Jeffery Dahmer-mets-Pol Pot levels of depravity. Until then, it's just boys being boys and/or Americans Making the World Safe for Democracy. (*Covers eyes and plugs ears, sings "lalalalalala"*)
QFT

I wonder if he's ever heard of the Golden Rule?

It's fucking disgusting as hell, but I also know the atrocities committed are perfectly understandable.

Once again, I suggest reading A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo.