Why do you keep turning this into attacks on the individual soldiers, Mr. Moto? Nobody here is attacking them individually or personally. What’s being disputed here is the sentiment that doing well in killing enemy combatants should be somehow cited as bravery and broadcast to all and sundry as a shining example of the human spirit. It says nothing about the individual soldiers being cited and everything about the attitudes towards war espoused by the people behind these messes - the ones who make the decision to go to war and send thousands of others off to their deaths.
Granted, if I were in a conversation with a servicemember and s/he said “I’m damn proud of the fact I popped a bunch of ragheads while I was on tour,” I might have a few choice words, but I’m not going to come right out and say “Baby killer” as soon as I found out they served in the Middle East. There are Iraq vets whose views I actually agree with, and such a knee-jerk reaction is much less than constructive.
I’m not exactly sure what I should be grateful to them for. I don’t recall the attacks on civil rights and freedom of speech after 11 Sep 2001 coming from Iraq and Afghanistan, to be honest.
Well, for that I have just two questions, Olentzero:
What can a soldier do about freedom of speech? This isn’t an issue you can take aim and shoot at.
Unless, of course, you’re removing tyrants who suppress such, but you seem to oppose this.
And why are you specifying the post-9/11 period. You do realize, Iraq aside, that al-Qaida was based in part in Afghanistan, sheltered by the Taliban. This alliance constituted a threat that had to be responded to.
All along, in this thread, you have been treating the events of September 11th as something best ignored, despite more than 3,000 dead Americans. You seem to think the worst part about that day is that it got America’s dander up, and caused a lot of our enemy to die.
True, you can only take aim and shoot those who wish to exercise that freedom. Say, for instance, those who say “Get out of our country.”
I mentioned freedom of speech, however, because those who oppose the war in Iraq (and who opposed the war in Afghanistan) have often been told “Our soldiers are dying over there to defend your right to say that” as if somehow it behooves us to refrain from exercising that right out of respect for their sacrifice, when there has been no demonstrable threat against that freedom from outside the country’s borders.
No, I’m glad Saddam Hussein is gone. But that should have been the task of the Iraqi population, not the US armed forces. True, it would have been a hard task to accomplish, but it was made harder by the fact that the US supported Saddam Hussein financially and militarily for at least a decade and preferred to let him crush an uprising that might have toppled him in 1991 instead of allowing the popular resistance to gain control of the country. And past mistakes (supporting a dictatorial regime) aren’t rectified by making further mistakes (using lies, and exploiting a tragedy, to justify an invasion and occupation and deepening the anger of the local population).
The State Department didn’t seem to think so when the Taliban first took power in 1996. Of course, then the threat was only to the female half of the Afghani population - not anyone over here. So it wasn’t important enough then to go in and take 'em out. Not that doing so has improved the situation any.
No, there you’re wrong. September 11th was a tragedy that, one hopes, will never be repeated here. It pales in comparison to the destruction wreaked on Afghanistan and Iraq by the US in the decade preceding it, however. And it certainly was no justifiable pretext for further ruining two countries halfway across the world.