I think it’s safe to assume it didn’t, otherwise no-one would know what had happened in the room.
And rats for dinner?
Refer to your recent Pit threads for advice on managing this harsh, vindictive streak you have.
So can we all just stop condemning all those poor Nazi soldiers, who had to fight them nasty partisans.
Partisans didn’t play by the rules either, so what’s the big deal about them?
Sure some soldiers snapped and burned some villagers inside a church, somewhere in Nowheregrad.
Doesn’t anyone understand the pressure these soldiers were under?
Name one person who does this. Name one.
Psst . . . TLC1 . . . don’t quite know how to break it to you, but Iraq did not attack the USA, and had neither the inclination nor the ability to attack the USA. For better or worse, the USA attacked Iraq, and was not protecting itself from Iraq.
Oh boy, that should give you at least an honourable mention in the upcoming Sontag Award ceremony. But I think you missed a great opportunity to include some bits about star troopers and the deathstar.
That’s not a death star, its a moon.
Happy now?
Well I dunno. I think it at least ought to be a death moon…
So far as I know, no one on these boards is ignoring, approving, condoning or applauding the murders, kidnappings, and car bombings being committed by the Iraqi Insurgency. To claim that the condemnation of an atrocity committed by US forces is tantamount to an approval of the insurgents (or terrorists, of resistance or freedom fighters or what ever you chose to call them) is simply intellectually dishonest, a diversion from the issue and an indulgence in Ashcroft-speek.
Likewise to say that Groefenwehr is a Sunday in the Park when compared to downtown Falluija is disingenuous when the topic is the prolonged American occupation of Germany decades after the collapse of Nazi Germany. Does any one suppose that Iraq will not become a permanent American base just as Germany has?
The American forces in Iraq are the heirs to a centuries long tradition of restraining and ameliorating the cruelty and barbarism of war. That tradition has given us the law and custom of land warfare and a myriad of treaties, conventions and international agreements. While there might be some dispute over terms of the accepted rules there are precious few who do not thing that they are generally a good thing and necessary and appropriate. While the law and custom may at times be inconvenient they are hardly quaint relics of a more civilized age or irrelevant to the present conflicts. The US and other Western nations hold them selves out as steadfast observers of the law and customs, as evidenced by our outrage when our opponents depart from them. We can hardly complain about the atrocities committed against us if we do not hold our selves to the customary standards. This of course ignores the practice of lobbing heavy artillery and dropping aerial bombs into populated towns and cities. High explosives are not fine discriminators of good guys and bad guys and so-called smart weapons are not nearly as intelligent as some people would wish. We need to recognize and accept that.
By the same token, we need to recognize and accept that we and our government and our armed forces have a duty to do everything reasonable to reduce the cruelty and restrain a potentially rapacious soldiery. None-the-less, an occasional lapse from the law and custom is inevitable. That does not mean that they are to be accepted and minimized. The killing of inoffensive wounded and prisoners is simply no acceptable conduct. To apologize for it by conjecturing circumstances under which it is less reprehensible just ignores the fundamental issue and duty.
So, what is to be done to prevent this sort of thing in the future and to repair the damage that has been done? The prevention answer is now and always been leadership and training. As I understand it the Marines to went into Falluijah are a brigade or larger force that was brought in especially for the operation and which had not previously been in country. I can only think that these people had been thoroughly briefed on the rules, the rational for the rules and the consequences to the over all mission of not strictly observing the rules. I don’t know what more than that could have been done for training.
That leaves leadership. Unit leaders from the SP4 or Lance Corporal leading a rifle team right up to the brigade commander have to monitor and control their people. Our Marine should have been stopped by his team leader or his squad leader. He should have been warned by his platoon sergeant or platoon leader that there were wounded Insurgents in the building and to leave them alone. The Marine in charge should have taken charge. The failure to do so is a leadership failure. The old saw is that authority can be delegated but responsibility cannot.
If, as I think, atrocities are inevitable then consider what our government and armed forces ought to have done in anticipation of this sort of thing. It ought to be apparent that stone-walling and minimalizing is counterproductive. Look at the example of the abuse of detainees in the Baghdad prison. The characterization of the whole thing as no more that adolescent hazing or the work of a few out-law MPs and as insignificant when compared to Saddam’s abuses started to look pretty weak as soon as it was disclosed that the renegade MPs were working at the direction of Military Intelligence officers and CID officers and civilian employees who were in turn operating under policies developed at Department of Defense with White House involvement. What had to be done then and needs to be done now is for the government and the armed forces to take unambiguous and visible action that shows that this sort of thing will not be tolerated. That does not mean that you take the poor tired, frightened Marine out in the public square and shoot him. What we have done however is pretty much a public relations statement that the matter is being investigated. That is just not enough. What we have done does nothing to assure the Iraqi and Arab public of American good intentions and benevolence.
If the occupation of Iraq could not be fairly characterized as a quagmire before this incident piled on top of God knows how many other incidents, big and small, goes a long way toward turning it into one. I am told that the blood feud and the private vendetta are integral parts of Arab culture. What this incident, and others like it, may well have done is convert another segment of Iraqis from sullen observers into active combatants.
Some how it need s to be impressed on every soldier and Marine that the success of the whole operation, the occupation and pacification of Iraq, depends on the professional behavior of each of them and that any one man’s screw up endangers the mission and costs the lives of his comrades.
No, “the story nobody hears” was the one in the soldiers letter (from Sam Stone’s link) where a marine went to help a wounded insurgent who promptly whipped out a grenade and blew them both up. If this sort of thing happens, then the marine who appeared on the video shooting the injured insurgent (“the story everyone hears”) would have a lot better grounds to defend himself, IMHO.
Sorry Avenger, I totally misunderstood your post, you were saying that wounded insurgents faking it wasn’t a normal thing, otherwise we wouldn’t have heard about the mosque shooting. I thought you were confusing the “story nobody hears” with the mosque shooting. I’ll read more carefully next time.
I disagree with you that if injured insurgents were commonly dangerous, we wouldn’t have heard about the mosque shooting, though. The video is pretty sensationalist, and probably still would’ve been aired. But your right that we also probably would’ve heard that insurgents often fire when injured at around the same time if that was what actaully happens. Given that the only place I’ve heard such a story is Sam’s rather unsubstantiated link, I doubt that that defense is available to the marine.
On the plus side, in my mistaken reply to you, I learned I could nest quotes. Thats pretty useful.
I’m agreeing with the Conservative Contingent on this one.
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The tape is not enough to judge the situation. But my guess is that he will be found totally innocent of war crimes. In other words, if anything, the tape works in the guy’s favor, not against it.
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There’s a big difference between saying, “OK, let’s go out and shoot the prisoners now,” and blowing an apparently wounded and unarmed enemy combatant away out of instinct and fear.
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It was a combat situation. It’s not as though one can, in such a situation, say, “OK, what’s our next step here? Hmm, let me think.”
I feel a lot sorrier for the soldier just doing his duty and probably living in abject fear and misery every day who has to top it all off with this media circus, than for the Islamofascist insurgents, wounded or otherwise.
Still, we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq. Damn.
I can certainly see the logic on both sides of this argument.
It’s obvious that, with everything that is happening in Iraq, our troops are under a lot of stress; they will be more apt to instinctively pull a trigger, before being able to think something through completely.
OTOH, we can’t just write-off this kind of event, essentially giving a free pass to anyone that finds themself in the middle of a similar situation.
I fully understand that if the bodies of iraqis have been booby-trapped, to kill american soldiers (et al.), it hinders our ability to provide aid to wounded civilians-- “I’m not going near them. What if they have a grenade?”
In this particular case, a soldier shot an unarmed, wounded insurgent, because he did not know whether or not the insurgent still posed a threat. Where do we draw the line, though? What are our troops supposed to do, in situations like this? They surely cannot approach every wounded iraqi, with the intention of shooting them dead because “they may pose a threat”-- we might as well have just firebombed the entire city, and forgotten about a ground assault, in that case.
What I’m getting at, is: regardless of how this particular case turns out (wrt the U.S. soldier), we* really need to re-evaluate the action(s) that our troops can take, when confronted by events like this.
LilShieste
*- the U.S. military
It ain’t me, it ain’t me…
I don’t see logic and facts being partisan, though my politics put me well out of any “conservative contingent”. I’ve read enough about the conditions of combat in Iraq to know it’s a brutal guerilla war, and in such a situation, the rules of engagement on the battlefield prescribed by the Geneva Conventions could get a soldier killed. Road to Hell, and all that. I don’t think the Geneva Conventions were meant to be followed so closely as to be tantamount to suicide in certain situations, and this may be one of those situations. We really don’t know, do we?
Damn right.
Except that you don’t know anything about this “islamofascist insurgent” who was shot, either. For all you know, he might have been a peaceful shoe-maker until an american bomb killed his mother the day before and he decided he had to take arms.
If you grant the benefit of the doubt to the marine, then you’re in no position to state that the man killed was an “islamofascist”.
While I’ve not seen much evidence of that, making the point so much nonsense, what IS fascinating is that you apparently have the same standards for bloodthirsty psychos and our own marines (given that you apparently think we should be bothering to compare their conduct), which doesn’t speak very well for your respect of the marines.
Quite right. I cannot judge the man. I do not, however, have sympathy for the insurgents as a group.
First, by ‘overlook’ I don’t mean justify, or approve of. I mean no comments at all. There are very, very few threads that ever talk about how nasty the ‘insurgents’ are (other than the threads related to beheadings). Maybe that’s why you guys aren’t aware that they have been booby-trapping bodies, attacking soldiers while waving white flags, etc.
But if a U.S. soldier does anything that sounds bad at first blush, you can count on threads popping up where the soldier is tried and convicted before the facts are in. Such as the situation regarding this thread. NO ONE knew the context when this thread opened, and yet it was instantly filled with howls of outrage and hopes that the soldier is cashiered and sent to Leavenworth.
It’s gratifying to see that now, a few days later, people are starting to think about this more, hear the other side, consider possible mitigating circumstances, and approach the issue with a little balance. I’m especially impressed by the response of Aeschines, who hasn’t let his disapproval of the war cloud his thinking when it comes to judging the actions of a marine in a tough situation.
And you also have to put some of the blame on insurgents. For instance, the Geneva convention forbids opening fire on an ambulance, hospital ship, or other clearly marked medical facilty. However, if the enemy uses that to store weapons in hospitals or uses ambulances as bomb delivery systems (a la the Palestinians), then they forfeit that protection under the Geneva convention.
Likewise, when a soldier removes his uniform and pretends to be a civilian, or puts on the uniform of the enemy, he loses the protection of POW status. In WWII, some Germans donned Allied uniforms and snuck behind allied lines during the battle of the Bulge. When they were caught, they were summarily executed. No trial. Just put up against a wall and shot.
In this case, we have an enemy that respects NO rules of warfare. They have fired while under the protection of a white flag, killing Americans. They don’t wear uniforms. They booby-trap bodies (and if the letter from the marine is to be believed, give gravely wounded men explosives to use to kill Americans who come to help the wounded).
So sorry, in this case there is no clear atrocity from the facts that we have been given. The tape is NOT damning, because we don’t know the context. For instance, if those soldiers had discovered other wounded insurgents ready to blow themselves up in exactly this way, then sorry - a quick bullet to the head of a suspicious wounded person who is not showing his hands is not out of line. The blame for that lies with the insurgents who have chosen to forfeit that rule of warfare for their own gain.
Maybe that’s because it’s pretty obvious? I rarely start or frequent threads pointing out the uncontroversial or defending the obvious.
The insurgents are pretty nasty, dirty fighters. Our modern soldiers, at least the professionals would never be able to sink to their level. On the other hand, we base part of our power on extremely high moral standards that we place on how our troops conduct themselves. Pointing out that there are worse and more bloodthirsty people in the world (as seems to be the marching order talking point that every talking head is trained to recite about this event) as a means of mitigation is just not acceptable argument. I don’t know much about this situation, and the video certainly does not convict anybody, though if anything it does show a bit of an unprofessionally jokey attitude instead of a tight tactical decision. I do think that marines are under some unbelievable stresses that mitigate a lot of the poor decisions they might make in confusing combat zones, and I tend to blame commanders far more than individual soldiers. But that doesn’t relieve us of our obligations to criticize unbecoming conduct, nor make them any less important. The insurgents have engaged in despicable tactics that make collateral damage far more likely. But we still have to demand some sort of accountability in facing that menace: it can’t just be “oh, the rules of war are off, anything goes, everything’s cool”
There are threads about every beheading. They are not especially significant as news and there is very little sense in spending a lot of time whining about what some criminals do. We can’t control what they do we can only control what we do.
The beheadings do not justify a single US warcrime. They do not justify the invasion. They do not justify the slaughter in Fallujah.
You should also remember that there wouldn’t be any beheadings if GWB didn’t think he was the Messiah.