I understand the guy’s frustrations. He was given a job, ultimately, by someone high above him that has no idea what the situation on the ground there is, and these guys are making his job extremely difficult. It’s like being told to make a football team out of poetry majors, and every time they fuck up a play, one of your friends gets killed.
Now, that being said, the guy just isn’t a very good inspirational speaker-- not even on the USMC/R. Lee Ermey level. Watching him ramble on reminded me of some of my dull middle school teachers, who would get incredibly frustrated with us and sort of rant like that, but weren’t good enough at it for it to have any effect on us.
No, I’m pretty sure those guys were born in IRAQ. Yes, Iraq has factions. There are still Americans who will identify themselves more as a ‘Texan’ (for example) than an American.
To me the Marine seemed more ‘upset’ over the fact that they wouldn’t go and fight. It seems more like the line in the Untouchables. “Everyone knows where the booze is. The question is who will cross Capone.” Everyone in Iraq knows where the ‘bad guys’ are. These guys just won’t walk 3 km and fight them.
They could probably do with a big PR campaign like Uncle Sam or Norman Rockwell to make them all feel proud to be “Iraqi”. Because if they don’t hang together now, they all get their heads hacked off with a sword later. (that needs work)
There’s one (Army) soldier reading this thread and laughing because the soldiers in the video are clearly wearing ACUs, not MARPAT; ergo they aren’t even Marines. :smack: And that kind of invalidates the whole discussion, since IME the Army doesn’t indoctrinate soldiers to anywhere near the degree that the Marine Corps does.
I also think it is unlikely that the soldier giving the speech is an NCO. He is probably a commissioned officer; not many NCOs are in a position to just go off like that.
The soldier has been in Iraq for what, a year? Two years? These guys that he’s addressing grew up there; they lived through all of the chaos that has been going on there for the past twenty years; they are completely creatures of that environment, of the tribalism and factional warfare and religious division, and they have lived all their lives dealing with its consequences. Now America has the nerve to come over there and lecture them about their national identity and who they are supposed to be loyal to? The whole thing is a farce! That video is a microcosm of the entire war and America’s pompous, patronizing, bullying attitude, and this is coming from someone who’s a fan of Cecil Rhodes.
That doesn’t mean they take Iraq seriously or have any real loyalty to it. Especially with a conquest imposed government.
But are they the norm? No, they aren’t.
You presume that they agree on who the bad guys are; either with our definition of “bad guy”, or each others. For example, most of them probably have no problem at all with people killing American soldiers, much less to the point of being willing to risk their lives to stop it. You also presume that they are all even on the same side. And you presume that when they leave and go home, it isn’t to hang out with their buddies the “bad guys 3 km away”.