I suppose I am as guilty as the Previous poster that I ranted about - all I was getting at is that our expectations of how we expect to be treated is based on how we are ‘programed’ by our culture - if you captured an enemy and say ‘tortured them for fun’ would you expect any different treatment if you got captured? I know this is a bit OTT as examples go but do you see what i’m getting at - if a japanees soldier was taught that to surrender was to admit to being the lowest of the low in cultural term’s and any ‘sub-human’ coward would be treated with distain as being dishonorable and disloyal - why would they see any enemy solider in a different light - I am not condoning them - after all my grandfather has a bad time in WW2 as a POW but even he understood why they where like that.
Well, of the two nations now, we know which is more prone to invasion and toruture.
It’s possible to condemn such acts without lapsing into “this just goes to prove…”
Did this get as much coverage elsewhere as in the US?
Do you think the USA is the only NATO-ISAF command doing that stuff atm?
They all need to promote the same alternative narrative to their domestic audience now the time to leave is nearing and the original goals remain unachieved.
My point is that it is pointless to apply 2012 standards to a war that happened in a whole other era. It’s like talking about how awful the Romans were in war by complaining that they used swords. How barbaric! They hacked people to death! Starved civilians in sieges! That was just how war used to be fought. We’re different now, but destroying a whole town, and raping and murdering everybody was pretty standard for thousands of years.
Tell that to the population of Fallujah.
Not to mention Panama City.
Actually, in many cases, leaving civilians out of a conflict gained its greatest acceptance in the eighteenth century, survived through the nineteenth and early twentieth, (as long as the population was included in one’s own basic culture), and was then discarded during WWII. Even the occasional lapses, (e.g., Leuven, Belgium in 1914), were generally condemned at the time they occurred.
A couple hundred years is fairly recent.
Are we? An estimated 2 million civilians were killed during the Vietnam War. Not all were killed by the US to be sure, but it doesn’t speak well for mankind ‘being different now.’ The lowest count from Iraq Body Count is some 105,000 civilian deaths. Something not shown in the movie version of Black Hawk Down is the large number of Somali civilians who were killed in the crossfire. A look at practically any war or conflict post-WW2 shows a very high level of civilian casualties. Thankfully no major power has been involved in a total war since the end of WW2, but if it ever came to pass the target of Mutually Assured Destruction would be vaporizing every city of the enemy and the civilians living in them.
105,000 civilians in almost nine years? Sounds better than I’d have expected given humanity’s track record. Plus I have severe doubts that those were all, or even mostly, caused by US military.
Hell no, the US had barely anything to do with it.
Just think how much worse it would have been had the USA not invaded…
I believe that to the extent that the behavior of American personnel has been relatively better is because of the setting and enforcement of standards by society and by our leadership, not because of the individual character of Americans. Look at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. When our leadership decided to chuck our standards out the window, our behavior went south.
I’m unsure if you are being facetious or not, so I will respond as if you are.
If somebody invaded your country, would you see that as an excuse to kill your own countrymen? I know I would. I hope China invades and occupies America so I finally have an excuse to kill Episcopalians.*
*I do not actually want to kill Episcopalians. This was only an example.
Yup. Happens on a smaller scale, too.
Yeah, definitely. A failure in low-level leadership can also result in a failure to live up to our standards.
You’ve lost me; your ‘point’ seemed to be that the deaths of so many Iraqi civilians wasn’t the fault of the USA because Iraqis killed each other, this seems (a) odd, and (b) to ignore the fact the second act of Paul Bremner was to disband the Iraqi army.
You then want me to talk about who I would kill in unlikely circumstances. Please forgive me if I decline the invitation.
Incidentally, have you read much about Fallujah?
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If you kill somebody, it’s your deal, not the cops.
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I just don’t think that having your country invaded is reason to start the sectarian killings up. No comment on that? You know the old saying that silence is assent?
It doesn’t matter what Paul Bremer did. Those civilians killed each other, and to suggest that US policy is the causal factor, while knowing that money, blood, and time were spent rebuilding schools, infrastructure, cleaning out corruption, and training police and military, is not only wrong, but undermines the character of the Iraqi people by saying “ooh! If only we had left this brutal dictator in power, they wouldn’t have killed each other so much!”
The Iraqi people, IME, are a hard working, resilient lot. They put a lot if faith in their own efforts. The idiots doing these killings often end up being hired mercenaries or foreigners recruited by one faction or another. Admitting that the US did as much as it could is not supporting the war. Admitting that US soldiers, for the vast majority of them, did what they could and didn’t murder anybody, is not supporting the war.
Shit, I went there TWICE and still don’t support it.
Incidentally, yeah I’ve read a little bit about Fallujah. I’ve talked to guys who were there. You ever talk to a citizen of Fallujah? Most of them were gone. Again, that was mostly mercenaries and radicals, mostly foreigners.
Interesting selective reading and parsing. 105,000 is the lowest of the low end estimates, and I didn’t say the immediate cause of death was the US military. You’re the one claiming we as humanity are different now with our 2012 standards. If ~12,000 civilian dead a year as the basement figure in a small conflict is better than you’d expect given humanity’s record, are you not judging 2012 on the standards of the past and only managing to find it ‘better than you’d expect?’ What of 2 million dead in Vietnam? Do 200,000 dead civilians a year meet your standard of “That was just how war used to be fought. We’re different now, but destroying a whole town, and raping and murdering everybody was pretty standard for thousands of years.” Look at any conflict post-WW2 and you will find that civilian casualties are almost without exception higher than military casualties. Note that Iraq Body Count gives a minimum figure of 150,000 civilian and combatant deaths broken down into 105,000 civilian and 45,000 combatants, a ratio of 2.33 civilian deaths per combatant death.