Hi IQBAL LATIF; Re: "Meanwhile, in Fallujah, the U.S. military is ruthlessly slaughtering hundreds of innocent women, children and elderly."
I doubt that US forces are slaughtering "hundreds of innocent women, children and elderly", but mostly because there is no such thing as an innocent human being.
It's undoubtedly true that there are civilians getting killed accidentally (to the extent that an optional war is an accident) in Falloujah, but it's also undoubtedly true that there are US Marines deliberately shooting civilians.
It may shock you, but there are quite a large number of posters here on SI that are calling for collective punishment of Falloujah until they agree to quit fighting. To the extent that the posters on SI mirror the US population, and the US population mirrors the soldiers in Iraq, there are undoubtedly plenty of soldiers in Iraq who feel the same way. While it would be against orders, that doesn't mean that they would either (a) get caught, or (b) have an officer who didn't agree with them. If anything, the people in the military are more inclined to see bloodletting as a solution to a problem than the general public. And many of those proposing a "5% solution" in Falloujah claim to be ex US military servicemen.
There is another factor, and that is that the Marines around Falloujah have taken a lot of casualties recently. Attacks against civilians is an inevitable consequence of high casualties in guerilla warfare against guerillas that are well supported by the local civilians. When I say that this is an "inevitable consequence" I do not mean to say that all soldiers do this. But the fact that a few soldiers do is enough to kill civilians.
The killing of civilians in Falloujah by the occupying forces is nothing more than normal human behavior in that situation in war time.
It's quite pointless to deny this reality. There is plenty of recent world and US history of occupying forces killing unarmed (the word I prefer to "innocent", which reeks of religious conotation) civilians.
It is only civilians who think that the soldiers on their own side don't commit war crimes. The soldiers know. You want to know more about war crimes from the point of view of the US military? Here's an interesting article:
GUERRILLA WARFARE
WHEN TAKING CARE OF YOUR MEN LEADS TO WAR CRIMES
Davida Kellogg, US Air Force Academy, Joint Services Conference On Professional Ethics, 1997
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But recent events in Central America and Africa, as well as Bosnia, and the botch made by an Italian military tribunal of what may be the last trial of a high ranking Nazi war criminal, have made it disturbingly clear how frequently and blatantly the Law of War is disregarded.
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And close on the heels of every outbreak, whether in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, Africa, or Central America, have come reports of war crimes, the latest of which at this writing concern the alleged beating death of a young Somali at the hands of Canadian peacekeeping troops. In this paper, I shall first develop the thesis that a particular subset of these war crimes are not just incidental to warfare in general, but rather the specific, natural, and foreseeable consequences of guerrilla tactics. Moreover, I shall show that these tactics themselves proceed organically from the overarching strategy in insurgency warfare of using combatants to achieve war aims in ways that are expressly prohibited by the Laws of Land Warfare precisely because they conduce to war crimes against innocents.
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Finally, I would like to open a discussion of what it is morally acceptable, as well as tactically sound, for the American military to do in order to forestall troop participation in that class of war crimes so often precipitated by the enemy's resort to guerrilla tactics.
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And many of those I have interviewed about their tours of duty in Vietnam have had some sobering things to say about the near impossibility of "fighting nice" under the conditions of guerrilla warfare, when enemy civilians interfere with what they consider an officer's first duty to look after his men (Conversations with Colonel David Price and team leaders from Texas Vietnam Veterans' Centers).
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usafa.af.mil
When Bush sent our forces into Iraq in the face of an inevitable guerilla war, he put those soldiers into a position where the attraction of killing civilians would be impossible for many of them to resist.
That's war.
Get used to it.
Go ahead and deny it, if you like. A lot of these guys are getting out of the service soon and they'll be telling their stories, probably before the election in November.
-- Carl |
