Shiloh, I'm NOT missing your point. Yep, we are in their country. But it's OUR kids who are there. Maybe if you were in charge of it all, you could change the personalities and the way of thinking of every kid who enters the armed forces. But nobody else in the history of any military, anywhere, anytime, has been able to do so. If you want perfection in people, you'll need to clone your own.
"...You and I would no doubt feel the same if the situation were reversed."
No need to reverse the situation. In a perfect world, nothing bad would ever happen. But the disgusting thing, to me, is when supposedly American media don't report transgressions by our troops as news in context, they report it as if those transgressions are the norm, and blow it all out of proportion to what it is -- isolated transgressions. I'm not advocating not reporting it, I'm saying it is no different than similar transgressions anywhere else. Our kids in uniform aren't, and don't purport to be, paragons of virtue, so treating them as if they were child-molesting priests is doing nothing except inciting anti-military attitudes. Which, IMO, is their intent.
"...I suspect you would not be as quick to rationalize..."
I'm not rationalizing. I'm expressing an opinion. I don't excuse the behavior of troops acting criminally, and neither do their superiors. But, I don't treat all GIs as murderers and rapists, either. And I don't like it when the MSM tries to make the military, in general, look bad because of the acts of a few. If the Iraqis want to do that, at least I can understand them trying to drum up anti-American support; why would supposedly AMERICAN media do that? |
