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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Michael Hart who wrote (45930)	4/16/2004 10:36:27 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50167

Hi Michael Hart; Re: "It seems that the imagery one gets when reading the above statement is much different than that of soldiers attempting to make tough decisions about who the enemy is in a guerrilla battlefield situation which I believe is Mr. Kellogs intent." Did you even read Dr. Kellog's article? He's talking about "*zippo inspections" and "My Lai", of shooting "any woman left in a village* which has been deserted by the draft age men", "firing on all Vietnamese encountered in a questionable situation and "*letting God sort them out." Re: "In the statement above I see soldiers walking into a family home and purposely (ruthlessly slaughtering hundreds) killing a family of children, parents and elderly for no reason.*" This is more or less what happened at My Lai, but I don't believe it has yet been even alleged in Iraq. To have that happen, you pretty much have to have an officer or two go bonkers. The charge is that a US sniper(s) is killing civilians at long range. I agree with you that there's no way that it's "hundreds" of victims, and that it's highly exaggerated. Al Jazeera published photos of only a few children that had been taken out with head shots, which is hardly hundreds. Let me put it this way, you've got something like 3000 Marines around Falloujah. I know the military is careful about who they give a gun to, but if those 3000 people were randomly selected from the American population, about 21 of them would be in prison. The numbers are worse for men of military age. Our prison rate for males between 20 and 24 is 1458 per 100K, and for males between 25 and 29 it's 1867 per 100K. So with 3000 random American males between the ages of 20 and 29, you'd expect to have about 50 of them in prison. Now I know that everyone in prison didn't get there for murder, but the situation in a war zone does tend to bring out the worst in people, and you only need one guy to make the headlines on Al Jazeera. (Uh, just like you only need one Arab to make the headlines on Fox News.) It's just not militarily possible to keep all your soldiers in line all the time. As casualties mount, it is a fact of history that attrocities get committed. And it only takes one bad apple to give Al Jazeera the footage they need to make many Arabs think that all US soldiers are participating. I'm not blaming our military, I think we easily have the best in the world. What I'm saying is that winning hearts and minds when you're fighting a guerilla war is damned hard and we ain't doin it. -- Carl