Understanding our Opponent

[2/3/06 UPDATE: Here is a new article which indicates that apparently the investigation is looking into whether this particular heinous act was planned for a week before the deed was done. It makes me want to throw up. --Liam]

And finally for tonight (skip down three or four articles and read up from there for the chronology of tonight's posting frenzy), I think it is important for us to get a sense of what is being done in our names.

As I've said before with the Haditha story, I don't believe that this necessarily reflects directly on the Administration, but I do believe that behavior like that described below does a lot to undermine our position both in the world and in the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.

WARNING: This post and the article to which I link contain descriptions of some really disgusting alleged behavior on the part of American troops. It is disturbing, but it is also important to know about, and to consider how we'd respond if someone occupying our country behaved this way. Important to understand all of the things we do that engender further attacks against us in the future.

According to this article and others I've read, several soldiers in Iraq conspired to stalk and capture an Iraqi woman, rape her, then murder her and the three other members of her family (including a child) and burn her body (ostensibly to hide evidence of the sexual assault).

This case is being investigated, along with the Haditha killings.

But next time someone on the pro-war side of current events talks about how we're fighting terror, or making America safer, just think about this case. Imagine it happened to someone in your family or your town. Or heck, imagine it happened anywhere in America at the hands of an occupying force. How would you react? Would you stop to consider that the people involved might not represent the true will of the occupying nation? Or would it further reinforce in your mind that the occupying country was "the great Satan" and should be fought using any means available?

We need to do our level best to clean up the mess we have created in Iraq. We need to do it quickly, we need to understand that the entire fiasco has made us less secure and more hated in the region and spawned a new generation that will aspire to grow up to be jihadists and martyrs. We need to do all we can to fix our mistakes, and then we need to get the hell out and let the Iraqis have their country back, let them stop being an occupied country and start to be a nation again.

Liam.

P.S. To be clear, I do believe that these actions do not represent the bulk of our armed forces, but they still reflect on them and on us in the eyes of the Iraqis and the world. And, to a certain extent, cases like this are probably more common now than in the past, now that the Army, in order to have any kind of success towards recruiting goals, has stopped turning people down for certain types of mental illness or prior criminal behavior. Lower the standards on who you will accept into the Army, and you will have a lower standard of Army. That still doesn't mean the vast majority of our fighting men and women aren't honorable and brave people putting everything on the line in defense of their country. It just means that the small percentage of miscreants and misbehavors (and those likely to snap under the pressures of combat) gets larger when you stop being quite so selective.