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Originally Posted by Synikul  That's correct, because everyone knows that when a bomb, disguised as a car, goes off right next to you, followed by gunfire from multiple directions, with bullets hitting the pavement and the vehicle you're in starts happening, the first thing everyone should do is stop, calmly assess the situation, make a careful determination of exactly where the shots are coming from, and calmly fire directly to that point. All this without shitting your pants in fear. |
Funnily enough, military training consists of teaching people to do exactly this. Being a soldier is a responsible job. It's not unreasonable to expect a certain level of competence from the people doing it. We ask them to perform their jobs rationally not only to save civilian lives, but to save their own.
You're completely, 100% fucking wrong on this. While cops and soldiers get leeway for reasonable mistakes, it is
idiotic to suggest that they can't be arrested for fucking up. It is precisely because the job is so important and high pressure that a level of order must be maintained. If you told troops it was perfectly okay to panic and just kill everyone that moves, they would tend to do that.
And blaming Bush is ridiculous. He's not on the ground, and he's certainly not appraised of the details of either incident. Why are you so vehemently opposed to the judicial system in place to keep our troops accountable?
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Originally Posted by Synikul What does it tell you about the "civilians" when they don't do those things? |
They don't want to get caught in a crossfire between the terrorists who routinely firebomb their homes, and the US troops that routinely firebomb their homes? Look, dude, you can't get it both ways. You can't simultaneously say that our troops don't have to worry about civilian deaths and play by the rules of war and don't have to avoid doing damage to civilians, and then expect the civilians on the ground to see us as saints. Why are they going to stand up to guys with guns for US troops? What have US troops done for them? That's a serious question. What the fuck has the US military done for Iraqi civilians? They got rid of Saddam. And so far, has that been to any profit of actual Iraqis?
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The minute we leave Afghanistan, it's going right back to the Taliban, or something very much like them with a different name, and it doesn't matter if we stay there for one more week or one more decade.
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Study history.
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There is a way to prevent all of this, and it goes right to the heart of the question you asked at the beginning of this thread. These people don't observe any standards of civilised behavior when they fight each other, and that's the way they have to be fought. If we went Roman on them, with 100 to 1 reprisals on the civilian population every time they step out of line, our goals might be acheivable, but since the political will to do that doesn't exist, we're destined to lose.
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We've been doing that. I don't know where you got the idea that the military has been walking on eggshells, but it hasn't. In our war against Saddam and against terrorists we have repeatedly fucked up the lives of average Iraqis. And you know what? This is the bullshit that fuels the terrorist recruitment drive.