Originally posted by Liberator
Umm, I wasn't talking about the whole population, I was talking about the people in Fallugah(sp?) and Najaph(sp? again) who don't want to fight or take the risk of getting killed leaving until the fighting is over.
BTW, we're not indescrimately wasting civvies, major effort in being put into making sure that the ones being killed are enemy combatants. If we wanted to whack a bunch of civvies we could just carpet bomb the whole city like we did Dresdin. All we would need is one or two flattened cities and the resistance would stop.
You realize also, that a not-insignificant percentage of the enemy dead are non-Iraqi in origin. They are finding many Syrians, Iranians and even Saudis among the dead.
*edit*
Better that they come to Iraq to die than us having to go into whereever they're at. It's much easier to rebuild one country than 5 or 10.
So, when you described "a guy with a gun in a combat zone" and a "guy with binoulars and a radio ontop of a mosque radioing enemy positions", you were describing the "the people in Fallujah and Najaf who don't want to fight or take the risk of getting killed leaving until the fighting is over"....what? Sorry, but you're going to have to be a bit clearer than that, cause your two statements are quite different. Maybe its my fault, but I just don't get what you're trying to say.
You do not indiscriminatly kill civies, you just make very little effort to keep them out of harm's way. The troops are trigger-happy 20 year olds, fresh out of basic training with a "kill 'em all" attitude. Even the British soldiers are complaining that the Americans are being too trigger-happy and heavy-handed when dealing with Iraqis.
linkThe fact that you could carpet bomb the city means nothing. Sure, you could do
worse, but the ability to waste an entire city does not excuse killing civilians. If I have the ability to kill 1000 people, that does not make it right for me to kill 1.
Stop pretending like every person you kill is an insurgent in disguise. Women, children and people who could not in any way be mistaken for militants are being killed every day. The US is even killing members of its own police forces. Many times, the wounded are not allowed to be taken to hospitals, even after it has been established that they pose no threat. So, they bleed to death when they could otherwise have been saved with proper medical help. Why? Beats me, but I've read numerous artcles that detail such incidents, so it would appear to be more or less common practice.
What about shooting out ambulance tires, or shooting the driver through the windshield? These are not figments of my imagination, they are documented events.
What you can't bear the thought of, is that US troops are not noble, self-less, heroic, professionals. They're poor kids, who needed some structure in their lives and joined the Army cause they wanted to see things go boom. If you were to accept even the possibility that this is true, quite a number of your beliefs would go down in flames. So, despite huge amounts of evidence to the contrary, you defend this romantic version of US soldiers. How many investigations into criminal conduct by soldiers have disappeared somewhere in the beaucrocracy of the Army. Remember when that tanked fired on the Palestine Hotel and killed several journalists? The Army insisted they were following the rules of engagement, but promised an investigation into the matter. And, what has become of it?
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