 |
| |
|
|
shawnmmcc
|
|
MtG, you post played the exact same games as Oerdin, except you don't have the excuse of your language being examined and having a personal reaction. You play the exact same game as all but his last post, except without the exuse.
Like happened with Spiffor, you are reading into my post a critique of the road blocks. They are necessary, and we have been forced into running them in the highly lethal way we do. How many times do I need to say it?  My point is with the language.
I'll give you an example in our own USofA. Dehumanizing opponents leading to vicious inhumane acts that the perpetrators were fully aware of at the time. One of the posters used Custer as an example for something. This is the man who deliberately slaughtered entire villages of women, children, and old men.
Read some of the letters of the troops who were present in the slaughters in the Indian conflicts post-Civil War. They range from horrified at their compatriots, to chilling in how they matter-of-factly talk about slaughtering these people. Please don't try to tell me that's how they did war then, they hadn't under Sherman in Georgia and the Carolinas. But those were real people, not "dirty savages." Reinforcing my point on language.
Once you start dehumanizing your opponents, you have taken the first step to war crimes. We already have had some of our troops brought up on charges of abusing Iraqi prisoners. Any surprise? Yes, you will always have that. But the current rhetoric and labeling makes it even more likely. That's why police require training so they don't beat the crap out of the guy who resisted arrest. It's normal activity to dehumanize your enemy. So, unfortunately, are war crimes.
Even your arguments throughout your post "refuting" mine are red herrings.
quote:
It depends. Teenage fighters and suiciders aren't uncommon in the ME, and the US has had teenage casualties. When I was in my teens, I had a similar age friend whose family had just moved from Beirut. (This was in the mid-70's) At ten years old he'd been a courier in one of the militias, at 12 a weapons and ammo carrier, and at 16 a combat veteran. Get him out of the environment, and luckily, he was fairly well adjusted and a cool kid, but he was certainly capable of killing. |
And then you make my point for me! He was no "insert label here". He was your friend. Given circumstances, you might have had to shoot at him (I assume you were in the USA military). Even kill him. He's a dead person, not a "...sack of ****."
Then you create an even bigger red herring. Martyrs, etc. and the innocent civilians. To quote other posters, citations, please. You don't because the US command rightly is sitting on the numbers, because as described in my previous post, the car bombers have put the US in their ideal lose-lose situation.
Occam's razor. The car is full of "stupid civilians" or the car is full of "Martyrs". Puh-lease, look at my description of the shooting of Reagan. We have enough civilians in our own country fully capable of panicking and doing the wrong thing. Heck, the ones who out of curiousity ran towards the president after he was shot are definitely in the stupid category - they're not even panicked, their rubbernecking! That could have gotten them killed. No duh.
I suspect if you put 100 randomly drawn Iraqis in a potentially lethal military-civilian confrontation, and 100 Americans, the Iraqis as a whole will do fewer things to get themselves killed (after over 20 years in a police state, there's been some natural selection). The problem is that most of Iraq is a warzone, and even 1 in 10,000 people panicking at the roadblocks adds up to alot of dead civilians. The drivers for the most part have no desire to "... and the drivers of those vehicles who force the escalation to fire for effect." I agree that they do, but it's just being the wrong kind of person to be in a warzone. It's not their fault that they are in a warzone, it's not the soldiers fault (they have absolutely no choice but to shoot), it is the car bombers fault, no, strategy, and as I mentioned on the previous post, a clever and amoral one. If we were under the same situation here in the USA, the video of Reagan's shooting leads me to suspect our civilian population would do no better, maybe even worse.
Lastly, your biggest confuser. Unless you've been in a warzone... (you use variants of that multiple times in this thread). Well, then, have you worked as an EMT? Paradmedic? Pediatrics or ER nurse? I'm talking about the kids. I have been in the situation of watching a child get burned, over 60% of her body (remember the fuss over flamable children's clothing - those statistics have little children behind them). The odor of the burning synthetic that melts into a kind of goo burning into and through the skin is very distinctive. Watching her get taken out to the ambulance while her skin is still black, hanging in odd little shreds while steaming is something that you don't forget. That's why whenever I see the kids being used for political purposes (look at my post on the Arab hippocracy thread - need to go there next) and killed, you will find I tend to have a strong reaction.
It's real to me, just like being shot at is real to you. And if any of you want to accuse me of trolling, I'll supply you with a name and you can check with Shriner's Burn Institute of Boston (she survived and spent over a decade going there), or if they won't help due to privacy I'll give you a date so you can check emergency response records in Middletown, NJ - those should be public record. Kids get maimed and killed in warzones. It's inevitable. The results are HORRIFIC. It does not make the troops who do it monsters, though very often the leaders are. But it does make war something to be entered into very carefully, and I will always be opposed to it unless their is no alternative.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
MichaeltheGreat
|
|
Apolyton Grand Executioner
|
 |
mooning the house that Ruth built.
Oct 1999
time: 21:32
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by shawnmmcc
MtG, you post played the exact same games as Oerdin, except you don't have the excuse of your language being examined and having a personal reaction. You play the exact same game as all but his last post, except without the exuse.
|
I've been where he's going. It's a different world. And I don't mean the geography, I mean the nature of how you live or die, fundamentally.
quote:
Like happened with Spiffor, you are reading into my post a critique of the road blocks. They are necessary, and we have been forced into running them in the highly lethal way we do. How many times do I need to say it? My point is with the language.
|
Not at all - I know it's with the language, and you're reading into soldier's profanity a whole bunch of philosophical layers that aren't there.
quote:
And then you make my point for me! He was no "insert label here". He was your friend. Given circumstances, you might have had to shoot at him (I assume you were in the USA military). Even kill him. He's a dead person, not a "...sack of ****."
|
In that context, yeah. He wasn't shooting at me or my squad or part of an active, lethal threat in my sector. If he was, he'd have been whatever expletive came to mind at the moment, until he stopped being a threat.
quote:
Occam's razor. The car is full of "stupid civilians" or the car is full of "Martyrs".
|
Uhhhh, like, there's more than one car, and more than one checkpoint. It's not an abstract philosophical problem, it's a daily security issue at dozens of locations.
quote:
Puh-lease, look at my description of the shooting of Reagan. We have enough civilians in our own country fully capable of panicking and doing the wrong thing. Heck, the ones who out of curiousity ran towards the president after he was shot are definitely in the stupid category - they're not even panicked, their rubbernecking! That could have gotten them killed. No duh.
|
Spend some time in Iraq. It's a different world, especially under Hussein.
quote:
The drivers for the most part have no desire to "... and the drivers of those vehicles who force the escalation to fire for effect." I agree that they do, but it's just being the wrong kind of person to be in a warzone. |
You're assuming roadblocks and security checkpoints are something extraordinary there. All Iraqis close to Baghdad and it's environs, and in many many other areas of the country dealt with internal security, movement control, access control, arbitrary search and arrest, and Hussein's enforcers (all the different organizations) were well known for essentially operating without any form of restraint. The Iraqi people have spent an awful long time in being trained in absolute compliance with armed power.
quote:
If we were under the same situation here in the USA, the video of Reagan's shooting leads me to suspect our civilian population would do no better, maybe even worse.
|
Give them decades of conditioning, especially around Baghdad (where monitoring of the IRG's politically less reliable units and personnel was very intense), and they'd get the hang of it.
quote:
Lastly, your biggest confuser. Unless you've been in a warzone...
|
Not a confuser at all. The difference with what you compare to is that you don't regularly work in an environment where people are organized for the specific purpose of killing you any time, any place. Cops don't do that - most criminals want to avoid the cops to carry out their business. These insurgents want American soldiers dead, and that's a reality you never forget in a warzone. It's not about who you save or who you help - those are separate issues. It's about being aware that at any time, any place, you can come into lethal contact with an enemy determined to kill you and willing to die trying to do so. That tends to crystalize your sentimentality about the nature of your enemy, at least when you're dealing with him as such.
That doesn't mean you collect ears, mutilate bodies, or kill people for the hell of it - it's frankly ridiculous to put profanity about someone who's trying to take your head off on a slippery slope with war crimes or atrocities.
In fact the guy that was a sack of **** or a mother****er or whatever a couple of minutes ago when he was a lethal threat, generally becomes something entirely different when he's no longer a threat - whether killed, wounded, or captured. It depends on the nature of the enemy. Hell, we felt sorry for the poor draftee SOB's that got stuck on the line in the KTO.
quote:
Kids get maimed and killed in warzones. It's inevitable. The results are HORRIFIC. It does not make the troops who do it monsters, though very often the leaders are. But it does make war something to be entered into very carefully, and I will always be opposed to it unless their is no alternative. |
Have you ever seen anti-personnel mine trauma? War wounds get as bad as you're ever likely to see in any major urban trauma center, then it keeps on going from there. I don't *like* it, but sometimes it's necessary, and sometimes we're simply stuck with it due to dumbass politicians.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Tingkai
|
|
To find the Northwest Passage
Aug 2001
time: 13:32
|
|
Average number of American soldiers wounded per day in Iraq since the invasion: 9.2
Average number killed per day: 1.6
Average number of Iraqis civilians killed by gunfire in Baghdad each day in August: 17
Price of the logistics and maintenance contract to support US troops in Iraq, awarded to a subsidiary of Haliburton, **** Cherney's old company: US$7 billion.
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
Pekka
|
 |
em seu burro dos pais!
Feb 2002
time: 07:32
|
|
edit: MtG already said it.
Last edited by Pekka on 06-12-2003 at 08:16
|
|
| |
|
|
|
shawnmmcc
|
|
MtG - one little problem - Oerdin is not in a roadblock right now, nor is he being shot at (he noted he is going to be deployed). Again, you make my point for me. It is not a soldier's profanity, it is dehumanizing the enemy before he's deployed. Hello, it's like the "dirty savages" US forces talked up before the Indian villages were entered in the Indian wars, or the gooks in Vietnam (a tragicomic example of how not to win the civilians over). No, I don't think Oerdin is going to commit atrocities. But I still stand by my statement. Look at your description of your friend. You don't use the "expletive deleted" after the fact.
It's interesting your point about police. This is the problem with occupation forces in a guerilla environment. They need to be both police and combat soldiers, and as you correctly made the point, they have different mindsets. The guerilla relies on that to put the occupier in a lose-lose situation. Think like police, and you take higher casualties, which if you've noticed the Nato peacekeeping forces tend to do. Think like soldiers, and the civilian deaths do your recruiting for you. It's totally inhuman. It works.
Which is why I was opposed, not to removing Saddam Hussein (who is a genocidal monster) but Bush alienating quite a few of our potential allies and not being prepared for the occupation (and ignoring our own intel people who tried to warn them). Those troops who are deployed are dying unnecessarily while a bunch of chickenhawks who had not been under fire KNEW they had it right. Morons. Reinforcing your point about if you haven't been there. :P
If you want to talk about the horrors of wounds, try the children's burn ward at Shriners. My sister came back not feeling sorry for herself because, as she put it, "I still have all my fingers and toes." She was there when Richard Pryor made a tour after his freebasing "accident." The kids all thought he was a wuz, because to them his burns were minor and he was full of self-pity. It keeps my definition of bad luck in perspective.
I won't say a warzone isn't horrible, but take a trauma center in a major US metro area, and they get it day in and day out. They probably don't get the intensity of a Corpsman (my brother was a squid with the marines - luckily did not see combat) in a combat zone. But the corpsman isn't deployed continuously in a war zone for twenty-thirty years. Which is why trauma centers have high burnout rates. Me, I have a high amount of respect for both groups of people. The corpsman for getting shot at while he doesn't shoot back - I'd never have the guts to do that - and the trauma center people for doing emotionally wrenching work day in and out for years.
Reference the checkpoints, I had edited what follows out as unnecessary from an earlier post. I was trying to shorten my post.  So here it goes. To reiterate. One major problem - we're speculating. We have to, the US Army won't release the numbers, and as I mentioned before, rightfully so. However, there are some mechanics to think about.
The roadblocks run in most authoritarian regimes have you drive up to them, and then you stop, show identity papers, and you might get searched. In fact, I will bet it is an automatic response for some people to drive up to the soldiers. We are stopping the people before the roadblock. (though they may have improved procedures, which maybe another reason civilian casualties at them are down). Now, before you say that it's obvious where they should stop, again you discount habits and people being on autopilot. Before they always drove up to the soldiers/police. Now they need to stop before hand. Yes, the vast majority of people, realizing that this is deadly serious, figure it out. The one in ten thousand (or whatever number) who doesn't ends up dead. It's sad.
It's also to a small degree our fault. We do not have enough Arabic speakers in our military (nor did we start immersion training for our MP and other units as soon as we knew war was a possibility, at least not seriously, if we had and dedicated resources to it, we could have had enough – except those pesky tax cuts didn’t leave enough money – sorry, I’m trolling  ). I can't remember the exact story, but they talked about one of the carloads of civilians who got shot at slowly approaching the roadblock, getting shouted at, and then shot. They got confused, they didn't know the language, and now they are dead/wounded (it was a family). That's what is so sad. Getting confused in a warzone (old roadblock vs. new roadblock procedures) can very quickly get civilians killed.
You still stand by your martyr red herring.  I will stand by Occam's razor, as in, "keep it simple, stupid" (not stupid at you, just the quote  ). I suspect we'll have to agree to disagree, except for one little item. I have not caught any martyr stories, as in, very few if any people are lending it credence except for your usual speculation/justification types (Rush comes to mind).
I have caught stories where the children were part of a family group (in one case grandmother was driving - which lends strong support to my confused statement). You look at every verifiable account of suicide bombings in the mideast. NONE have gone out and deliberate sacrificed their own young children in the vehicle, not even as camouflage to conceal the vehicle status during the actual bombing. There are religious reasons, and human reasons. In some cases in Iraq women have been the drivers. The chance of a woman sacrificing her own child is so small as to be a statistical artifact. (as in you might, while searching, find one example somewhere to support the idea, while I'll stand by a statistical analysis of the shootings – if they are ever released).
Plus, the leaders of Al Quaeda will use every martyr they can get to make a car bombing. It will keep our troops agitated, meaning that they are more likely to shoot at a vehicle whose driver screws up. That is the hideous cleverness of carbombing the roadblocks, creating this situation (which I commented the first time I heard of them carbombing – I stated that we were in trouble to a friend).
I will stand by the fact that the majority, if not all, of the deaths of young children at these roadblocks are due to confusion and/or stupidity. Especially because the numbers appear to be dropping (at least what's reported). Natural selection, people who don't adapt to the changing situation in a war zone, end up dead. I will speculate, and we won't know for a very long time, that the vast majority of adults killed at roadblocks were due to stupidity, confusion, inappropriate reactions, etc.
So we agree as follows - Saddam Hussein was (as in past tense, I hope ) a monster. The roadblock situation sucks, and that the guerillas are using the civilian deaths for propaganda purposes. Trauma wounds suck, whether from a mine destroying the foot and varying degrees of the lower body, or from a high speed collision that you survived due to air bags but your legs up to the thighs were left with the sheet metal. Burns whether from shaped charges, domestic accidents or child abuse, suck. A soldier in or just after a firefight uses language that is not particularly nice, and this is OK, it's perfectly human.
We disagree on - whether the civilians are martyrs or people who just should never be in a war zone. You can probably find isolated cases of the former, I still bet the majority of them are the latter. However, we both agree it doesn't change how the roadblocks have to be run, sadly. I'm not sure on how we view the Bush administration ignoring the experienced military intel types and their warnings predicting the situation we are now in - Rumsfeld's fault directly, but Bush is his boss and hasn't sacked him for it. Plus Rumsfeld is one of the idiot's pushing the Stryker, I have done some interesting research on that, including from some military bulletin boards and from one guy who analyzed the proposed TO&E of those units (really scary - message me and I'll forward it to you, it harkens back to McNamara's idiotic ideas during the Kennedy administration).
I firmly believe that a soldier about to be deployed using that as an excuse to use dehumanizing language appropriate to a firefight or post firefight situation is not appropriate (look up the history of war crimes, and read the interviews with the soldiers - it's chilling). You look at it personally, while I take the view of the historian (and can document it in multiple histories – including our own country). I strongly suspect we agree on the differences between police forces/combat troops, and that having either group do double duty is a recipe for problems.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Ned
|
 |
of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:32
|
|
shawnmmcc, I agree with your post. But rather than complaining, what is your solution other than educting our troops in Arabic, which I still think is a good idea.
Would you support turning the policing over to the Iraqi's themselves ASAP?
MtG and others point out the obvious security problems this entails. We might lose a few Ba'athist bigwigs as they escape. So we lose a few battles, but we win the war. We win it because the people will be on our side more than they are now. With an established police force and army, we can withdraw or minimize our footprint sooner.
MtG, what was worse for the Confederacy? The war or reconstruction? Reconstruction, what a farcial name for rape! Dismissing the Southern armies and replacing them with an army of occuppation was a tragic mistake. Lincoln was not in favor of occuppation IIRC.
In Germany, we dismissed the entire army and police force because we wanted to de-Nazify Germany. The Germans didn't have police of their own until '48. Now surely we got rid of the Nazi's. But was what we did the right thing to do given that Germany became one of our best allies in the end? Couldn't we have trusted them sooner?
In Japan, we did not dismiss the police and our occuppation went smoother than any other. The Japanese people began to really like us Americans.
In Vietnam, there is no doubt that a large percentage of the people who were allegedly were dying for, the people of South Vietnam, began to hate us because we essentially became a somewhat hostile army of occuppation.
Learn from history, God damnit.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Dr Strangelove
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by MrFun
Trusting recent traitors to reintegrate their own states in good faith, within the legal government of the United States AND enacting enforcement of civil rights for freed blacks??
yeah, right |
I can't imagine what an Iraqi version of the KKK would be like. Suppose they held an international KKK jamboree and the Iraqi KKK showed up? Now that would be interesting!
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Dr Strangelove
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by Ned
The KKK was the equivalent of the Iraqi resistance. It would not have been created at all had the South not been occuppied. |
The KKK arose to make sure that blacks would know better than to believe that their status had actually changed. Your statement is correct only to the extent that the occupation of the South gave blacks hope that emancipation might really mean something.
|
|
| |
|
| |
All times are GMT. The time now is 05:32.
Apolyton Time is 00:32. |
top of page
|
| archivepost |
|
Forum Rules:
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
|
HTML code is ON
vB code is ON
Smilies are ON
[IMG] code is ON
|
|
|
|
|
|
05-12-2003 14:18
I expect better from you - I expect any civilians that died in this would have most likely died in the first 5 mins trying to run away. Of course some could have been killed some distance from the fighting as their houses got flattened by stray 120mm tank rounds...
|