Our Troops Are The Good Guys, Some “Liberals” Hate That
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When it comes to war and the military, there are two attitudes that I despise. The first, and more widespread, comes from the right and their insistence that military action and decisions should never be questioned. Attempts to probe the military are always regarded by this group as traitorious rather than the necessary function of a strong democracy.
The second group without a clue are liberals who buy into the caricature of America’s soldiers as bloodthirsty savages who kill for the heck of it. Glenn Greenwald is in this camp. Greenwald insists that things like killing of Iraqi civilians in the Wikileaks video and Abu Ghraib are just standard operating procedure for American soldiers, and not aberrations from the norm.
In the case of the Wikileaks video, Greenwald characterizes it as “the plainly unjustified killing of a group of unarmed men (with their children) carrying away an unarmed, seriously wounded man to safety”. Except in the mindset of the soldiers shown, this wasn’t just some guy, but part of a group of insurgents. While it’s very clear that the military coverup of the activities was wrong, and possibly a crime, it galls me that it becomes so simple for people “over here” to Monday morning quarterback the decisions soldiers make in the field when they feel their lives and the lives of others are on the line.
This incident should be completely probed by an independent body, but to indict the entire U.S. military over a video like this is stupid. Furthermore, it isn’t as if Wikileaks just released the video. Every element that Wikileaks put out alongside the video was designed to indict the soldiers and the military coverup in the worst light possible. It was nearly as dishonest as the post-incident bullshit spin the Pentagon put out.
I didn’t and don’t support the Iraq War, but the vast majority of our men and women in the U.S. military are good people who do the right thing. I understand the nature of news, and it will never change, but “Soldier Does Right Thing, Follows Orders And Respects Lives Of Others” will never be a headline. When things like this and Abu Ghraib pop up the reason they are news is because they are deviations from the norm, not as Greenwald and others claim like Fox News caricatures of liberals, the standard posture of the military.
The entire reason there is an outcry when a member of the U.S. military engages in some form of atrocity or deviant behavior is because it is such an aberration from the norm. If, as Greenwald contends, our soldiers were just a bunch of animals killing civilians for sport, there would be no desire for coverups, because it would just be what we do. But that isn’t what we do. Whether the conflict is the wrong or right one the conduct of our soldiers on the ground, on the air, and in the sea is one of responsibility and duty, not mindless savagery. A small percentage of “liberals” like Greenwald don’t get this because like their close-minded counterparts on the right, if a deviation fits their narrative it becomes the dominant story despite the reality.
I’m not the kind of person who believes in “my country right or wrong” by a longshot. When we do wrong, we need to investigate, correct, and punish if necessary. But if you add it up, the right way outweighs the wrong. By a lot.
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© 2000-2011 Oliver Willis
Well said, Oliver; well said.
This is the same argument the Police make when they shoot an un-armed black man or sodomize him with a night stick, etc. Or the Army makes when Iraqis get tortured/killed in Abu-Ghraib
Do I believe that all the Soldiers are bad and evil and just go shooting Iraqis for fun? absolutely not.
The problem arises when the incidents where the shootings/killings are unjustified don’t get properly investigated(which you did mention you are favor of so on that note we agree). Why does it take an org like Wikileaks for the true story to come out. The Military does itself and the Good Soldiers in it’s rank a dis-service by not being more pro-actively in saying we fucked up and punishing the offending soldiers/officers.
Thank you for posting this. Most liberal bloggers I know do know that our troops are the good guys, but being anti-military is still one of the most popular things the right-wingers use to smear us. What you said needed to be said.
The exceptional is always reported because it’s exceptional, and then people who don’t know any better think it’s the norm.
As they say, “don’t hate the player, hate the game.”
I’m sure that troops, by and large, respect human life.
However, the American rules of engagement are too lax. As a result you have thousands of dead Iraqi civilians. The ROE could be tightened up so as not to kill so many civilians, but then you’d be letting more insurgents escape and you’d probably have more US troop deaths.
Would Americans support new ROEs that increase the chance of troop casualties? I doubt it. The average American doesn’t care much if Iraqi civilians die. Anyway, there’s an easy rationalization: if civilians are shot, it’s the insurgent’s fault.
That being said, once a troop has killed a few dozen civilians, it will alter their psyche in a negative way. More so than their initial training did.
‘I’m not the kind of person who believes in “my country right or wrong” by a longshot. When we do wrong, we need to investigate, correct, and punish if necessary. But if you add it up, the right way outweighs the wrong. By a lot.’
Wow, laden with generalizations and mis-characterizations. You just ran the whole article saying that the military guys are the “good guys” again but then said “I am not ‘my country [military, financial institutions, government, etc.] right or wrong.’”
Also, Oliver, what’s wrong with being anti-war? Objectively, I can’t really say I blame the soldiers in this situation. I don’t think Glenn Greenwald is saying that by a longshot even though you choose to ignore his statements to the contrary. It’s clear that they thought the men with cameras were carrying RPGs. [But what's also clear is that they violate the rules of engagement by firing on unarmed civilians trying remove the wounded. The ROG clearly state that even enemy soldiers clearing the wounded should not be fired upon unless they constitute a direct threat.] But the cavalier attitude toward killing expressed in the video is *NOT* isolated and we’re all to blame for that.
Agreed. I thought Greenwald went too far in his assumption of the incident. His preconceived notions about war in general and our troops seethed throughout the post making it unbearable.
There is a difference between supporting our troops and questioning the reasons and or methods of war. This is often distorted by the right as being against our troops and considered pandering to the right by the Greenwald’s of the left.
Soldiers do their duty. Their take orders and carry out the strategy all with our country’s best interest in mind. The video is disturbing yes, but to say this the video is the essence of our military and soldiers is plain wrong.
what’s wrong with being anti-war
Please show where I said that. You can’t, because I didn’t. I was against the Iraq War from before the start.
The problem is that you’re taking this strictly anti-war post by Greenwald and turning it into an attack on soldiers, which it is not. You defensively globbed onto sentence fragments and mischaracterized the post. Please show where he’s disparaging individual soldiers when he writes this paragraph in the original post:
“The WikiLeaks video is not an indictment of the individual soldiers involved — at least not primarily. Of course those who aren’t accustomed to such sentiments are shocked by the callous and sadistic satisfaction those soldiers seem to take in slaughtering those whom they perceive as The Enemy (even when unarmed and crawling on the ground with mortal wounds), but this is what they’re taught and trained and told to do. If you take even well-intentioned, young soldiers and stick them in the middle of a dangerous war zone for years and train them to think and act this way, this will inevitably be the result. The video is an indicment of the U.S. government and the war policies it pursues.”
Being anti-war also requires us to examine our highly martial society where we deify warriors as being the only “Good Guys” in the world and excuse nonchalance toward death as “just doing their job.”
Videos of hastily targeted remote killings appreciated with schoolboy glee emerged as early as 2002. That you’ve bought into the self-serving fictions of fairness and honor surrounding warfare (of all endeavors) is a testament to either your gullibility or your knowing participation in such bloodthirsty mythologizing.
Um, in the piece you pull out, Greenwald says our soldiers are trained to kill innocents. WTF.
So if incidents like this aren’t the norm, why did the Pentagon feel the need to put out the “post-incident bullshit spin” as you put it?
Ok. Wow, I thought you actually learned how to piece participles together. But you conveniently look at sentence fragments and smear what’s said with a red herring. That’s not argument.
Nevermind, you’re right. They killed no innocents and no US Soldiers, The Good Guys of the World, haven ever killed innocents nor was that ever their intention or the intention of the US government.
This is a false dichotomy.
I have met a lot of soldiers. U.S. soldiers tend to be the most idealistic people I’ve ever met. Some of the young people I know who have been deployed are the most admirable young people I know, with the greatest potential.
The truth is that the U.S. is engaged in an unjust war and every Iraqi killed is killed unjustly. It’s just wrong for us to be there.
It is very easy to take this view and consider the troops to be decent people, doing a horrible job for a bad reason. That’s the ‘liberal’ position. The liberal position is that the horror of war is doubled because the United States sent these people–who for the most part are incredible people, really idealistic noble people–to do something horrible and wrong.
On some level, I suspect they know it. And these people in the Apache helicopter may be able to rationalize what happened but they also have to live with it. I cannot imagine what that is like. It’s awful. It’s sickening.
I am absolutely convinced the Apache gunners did the wrong thing and showed callousness to the people who died. My sympathy is, I admit, more with the relatives of the dead. They cannot ever see their loved ones again. But it’s so twisted to think that we have to be utterly callous to their suffering to respect the troops.
Liberals care about the troops as much as anyone. There is no contradiction in not blaming the individuals and criticizing their actions. They didn’t start the war.
Because they were trying to cover their asses.
The American Federal Govt. are the bad guys – We Australians are finally waking up to the fact. Illegal war after war. Political bullying. Unilateral actions. Assassinations. Drone murders. It never seems to end.
And if grunts follow that lead, follow those orders, they’re just as culpable. We didn’t let Nazis pull the “following orders” excuse at Nuremberg, nor should we let US (and Australian) soldiers hide behind it today.
Reckoning imminent.
“Greenwald says our soldiers are trained to kill innocents. WTF”
Well, The Fuck is that our soldiers ARE trained to kill innocents.
Apparently, our wonderful soldiers were trained to act that way on that day in Iraq we saw in the video. Do you deny they were not following training? Do you deny that innocents were killed?
Peace loving people will not let your stubborn support of our corrupt institutions go unnoticed. The military and our government are populated with thousands of bloodthirsty people.
Do your ostrich routine for as long as it takes. Fox News will be calling soon.
No, that’s your faulty interpretation of what Greenwald is saying. He is saying that once those men were identified as the enemy, those soldiers felt free and even obligated to destroy them even when they did not pose a threat. The issue, in this case, is that these men were incorrectly identified as enemies by US troops predisposed to make that assumption. And that assumption determined everything that followed, including the attack on the van.
Something else to consider: when soldiers screw up and kill innocents, which keeps happening in a wars like this regardless of intentions, they are directly contributing to failure and defeat. It’s all well and good to sit here in a country not currently under a military occupation that our troops are the good guys and we should cut them more slack, but that’s not going to fly in the places where our mistakes repeatedly cost innocent lives. You know, the places where we desperately need to convince people that we’re the Good Guys.
And by the way, it’s really disingenuous to pretend this is some huge deviation from the norm. What’s unusual is that we have video and audio of a strike killing civilians. But this is a depressingly common occurrence. Our troops frequently kill innocents. That’s the nature of the wars we’re fighting, and a byproduct of the way we’ve been fighting them.
The Good Guys on that video are the journalists who put their lives on the line to keep people informed and Protect Our Freedom with that information.
The Real Heroes are the good Samaritans who risked, and lost, their lives trying to save an innocent man who had been gunned down by unquestionably “blood thirsty” soldiers.
There’s nothing good or heroic about the actions of our soldiers there. I do not Support Those Troops.
Oliver, I suppose what I have to say is this: what the video shows is not abnormal behavior in any war. People are trained to kill, and they have to find a way to deal with that, and a large part of that is learning to dehumanize the enemy.
I’m not saying “our soldiers are the bad guys” and I’m not saying “this is standard operating procedure.”
I’m saying “our soldiers are human, and you know that these kinds of things will happen in a war, and it’s wrong, and its hideous, and while we have to punish the soldiers responsible – to make an example of them – the real crime was putting hundreds of thousands of people into situations in which they had to learn callous disregard for the life of ‘the enemy’. Because this is what happens when you do that.”
Does this indict our entire military? No. But let’s not pretend this is some huge surprise, either. It’s a very human reaction to a very inhuman situation.
It’s not at all clear that Greenwald is working with a view of soliders as blood-thirsty animals. One the contrary:
You can argue with this, but I don’t think it’s because Greenwald wants to spit on babykillers. He is clearly taking issue with doctrine and its predicted effects, not on the character of the body of soldiers. Earlier in the piece, he claims that each move was explicitly authorized which is exactly not a case rogue soldiers (at least on the field).
So, I think you’ve misread his piece.
I think from watching the wikileaks clip you have a very clear incident of confirmation bias, where the crew is looking for weapons, sees people with tube-shaped objects in their hands and they see weapons where we know there are cameras thanks to the helpful editing of the helicopter camera footage provided by whoever provided it. We also hear the helicopter crew member on the radio lying flat out about what he saw (6 of them with AK-47s, can I have permission to engage, etc). But people fudge facts like that in their jobs all the time, they know how to work the system to get the results they want. I don’t see any evidence from the clip that the helicopter crew believed the men in the street to be unarmed.
Greenwald is part of the hothouse environment over there at FDL that encourages a flailing attack-first mentality. I get the sense that they’re trying to earn their spurs or something, that they’re trying to compete with outlets like talkingpointsmemo but have a little too much of a Hollywood mentality to be in for the long haul, to do all the hard work and daily reporting that a legitimate contest of that type would involve. So they have to notch things up with Andy Kaufmanesque theater. Be the story. It’s not really what people want IMO.
That’s not entirely accurate. I know what you’re pulling that from, but the antecedent of “that” in Greenwald’s piece when he says “that’s what they’re trained to do” isn’t be bloodthirsty. It’s to be happy at killing someone they perceive to be the enemy. That’s basically true. If you were not trained to be proud of your work, work that does in fact involve killing someone, if instead you were trained to pause and reflect on the tragedy of it all, it would make you a less effective soldier. The problem isn’t the happiness; it’s how broadly they see “The Enemy.”
Now, although it is not the primary thrust of what you are saying or, necessarily, what Greenwald is saying, I do think the updates at the end of his post are vital to the context of all this. If the video was of Americans trying to haul the sick or wounded away, and the soldiers doing the killing were Chinese or Cuban or militants fighting against us in Afghanistan, would we really say – I mean, really, would we – say that those soldiers are overwhelmingly good and honorable and these scum are just bad apples so it’s unfair to paint with a broad brush?
I am not suggesting either that troops are bad – my father and one of my dearest friends are both veterans. Nor am I suggesting that all sides in a war are equal in pursuit of justice. What I am suggesting is that we can make all the excuses we want for ourselves and how to view this; it’s ultimately immaterial how it looks to Americans. What matters is how it looks to the rest of the world. That’s where new terrorists come from; that’s where our other soldiers and civilians have to hold their heads up and travel and be confident in safety. How do they know what most of our troops are like; how would we know what most of theirs are like? Soldier Does It Right may not make headlines, but that’s all the more reason that stuff like this must not happen in the first place, not just that we shouldn’t cover it up after the fact.
And so we have to ask ourselves what sorts of training, behavior, and screening allows this to go forward. Because I can’t imagine that these were soldiers who were careful, methodical, fair, and contemplative forever, and only with this one attack ended up doing something both over the line (the killing) and disgusting in appearance (the snickering). They had all been models with no red flags, and then suddenly SNAP! There’s a reason we run psych profiles on troops. There’s a reason we don’t allow them to get away with small infractions: because the big ones hold geopolitical implications. And heck, even if it was just one snap, that itself should give us pause.
To suggest it’s just that these soldiers sucked is unacceptable. It’s not just about the coverup. It’s the procedure that put these guys on that battlefield in the first place. Why were they there? There is something systemic that went wrong. No, it doesn’t mean the military is evil or full of awful people. But it does mean we need to vigorously examine the whole thing from top to bottom, because slips like this should never ever ever happen. And to compare a push for such a top-to-bottom look to hating the military is painting with the same caricature brush Fox does.
The problem with your defense of the helicopter crews is that you don’t know what was in their mind. What you do know is that what they were saying was going on so they could get authorization to fire was clearly untrue. some troops are good guys, some aren’t. Some are patriots. Some are white supremacists. Some are religious zealots. Some are gang members. Some are militia types. Some are smart. Some are stupid. And some are murderers. In this case it appears we witnessed a set of murders.
Mr. Willis, your quote above is a fairly transparent way of saying that the vast majority of our men and women in the U.S. military are good people who are just following orders?
uh. If they lied to get permission to fire that’d be premeditated murder.
Let me say this as politely as I can: this is a total lie.
I do not believe soldiers kill for the heck of it. I believe only a tiny minority purposely kill civilians.
I said this was not an aberration because (a) it has happened so often (how do you think the 100,000 Iraqi civilians – at least – got dead?); (b) The Pentagon itself said that what these soldiers did was completely consistent with their policies and practices (they must hate the troops, too); and (c) people who actually know what they’re talking about – who have spent years covering our wars — say that this happens frequently.
You completely lied about what I wrote and believe in this post.
I explicitly said that this video is NOT an indictment of the soldiers involved, because they’re doing what Pentagon policy calls for — as the Pentagon itself concluded.
What this is the standard Krstol/Cheney McCarthyite smear: anyone who criticizes military policy HATES THE TROOPS.
At least they don’t usually lie about what people have actually written in order to carry out that smear, as you’ve done here.
Frank – You leave a typical jingoistic response – “Soldiers do their duty” – to a complex, and to some, life ending, problem. You and Mr. Willis are part of the problem.
Simple answers may work for simple minds thinking about simple problems. Unfortunately, we are not talking about simple problems.
You and Mr. Willis need to grow up and stop believing your fairy tales about “soldiers”.
Please.
As Major General Antonio Taguba’s report showed, the torture at Abu Ghraib happened as a direct result of official policy. It was not an aberration, but “systemic”. He later wrote that “the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture”.
It was an aberration from what we believe as a nation. I make no excuse for the Bush/Cheney authorization and implementation of torture. In fact, it disgusts me.
Unfortunately, if you watch the wikileaks video and listen to what the gunner says, you don’t need Greenwald to accuse the US military of acting like bloodthirsty savages, the gunner makes that case for himself. I’m not saying that the gunner is the norm, but when the military covers up events like this, what happened in Iraqi prisons and the recent slaughter of two pregnant women it does make you wonder how wide spread it really is. By covering up events like this, it allows them to continue.
War is hell. If you think either side is innocent after all these years you’re sorely mistaken. What we really should be doing is holding our leaders responsible for their lies which got us in this war in the first place, but the current administration seems more interested in “looking forward, not backward” and continuing this bad idea rather then fulfilling his campaign promises.
This is an absolute bullshit and, as previously mentioned, artificial dichotomy.
The problem with ‘exceptional’ incidents like My Lai was that they were frequent enough to be, perhaps not a norm, but pretty damn typical given that U.S. soldiers were being ordered into ‘free fire’ zones.
Yet, still, those who pointed out how systematically it was going on were likewise said to be failing to point out that our troops were the ‘good guys’.
George Orwell pointed out that the problem with war was less that you were sending young men to die, it was that you sent them to kill — even when it was necessary, it was a tragedy, and he had no naivete about how horrible it was even when necessary.
Second, given the constant censorship, coverup, and reliance on official sources, even if one were in principle to agree, how would we know that these were deviations from the norm, and to what degree? Prior assumption? Ideological attitude?
And how many groundless attacks on civilians must take place in order to be measurable on some scale of ‘deviation’ to ‘norm’? Is ‘norm’ defined quantitatively? Qualitatively? Is ‘deviation’ or ‘aberration’?
Is it an “aberration” when it happens once in a war? Once in a year? Once a week? What?
No, I said they do the right thing. Sometimes this means not just following orders. But congrats on the Godwin.
Exactly. I checked out Oliver’s post after I read Glenn’s, and was so confused by his characterization of what Glenn had written that I had to go back and re-read Glenn’s post to see where Oliver could have possibly gotten the “our soldiers were just a bunch of animals killing civilians for sport” concept from. I came to the conclusion that it emerged directly from Oliver’s ass.
@Bijan, given the earlier thread(s), I don’t think Oliver is really interested in looking at that. Since the poor guy received criticism from Greenwald, he’s more interested in taking some words out of context and spitting out ridiculous red herring fallacies.
No, I said they do the right thing.
What does that (“the right thing”) even mean? That we invade when we want to? That our soldiers follow our orders, which makes it “right”? You’re getting further down the rabbit hole with each comment, Mr. Willis.
And, no, it wasn’t a Godwin reference, it was a reference to an important part of international law.
But, congrats on the straw man.
There is right and wrong. The vast majority of our soldiers know that. If they are given an order that is wrong, they know they shouldn’t follow it. This is pretty simple, yet you seem to be having a devil of a time with it?
It was an aberration from what we believe as a nation.
What is it that “we believe as a nation”?
I’m all ears for Mr. Oliver “I am America” Willis to explain to us ignorant plebes.
seizan,
The other threads popped up as I was writing that
Still, I would be interested in a reply from Oliver about, e.g., this quote. It seems pretty clear that Greenwald was, at the very least, attempting to distinguish between the character of US Soldiers and the effects of US doctrine. This isn’t consistent with a smear of the troops as bloodthirsty animals who kill for sport.
So, what’s the actual reading that supports putting Greenwald in the class of liberals who think that the troops are majority bloodthirsty animals who kill for sport?
Let’s put it another way: What sort and amount of evidence would be sufficient to convince you, Oliver, that the US Armed Forces were majority bad apples? Or systematically trained to do some wrong things? I presume that this is an empirical matter, after all. Similarly, a institution which wants to hide outliers will also attempt to hide systematic problems. Is it a slur to believe that it is possible that there are systematic problems (even if you think that some benefit of the doubt is warranted)?
You keep picking these fights with Greenwald Oliver, and the fact is he’s much smarter than you.
Embracing fail, yet again.
It isn’t anti-military to expect the best out of our troops. If anything, we should expect a higher standard.
Not sure which ax you’re trying to grind now. There are solid Lib bloggers, and then there’s you, making apologies for failures. Angling for some sort of mythical CNN position which will never happen? I dunno. Your blog jut kind of sucks as of late.
Sad. Fucking pathetic. You lose yet again.
Firing on an injured man, a van and the people attempting to help the injured man is not wrong to you?
I don’t think I’m the one who’s having difficult seeing the picture here.
I’ll just agree to disagree with you. You’re digging in and in a defensive posture, so any further discussion will not provide much benefit, I think.
The fuck does this have to do with the topic at hand? The military personnel in question did follow orders, so any debate about whether they sometimes don’t follow them for moral reasons is irrelevant to the discussion, except that it illuminates why you’re not seeing eye-to-eye with Greenwald – he sees it (rightly) as a problem with U.S. military policy, while you’re stuck in the ridiculous good vs. evil mindset that made Bush such a terrible president.
Well clearly as God on earth your word is law. Whatever, nobody’s forcing you to read.
If you’re a soldier and you believe the injured man is an insurgent and an unmarked van comes to pick him up, the choice isn’t nearly as stark and simple as you’ve portrayed it.
That’s a fine thing to believe based on faith or circumstantial evidence (you know some soldiers, like most of us), but if you don’t have any data to back it up or other concrete reason to believe it, isn’t it exactly like the other two unsupported assumptions you attack? I think the major problem Wikileaks and Greenwald have with how this situation played out was that, because these incidents are covered up, it’s impossible to know with any degree of certainty what “the vast majority” of soldiers actually ARE doing.
It sounds like you’re just saying that there are certain ideas good Americans ought not to contemplate. But we cannot disprove that all soldiers are bloodthirsty savages until we postulate that, hey, they might be. We need the freedom to investigate along many premises to find something approaching the truth. It doesn’t help when the authorities lie, though.
The Geneva Convention is pretty clear on firing on injured combatants, Mr. Willis. You’re an intelligent man, and I’m sure you are aware of this.
There is no excuse for firing on an injured combatant who is not making any hostile action. This is one of most clear parts of ROE.
There is no moral high ground in regards to firing on the injured man. As an intelligent man, I’m sure you have doubts about defending this specific action in the video.
Sully, I think Oliver’s “what we believe as a nation” is a very similar response to Sarah Palin’s “world view” response.
I think you’re missing Glenn’s point – it’s not that our soldiers do bad things (which happens in every war), but how we respond to it – whether we lie about and pretend the people who did it heroically won another battle for us, or whether we treat it as something that actually went wrong (which it is) and view “news” that comes straight from “official” sources with any kind of skepticism, as we should.
Fantasy? My best friend is an Iraq war veteran and I come from a military family. There are ways to have a discussion, assuming you have any idea where I come from not the way to do it.
You are right these are complex issues, hence why Greenwald’s column was off base. It assumed one extreme conclusion over many possibilities. But what do I know? I am fantasizing about GI JOE and Starship Troopers. You seem to be willing to disregard dissenting opinions with a whim, so no doubt you have all the answers and I will continue to “be the problem” in our doomed world.
Ignore Oliver’s blathering. (He’s a smart guy and usually worth reading but once in a while he indulges the basic human right to be a blockhead, and today is one of those days.) The basic lesson here, which a LOT of people need to take to heart, is that when you hear euphemisms like “force projection” and the like, this IS what it looks like and this is what is being advocated. Modern warfare ALWAYS and inevitably includes frequent incidents of this type (with the use of drones they can now be perpetrated without even putting soldiers in harm’s way.) As for good intentions, we all know which road is paved with them.
Don’t worry, he’s still responding to some commenters downthread, and is naturally working his way back up to the person he smeared with this garbage dump of a strawman-laden post.
Sometimes I disagree with liberals on things, this clearly means I am… e-vil.
Yes, OW. Everyone hates soldiers because you have the emotional development of a three year old.
Really, he’s part of the problem. He want to pretend soldiers are always good people, otherwise his cheerleading isn’t really ‘chearleading’ so much as it is ‘cheering on the deaths of innovent people’. Understandably, that leaves a bad taste in his mouth. Less-so is his decision to react to that cognitive dissonance by pretending that soldiers never do anything bad and should never be held to account for anything.
Here’s an idea, bozo: Being in control of enough hardware to kill a thousand people in under 10 minutes means you have to be a whole shit-load more professional than the douche-bags in that video were being.
Voting against healthcare= a sin against humanity that can never be absolved!
Opening Fire on a van of 2-year olds and then blaming the driver = One of the Good guys!
Great moral system you got there.
Saint Glenn says “But there’s a serious danger when incidents like this Iraq slaughter are exposed in a piecemeal and unusual fashion: namely, the tendency to talk about it as though it is an aberration. It isn’t. It’s the opposite: it’s par for the course, standard operating procedure, what we do in wars, invasions, and occupation”
And I say that’s bullshit. The reason incidents like this pop up is because they are aberrations from the norm. Clearly stating this makes me a heretic.
Yes, the soldiers are all bad people right? The smug is insufferable.
Note that I’m not suggesting that any of these things are true. I’m just trying to understand the epistemic parameters.
For example, Oliver, you opposed the Iraq war…did you do so on legality grounds (even in part)? If the war is illegal then soldiering in it is illegal and there “should” be mass refusal by the troops to participate. I put ‘should’ in scare quotes because I think it’s extremely difficult to resist participating in the Iraq War if you are a US solider, indeed, it is quite difficult to come to the point of contemplating resisting participation (though, it is shocking that there are any yahoos who resist participating because they are birthers…shocking!).
(And legal by what code of law? And under what enforcement regime? It’s pretty clear that none of the people with policy responsibility for the torture policy are going to be investigated, much less indicted.)
What do you call it when Greenwald gets upset that Oliver may have ignored some context to his remarks when Greenwald himself is ignoring the context that led the soldiers to shoot the unarmed rescuers?
Greenwald is just wanting to make sure that the kneejerk hatred against the troops makes its way up to the people he feels deserve it: the leadership.
If you are going to respond like a petulant child, why bother? You discredit your position. You made your position clear in your post. Let that be your final word if you’re going to get angry with comments people leave.
Oliver is a good person and worth reading, but in this case like much of the “netroots” he’s channeling Obama’s center-hugging posture and muting his own critical faculties. And in response to criticism, the resort to straw men (“all soldiers are bad guys, right”), whining (“I am e-vil”), and evasiveness (“It was an aberration from what we believe as a nation.”) are unbecoming. We all have our bad days.
It’s always the bad seeds that get reported. I’m sure that there are quite a few trigger-happy chopper jocks and tank-gunners, who are bored for the most part and want to set off ordnance for the hell of it. Any justification for them to take out their frustration at being in a shithole, doing an essentially thankless job under horrible conditions might be understandable but still inexcusible. Soldiers are people and go through boot camp and deployment with the same baggage the rest of us have, they’re just forced to “stow it” in their footlocker until it becomes for some too much to handle. Then what happens, you get these incidences and the media is all over like skank on Gaga. There are plenty of career mil’s that keep it together enough to keep their bearings. Part of this I think is also the lowering of standards for military recruiting- they let petty thieves in, they get petty soldiers.
Do we really need completely juvenile constructs as ‘good guys’ vs. ‘bad guys’ to dominate our conception of the world?
I’m thinking the site with the Superman icon thinks we do.
Ah, so you mean it’s only a rare occurrence in theory. Well I can certainly agree with that. Our troops are Protecting Our Freedoms in theory. They are the good guys in the video in theory.
Well that certainly clears things up.
Saint Glenn? People really should stop indulging in the ad hominem characterization – just makes a discussion a playground argument instead of reasoned discourse.
Greenwald wants to make sure some of the spit lands on the people who made the babykillers.
So you hate when people on the left or right generalize the military for any reason, yet you then do it yourself by saying almost everyone in the military is a good person only trying to do the right thing.
I’m glad you’re above your own rules.
Here’s a question: how many “aberrations” does it take before you see a pattern?
War is ugly and civilians get killed.
UNNECESSARY and ILLEGAL wars where civilians get killed are even uglier.
If this was truly no big deal, as Willis is implying, then the military would not have worked so hard to keep it hidden.
Just my two cents.
KD
Oliver, is this attack an unjustifiable “abberation from the norm” or was it in fact justifiable? You seem to be making arguments for both.
The Geneva Convention is pretty clear on firing on injured combatants, Mr. Willis. You’re an intelligent man, and I’m sure you are aware of this.
There is no excuse for firing on an injured combatant who is not making any hostile action. This is one of most clear parts of ROE.
The problem with your interpretation of the Geneva Conventions is that protection of wounded combatants is valid only once they are out of action. The van was not a medical vehicle. It had no markings. Greenwald describes them as “unarmed civilian rescuers.” I’m sorry, I didn’t see the signs they held up proclaiming they were rescuers. Remember, this gunship didn’t just see people strolling along the street and start shooting. There was a firefight in the area and there was a US unit nearby so there was no indication these people were “rescuers.”
It’s so easy for people like Greenwald to make their grand proclamations after the fact and only faced with 17 minutes of video. However, when their BS gets called on, they scream “LIAR!” as fast as lightning.
I explicitly said that this video is NOT an indictment of the soldiers involved
And you added the qualifier, “at least not primarily.” That’s not explicit Glenn.
Good post Avedon. But, I still stand by the fact that most, meaning in excess of 98 percent of the Soldiers boots on ground are decent people and are doing the right thing given the situation.
Oliver, there are so many good things about this site and I hate to see you damaging it by refusing to admit that you have made a mistake. You have totally misrepresented what Greenwald said and should acknowledge it. You showed bad judgment, as everyone does once in a while. Admit it and you will be respected. Be big man. You can still disagree reasonably about his position that these incidents are typical, of course, although i think he is right. His point is not that cruel soldiers are constantly killing innocent people, but that the rules of engagement and the reliance on this kind of technology inevitably lead to these kinds of tragic events and attempts are always made to cover them up, which, lets face it is pretty obvious. Step away from this for a few minutes, let calmness prevail over the desire to win an argument, and try to see it from the position of a reasonable outsider. Good luck to you and keep up the good work.
No, it just means you aren’t particularly liberal on those subjects. So you’re going to get flak from the left on those. Deal.
Asinine strawman non-answer. You smeared Glenn with the usual lame, fact-free tripe, then hide behind the strawman of invented victimhood. You poor thing, your “fair and balanced” critique of liberals has them attacking you? That must make you truly independent minded! I seriously have no idea where you get this crap from, nor why you still have a viable web sit. BTW, the only reason I’m here is because I wanted to see Glenn’s rebuttal. Your response to his rebuttal was an embarrassment. Bye!
Oliver, take a break. Go out and have a beer or a smoke or something because it’s pretty clear that you’ve gone past the point of intelligently responding.
When you come back, it would probably be in your best interests to admit you were (are) wrong.
That’s salvation, my friend.
Jesus, how many strawmen are you going to construct in one thread?
Fantasy or Fairy Tales, Frank, take your pick. Jingoism is what it is.
“There are ways to have a discussion, assuming you have any idea where I come from not the way to do it.” — Can you please restate this? It is kind of confusing.
I appreciate you stating your cultural background – “My best friend is an Iraq war veteran and I come from a military family.”
Anyways, we probably should not base an opinion’s validity on the cultural background of it’s provider.
OH come on. You’re lurching to the opposite extreme and you know it’s BS. No, of course not all soldiers are bad people. But some of them clearly are.
There are assholes in the world who like killing and blowing things up, Oliver, and they gravitate towards careers that let them do that with (or without) official sanction. You’re smart enough to know that. These fucks were laughing, Oliver. See how they run! C’mon, let us open up on the van trying to rescue the wounded!
Glenn wrote:
Quite frankly, this is just as much of a cop as Oliver’s post. Since when is “just following orders/procedures” a reason to withhold judgment of the individuals carrying out the acts?
The video is primarily, first and foremost, an indictment of the soldiers carrying out inhumane and immoral actions, whether those actions were officially sanctioned or not. The fact that they requested and received official permission to do what they did, doesn’t in any way mitigate the fact that they requested permission to kill unarmed, injured civilians and those who came to give them aid.
Oliver mistakenly attacks Glenn for condemning the individual soldiers, and Glenn responds by arguing that he was, in fact, condemning military policies and not the soldiers.
Sorry, guys, you’re both wrong.
The individual soldiers bear responsibility for carrying out immoral orders and their superiors bear responsibility for placing them in such a situation.
You guys are just splitting hairs because you’re afraid you’ll both be branded for “hating the troops” if you hold individual soldiers responsble for their actions.
Apparently, you both need to be reminded that individual soldiers should be held to the same moral and ethical standards we would like to hold their superiors. No one gets a pass because they were “following orders” or “procedures.”
0.5 percent would constitute a statistical aberration, and yet, applied across a large enough sample size, might add up, in this case, to quite a few dead civilians. Even 2 percent still qualifies as non-normative in my book. Now, if this were 10-20 percent or more of what happens in a typical day of action in Iraq, that would absolutely be related to flaws in military directives regarding ROE. I can even see the argument here that the ROE need to be tightened up. But I don’t see how we get from that point to some kind of “military culture of tolerated atrocity”.
I don’t believe that that fact was ever challenged.
“I didn’t and don’t support the Iraq War, but the vast majority of our men and women in the U.S. military are good people who do the right thing.” I guess occupying countries for no reason other than “Bush or President X” said so is doing the right thing.
Oliver, the aberrational part is that we are privy to the action in this case. Thanks to a tightly locked down military and obsequious media, we only hear about incidents like this that happen routinely, when the truth slips through the cracks.
What’s up with ‘St Glenn’? How is that responsive? Just askin’ …
His proverbial 15 minutes of fame arrived, and Oliver squandered it making a fool of himself
First, Oliver, if you were on the receiving end of this sort of treatment, you’d be thinking differently.
Second, I remember how the Winter Soldiers were treated for telling what they saw in Vietnam, and the general understanding among them was that My Lai was not an aberration, but, rather, was closer to the norm. They were villified then for suggesting that indiscriminate killing of civilians was common.
Forty years after their testimony, their truthfulness is gradually becoming apparent. I expect that, twenty or thirty years from now, the same will hold for our various wars now. You choose to see this as an isolated incident, but, that’s very far from the aggregate truth.
We have a government, a military and a mainstream press that lies to us with great regularity. Our military occupation of that country was and still is predicated upon lies They lied about this. Despite repeated requests, they refused to let Reuters see this video. They have sought to cover up other incidents. They are lying to you, and to me, and to all us. The lying is endemic.
Once someone repeatedly lies to me, I no longer give them the benefit of the doubt, or continue to offer them my trust.
You’d be wise to show some skepticism, too.
It sounds like you are defending them. When you call something like this an aberration, that means you’re saying that yeah this was a bad thing but it’s no big deal because it was just a couple of bad apples. You are making the same argument that the Bush Administration did at Abu Ghraib. The exact same one.
thank you. I had the exact same reaction.
Well, Sully, t would definitely be against ROE to fire on a marked medical vehicle. And it would be against ROE to fire on an injured man who was hors de combat. The military has been known to extend certain rules to cover these situations. “I’m not firing on the injured (in this case non-)combatant; I’m firing on the van! Just the van! Whoops, the injured guy died – but I wasn’t shooting at him!”
And these are sound military decisions. They are made to dance within the strict boundaries of the rules, while still accomplishing the desired objectives.
This is why it was decreed after WWII that the ultimate war crime was starting a war. Because this kind of shit is what people do, with the best of intentions and the highest of principles, and think of themselves as the good guys for doing it.
The person who OKed firing on the van wasn’t thinking about being a bloodthirsty sadist – they were thinking of following the rules to the letter, but causing maximum damage to “the insurgents,” to end this war as quickly as possible. They can probably look you in the eye, and say with total sincerity, that they are trying to be merciful to the next would-be insurgent – or the next dozen, or next hundred, by ending the conflict as quickly as possible.
And they’ll be able to defend the coverup for the same reason – “let’s not energize the insurgents!”
And people will defend the honor of our soldiers and so forth for the same reasons.
The real sickness is that this *is* war. It’s a perfectly normal situation; you expect this to happen, over and over again. It’s not SOP – no one says “go out there and kill civilians who might just be journalists and average joes.” But it’s normal. It happens.
Again, this is why the ultimate war crime is starting a war.
Oliver, I’m really not getting what your point is. I think you’re trying to say something like “don’t use this to condemn our military!” but no one is. But they should use this to condemn *warfare*. They should use it to understand that when they can blithely say things like “I think Iraq was worth it!” they’re completely ignoring the real human cost – both the people who are callously killed, and in what we do to turn our soldiers into callous killers. Those gunners who killed these people are either now very dangerous – uncaring about human beings – or going to have serious trauma dealing with what they’ve done.
Sigh. I know you’re upset – but I’m not sure what you’re upset about, and since I kinda like you (though I’ve always been more of an MMMer, myself), that kinda concerns me. I hope you can find the right words to give voice to what’s bugging you about this situation.
You need to read Common Article 3 from the Geneva Conventions again.
Oh, and it’s “Saint Glenn” is it? So I take it from that derisive contsruction that you generally disagree with Glenn Greenwald’s positions on various matters, and see him as unworthy of the respect and fame he’s acquired as a columnist and commentator?
Greenwald’s characterization of what happened to that van is absolutely right, and shared by other “unthinking liberals” like Brandon Friedman. Stop trying to rationalize what was an unquestionable violation of the Rules of Engagement and a senseless, unnecessary killing.
As everyone who watches the video can see, the man on the ground whom the van approaches was unarmed (the soldiers in the Apache say as much within a minute of the shooting), and the occupants of the van neither made any aggressive moves toward the gunship nor even indicated an awareness of its presence. They did nothing, NOTHING, more than remove a wounded man from the field. That is not cause to use deadly force. If it was, we’d be seeing a lot more dead Red Cross and Red Crescent workers in combat.
Greenwald may be wrong to try and paint this as an endemic problem that has infected the entire military (on a day when we learn that US forces killed women, bound and blindfolded their corpses, dug out the slugs, and pretended it was an “honor killing” that we had nothing to do with, that claim has a little more merit than you’re willing to admit). But your attempt to defend that crew for firing on the black van appears to be the same sort of reflexive jingoistic rationalization you claim to decry when it appears on the Right.
You are wrong, Mr. Willis, and so were those soldiers. Perhaps we hold them to too high a standard, but I don’t think “don’t kill unarmed individuals helping the wounded” is a particularly high bar to expect them to clear.
It isn’t enough to say that we’re fighting “a different kind of enemy” as justification for this kind of incident.
Yes, the enemy isn’t in uniform and so it’s more complicated to judge soldiers’ behavior by the rules of traditional warfare. But that shouldn’t mean soldiers have carte blanche to fire on anyone who doesn’t have a giant red cross painted on their car or stitched on their clothes.
Fighting “a different kind of enemy,” especially when one is also simultaneously trying to rebuild a nation and earn the support of its civilian population, should require greater circumspection and evidence on the part of soldiers, not less.
Of course, that’s the crux of the whole problem with the invasion and occupation since the beginning.
Policies are in place that don’t suit the complexity of the situation and individual soldiers, in turn, seem to think those policies abrogate their responsibility to act as individual moral agents in any given situation.
Which leads to incidents like this in which the first impulse was not to investigate and understand the situation, but rather to trigger the official approval that would absolve anyone from moral responsibility for not looking any closer at what was going on.
The reason incidents like this pop up is because they are aberrations from the norm.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal said, “We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.”
Oliver, are you calling Gen. McChrystal a liar? Do you know something that he doesn’t?
I explicitly said that this video is NOT an indictment of the soldiers involved
And you added the qualifier, “at least not primarily.” That’s not explicit Glenn.
This type of ridiculous post by Oliver is exactly why I stopped reading this silly blog in the first place. Oliver is basically an apologist for Obama’s broken promises, and now he’s following the Cheney-esque mindset of “if you criticize troops you hate them”. The only reason I came here is because Glenn commented on this post, and it just reaffirmed that I made the right decision when I stopped reading this blog.
[...] are various ways to view this. One is knee-jerk, blindfolded apology. But I also agree with Oliver Willis that knee-jerk denigration of the troops isn’t called for, [...]
Oliver,
You are defending the indefensible and in some instances here in this thread you are actually lying. And I mean lying in the classical sense of that term. That is, I suspect that you know the truth to be different, in fact, vastly different from what you are describing.
See this Andrew Sullivan post
It begins thus:
“I’m going to try not to get into a semantic debate about the realities of war versus civilian perception of war, but I do want to clarify a little of what’s happening in a technical sense so that the viewer understands what is and is not allowed in these situations. And I’m sure that, despite my best abilities, my personal bias as an Active Duty US Soldier will ultimately show through in the end. I’m currently deployed to a region in southeast Baghdad, near where this incident took place, and the Rules of Engagement that dictate the use of lethal force state 51% certainty that the individual represent a threat to you or another US Soldier. (To my knowledge, it always has been.)”
And near the end it has thus:
“90% of what occurs in that video has been commonplace in Iraq for the last 7 years, and the 10% that differs is entirely based on the fact that two of the gentlemen killed were journalists.”
And that is followed by:
“War is a disgusting, horrible thing. As cliche as that excuse has become, for people to look at the natural heartbreaking nature of it and say that they’re somehow anomalous just shows how far people who have not experienced war have to go to understanding it. That doesn’t justify failing to take every reasonable precaution necessary to avoid incidents like these. However, a little humility, or a little desire to have a broader contextual understanding of why these pilots did what they did before condemning them as war criminals would be appreciated.”
This can’t be the REAL Glenn Greenwald: he took less than 20 pages to make his point!
I should repeat with emphasis: “90% of what occurs in that video has been commonplace in Iraq for the last 7 years, and the 10% that differs is entirely based on the fact that two of the gentlemen killed were journalists.”
I see you wrote fairy tales, correction to my previous “fantasy?”. What I am still stating is you assumed you knew me. Assumed I had a “fairy tale” idea about soldiers. Again I know many soldiers and come from a military family. They have shared their experience in both past and present wars. So how is there a “fairy tale” in that?
Calling me a jingoist affirms my previous statement. You know everything. You know the whole story yada yada yada. I was never for the war in Iraq. I was against the Obama’s surge in Afghanistan. I happen to have a different opinion in this matter though and so I am a simpleton. I get it.
I think it’s pretty clear what Oliver is saying.
He’s saying that on President Obama’s watch, it’s now OK to use the “don’t let a few bad apples spoil the bunch” defense of the military; because it would reflect badly on the current president to have attention brought to atrocities committed by American troops at the same time he is ordering more troops into battle and when there is increased focus on just what those troops are doing under his command. When Bush was president, this defense was intolerable and criticism of the excesses of the military were A-OK, because anything that reflected badly on THAT president was hunky-dory.
Oliver is and always has been as much of an Obama honk as any “loyal Bushie” was to GWB. It pains him deeply to contemplate anything reflecting poorly on Mr. Obama, so invested is he in Obama’s perfection. There have been recent cracks in the mortar, to be sure, but the edifice is overall still very strong. Hero-worship dies hard.
Agreed. I’m with Oliver on most things, but he’s really behaving like a child on this thread.
Um, in the piece you attributed to Greenwald, you misquoted him. WTF:
From this, Oliver hears:
Please show where
Ihe said that. You can’t, becauseIhe didn’t.While you’re at it, go ahead and address this one. WTF:
Please show where
Ihe said that. You can’t, becauseIhe didn’t.Oliver, you’re usually spot on, but in this instance, you’re off the mark. I don’t know where you placed your cross-hairs in this argument, but in attempting to equate those whom they perceive as The Enemy with innocents, you completely missed the target. By a mile.
Beyond this point, the fact is that the Pentagon stated that these soldiers did nothing wrong, that their actions followed the Rules Of Engagement, which is what they are trained to do, are they not?
Yes, we’re supposed to be the good guys and for the vast majority of soldiers, that’s true. But like the population as a whole, they are not 100% pure. If they were, we wouldn’t have had Abu Ghraib (or My Lai for that matter). Any hunter knows that you are supposed to positively ID your target BEFORE you pull the trigger. These soldiers were not under fire and defending themselves, they were acting as snipers. As such these soldiers screwed up. They didn’t even sound professional, giggling and even begging for one of the wounded to pick up a gun so he could finish killing the wounded man. Ask yourself: Why would a soldier want a disabled member of the enemy to pick up a gun if the soldier’s primary concern was the immediate safety of himself and his team?
The soldiers either performed admirably following the Rules Of Engagement (and deserve to be lauded), or they didn’t (and they deserve to be investigated).
You can’t have it both ways, but it sounds like that is what you’re striving for.
I think you summed it up nicely, Mr. Willis. However, I would add that anyone who goes into the military to “help other human beings”, is delusional and misunderstands the purpose of the military. The military has one purpose and one purpose only and that is to slaughter other human beings as quickly and efficiently as possible – PERIOD. If you want to help people, join the Peace Corps or Doctors Without Borders. As a Christian, the killing of anyone for any reason is a direct repudiation of Christ’s admonition to “love one another as I have loved you”.
The Liberals are not wrong to do it. If the brass had been HONORABLE and HONEST and RESPONSIBLE by being truthful about the incident from the START, then this climate of untrustworthiness would not exist on either side. Our Armed Forces have become our Catholic Church, first their image and their asses, THEN the nation!!
I won’t venture an opinion on whether the conduct stemmed from military doctrine and approved practice or was an aberration.
The video is pretty self-contained, IMO. If these guys were insurgents bent on attacking US forces, why are they strolling around in the open while a military copter is circling them?
The previous comment about shooting the rescue van is well-taken. I will add that gloating over the deaths of one’s adversaries, as they plainly do in the video, even if you grant they were adversaries, is unbecoming of soldiers.
Greenwald did not characterize the military in this way at all.
Go ahead and read the post.
Greenwald was demonstrating that *in this instance* (and in others), when civilians are killed by troops and the Pentagon lies to our press about it, our press dutifully transcribes what the Pentagon says, without asking anybody else about the events.
If you want to reflexively attribute some hyberbolic “liberals hate the troops” meaning, that’s your business.
But you’re wrong.
Oliver’s ass seems to be very prolific
Exactly. THAT was Greenwald’s point: “The Pentagon fabricates a story to cover up an embarrassing incident, and our U.S. media act as dutiful stenographers, rather than investigative journalists.”
The fact that civilians die in war was not Greenwald’s point (though it sure is a good argument to conduct war only when necessary and only when it can achieve a real end).
Gee, Oliver, so your position is that only some Liberals hate the troops? That’s awfully generous of you. Thank you for naming precisely one member of that “some” in the post or we might be left with the impression that you were unfairly broad-brushing. I anxiously await the follow-up posts wherein you will surely detail the methodology by which you were able to discern Greenwald’s motives and beliefs wholly apart from the things that he actually wrote. My own crystal ball is on the blink (and never worked that well to begin with) so your help in this regard is much appreciated.
It’s comforting, I suppose, to pretend that we live in a world where “good” and “evil” don’t depend on context and can usefully describe complex things like people or institutions, instead of individual acts. Comforting, but not accurate and, worse, reductive. Based on what you’ve said, I don’t think I’m going too far to suggest that you believe that calling members of the U.S. military “the good guys” has the effect of supporting them, somehow. On this we disagree. In my view, reducing everyone in uniform to comic book “good guys” is patronizing BS that ultimately robs those who serve honorably of the respect that is due for their sacrifices.
You and I have agreed in the past that constant “yeah, but”-ing (mostly by those who are trying to tell a more detailed view of history) have had the cumulative effect of making Liberals reluctant to express pride when America does something praiseworthy. We’ve also agreed that the net effect of that reluctance makes it harder to deal politically with the Palinites and their “Real America” BS. But you pole-vault way the Hell over the line when you go from that to putting words in people’s mouths and then smearing the with the laziest possible “ZOMG (some) LIBRULS HATEZ TEH TR00PS” attack. Not cool. And as much of a pain in the ass as Greenwald can be (boy howdy) I think you owe him an apology for slamming what you heard not what he said.
Great post Oliver.
Dan Riehl and Pam Gellar couldn’t have said it better.
Let me know how the sand tastes after you get your head out of it.
It must be pretty hard to type with USA foam fingers attached to both hands but you’re doing a great job of it, nonetheless.
what part of “The Pentagon itself said that what these soldiers did was completely consistent with their policies and practices” do you not understand?
how is “completely consistent with policies and practices” an “aberration?”
“And I say that’s bullshit. The reason incidents like this pop up is because they are aberrations from the norm. Clearly stating this makes me a heretic.”
I have a difficult time grasping your basis for this. The Pentagon and most administrations subsist with the expressed intent of painting America’s foreign excursions in the best of lights, while depicting anyone that says otherwise as liars through a mixture of propaganda, cover-ups and rank falsehoods. Embedded journalists in areas like Afghanistan are frequently handicapped from reporting on situations independently, and are often kept from doing any independent investigation under the auspices of “safety”. The result is not that the ‘truth’ comes out, the result is that the embedded journalists report the Pentagon’s version of the truth, and we receive that.
If your basis for saying “there aren’t very many bad stories” is because we don’t SEE very many bad stories, then you’re automatically operating under a false premise that’s informed by government filtered ignorance instead of actual knowledge. As something to ponder when assessing the frequency of civilian casualties, you should look at General McChrystal’s own statements regarding Afghanistan:
“We really ask a lot of our young service people out on the checkpoints because there’s danger, they’re asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations. However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it.
That doesn’t mean I’m criticizing the people who are executing. I’m just giving you perspective. We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.”
I understand the desire to avoid the characterization of our military as monsters (which, Greenwald’s piece didn’t do), but you can’t make commentary about the dishonesty of other peoples reporting without having a modicum of awareness about the reality of how these excursions typically take place. We’re not fighting a “war” against a transparently recognizable army. We’re fighting a war against a sect of invaded “suspected terrorists” where a “possible combatant” is treated the same as an actual combatant. This practice is a corollary effect of our vaguely defined War On Terror, and it demeans any commentary on the subject to attack that observation as though it’s an effort to attack the troops instead of an attack on the circumstances our troops operate in.
Unrelated to my dissent with your comments, you’re making several exceedingly sloppy errors in both your main post and your responses. Your first is that you’re summarizing supposedly odious aspects of those you’re attacking (Greenwald, WikiLeaks), without showing how their commentary matches up with your description of it. Nowhere in Greenwald’s piece did he characterize the soldiers as bloodthirsty savages. And if you’re going to call the WikiLeaks video “dishonest” (despite the contents of the video being authentic), is it not reasonable to request that you show me where something they said or depicted in the video was a lie?
Your tangent in the comments is equally as sad to look at. I weary of the tendency of bloggers I otherwise respect to deride critical comments by addressing them in strawmen that are far removed from the substance of dissent. You would be better off ignoring people who intelligently disagree with you than childishly addressing their comments with summaries that are divorced from what they’re actually saying.
@ Miracle Max,
“The video is pretty self-contained, IMO. If these guys were insurgents bent on attacking US forces, why are they strolling around in the open while a military copter is circling them?”
Because Apache and Cobra’s are attack helicopters. You can’t hear the rotor wash when they are orbiting.
Thank you. You have it exactly right, and thank you for pointing out so many aspects of discussing incidents, whether in combat or as other actions of a war. In a well functioning democracy, questions are a vital part. As someone who feels many wrong acts (torture, and illegal detentions,for example) need to be investigated, I believe it is no less than our duty as citizens to ask questions. As the daughter of a (deceased) veteran, the sister, aunt, niece, and friend of veterans, I also know that the vast majority of our nation’s military signed up to protect the United States, and put their lives on the line. They go where they are sent. They are not out looking for people to hurt and kill. It is a slap in the face to these decent people to lump them in the same category with those who participate in wanton violence and behave unethically. Not all nations share our age requirements for military service, and not all nations have a volunteer military. Not all neations are kind and decent in their use of force. We need to be, both physically and with our words. Thanks for your very well thought out post.
“And I say that’s bullshit. The reason incidents like this pop up is because they are aberrations from the norm. Clearly stating this makes me a heretic.”
If you’ve got 125,000 troops over there and aberrations happen at maybe one in a thousand, we’re talking about a LOT of aberrations.
And each of them is important.
Bottom line is that the Pentagon shouldn’t be covering these things up, and our failed U.S. journalists should let them.
And, really..”saint” Glenn? Don’t be so touchy!
No – the reason incidents like this “pop up” is because the video footage was leaked! In almost every other attack we have no idea what has actually happened. And we have proof that the military constantly lies about incidents like these. Just the other day another lie was exposed after it was revealed the military removed their own bullets from the victims!
The military has one purpose and one purpose only and that is to slaughter other human beings as quickly and efficiently as possible – PERIOD.
*BZZZTTT* Wrong! The military’s mission is to “break things and hurt people”, and come home. PERIOD.
We were told in the first few days of military service , that the military (in my case, the US Army) had no interest in people that liked to kill. If that were the case, the Army would be recruiting on Death Row.
People that like to kill not only break the Rules Of Engagement, and occasionally the Geneva Conventions, they also get their buddies killed, because they are undisciplined.
As for comparisons to Nuremberg , and tossing around code phrases like “they were only following orders,” why don’t you check and see how many lower grade officers, NCO’s and enlisted men were tried at Nuremberg, or even subsequently. If it was a few dozen, that was a lot.
As a Christian, you are completely misinterpreting the meaning of that citation.
The military has one purpose and one purpose only and that is to slaughter other human beings as quickly and efficiently as possible – PERIOD.
*BZZZTTT* Wrong! The military’s mission is to “break things and hurt people”, and come home. PERIOD.
We were told in the first few days of military service , that the military (in my case, the US Army) had no interest in people that liked to kill. If that were the case, the Army would be recruiting on Death Row.
People who like to kill not only break the Rules Of Engagement, and occasionally the Geneva Conventions, they also get their buddies killed, because they are undisciplined.
As for comparisons to Nuremberg , and tossing around code phrases like “they were only following orders,” why don’t you check and see how many lower grade officers, NCO’s and enlisted men were tried at Nuremberg, or even subsequently. If it was a few dozen, that was a lot.
As a Christian, you are completely misinterpreting the meaning of that citation.
Soldiers are soldiers. They are trained killers. Why deny this fact? The constant focus on “supporting the troops” sets up emotions which inevitably translate into pro-war policies. I think you protestith just a bit too much, Oliver. By restricting access to the battlefield (if you can call it that) the Pentagon invites harsh judgments on its actions when we finally get a taste of what the killing really looks like.
@Oliver Willis
The reason incidents like this pop up is because they are aberrations from the norm. Clearly stating this makes me a heretic.
Wait a minute. You are accusing liberals of hating the troops and you are the one complaining about being the “heretic”? What a capital “H” Hypocrite. You can toss whoppers so well you should consider running for office.
As many as he needs to in order to wear out some faux victimization?
You really get the D-list trolls Oliver.
You’re saying they didn’t see the copter?? Even though the pilot thought they were pointing an RPG at him???
Clearly, 100,000+ civilian deaths were not aberrational. Casualties of war, perhaps, but not all could conceivably be considered outside of SOP Expectations. Mr. Wills chooses to ignore the numbers & well-reported stories from the field and focuses on things Mr. Greenwald neither says nor believes.
When I watched this video, I took off my Liberal Hates America hat and put on my Marine Corps Cover in order to make sure I gave it impartial view. As a veteran, I owe these guys that much. It is so obvious these guys are civilians, anyone with an ounce of combat experience would see this. Insurgents don’t wander and socialize in the middle of the street in open sight lines where they can be seen by Apache helicopters — civilians would do that. Insurgents know how to take cover and return fire, the civilians in this video obviously did not. Insurgents would not park a van right in the middle of a firefight and expose themselves — civilians would do that. Insurgents would not try to help wounded civilians or comrades in the first place — civilians, good Samaritans would do that. “Good people” help the wounded, they don’t shoot at them and run them over, and laugh when it happens.
You need more Kryptonite. What you are missing here is that the good people trying to do the right thing were the ones that were shot and killed. Pointing this out does not make a “Liberal” or a “Conservative”, it doesn’t mean you “hate America”.
This is still WAY too much swallowing US Government propaganda.
The point you miss entirely is that the very mission of the US military in Iraq and the broader middle is evil.
Therefore, whether ‘relatively’ good or bad they are still serving an evil mission that has killed millions of innocent people that have done us no wrong.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq
The brainwashing they have been subjected to and the lies you and they have told themselves and each other about “duty” “honor” “patriotism” and the rest are just so much propaganda like Orwell identified to justify this orgy of killing and destruction.
The fact is, no matter how much you want to believe, need to believe, otherwise, the raping, torturing and killing of innocent people, women, children, the elderly, is an EVERYDAY thing in the Middle East subject to our imperialism.
To call this an “aberration” — millions of dead later — is either disturbing delusion or sick propaganda.
LOL! Exactly!
What Mr. Greenwald didn’t need to say is “You’re welcome for increasing your traffic by 1,000,000% or so.” Don’t mess with the bull, you’ll get the horns.
No, it is not an indictment of the troops to say that things like these are standard operating procedure, because they are. In this case, the incident was an embarrassment because the soldiers made a mistake, and worse, because the victims happened to include two Reuters newsment. Therefore the incident was covered up. But we all know about collateral damage, friendly fire, and all the other inevitable, tragic, gruesome mistakes and accidents that happen during a war. Which is why civilized countries do not start wars of choice for frivolous reasons, on trumped up excuses! There were probably a lot of incidents like this in World War II, and the men who fought there knew it. But no one questions that World War II was a war of necessity. Iraq was not a war of necessity, as we now know, and was never justified. And that’s why people like Glenn Greenwald, whom I often disagree with, BTW, are quite right to insist that we American citizens need to know what has been done in our name, and on our nickel.
Yea, many of them actually are. Propaganda notwithstanding. Patriotic Correctness notwithstanding. There are more than one or two sociopath killers in the military.
Remember Mai Lai? Haditha? Wedding after wedding in Afghanistan? How many “aberrations” are there in your world? How many accidents?
How many dead women and kids can you explain away before you have to confront the kindergarten views of our military and country we were given??
The Afghan War kills three children A DAY!! And you talk about ‘accidents’ ‘exceptions’ and aberration’
http://rawstory.com/2010/01/afghan-war-kills-children-day-report/
How many millions can “good guys” kill in your world??
An assessment of the Iraq video by someone with actual knowledge of the situation:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/04/the-lies-of-the-pentagon-ctd-3.html
Oliver:
This post is very disappointing and, I must say, a complete fabrication of what Glen Greenwald said. I am a Viet Nam vet, I been anti-war since before I got drafted and I am here to tell you that everything that Greenwald said was true both about this specific episode and generally about what happens to people in war. That is NOT an indictment of our troops but, rather, an idictment of the military and political leaders who put troops in positions like this and then instead of takin’ responsibility by callin’ it what it is, they attack the truth tellers. Listen to the entire tape or read the entire transcript and then publish Glen Greewald’s response to you. We are at a critical point in our history here, and it doesn’t matter who is President, the action that Wikileaks exposes must be condemned and the justifications for it must be smacked down hard!
Oliver, you sound like Bush or Cheney or worse yet, like all those appologists for civilian massacres in Viet Nam under LBJ and Nixon. Don’t drink ObamaRahma’s Kool Aide, Brother Willis, it is neither unpatriotic nor an attack on the troops to call killing innocent civilians terrible and the administration that condones it criminal. I am here to tell you, citizen, that because it happens with our troops and it happens more frequently than we want to believe doesn’t change the truth of it horror.
Yo, I’ll challenge that:
http://legacy.signonsandiego.com/news/military/20070503-9999-1n3ethics.html
[i]
The interviewers tabulated the percentage of “yes” responses to statements starting with, “I would report a unit member for”:
ARMY | MARINES
Injuring or killing an innocent noncombatant:
55% | 40%
Stealing from a noncombatant:
50% | 33%
Mistreating a noncombatant:
46% | 32%
Not following general orders:
46% | 35%
Violating rules of engagement:
47% | 34%
Unnecessarily destroying private property:
43% | 30%[/i]
I’d say about 50% of troops on the ground are decent, but I sure wont go higher than that.
+10000000
i hope you have to look into the eyes of parents who have lost their kids for no reasons and explain about ‘accidents’ and ’rounding errors’ and your passionate commitment to social justice
I guess it’s time for Oliver to start posting pictures of anorexic white girls posing as models again.
He’s clearly stepped into a pile of dung that’s stuck to the bottom of his shoe and he doesn’t want to use his hand to get it off.
You my friend have stepped in hot shit.
No, it just makes you dishonest or in denial.
Here’s the thing. YOu totally conflated what Glenn wrote about the first series of shootings and the second. In the first, one can make an argument that the men may have appeared armed. And even in that case, your argument is completely fatuous, given the glee with which the soldiers carry out their command. In short, you can make the argument the soldiers were discharging your duty, you can’t make the argument that the discharge of duty hasn’t corrupted their respect for human life. The dialogue certainly doesn’t prove anything about these soldiers being “good people”. In fact, they seem pretty repugnant, whether the shooting was justified or not. The idea of being behind one of these people in the grocery check out one day nauseates me.
But more importantly, you write that Greenwald presents the video as:
the plainly unjustified killing of a group of unarmed men (with their children) carrying away an unarmed, seriously wounded man to safety”.
That’s not correct. He presents one element that way, and he actually allows for the fact that the soldiers may have felt justified in the first series of shooting [although I don't think so, personally]; the second is clearly unjustified. It indicates either a disregard for the rules of engagement, or a de facto secondary rule of engagement that operates under cover of secrecy and maintained secret by the apathy of the American press.
I don’t understand why he responded to you in the first place; your argument is based on a misreading of his article, and then goes off the logical deep end. I’d consider changing the tag line of your post; people may be confused which element you are; the stupid or the kryptonite.
Amen!! There is a lot of blame to go around for the massive crimes associated with our wars, invasions and occupations in the middle east and the millions that have died as a result.
The political leaders of both parties devised and supported the policies, the military leadership operationalized them and the individual soldiers took orders and took part in the enterprise.
The American people were way too easily brainwashed to hate people who have done us no wrong and to accept the killing, torture, injury and rape of hundreds of thousands.
The media continues to cover up these crimes in most cases (how the brainwashed can believe in “aberrations” ) and cheerlead the war, empire and military in a way that is authoritarian-nationalist in nature.
And hacks live Oliver in both parties demonize real honest dissenters from this monstrous policy whenever the heat comes too close to their preferred politician, be it Bush or Obama.
The whole empire and political system that support it are corrupt to the core and whatever association and support we give them transmits some small portion of this guilt to us!
Dag, buddy, you wanna buy a bridge in Brooklyn?
I mean are you serious with that?
You don’t read it, and yet, here you are.
“Well clearly as God on earth your word is law. Whatever, nobody’s forcing you to read.” Oliver Willis.
When you start making statements like this you might as well just raise the white flag.
The word “Defeated” comes to mind.
Besides that. It seems as though Oliver has a problem with Glenn because Glenn has the nerve to point out that Obama is continuing Bush policies.
How that would cause a problem just doesn’t make sense to me.
If you love your country.
But its all the bilge I have to slog through to get to the horns…
Holy cow, you are SO out of your league in going after Greenwald.
Before you ever do that again, you seriously have to work on your reading comprehension skills.
Oh, and thanks for joining Dick Cheney in his propaganda efforts!
The second group without a clue are liberals who buy into the caricature of America’s soldiers as bloodthirsty savages who kill for the heck of it. Glenn Greenwald is in this camp.
If you can find “bloodthirsty savages” in anything written by Glenn Greenwald, then I’ll retract what I’m about to say:
You’re making shit up. Cut. It. Out.
Greenwald insists that things like killing of Iraqi civilians in the Wikileaks video and Abu Ghraib are just standard operating procedure for American soldiers, and not aberrations from the norm.
Again, find the phrase “standard procedure” for all American soldiers, otherwise, get a dictionary and get a grasp of English.
Taking the rosy picture of war that the Bush administration wanted to paint about Iraq and Afghanistan and pointing out the facts that war isn’t rosy isn’t the same as calling anyone in US uniform a “bloodthirsty savage”.
You remind me of the folks who talked about how the anti-war protesters during the Vietnam war would go to the airport and spit on US soldiers returning from southeast asia.
But quoting some facts:
http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=350
“Upon further investigation, none of the stories panned out — the Spokane “threat” stemmed from the misreading of a letter in the local paper promising that opponents of the war would not spit on returning soldiers — and yet, in each case the rumors were used to stoke pro-war rallies.”
War means that our troops are inevitably going to be involved in friendly fire situations. They’re inevitably going to be involved in situations where US troops kill unarmed and innocent civilians. That’s a fact that has been true for every war in US history. When we make a decision to go to war or not, we need to base the decision on facts, not Dick “deferred four times” Cheney or Donald “I’m a complete puppet” Rumsfeld fantasy. The cost of NOT going to war has to be so great that the cost GOING to war, i.e. the inevitable deaths of US troops and the inevitable deaths of civilians by US troops, is the lesser of two evils.
The problem is Americans can’t watch this video and say that. There would be ZERO cost if we had NOT invaded Iraq. There were no WMD’s, there was no link between Iraq and Al Queda, there was no reason to invade.
This video shows the evil of going to war and the lesser evil in this case would have been to NOT invade Iraq.
But rather than look at the cost of war versus the cost of not going to war, the hawks, and poeple who have trouble with basic logic, try to take a comparison of two potential evils and choosing the lesser one, and turn it into spitting on vietnam vets and calling anyone in uniform a bloodthirsty killer.
You think 1/1000 U.S. actions in Iraq result in a a civilian casualty? What I have consistently said is that there are aberrations, but when you look at every action our soldiers do, it’s far from the day-in-day out activity that is being characterized here.
So all that receive an education and see the world stuff was BS.
That’s right, because anybody who doesn’t buy into the “if America does it, it must be wrong” school is a right-wing nutcase.
The military has one purpose and one purpose only and that is to slaughter other human beings as quickly and efficiently as possible – PERIOD.
Is that so?
Please make a reply to the particulars of Glenn’s post, Oliver.
Actually, this incident and coverup largely happened under Bush, but keep playing amateur psychologists and casting aspersions.
A wounded guy they apparently were operating under the suspicion of being an insurgent. If they knew he wasn’t and shot anyway, that’s a crime. But I’m not about to string up a guy based on a web video and a pentagon coverup.
This is quite the party OW is throwing here. Quite the clusterfuck of military opinion.
First off, I’ll have to say that OWs wingnut trolls can kick Greenwald wingnut troll ass any day. They never quit regardless of the facts they’re presented with. Oorah!
Second, what is the solution to this mess? I perceive Obama as trying to do what he can to extricate America out of Iraq, given the political realities. What do the Greenwaldians propose?
Fighting over nuance of perceived intention seems kinda dumb.
did you do so on legality grounds (even in part)?
No. I always thought the “illegal war” argument was bull. Congress authorized the use of force. I opposed the war on the grounds that Saddam was contained, and that our primary target should be Al Qaeda and affiliated networks, and should be the prime focus of our force. In time, Saddam’s regime would have fallen.
[...] don’t worry, the acculturation in the Homeland is such that whatever you do you will be the Good Guy. And thus the cycle continues, mass murderers become respected and get the next bit of mass murder [...]
Over 100,000 Iraquis have been killed, possibly many more, in this war. That is civilians. This is not an aberation, this happens (or at least happened) nearly daily. The only reason we know about it as opposed to the other incidents is that it is on film and got released. Not because it is all that unusual.
You mean as stark and simple as “our troops are the good guys”?
At what point does it stop being an aboration, I mean it has been justified for 8 years by those rule and acquested to by the rest of us. At some point all these things stop being abrations and become who we are.
This dude must have lost his kryptonite, because his position in this debate is beyond stupid. I’m a veteran of the 101st Airborne Division and served in an intelligence unit with Arabic linguists. The key point that Greenwald made yesterday and again today is that the US military investigated this “incident” and decided that nothing wrong was done. This is standard operating procedure. That’s the reality of our occupations. Killing innocent civilians isn’t the objective, but it’s an accepted price we force others to pay. It is immoral. It is unjust. It is routine. Maybe Mr. Willis could take a moment to write an article condmening General McCrysthal for his recent comments concerning the killing of innocent civilians at checkpoints in Afghanistan. Apparently, he hates the troops as well.
Thank you for posting this OW. I find very little to disagree with Greenwald about but I couldn’t have been more sickened by his broad generalizations of the US military and how it conducts itself.
Okay, so raise your hand if you’ve actually led troops under fire, called in fire support, guided “eyes in the sky” onto a target or seen first-hand what mortars and machine-gun rounds actually do to a human being. Okay, at most I count three of us on this blog. Sorry to generalize, but it amazes me how many people with minimal to no experience in the military just know all about the mentality of soldiers/marines on the ground and the supposed brain-washing we go through. Just as my stomach churns when FOX News-heads try to hug me and tell me how proud they are of my service, my stomach churns when people on the other side with little to no first-hand experience decided to get in my head and “understand” why I did what I did.
War is an awful thing. We have to condition men and women to do awful things for their country. Some people react to their training with gallows humor and attempt to make the best of it (I think I’m in this category) and others get the impression that as Americans they’re entitled to take liberties with other people — usually those weaker than them — and their property. When I saw the latter during operations, usually grabbing said soldier by the neck and a firm “Enough” settled it in the moment. Debates on right or wrong could be held later.
As far as doing the right thing, I can say that I — and most of my friends — were trying to do the right thing. I couldn’t worry about the lofty political debate; my remit was the men in my unit and the people in my sector. I did my best to make sure no one got hurt that didn’t deserve it or who didn’t act recklessly. I came to believe that the Iraq War was unjust and the military was not the place for me, so I left.
To Glenn: be careful who you call a liar. A lie, as I understand it, is an untruth conveyed with intent to deceive. I think Oliver was responding to your opinion piece with his own opinion piece. I don’t think that makes him a liar. He may have misinterpreted the meaning of your words, but he didn’t LIE about it. Get a grip.
IMO, shooting up the van was wrong and the cover-up was totally wrong. One thing that’s gone unnoticed: the two “bloodthirsty killers” on the video who ran with little children in their arms trying to help. The true story is so much more complicated and interesting — and difficult to rage about — than any of us would like to think.
Citizen timmy:
Don’t make the mistake, Brother Tim, of accusin’ those who criticize massacres and war crimes and the appolgies for them of not proposing solutions to the problem of the war itself. Greenwald is right to call out the murderers, their leaders and the politicians who appolgize for the crimes. I think you will find that most of us who are opposed to this war support Obama’s “time table for withdrwal” and have high hopes that he can survive and succeed where JFK did not when confronting the military-industrial-security state aparachiks. The damage that war does goes far beyond the immediate horrors the soldiers and innocents experience…the corruption of values and politics and the terrible social and economic costs of war can be seen in this post and the comments to it. We are at war with ourselves today and at a time in our history when we need to be movin’ shoulder to shoulder against the corporate monster that threatens our country, we can’t afford to be shootin’ the friendlies.
Go read Greenwald’s response to Brother Willis and then come back and talk to us, Citizen Tim.
Mr. Oliver Willis,
I’m not a fan of Greenwald, and have always thought the American military to be a force for good. (I strongly supported American invasion of Afghanistan, for example.) Now … having seen the video, and having read the response from Pentagon and some in the right … I’m not so sure anymore. Maybe I’ve been wrong about the US and its armed forces this entire time.
See, I understand fog of war; uncertainty; the need for quick decisions; errors a reasonable person in the face of danger could make. But how in the world could helping a wounded person — even if he is an insurgent, enemy combatant, or whatever — be construed as dangerous, necessitating the application of maximum firepower? And we are told this is within the ROE of the American armed forces!
If that is so, Mr. Willis: the US has no business fighting wars — ANY WARS — outside of its soil. Its military culture is so corrupt, so out of whack, it appears, that even the senior officials at Pentagon, directing the war effort cannot distinguish between right and wrong. Between justified killing and gratuitous murder. Sick, really.
It goes without saying that we don’t often witness the atrocity of combat. The video, which apparently has been viewed by more than a million people in the past twenty-four hours, has allowed us to see the horror. Today my mother called to tell me of a friend’s son who is back from Afghanistan, and “not doing well.” That is the story for me, the aftermath. Good or bad soldiers, if they “survive” combat, they are inevitably psychically destroyed. A generation crippled. I grew up with a father who was blown off a cliff in Korea. He survived with a head injury and intermittent rages. The legacy of combat is ruined families. I have a copy of a Kurt Vonnegut essay called War Preparers Anonymous. It is about the sickness of old men starting wars for young men to fight. In our present wars, old men who were never soldiers. The video bore witness to the unbearable madness. All intellectual argument is moot.
Your opinion, but as an active member for years I would disagree with you.
I don’t recall them saying that they were pointing an RPG at them during the video.
WELL OLIVAR AS A PROUD CONSVERATIVE ON NATIONAL SCRUEITY ISSUE’S I JUST WANT TO SAY ‘THANK’S’ FOR REACHING ACROSS THE ISLE TO US BECASUE ITS NOT TO OFTEN THAT YOU LIB’S ABANDEN YOU’RE PARTISEN RETHORIC. WELL I GUESS THEIR’S STILL A FEW GOOD LIB’S LEFT SUCH AS YOU AND ZELL MILLAR
WELL I DEFINATELY AGREE WITH OLIVAR THAT ARE FIGHTING BOY’S JUST KEEPING THE HOME-LAND SAFE. WE DID’NT ASK FOR THIS WAR, BUT WE HAD TO TAKE IT TO THE IRAQIAN’S IN ORDER TO PROTECT OUR CHILDREN’S WHOSE THE FUTURE OF AMERICA.
WELL GLEN GREENWALLS JUST A TYPICLE COASTAL ELITE CHEESE-EATER SURRENDING MONKEY. THANK’S AGAIN FOR POINTING IT OUT OLIVAR
Jeez dude, what is this, high school? Your pithy retorts to those who are taking the time to comment is really distasteful. Maybe you’re just too busy and important to mix with the plebes, but that should give you enough practice at least to be able to think beyond “whatevs, yo.”
Oliver Willis has just deployed a fucking Strawman Army and sent them to their deaths. Sad, really.
Just stop being a hard-head and admit that you fucked-up in the heat of the moment. It happens sometimes – after all, isn’t that your argument in defending the actions of these particular troops?
Lucky for us, these rhetorical mistakes aren’t fatal.
A suggestion. Change your moniker to ALWAYSANGRYALLCAPSGUY.
hey oliver, you got caught making up stuff and having a flimsy argument. maybe the intellectually honest thing to do would be to admit that you’re wrong and try to learn something.
your ad hominem attacks against “saint” glenn greenwald was bush league. the entire mischaracterization of glenn’s point is pathetic.
/me removes oliver’s blogger card and gives it to someone else more worthy…
I like your work Oliver but you are being obtuse. Since our military and media has whitewashed the effects of civilian deaths from both wars; folks have no idea that we are winning few hearts and minds. Isn’t this the type of thing we all need to watch to help sell the notion that these wars are self defeating excercises. THe more we kill the less we are liked. Declare victory and get the hell out. Being against Iraq from the start, you should at least be agreeable to that. Plus we would be supporting our troops as they would no longer have to think so hard about when to blow somebody up.
you keep watering down your argument and repositioning yourself hoping that people will stop caring that your initial premise was based on mischaracterizations and dishonesty.
now, you’re almost admitting that what happened was a horrible travesty of justice, but that because americans are unwilling to admit that they secretly hold bloodlust as closely to their hearts as they do greed, that they are without blame in this matter.
those soldiers are american soldiers paid with american tax dollars appropriated by democratically elected leaders of america.
that i did not pull the trigger does not absolve me of the responsibility.
This post from mcjoan on DKos sums up nicely what I think many of us are attempting to articulate:
[i]This is a move toward transparency that should have been practiced from the moment the army found out they killed a number of innocents, and importantly two Reuters employees. The killing of innocents is the collateral damage that is inevitable in war, and what makes a war of choice rather than necessity that much more immoral. [b]That this was a war of choice creates even greater responsibility on the U.S. to be honest in how it conducts that war, and honest with the American people who are sending their sons and daughters to fight it[/b].
There’s also the practical fact that cover-ups are almost always far more damaging than the event they are meant to hide. In this case, because two of the innocents killed were connected with a media organization, it was inevitable that the truth would come out. But it’s compounded when it sustains the myth that war is not hell and that the U.S. doesn’t conduct war that way[/i]
KD
Mr. Willis: You are an apologist, nothing more. I don’t care what else you have written on this blog, what causes you have supported, etc. To defend this episode is outrageous. Shame on you.
Thank you for your servicet. However, in America, serving in the Armed Forces is not a requirement for citizenship, nor does it give you ultimate authority over judging the facts of reality. So anyone can say what they want wrt to this silly incident. You also sarcastically call the soldiers who ran away with the the children “bloodthirsty killers,” accepting Oliver’s ungrounded and false assertion that this is what Greenwald called them.
If Oliver didn’t *intend* deceive with his very faulty logic, then he’s unfortunately unable to argue such complex matters and should just give up on responding to criticism unless he wants to appear like a child. It’s not difficult to rage about this at all. These questions remain: Why are we there (or in AfPak for that matter)? What have we done? As you indicated, these are not necessarily questions that soldiers can ask. Which is why Greenwald is doing it!
Also, are we morally upright when feeling good and bragging about killing *anyone* (as the soldiers did in this video)?
chuggachugga chuggachugga…
the Cluetrain Has Left The Platform, Oliver. oh dear; why are you still standing there?
much as it is anathema for Yanks to acknowledge, the rest of the world has [painfully] established this amazing concept called “International Law”. that’s where the illegality comes from.
in the eyes of the world at large, international law subsumes the illegal decisions of national governments — which is why there’s now an International Criminal Court.
one day, Bush et al. will be tried for the crime of killing ~1.5M+ innocent Iraqis, based on knowing and malicious distortion of intelligence. I know, I know; you don’t believe it will ever happen.
but no doubt Joseph, Hermann, and their other chums never believed they’d wind up in the dock in Nuremberg, either. or Ratko Mladic in Den Hague, etc. etc.
And hacks live Oliver in both parties demonize real honest dissenters from this monstrous policy whenever the heat comes too close to their preferred politician, be it Bush or Obama.
I don’t think Oliver’s being a hack. I think he’s misreading what Greenwald wrote but that’s largely because Greenwald is splitting hairs pretty thin.
Greenwald says he’s not indicting the troops, but the policies they operate under. Sorry. It doesn’t work that way.
Greenwald writes that our “standard operating procedure” is “a major reason there are hundreds of thousands of dead innocent civilians in Iraq, and thousands more in Afghanistan.”
No shit. The standard operating procedure during any war, lead by anyone, is going to lead to dead civilians. If you don’t like dead civilians, you oppose the war in general. Focusing on a critique of the “standard operating procedure” is to miss the forest for the trees.
Unless, of course, you believe that the “standard operating procedures” include the deliberate targeting of civilians and/or reckless disreagrd for civilian lives.
In this specific case, if the soldiers were given orders to kill innocent civilians and they knew they were killing innocent civilians or didn’t care, they too are guilty of war crimes. What I see in that video is the soldiers and their commanders, not giving a shit either way, which in my understanding is a war crime.
Now either Greenwald believes the soldiers and their superiors were acting in full awareness or in reckless disregard of who was below them or he doesn’t. Note that he does a lot of wailing over civilian deaths without explicitly stating his opinion either way.
But it doesn’t make any sense to attack our “standard operating procedure” for leading to civilian casualties unless you believe that soldiers are being asked to operate officially without regard to who they’re shooting at.
I can understand why Greenwald would want to reserve judgment of the individual soldiers, but you can’t do that AND condemn the policy they were acting under because if the policy is a war crime, the soldiers acting under cover of the policy were committing war crimes.
Greenwald walks a fine line in his post because he seems terrified of being attacked for “hating the troops” even as he wants to state his opposition to the “standard operating procedures.”
Sorry, but if the standard operating procedure is illegal, the soldiers acting under it are violating the law just as much as the generals who put it in place.
Citizen PaddyK:
So, let me get this right, Citizen PaddyK, you mean that no one who hasn’t “led troops under fire, called in fire support, guided ‘eyes in the sky’ onto a target, or seen first hand what mortars and machinegun rounds can do to a human being” have a right to speak to the question of massacres of women and children or “the mentality of troops on the ground”. That, of course, is comeplete and unadulterated bullshit. I was a medic and “in-country” in 1966-67 and I believe I saw as much of what mortars, machineguns and white phosphorus did to GI’s, Vietnamese, men, boys, women and children and even a few officers. We live in a democracy if we can keep it, but thinkin’ like yours is what threatens the very life of that democracy.
Read Greewald’s piece and his response to Brother Willis and then get back to me…but Jesus H. keeeRIST on a God damned crutch, don’t wear your service like a nametag on a prison guard.
We’re the “Good Guys” in Iraq, members of imperial tax-sucking costumed goon squads that go on two year murder safaris in foreign lands. If we’re the good guys, those bad guys must be bad, really bad, like kill a million civilians and then ignore their deaths and lie about the whole affair bad. We’re not the bad guys, the Iraqis that actually live their lives with their families in Iraq under a pseudo-US Military occupation, i.e. MIC Cash Cow. Yeah, right.
Keep telling yourself that though, since it makes you feel better about what costumed goons do with your tax money in your name. Remember, when you and your family end up dead due to a “terrorist” attack on American soil in retaliation for things like this, that you, your friends, and your family died “Supporting the Troops”, worshiping those that oppress you, rob from you, and put your lives in danger, like good little slaves.
I treat things with the contempt they deserve. Sorry I dont spend 5 paragraphs doing so.
The way I see it, the problem with the middle east isn’t just religious extremism, and that a proud ancient history of wealthy empires contributes to a sense of self-entitlement, and that they “live in a fucking desert”… It’s that whenever we modern outsider infidels tinker with their lands, we never finish the job in ways that are satisfactory with most of the population. Japan post WWII, good. Iran post shah, bad. Too many people die and the quality of life does not improve quickly enough to the satisfaction of the survivors.
Now, along comes Greenwald, who says on 4/06/10, in a nutshell: Our military leadership is behind the behavior we see in the WikiLeaks video, yet their policy is to disavow any knowledge of these actions.
Does knowing this, or allowing this, or stopping this, add to America’s ability to leave behind a safe and sane and grateful Iraqi population?
We already know that wingnuts believe in a post-postmodern Iraq full of ethical principles and freedoms where the ends justified the means. But how do we know that Obama isn’t trying to fix the possible breakdown in chain of command (since he assumed command), and that he really isn’t the antichrist?
I have submitted to your request and posted another comment, such as it is, at the current bottom.
No, Mr. Willis, you are still wrong.
9/11 was the RESULT of American intervention and killing innocent women and children in the Muslim world. Of COURSE after enough of that “blowback” will result.
Ron Paul was RIGHT, you, Rudy Guliani, and the neocon warmongers are wrong!
Rudy Giuliani v. Ron Paul, and Reality
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/state_of_change/195576
The military does not defend us from terrorism in the Middle East, it CAUSES terrorism by killing innocent people and then Americans like YOU always justifying it and therefore cause people to hate us (and why not, we kill their kids and you couldn’t give less of a damn).
@seizan Geez, here I was thinking I was lightening the mood a bit and being level-headed. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. I did not mean to imply that people with no military service can’t have an opinion on the war or the video, simply that without military experience many will fall victim to projecting their own prejudices — whether they be backed up by experience or, say, World War II and Vietnam War movies.
We jokingly refer to ourselves as “killers” in the military. I meant to highlight that obviously not all soldiers in the video were looking to kill kill kill, but were obviously horrified to see innocent children harmed in the attack.
Instead of deciding that either Oliver is a liar or unable to carry on a debate, why don’t you simply debate his points. I just don’t see why we have to resort to name-calling. There’s a reason “liar” is not allowed in parliamentary language: because it implies motives on the target. Whether it be bloggers or soldiers at war, we must be very careful about assumptions on motives.
You seem to be making a leap — that Greenwald does not — from “Why are we at war in Iraq?” to “How do we conduct ourselves once at war?” These are two separate, albeit related, issues. The soldier who finds him/herself at war in Iraq can not control why their country is at war there, only their actions once they are there. I would agree that the reasons we went to war in Iraq are totally wrong, but I can not sign onto the idea that there is an ingrained, inherent ‘something wrong’ with how American soldiers conduct themselves in theater. This is where my experience — and others lack thereof — comes in.
It’s unclear to me how you know that our troops are the good guys and how you know that the vast majority are good people who do the right thing. I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’d venture that given good conditions, most people will do the right thing. I’m not sure about the conditions, though. Greenwald is trying to making the justifiable point that these kinds of deaths–the ones on the video that you somehow defend–are much more commonplace than is understood. You’d likely agree, given your defense of the actions in the video–actions “made in the field, with lives on the line,” is how your defense goes. Well, if you’re defending what you see in that video, it’s hard for me to imagine much that you wouldn’t defend. These are people just being gunned down. The initial shootings might be slightly defensible, but they’re still sickening. But waiting for someone injured to “make a move” so you can gleefully finish him off, and then blowing up the van with children that come to rescue him–an clearly pose no threat–is completely indefensible. Otherwise, your just defending any killing at any moment, despite what we can see with our own eyes, because it’s a war zone and anything goes. That’s not a position you want to take.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m simply tired of those who have never served assuming they can psychologically analyzing training for war, fighting in a war and all the motives and conflicting priorities that you and I, no doubt, encountered everyday in theater.
Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. No argument there, so lighten up.
I’ve read it, thanks.
Thats right. Anyone who doesn’t get America is wrong in Iraq (and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia…..) is a nut-case.
Whatever ‘wing’ they call themselves, it ain’t good.
Citizen timmy:
We are WAAAY beyond the responsibility of noblesse oblige to “leave behind a safe, sane and grateful Iraqi population”…we have two responsibilities right now: to get out and to commit whatever resources we can muster to the reconstruction of the damage we have done.
For example, my perspective on what happened to you in 1966-1967 comes from a totally uninformed viewpoint. While I can read up on that period and come to an opinion on what I believe your experience was back then, I will always be lacking in the perspective that you bring to the story. How would you like it if I wrote a diatribe on the Vietnam War based solely on video clips I could find at the public library? It probably wouldn’t paint a full picture. That’s all I’m saying. I’m certainly not trying to deny anyone their right to an opinion or the expression of it.
I’ve just had an epiphany! We can use oil to pay for it all.
(*crickets*)
I guess I am curious about what the reasoning was behind this military policy – seems counterproductive in the extreme. And aren’t they afraid of any future timmy mcveighs? I digress…
I see. Not high school, but simple condescension. Thanks for clarifying.
The problem I have with your post here is the coverup itself. You say that if this sort of thing happened all the time, there would be no need for a coverup.
The problem I see is that this _must_ happen all the time. If not, why _would_ they cover it up? Why not take the shooters and put them on trial? Why not show everyone how much better we can be, instead of bury the story and hide the shooter?
Answer me that, Oliver!
Me saying that 50% are decent is my opinion. The numbers saying that only 47% (of army, of course, marines are lower) would report a unit member for violating ROE? Fact. The numbers saying only 50% would report a unit member for stealing from a non combatant? Fact. The numbers saying that only 55% would report a unit member for killing a noncombatant? Still a fact.
I mean, I guess you and I can have different opinions of what a decent human being is, but one that doesn’t steal, one that follows the rules, one that doesn’t kill innocents and moreover, one who stands up and reports when others DO, thats required for decency in my book. But hey, I’m not an active service member, so what the hell could I know?
Yeah, I agree about the point “how would we know?”
I don’t think we can say it is or isn’t an aberration because we’ve been excluded access to the data. Given how much effort appears to be taken to hide the so-called aberrations, I’m inclined to believe they are a lot higher than we’ve been led to believe or probably would want to believe.
Frankly given how messy these situations are, killing of innocents by accident or otherwise has got to be pretty damn high. Heck what percentage of US civilians commit acts of violence? Now give them a lot of heavy armament and send them into a hostile country – what’s gonna happen?
BTW – I think both sides of this argument have blame to wear. Greenwald I feek read a little more into the video than it demands (albeit I still agree with his central point), Oliver mischaracterized Greenwald to some extent, and Greeenwald has accused Oliver of “lying”, which clearly with Oliver lacking such intent, is an unfair accusation (inaccurate perhaps, but not lying).
In the end I do think everyone is terrified of the “third rail” of condemning the soldiers, though frankly I blame them less here than others have (that is, I think I can understand how they could have made the mistakes that they did, right down to the ugly conversation). Still I agree with others – putting on a uniform does not allow you to hide behind orders. For that matter if there weren’t so many willing participants the US, and others, wouldn’t be able to wage unjust wars, so soldiers at least deserve that blame.
I think what we can probably all agree though is that this is an example of why we shouldn’t have wars – stuff like this will happen regardless of how we massage the rules of engagement.
That in turn points to why we need more of these videos – if people can’t see why war sucks so much, they have no reason not to avoid it. If these sorts of things are all part of the fact that “war is hell”, then lets bring that “hell” back to the eyes of the people who enabled it – us the voters.
I think I’ve been here once or twice before, but Oliver Willis is not one of my regular reads–I got here via Glenn’s link.
And frankly, I will only come back to see more train wrecks. It seems likely I won’t be disappointed. I have no idea what percentage of the troops behave decently, but would guess it’s the majority. But a man who says that 99.99999999% of their actions are good isn’t interested in learning any differently. Taken literally, it means one action out of 10 billion are bad. Taken metaphorically, it means Mr. Willis has closed his mind on the subject. You don’t tack on so many 9′s unless you mean you have already decided it’s a certainty that this incident was an extreme rarity.
We have no way of knowing how large a minority in the military (presuming as I do that it’s a minority) do act badly and one reason we don’t is precisely because the press leans over backwards so as not to offend people with Mr. Willis’s delicate sensibilities. How the hell are we supposed to find out the truth if we’re all supposed to reassure each other every time a Pentagon coverup is revealed that this was an “aberration”? What sort of aberration? Are we talking about a few incidents, a few dozen incidents, hundreds, thousands? Given Mr. Willis’s figure, it was a statistical miracle if any of our troops so much as used harsh language.
I don’t have much respect for any far lefties who really do talk as though everyone in the military is a mass murderer, but for the same reason I don’t have much respect for Mr. Willis. It’s difficult to respect blind ideology placed over respect for facts and evidence.
No Kevin, they are trained to protect their comrades from perceived threats. I think what Glenzilla is saying is that when you invade a country for no reason and try to pacify it, the result will necessarily be that lots and lots of civilians are going to be killed. Armies break things and kill people. If that is not the result you want, don’t use the army to achieve your goals.
“If you take even well-intentioned, young soldiers and stick them in the middle of a dangerous war zone for years and train them to think and act this way [protect your comrades from perceived threats], this will inevitably be the result. The video is an indictment of the U.S. government and the war policies it pursues.”–Glenzilla
I mean, I guess you and I can have different opinions of what a decent human being is, but one that doesn’t steal, one that follows the rules, one that doesn’t kill innocents and moreover, one who stands up and reports when others DO, thats required for decency in my book. But hey, I’m not an active service member, so what the hell could I know?
I don’t really know WHAT you know. I stated that as an active member I disagree because in the last 19 years I probably have more associations and friendships with military people than you do or have. I was born and raised on a military basis because my father is a retiree, so I have been around the life and the lifestyle for all 38 years of my life.
If, as you say by citing that representative sample as the litmus test for human decency that exists among Soldiers being less than 50% of our population then that is your opinion. Again, I just said I disagree with you. Why get worked up about it….statistically speaking by your measure I am more than likely a low-life anyway.
Once US soldiers are in a theater that is a densely populated urban environment, in a culture and language they don’t understand for the most part, fighting an asymmetrical war against an unconventional enemy, huge numbers of civilians are going to be killed. This incident just brings that killing into focus for more people. 150K+++ civilians have been killed during the invasion. US soldiers are doing what they are trained to do, protect their comrades and kill the enemy. The inevitable consequence of that is that hundreds of thousands of civilians are also killed. That makes the policy bad, not the soldiers who carry it out bad. This incident doesn’t really matter in the great scheme of things, it is just a very graphic example of how the US carries out modern urban warfare. We still don’t know all the facts, and the military coverup of the incident is understandable but inexcusable, but it comes back to the 150K+++ that have died because of the invasion. That is the real atrocity.
You know, Mr. Wills, your whole attitude can be summed up by the title you chose for this poorly reasoned piece. The title of “Our Troops Are The Good Guys, Some “Liberals” Hate That”.
Which liberals hate that our troops are the good guys? Nothing in Mr. Greenwald’s postings gives me that impression, and I’ve read a lot of what he’s written for a couple years now.
No, you’re assigning a motive to fit a narrative you already have accepted that originated with right-wing polemicists, the idea that some “liberals” hate the troops. That narrative is total bullshit to begin with, and you should not be propagating it. No one “hates the troops,” even if they hate what they’re doing sometimes, as in this case, and I think Mr. Greenwald made that very clear. For whatever reason, you chose to make this jab at him, and it’s unjustified. So, instead of admitting you’ve made an error or misjudged, you dig your heels in and attack further.
I can understand that, it’s no fun having a point you’ve tried to make be eviscerated, but if you’re going to be an individual who learns and gains wisdom, you’ll need to learn that here. At this point, you’re going to have a very difficult time getting yourself out of the hole you’ve dug in any graceful way. The least you can do now, though, is to stop digging the hole deeper.
Yes. It is exactly an everyday occurrence.
But keep swallowing the excuses for the daily deaths of innocent civilians based on military-worshiping propaganda.
Oliver, I read you all the time, but I feel that you are totally off base (off planet) on this one. In modern urban warfare, civilians get killed in huge numbers. That is the atrocity. US soldiers killed lots of civilians in Iraq. You can’t deny this fact (well you can but you would be wrong). It is totally predictable that US soldiers would kill a huge number of civilians in this type of warfare. I think that this is Glenn’s main point.
I would indeed forward the conclusion that all are guilty of war crimes, from political and military leadership on down.
John McCain in Ann Arbor: a cowardly evasion on US war crimes
“Senator, you have taken a position against torture. But there is an underlying principle that was laid down at the Nuremburg trial after World War Two. The prosecutors of the Nazi leaders—the lead American prosecutor was US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson—asserted that the primary war crime committed by the defendants, from which all of the other atrocities sprang, including torture, concentration camps and the extermination of entire populations, was the planning and carrying out of aggressive war. Do you believe that this principle is still valid? And if so, should not those US government and military officials who planned and carried out the unprovoked war against Iraq be made legally and criminally subject to this principle?”
This evasion revealed the hypocritical essence of McCain’s democratic pretensions—and not only McCain’s, but those of the entire political establishment, supporters and critics of the Bush administration, Republicans and Democrats alike. They are all implicated in a war based on lies, carried out in defiance of international law, against a country that had neither attacked nor threatened to attack the United States.
This is, under the definition laid down at Nuremburg, a war crime. It is the crime for which Nazi civilian and military leaders were hung, and others imprisoned. It is worth recalling the words of Robert Jackson about the universal applicability of this principle. He wrote: “If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
Oliver, here is the crux of the matter
but the vast majority of our men and women in the U.S. military are good people who do the right thing.
The right thing in a densely populated urban environment, in a culture and language they don’t understand for the most part, fighting an asymmetrical war against an unconventional enemy, necessarily involves killing huge numbers of civilians. That doesn’t make our troops bad people, they are in an insane setting. In doing what they are “supposed” to do, they end up killing huge numbers of civilians.
If you are going to try to make a point, at the very least you should be accurate about what you claim someone else is saying. You are so off base regarding Greenwalds’ point, it is nearly sinful. The subject is very serious. You should treat it as such and quit making things up as you go along. Such an arrogant position to be using your blog as a source of opinion based upon facts, when in reality you are simply making things up and spreading the some lies as facts! Either your reading and comprehension skills very week, or your are simply making things up as you go along. don’t you think that you owe your readers something that maintains a higher standard?
Oliver, not only is aggressive war illegal under international law, but congressional law, but the congressional authorization was based on laws and it was conditional, with conditions that were quite obviously never met.
“The entire reason there is an outcry when a member of the U.S. military engages in some form of atrocity or deviant behavior is because it is such an aberration from the norm.”
But they were doing it because they thought they were in danger and protecting themselves and their buddies, right? Isn’t that the norm? You can’t have it both ways.
wow, u lied alright…lol…stevie wonder could see right through that.
[i=mcjoan]This is a move toward transparency that should have been practiced from the moment the army found out they killed a number of innocents, and importantly two Reuters employees. The killing of innocents is the collateral damage that is inevitable in war, and what makes a war of choice rather than necessity that much more immoral. [b]That this was a war of choice creates even greater responsibility on the U.S. to be honest in how it conducts that war, and honest with the American people who are sending their sons and daughters to fight it[/b].
There’s also the practical fact that cover-ups are almost always far more damaging than the event they are meant to hide. In this case, because two of the innocents killed were connected with a media organization, it was inevitable that the truth would come out. But it’s compounded when it sustains the myth that war is not hell and that the U.S. doesn’t conduct war that way[/i]
The entire post is pure Bullshit! Video evidence shows 1 of the party carrying an rpg and another with an AK style weapon. Our Soldiers already excercise the greatest restraint possible to the point of endangering their own lives. This inference is that it based on deceit disgust’s Me.
As to the reporters…..
This is what happens when “You dance with the devil in the pale moonlight !!”.
All of you guys need to chill the fuck out.
Then war is never legal. Cue the ponies and rainbows.
But not on purpose or as an element of US military policy. Which is my point.
This is saddening. Not having read Willis before, he seems like a reasonably interesting and insightful commentator in general.
But to be introduced to him making an utter fool of himself by reading Greenwald (St. Greenwald? WTF is that for kiddie-pool snotty talk?) in a completely disingenuous manner, putting words in his mouth and then insulting everyone who happens to not share his opinion just means I don’t think I’ll bother with returning.
Whatever reason Willis has for picking this fight, the fight itself was both a dumb one to pick and left him looking petulant, dishonest and pretty short-sighted.
On the original topic – attempting to claim that this is somehow an uncommon occurance is (aside from being demonstrably, obviously false, at least if Willis believes the words of people like McChrystal and the demonstrated actions of the entire chain of command) just dumb argumentation – it cedes that this is an example of soldiers behaving badly. If he wants to argue that Greenwald and McChrystal (or me, for that matter) are libeling the troops by pointing out the obvious, his entire argument falls on his ears – it is entirely self-refuting.
Which is why I won’t bother returning – that sort of crappy judgement means there’s no reason for me to waste time considering other things he has to say. Life’s too short, and actual trustworthy commentary too plentiful.
Your definition of evisceration is very loose indeed. In the process of making boneheaded, broad, mischaracterizations of the U.S. military, Greenwald jabbed at me. I had the nerve to respond to St. Glenn and the lemmings have followed. Somehow, I don’t submit my positions to mob rule.
I enjoy the people commenting to say they don’t read or will never come again. Oh, the smug.
I agree with you, but I stop short of questioning whether or not someone can comment on a subject if they have no military experience. However, I do agree that many of the posters here have a notion that being in the military is like being a policeman. Policeman don’t have organized units that have a mission of “Locate, close with, and destroy”. It is all ugly, and in looking at this video it is easy for me to say that this is highly, highly, highly questionable. As a light Infantry PL during the troop surge I know that my first priority was not securing the Baghdad Security Belt, or rooting out “belligerents” in my sector, it was making sure that I did everything I needed to do in order to get everyone in my platoon home in one piece. That is every small unit leader’s concern. That and the mission are the pervasive impetus for every action and reaction we make while out in sector.
I am not sure if the video we are viewing is what the Apache pilots saw. (I notice there was no reticle or range finder displayed.) But this is one that will be talked about for a while. This was not a LTC Ralph Hayles incident whatsoever.
Just for fun, I’d like you to reread your post, and every time you see the words “U.S. Military” and “soldier”, substitute the words “Catholic Church” and “priest” and see if you still agree with it.
When the US military engages in the systematic, systemwide hiding of child rapist you might have a point.
Oliver,
You’ve gotten quite a bit of attention by distorting and misrepresenting Glenn Greenwald’s column. The least you could do is explain yourself in a cogent manner instead of avoiding the issue. There’s no shame in owning up. You might actually earn a little respect.
That’s a fair turnaround, but, given that it appears that a small minority of Catholic priests are alleged to have engaged in child molestation and rape (you know, compared to the whole force of Catholic priests), I suppose one might fairly ask what would happen if the Catholic hierarchy were accused of covering up for decades’ worth of accusations that their priests were shooting altar boys from helicopters?
Liberals are allowed to have discussions. Please return to wingnuttia and await future talking points.
I have no interest in bowing to the feet of St Glenn or his acolytes. I said what I wanted to say in the blog post, which was the whole point. Jesus.
Honestly Oliver, fuck you. You constantly try to build yourself up by smearing other liberals then try and take credit for your “fair and balanced” and “serious” position. You’re a self-serving hack.
I supported the invasion of Afghanistan. I know soldiers and respect their service and sacrifice. At the very least, I pay the tax dollars that go into the occupations of two different countries.
But to question the actions of individual troops and officers isn’t anti-soldier or anti-American. It’s logical and it’s patriotic.
Please, please continue to try and pick fights with Glenn Greenwald. He’ll continue to swat you around like the petulant, bitchy little kid that you are.
You and your porn links don’t add up to jack shit.
I made pretty clear that there should be an investigation into this and the coverup. Ditto for the Pat Tillman issue as well.
PaddyK: bygones. note that I didn’t call Oliver a liar, but he doesn’t really read what Glenn said and I discovered that earlier today when I pulled a direct quote from Glenn’s article and Oliver tried to dismiss it with a red herring never really arguing with substantive objections to his arguments. Again, one can distort the truth for a number of reasons but either intention is involved or it isn’t. I was referred here by reading Glenn’s post and I imagine Oliver’s a fine guy and that Glenn was only being critical of his comments, not the person (for example, he didn’t do things like resort to calling Oliver a “saint”–whatever that means). Anyway, sure let’s keep it substantive–but it takes “two to tango “and I haven’t seen that from Oliver.
And yet here you are every day lecturing me on how I should write and think. St. Glenn wasn’t questioning individuals, he made clear that he believes this activity is policy. Why you feel the need to be St. Glenn’s bitch, I can’t answer.
Thanks for proving my point.
Guys…….the horse is not going to run faster, nor is it going to get up. The video is out, let’s see what happens from here. You can’t draw parallels to Nazi’s, the Catholic Church, or Mai Lai on this one. Take this event for what it is. Regardless some people will support this, some people will denounce it, and others will acknowledge the tragedy but say they understand how and why this happens at times. Combat is an ugly thing, and Soldiers will never do what they do in a way that is palatable to those we fight, or those that send us to fight. Mistakes are often made, and sometimes people try to bury those mistakes. The fact that this is even a discussion says something is right about America. It wouldn’t be allowed in 99.99999999% of the places where we have ongoing contingency operations.
smug
Dude, invest in a fucking mirror.
There’s nothing wrong with being wrong. Digging in, refusing to engage anyone who disagrees with you, and generally acting like an ass, on the other hand…
Well, that’s why I feel no compulsion to visit.
“St. Glenn”?
Dude, he’s a lot smarter than you. And he has consistent principles.
This doesn’t make him a saint, it makes him a very important voice for liberals and Democrats.
You? I like your site. It’s nice to know what Sasha Grey is wearing or when Iron Man 2 is coming out.
“And yet here you are every day lecturing me on how I should write and think.”
It’s your blog. Feel free to ignore or ban me. Meanwhile, feel free to apologize for acting the fool once again. You’ll feel better, trust me.
That’s good, and I would agree with those recommendations, but it’s not particularly a response.
You may not agree with the allegation, but certainly a lot of people — including veterans from the very war zone depicted in the video — are indeed claiming that this incident is representative of much of what has transpired (note: this is not to be taken as suggesting 50% or 100% of U.S. troop operation), thus the suggestion that this case represents not a bizarre and singular aberration, but an incident apparently not at all objected to by the chain of command.
The war ITSELF is this very deliberate military policy you are talking about!
That is why supporting it or taking part in it or continuing it is the farthest thing in the world from being “good guys” !!
It IS on purpose. It IS deliberate policy. “If you don’t do what we say and follow bully America we will kill millions of your people including hundreds of thousands of women and children with rape and torture galore”!!
You STILL have not answered about the FACTS!
Millions of Iraqis have died in the war — how can you justify this fact and still call the US Military “good guys”???
Answer that or live with the shame of justifying the crimes of systematic rape, torture, and murder of innocent civilians.
It’s clear that Oliver is deeply invested in a 1990′s style thinking regarding the word “liberal.”
There’s nothing brave or edgy about slamming liberals Oliver, and more importantly just what is your strategy anyways? You do it out of fear. And it’s an incredibly pathetic fear — that of not being taken seriously by establishment media.
IMO of course. Maybe you’re just been drunk for the past 24 hours. Or off your meds. Hard to tell.
Just read that the US Army can’t find their copy of the footage.
Convenient, eh Mr. Willis?
I love that as liberals we can have disagreements, but your constant attempts on this thread to martyr yourself are pretty fucking annoying.
“Greenwald jabbed at me.”
Yep, this is what it’s all about.
Smartest, most level-headed response on this thread. Well said and thanks for saying it.
I dunno why you insist my positions are part of a conspiracy theory to engender me to… God knows who. I good be a good little boy and just agree with everyone, or I could have my own position on an issue. Use Occam’s razor, apply liberally. Most of the time the garbage, in my opinion, comes from the right, but sometimes it comes from the left. Is it that shattering to you to think that not all liberals think alike on these issues. Do I get kicked out of the liberal club for not sharing the same idea on this, what other issues am I not allowed to deviate on?
Dude, he’s a lot smarter than you. And he has consistent principles.
Yes, I must write seventy paragraphs to be serious.
This doesn’t make him a saint, it makes him a very important voice for liberals and Democrats.
The way people act in this thread in other, you would think he was. As if his positions are the words of God.
It’s your blog.
Are you sure? You seem to think otherwise, for months now.
Actually, I’ve engaged on this thread. The anger people feel is because I won’t change my position to satisfy others. Whatever. And thanks for making a second comment explaining why you won’t come here. LOL.
Right, I’m not supposed to respond to St. Glenn. Just accept his world view, and bow.
“Yes, I must write seventy paragraphs to be serious.”
Here’s your blind-spot in a nut-shell Oliver. There’s a place for snark and one-liners, but there also comes a time for gathering facts and quality analysis.
Just because you’re incapable of the latter doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t do it.
“Are you sure? You seem to think otherwise, for months now.”
Anti-intellectualism in the form of a whining baby. Stay classy, Oliver.
[...] Oliver Willis – has been attempting a defense of the troops, and taking issue with Greenwald in particular. Greenwald and others push back in the comments. [...]
The problem is that your responses are lame not that you could have an argument with Glenn. Glenn criticized your comment, now you call him St. Glenn and his readers lemmings. This makes your arguments very weak because you’re resorting to easily identifiable logical fallacies. Yes, you can have an opinion and it can deviate from the mainstream, but it takes maturity to not resort to mischaracterizing and name-calling. Perhaps, in time, you can cultivate those qualities. Hope springs eternal.
Misrepresentations and smears aren’t “positions” Oliver, and there’s nothing brave or “mavericky” about them.
As I said before in a another thread…the Democratic Party will only have moderate and conservative Democrats left in it’s party THINKING they’re progressive.
Some “Liberals”….Geez.
When did killing innocent people become okay to so many so-called “Liberals”?
There is a time for quality analysis, and I link to many of them every day. I happen to think Greenwald is the liberal version of Steven Den Beste, a right-wing blowhard who used to get great praise from the right years ago who made points under mountains of paragraphs. I happen to find such writing tedious and not insightful. People are often dazzled by it and bypass other, better writers.
Me, classy? You’re the one who told me to fuck off.
This video is only unusual in that is has revealed, with ample supporting proof, the cold brutality of war to a largely insulated public. The military is a tool, that uses various tools and operators to achieve its stated goal. It doesn’t take much understand this, and to predict the result of applying a tool whose principle use is to apply force in order to destroy a designated “enemy”. We have invested much of our national wealth and brainpower in honing the efficiencies and destructive capabilities of our tools. We worship weapons and war on a national level, it has poisoned our culture, for the long term. From top to bottom we are enmeshed in the wholesale application of violence.
So yes, these soldiers were doing what they are trained to do (as the Pentagon has stated). They used a $12 million dollar flying weapons platform to kill/murder/slaughter people or “suspected insurgents” with anti-tank ammunition and high explosives. It’s pretty horrible isn’t it.
As others have stated, the reason this one got more attention than the others was that journalists were killed.
That so many are now so repulsed by having witnessed what soldiers are trained to do explains why the military goes to great lengths to avoid having that reality become part of the national conversation. It explains why so many want to believe in aberrations, instead of consequences. It explains the broken soldiers from these wars. It explains the piles of dead innocents. It explains the misery, anger and hopelessness of those on the receiving end.
It takes hard work hard to keep yourself from getting too close to these uncomfortable realities.
I never called myself brave or a maverick. I said I have a position, and clearly I did a bad thing by not having the same position as everyone else.
If you think US troops are the good guys, Oliver, you might want to read this.
Wow. Steven Den Beste. There’s a blast from the awful past. I had forgotten about that guy. He was the original wanker. What a dickweed.
Den Beste was indeed tedious and wankerriffic. I think Greenwald is mostly just establishing what’s going on. Yes, it’s tedious and not especially insightful–he’s not saying much that we don’t know, but he’s laying it all out there, doing the research to back up his positions, for Moloch and everyone to see. He’s not a blowhard, but a lawyer (yeah, a fine line that is). His wordiness is necessary from a lawyer’s argument standpoint: That’s his style, man. I think GlennZilla is a National Treasure. He’s consistent in rhetoric, he tirelessly researches the topics for his post (which explains the long form), and he gets shit right. This world could stand more Glenn Greenwalds (and fewer Steven Den Bestes).
i’ve never read a blogger with such thin skin. you must be the biggest pansy to ever pick up a keyboard.
I agree with you on much of this, but on what facts do you base your assessment that our troops are the “good guys”? I don’t believe that the men and women who join our military are bad people, but they are fighting for the side of imperialism and occupation.
Those soldiers did not treat Iraqis like human beings, just like the United States government and media do not treat Iraqis like human beings. We did not go into Iraq because of WMDs, we went in to force regime change to serve our own, often vile, purposes.
In the grand scheme of things, we’re not the good guys.
Clearly. More cutting insight to follow I hope.
My husband is a combat vet of the war in Afghanistan and he is disgusted by this video, particularly the shooting up of the van. Here’s his take:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/4/6/854626/-The-Video:-A-perspective-from-a-liberal-veteran
You can actually ‘support the troops’ and be disgusted by the actions of the gunners/pilots in this video at the same time. It’s possible! In fact I think it’s essential. Look at it from the perspective of the soldiers ON THE GROUND in this video. They have to come in to this situation and deal with the consequences of the video-game-like shooting of the pilots. Carrying the injured children from the van; assessing the wounds of the adults injured too. They have to deal with the blood, the screaming, the heartbreak. The pilots and the gunners get to fly back to their base afterward and never see the carnage they’ve left behind. Of course, even the pilots and gunners have to deal with the emotional toll of killing people, particularly people who turned out to be truly ‘innocent,’ when they come home. We expect soldiers to deal with this crap and our way of ‘supporting’ them is to call people out on their patriotism when they criticize other soldiers’ horrible acts. Who does that serve? Certainly not the soldiers. All of this grandstanding ‘patriotic’ junk does not serve the troops nor does it serve our society as a whole. It brings us no closer to being a peaceful, humanity-centered country. It further dehumanizes everyone, including soldiers, who in this estimation become alternately super-human do-gooders or stick figures ‘following orders.’ They’re actually full human beings, and just like the rest of us, some of them have really poor judgment. Some of them are sociopaths. Some of them are cruel and heartless. And some of them have their hearts broken by the actions of their comrades.
Oliver, the reason it’s am aberration is because the video got leaked. That’s it. You’re becoming unglued.
Oh. My. Gawd.
Having tangled with Den Beste in the past, I can honestly say now you’re just being a dick. Sorry, there’s no other word for it.
But if Greenwald is the librul Den Beste (love how you’re playing your own version of the Con false equivalency game) I guess that makes you what, Pam Geller?
Stop acting like a child.
[...] to the ‘Skins sure has messed up some minds the past 24 [...]
Next time send me a script so I have the approved positions on the issues.
They do at precisely the point in the video when the Reuters cameraman peeks around a corner and points a camera at the gunship.
not only are the roe perhaps in need of improvement but we are fighting deeply foolish wars, strategically badly, largely at the behest of the worst elements in israeli society and their lackeys here in the media and government.
Aberration? We invaded Iraq in March 2003, right? It’s April, 2010. So: 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians / (7 years * 365 days) = about 40 dead Iraqi civilians per day. There were a dozen people killed in this incident, so that means that there would be, on average, approximately 3 similar incidents per day (or one every 8 hours). That’s about the same frequency as the movement of a healthy set of bowels. Are you sure this is an aberration?
The problem with this half-assed column is that the video and the circumstances surrounding the video strongly suggest a problem that’s endemic, not aberrant. Case in point: the gunners get okays from their superiors throughout the entire offensive, they act within the bounds of supervision, they sound levelheaded – as if this is routine, not as if they’re going on a rampage. Or consider this: this attack got the stamp of approval from interior review, it was not found to have broken rules of engagement, although this may change after the general public gets a look at this tape.
In other words, this passes for ‘normal,’ or at least for ‘acceptable.’
Well, is it acceptable?
Let’s take a look – you have gunners in NO IMMEDIATE DANGER WHATSOEVER mowing down civilians who obviously pose NO IMMEDIATE THREAT WHATSOEVER. Maybe gunners think the cameras are guns [keep in mind these guys should know what guns look like, the cameras do not look at all like guns, and the video we are seeing is MUCH worse quality than what the gunners saw], but let’s take them at their word and say that they thought the men were armed. They still shot through two groups of civilians about whom there is no question were unarmed, the second of which arrived heroically to treat the wounded, and which included two children, and they did this with no hesitation and with some level of relish [most obvious when waiting for the man crawling on the curb to pick up a weapon so he can be shot, or when the vehicle runs over a dead body].
In other words, in order to take out two potential targets about whom there was considerable uncertainty, the gunners chewed through a group of civilians, an improvised ambulance, and two young children. This could potentially be excused if there was ANY proximate combat activity – there wasn’t – or if there was ANY threat to any perceptible party – there wasn’t. Barring these, and considering the banter, you have to admit that what’s on display here is criminal. Given that this was conducted with oversight in a sane, routine fashion, and given and that it was deemed acceptable by internal review, you have to admit this is not a singularity. This is obvious, and you’d know that if you watched the video.
Even if you take issue with these very basic assertions, what’s indisputable is that the technological MODE of attack – attacking from a God-like position, frying ants while drinking lattes – poses serious problems. No one is going to dispute that attack from an invulnerable aerial vantage is isolated, and this form of hugely asymetric military violence is something that should be looked at. What does it mean to kill someone when you are at no risk whatsoever? [almost verbatim the legal definition of murder] What kind of mentality and behavior does this engender and habitualize? [videogame pathologies] Is this something we’re willing to accept? [because it's inevitable that drones will someday soon be flying over American soil en masse].
In other words, this column is an unresearched, lazy fraud.
Dk – “The fact that this is even a discussion says something is right about America. It wouldn’t be allowed in 99.99999999% of the places where we have ongoing contingency operations.”
It’s a great thing when so many have to unjustly die just so you can make smug and arrogant comments like that. America has gotta rethink its destiny and leave other people the fuck alone. Really.Pisses.Me.Off.
What point of yours was proven by the assertion – a very obvious one – that most anti-US ‘terrorism’ is fueled by real world grievances? Do you think these people are some James Bond gang of villains who want to risk their lives for no reason? Is it mere coincidence that many (not all) so-called terrorists are desperately poor? Or do you buy the culturally racist ‘ideology of Islamo-fascism’ argument, that these people are brainwashed by their zany Oriental religion into living backwards lives and forfeiting their lives to destroy the great satan? It’s a serious question, which is also unbelievably easy to answer, especially if you look closely at the history of Afghanistan or Iraq.
You would have to be out of your mind to think that a military strategy is going to win here – we just need to kill all the terrorists, and then keep identifying them and killing them as they crop up, and then we’ll be safe? Right, and napalming villages in South Vietnam will get rid of the Communists…
The goal in ‘our’ current strategy is obviously not a sincere one to eradicate ‘terror’ (for one, that would be a performative contradiction since ‘show and awe’ basically defines spectacular violence vis-a-vis ‘terrorism’). If stopping terrorism was a serious concern, there are simple ways to do it – you resolve Kasmir, you resolve Gaza and the West Bank, you don’t start wars that end up killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, you don’t kill people with robots.
i have never read this blog before- i linked to from another site. if this posting is any indication of the veracity, depth and intellectual honesty of of mr. willis, then why are so many people reading his blog? his fact-free posting, endless parade of strawmen, complete inability to “get it” and sandbox ad hominem attacks don’t warrant the attention of anybody with a functioning brain. as is evident from the comments, the readers of this blog are obviously smart, critical and honest (infinitely more than the blogger)- so, WTF? what am i missing?
ya know what I hate?
bloggers that talk out their asses without knowing the first thing of what they speak.
I actually spent 4 years in the Marines. My peers were a semi-representative sample of American male youth. That is to say… they were remarkably ignorant, highly suggestible, and at all times ready (even eager) to mix it up with bad guys.
I say they were “semi” representative because the South and urban centers were over-represented. Moreover, most kids that were college material ended up in college, not the Marine Corps. So there was a skew. And if anything, the skew is more pronounced. By 2007, a lot of the people in Iraq had signed up in the aftermath of 9/11 and after the Iraq war had begun. They signed up to rain destruction down on Iraqi’s or some Arab country that could be called out “enemy”.
Almost all of us (and I worked in the relatively educated “air wing”) were more interested in football, beer and women (rare creatures on Marine bases) than we were in politics, news or world affairs. A substantial number were more interested in glorifying their God than much of anything else.
This is precisely the mix of people susceptible to hazardous heuristics like the one that led so many to believe that Hussein/Iraq had something to do with 9/11 or that the best thing to do after we were hit was to teach those Arabs a lesson.
I served from 85-90, before we had video games that made gory killing by remote control second-nature.
BTW: when I went to bootcamp, the Libyans and Iranians were our main bugaboos. And we were taught to dehumanize our enemies. So when we stabbed the cloth wrapped poles with out bayonets, we were screaming all sorts of racial slurs, even without realizing it.
Which reminds me…
Some things have surely gotten better. Like treatment of women in the military. When I was at Paris Island, when a woman platoon jogged by, we’d be led in cat-call cadences by our drill instructors. That’s definitely not happening anymore.
But what is happening, and this I promise you, is the standard dehumanizing of the enemy. If you see the enemy as human, you are less likely to want to kill him. You might think twice when you shouldn’t be thinking at all. As a result, you get your own people killed. And then you have to face the rest of your squad/platoon/company. Good luck with that.
Greenwald isn’t saying that our soldiers do this shit because they are bad. He’s saying they do it because they are at war. And when you are at war, you get stuck doing bad shit as a matter of routine. Better them and theirs than you and yours. And if thinking of “them” as sand-n****** helps you get through the day… well… you go fight this damned war if you’ve got issues with our guys doing the ugly things they do in war.
But don’t pretend war isn’t ugly or that our guys are, on the whole, decent people. It takes an exceptional person (Pat Tillman – college educated, btw) to remain decent under war-time conditions. And if you are exceptional, you certainly aren’t the norm.
Greenwald is right on this. And you, having spent not a day in uniform, let alone at war, have no idea what you are talking about.
Yes, Mike, we all have to serve before we can say anything about the military.
From an Andrew Sullivan reader:
“Forty years ago, when Charlie Company went into My Lai to inflict some collective punishment, a helicopter pilot watching from above saw the carnage and did something to stop it. Nowadays, helicopter pilots make movies of their killings and beg a wounded man to make a suspect move so they can pump more 1 1/4″ rounds into him. How completely depraved.”
You know, when the last tree on earth is cut down, you know what the axe man will say?
“Don’t blame me. I’m just doing my job.”
Hi Oliver, I´m glad this has made people get involved in the discussion about the war we are in. Please watch this video about how easy it is for nice people (soldiers) to turn bad “evil-power” or “good-altruistic” in nature? It has a point, I promise. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsFEV35tWsg
I hope to hear your opinion on this.
Nope.
But we should all have half a clue before we put fingers to keyboard and not buy into jingoistic claptrap because it feels good.
The way Oliver has argued this out is mighty dishonest, from the title on down.
Glenn just said you are a liar. He is right.
I find it interesting that you even saw WM platoons. I graduated from PI in 1974. I don’t recall seeing a single one, let alone a formation of them.
Walt
You know, it’s kind of appropriate and ironic you’d post this Oliver.
One of Glenn’s constant themes is about an establishment meme, or method of operating, in which those who support establishment policies are considered “serious” and those who oppose them “unserious”. The “unserious” are accused of “hatred” on an entirely unrelated issues regardless of their views, and virtually the only way to get around it is to post absurd “pro-(X)” (X=America, Troops, Israel, etc) over and over again when you’re engaging in the criticism.
Glenn actually does this, subtly. He does actually, in his article, explicitly avoid criticizing the troops involved, and as he quoted himself, he actually explicitly holds the troops largely blameless and makes it explicit his complaint is against the Pentagon and the policies the troops are required to follow. But he doesn’t do it over and over again, he doesn’t start his article with a “Serious” “Nobody should criticize the troops over the massacre shown in the Wikileaks video”, and doesn’t pepper it with “Our troops are honorable men” and “We should support our troops”. Glenn expects his readers to be smart enough to figure out that as his article is actually critical of Pentagon policy, and as he doesn’t actually attack the troops, and actually at one point makes it clear that he isn’t, that, well, Glenn doesn’t HATE OUR TROOPS AND HATE AMERICA(tm).
But there’s “Serious” and “Unserious”, and Glenn is “Unserious” and therefore, in this environment, with the memes running that run today, you can almost get away with claiming his article is one big hate-on for people who are stressed, scared, and whose only protections are some heavily artillery and a set of protocols, the combination of which leads to innocent people getting killed.
Are the troops here blameless? I’d say they’re probably more to blame than Glenn implies, which is not to say I don’t understand that there’s a massive difference between principles as viewed from home, and principles as viewed in an environment peppered with other heavily armed people who want to kill you. But I suspect this paragraph, which also says something complex that isn’t couched in numerous “Of course, nobody blames our glorious troops who are heroes” sentences, is also liable to the same misinterpretation you did Glenn.
As to whether the massacre as shown in the video is unusual: the experts seem to claim it isn’t. Your evidence that it is is that only unusual things attract the attention of the media.
Well, here’s a suggestion: we know that massacres have, actually, happened multiple times (but that doesn’t mean much by itself, there could be ten and it wouldn’t be “normal” and “routine”.) But we also know that there were unusual aspects to this one that have nothing to do with the protocols involved, the innocence of the people killed, or the numbers or anything like that. The major difference between these and others was that journalists employed by one of the major news agencies in the world were amongst those killed; that the Pentagon lied to that agency; and that the agency’s influence was large enough to ensure that someone leaked the video in the end.
But let’s go on with this. You’re claiming that it’s unusual and as evidence are claiming that this is one that’s attracted the attention of the media. But with respect, while it came up early on Reuter’s feeds yesterday, and had some play with the non-MSM media, for the most part the MSM buried it. I had to do physical searches to get information from the major news sites. CNN.com didn’t have anything up at all until late evening. The story, arguably, only started to show up because people were making noise about it. Millions of people were watching a YouTube video and wondering why this video wasn’t being covered by CNN. CNN’s article on the subject devoted as much time to Wikileaks as it did to the substance of the video.
It’s simply incorrect to claim that the media coverage of this video shows that it’s unusual. The media coverage is there because there’s an outcry. The outcry is because this is the first video leaked. The video was leaked because the “wrong people” got killed. Nothing in that chain suggests that the incident was unusual, and past experience of wars suggests that it isn’t.
Wars are bad. Wars are bad because innocent people get hurt. This means that the entire establishment’s narrative on wars they see as “necessary” has to be based upon undermining those who show how bad it is. You’ve fed into that, taking Glenn’s semi-refusal to follow the “serious” commentator pattern and leveled the standard, boilerplate, criticisms leveled at “unserious” commentators. And those criticisms are, objectively, without foundation. You criticize him for “buy(ing) into the caricature of America’s soldiers as bloodthirsty savages who kill for the heck of it.” He did no such thing, promoted no such view, and said the opposite. Further, your decision to see his article in those terms is blinding you to the argument Glenn actually is making, and making it difficult for you to come to terms as to what the leaked video really shows.
I think you should publish a retraction.
Pretty funny how as soon as someone who happens to be black departs from liberal orthodoxy (in this case ‘our troops are all baby killing psychos’) the race card comes out. Aren’t liberals supposed to be better than that.
…and when you are at war, you get stuck doing bad shit as a matter of routine. Better them and theirs than you and yours. And if thinking of “them” as sand-n****** helps you get through the day… well… you go fight this damned war if you’ve got issues with our guys doing the ugly things they do in war.
I don’t so much have “issues with our guys doing the ugly things they do in war” – rather, I hate being forced to cough up my tax dollars for something that is a useless waste of lives and money at best, and a threat to our national security at worst.
The anti-choicers don’t have to have a red penny of their money go to abortion, while my money goes to gleefully killing civilians, star wars, halliburton, blackwater, death squads, predator drones, killing civilians at weddings, embedded propaganda, and gitmo.
Blindly agreeing with group think – defined as ‘whatever Greenwalt decides it is – may seem like salvation to you. Just like agreeing 100% with O’Reilly’s latest rant might seem like salvation to the average Fox viewer. Some of us prefer to think for ourselves.
Ask the women who have been raped by our troops around the world like in Okinawa (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7256056.stm). Then get off your good guy hi horse. We are an empire, and our troops act like imperial troops: pillaging, raping, and murdering. The reason we don’t hear this stuff more often is because if we did, we would not support these imperial wars.
Oliver, do you really believe that everything that goes on in war is dutifully reported by our media? It takes a breathtaking amount of naievity to extend faith – both to the goodness and honesty of the Pentagon (who happens to be fighting an illegal war against the citizenry of Iraq), and to the journalistic integrity of the corporate media (which gave 24/7 coverage to the Britney Spears meltdown in the midst of two wars) – to believe that these are isolated incidents. How can you possibly believe that our government provides full disclosure of its war activities when all current evidence and all of history proves this belief to be completely false? We are not the good guys in this war. It was started on false pretenses and has served absolutely no good for this nation or the world. I support the troops when they are involved in a nobel cause, which they are currently not, although I don’t blame them. Like Greenwald’s point – which you completely miss and misrepresent – I blame the government for putting them in this immoral and illegal position. War is hell.
Next time you talk to someone in uniform ask them this simple question, “If your superiors ordered you to open fire on unarmed U.S. civilians, would you do it?”
Thank you Oliver, for saying what needs to be said, and showing that not all of us on the left are anti-military flag-burning fanatics, despite what the repubs say! Don’t pay attention to the haters, they’re the same sort of people who denigrated returning from Vietnam…armchair revolutionaries who make themselves feel better by belittling the sacrifices of others.
If anyone deserves to be castigated, it’s the leaders who got us into this mess in the first place. The buck has to stop somewhere…future generations might want to remember what General Sherman said regarding war:
“You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it…Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.”
Of course he also said:
“If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world but I am sure we would be getting reports from hell before breakfast.”
Ha, I was going to write a really long comment ripping oviver to shreds, but then i realized he would just respond go pray to your saint or some other lame comment. This is the first time I have been to this site, and it will be the last
I think you have missed the point. You don’t have to believe that US soldiers are evil to believe that the military has mistakenly created a culture that makes this kind of this common–which is absolutely is. The military leadership has failed to demand professionalism from people they are sending into combat, and as a result the necessary amount of reverence for engaging in warfare is missing in these troops and probably most others.
Does that make them evil? No. Probably not even criminal. But the civilian death tolls that are coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan are unacceptable and the military needs to be held accountable for that and be reformed to prevent it in the future.
Oliver really gives the “sensible liberals” a very bad name with this exchange. Wouldn’t a liberal be at least slightly troubled by the fact that our nation has been at war so often and that with bases spreading the globe, we might possibly, be a force for bad, at least sometimes?
Being sensible means using facts, data, and evidence to prove your point. Being ridiculous means arrogantly declaring grand truths (WE DO GOOD, DAMMIT), digging your heels in, and throwing mud in all directions.
After reading this whole thread, and Oliver’s pathetic performance, where he substitutes ideology for evidence and petulant whining for reasoned debate, I have to rethink his self-sure moniker:
“Like Kryptonite to Stupid”. . . if by Kryptonite you mean “that which distills, expands, and then spreads.”
The pure delight and glee these sadists took in destroying these lives made me want to vomit. THANK GOD, my father, a veteran like most of the men in my family, is dead because if he saw this video and heard these monsters carry on I am sure he would have cut out his eyes. If these jackals were human at least one could take some comfort in the hope that their nights would be forever full of visits from these dead children, but these men are sick soulless demons.
I support our troops, and that we as civilians have allowed them to be abused, misused, and misled, thrust into untenable situations daily without proper command support is an obscenity and almost as heinous as the actions of these villains. Sending them there was criminal but they are THERE and they still owe it to themselves and the service to be honorable and remember that even though doing their job almost always require hurting and killing, HURTING AND KILLING IS NOT WHY THEY ARE THERE. Kill if you have to BUT NOT JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN.
BTW, the Pentagon admits that 38% of Marines in theater and 46% of soldiers DO NOT BELIEVE Iraqis or Afghans deserve to be treated humanely or with respect. In fact a majority of troops admit to at least once (but most routinely) abusing and locals and destroying their property for the troops own amusement.
So much for aberrations.
“But not on purpose or as an element of US military policy. Which is my point.”
My god, man, you’re dense. No where does Glenn say it is military *policy* to go around killing civilians. No where does Glenn say that US troops go around looking for civilians to kill *on purpose*.
Saying Glenn said that when he did NOT and attacking him for this made up statement is called a Strawman. Telling you that you’re *lying* about what Glenn said is not beign a “lemming” of Greenwald. Deal with it.
The military killing civilians in a war is an expected part of war. Hawks will try to tell you that stuff like this is a 1 in ten-billion chance of happening, that it doesn’t happen 99.9999999% of the time. Hawks will try to sell war as something that can be pulled off without a single casualty, we’ll be in and out in 6 weeks, they’ll welcome us as liberators, we’ll be the white hats riding in on white horses.
Well, this video shows you what really happens in a war. Our troops killed civilians. This happens regularly in war. It happens a LOT in occupations of large cities.
You don’t have to want to go out and kill civilians “on purpose” for US troops to kill civilians. You don’t have to have killing civilians be part of standard “US Military Policy” for US troops to kill civilians.
This is the ugly truth of war. War is evil. Innocent people die.
The only way war is justified is if it is the lesser of two evils, compared to NOT goign to war. ANd in Iraq, that is NOT the case.
So, in order to keep selling an immoral war, the hawks try to downplay the real cost of war. They try to present the US war as if no civilians are ever killed by US troops.
And you, best of all, try to act as if the killing of civilians is *irrelevant* so long as they didn’t do it “on purpose”, so long as it isn’t “policy” to kill civilians. Civilians are dead and all you care about was whether the pilot went looking for civlians to kill or not. The morality of war isn’t based on intent, it is based on the physical cost, on the number of deaths war will create versus the number of deaths NOT going to war will create.
The cost of war in Iraq is that civilians are killed by US forces on a regular basis, whether intentional or not. Compare that to teh cost of NOT goign to war, and the war in Iraq suddenly becomes morally unsupportable.
Our PT paths crossed at least a coupla times a month. Drill instructor would have us inhaling deeply (and loudly) through our noses, singing praises of “hair pie”, etc. I thought it was fun back then, but of course, I was 17 (barely).
ohai oliver willis. totally agree american troops FTW!!!1111 w00t!
yes your american troops are most definitely the good guys. the 100000′s of terrorist dead – babies, children, men and women are NOT the fault of the brave american troops who actually killed them it is their own fault for not fleeing the battlespace that is iraq.
furthermore all the families killed at checkpoints, totally not evil. those brave young men and women are good dammit, mistakes happen even if it is every fucking time, and hey if we need to continuously slaughter innocents wtf broken eggs = omelette amirite!?!?! clearly no blame can be assigned to our brave boys.
also, when the order is given to assassinate american citizens, obviously the brave troops who carry out the state sanctioned murder are good, not evil. who could possibly imply that assassination is WRONG to carry out lol!1!!!
and the brave console jockeys who knowingly fire at weddings with the babies and the children because maybe perhaps lets hope a terrorist is there, NOT evil totally justified. onward good soldiers!
i too also like the cut of your jib oliver! the way you totally lied about that whiny bitch greenwald said, well played sir, well played.
all those troops in the situations noted above, and the many many support personell, are not in any way guilty, jesus would approve i am sure, and hey they are just following orders and have good intentions, and the ones you’ve met are pretty cool too, so its all ok, and the iraqi citizens clearly want us there.
keep up the good work oliver willis! your clear and unwavering support of the troops in any and all situations mark you as a man of supreme moral clarity, dont let those smug bitches get you down…
byenow!
The fact your strongest response to murderous slaughter is that the cover up was wrong and “maybe” criminal. Shows a mindset that allows for such atrocities. That fact is that the reason these things go on is “the vast majority who are good guys” willingly close ranks and cover up for and defend the murderers, thereby encouraging more and more of the same and creating a culture of corruption in institutions like the police and army that make them a law unto themselves.
I vaguely associate your name with being a thoughtful blogger, so I was expecting to see some useful discussion when I turned up on your site.
But here I see you replying to a substantive, detailed comment from somebody more knowledgeable than you, and what do you do? You snippily answer an argument they haven’t made, entirely ignoring the meat.
I imagine you’re riled up and feeling under siege, which is an excellent time to heed the maxim, “better to remain silent and be thought a fool then open your mouth and remove all doubt.” Or you could politely say you’re overwhelmed and need to think before responding.
This, though? It’s terrible for your credibility.
One difference that you are obviously too unintelligent and brainwashed to pick up:
there is actual EVIDENCE to support my view that the US military invasions, occupations & bombings in the Muslim world CAUSE not PREVENT terrorism.
Do you have any evidence for your idiotic “they hate us for our freedom, the heroic US military is defending me from the irrational Big Bad Guys out there!” ???
If you can read, id start with
1. Robert Pape “Dying to Win: the Logic of Suicide Terrorism”
and
2. Michael Scheuer “Imperial Hubris: How the West is losing the War on Terror”
Both point out with Bin Ladin and Al-Qaeda and the broad set of suicide terrorist recruits that almost all are purely motivated by a VIOLENT MILITARY OCCUPATION OF THEIR COUNTRY !!
So you brainwashed military-worshiping idiots not only support the killing of millions of innocent people but also CREATE TERRORISM HERE IN THE US by supporting these very unjustified slaughters of women and children like in this video and calling their killers “good guys”
Thanks for the lecture, I’ll add it to the circular file. I love how everybody’s an expert in psychoanalysis now though.
Can this be wrong even though America did it?? Pregnant women, dude… February… YOUR commander in Chief and heroic military…
More “good guys” for Evil Oliver, champion of child killing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/world/asia/05afghan.html
U.S. Admits Role in February Killing of Afghan Women
After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid.
dammit, man, then engage with the EVIDENCE that our military are NOT in any way OBJECTIVELY “good guys”
are there questions about Abu Gharib?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse
about the Haditha Massacre?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haditha_killings
about the recent Afghan massacre of 9 children executed while handcuffed?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/afghanistan/article7040166.ece
the even more recent execution of pregnant women by US forces?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/world/asia/05afghan.html
U.S. Admits Role in February Killing of Afghan Women
After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid.
what about the 1.36+ million dead Iraqis?? Could “good guys” cause this???
ANSWER THE QUESTIONS AND EVIDENCE, YOU COWARD !!
and the anger I feel is because you support the torture rape and killing of innocent children and call the victimizers “good guys”
its not cause your stubborn and stupid, tho you are. It is because you are EVIL that I loath you and your kind
As long as Republicans and right-wingers think it’s ethical to constantly spread hatemongering and fearmongering — as long as they think of politics as some tribalist war — they are going to be a danger to American democracy.
This self-serving BS that liberals are somehow more likely to be extremist or sheep is not only inaccurate, it’s evil. This nonstop hysteria with “OMG the liberals hate America and want to force my pastor to perform gay abortions!!!1!” is evil. It may make you feel good to tell yourself that everyone with whom you disagree is *still* suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome, but doesn’t that just mean that right-wingers are suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome?
Glenn: Thank you for your coverage of the release of this video. It’s sickening. My reaction is a little more “ambivalent” in terms of how I would judge the soldiers who pulled the trigger. They were in the air, in no obvious or immediate danger, and I found the tone of voice in which they appeared to be celebrating the chance to kill a bunch of potentially innocent Iraqis – completely chilling, disgusting, and deserving of censure.
Even if one believes that they thought the men on the ground had weapons – and even the poor quality video that resulted from de-encryption suggested to my untrained eye that no such weapons were visible – they still fired on a vehicle and on obvious civilians that came to aid the wounded. You hear them say, “Just pick up a weapon” – so I can go ahead and shoot you. There’s no excuse for this behavior, although there are obviously a whole cesspool of reasons. Yes, war is insane. Yes, it creates an evironment that drives previously sane people to do insane things. And yes, it’s obvious from the tape that what they did was authorized, and that it was Standard Operating Procedure.
What’s missing from the “national discussion,” albeit lucidly present in what you’ve written, is the distinction between convicting the individual soldier, and roundly condemning the behavior. I am sickened by what those soldiers did. I am even more sickened by the behavior of the “Pentagon Brass,” who have clearly become dehumanized to the point at which they simply do not understand the distinction between “Right” and “Wrong.” I want those men “at the top” removed from power – NOW. I want the guys in IAVA to come out – without equivocation – against this kind of behavior. And I want those who lead this nation to clearly condemn the sin, without necessarily finding a need to scapegoat the “sinners.” It is the absence of a national sense of outrage that I find to be obscene. It is exactly this national assumption that we Americans are special, and that nothing we do isn’t noble – that has created the disgust with which much of the world views this country. And I am heartily sick of being ashamed of my country.
[...] Joyner? One of the QandO guys? Nope, that was Oliver Willis, [...]
And I sincerely appreciate that you, Mr. Willis, are pointing out that this is not a problem amongst liberals in general. Forgive me for not making that clear in my previous message. However, as someone who has been reading Mr. Greenwald’s work for years now, I do not believe that he has a vendetta against our military, or hatred towards America. His efforts for years to ensure that terrorists are tried in civilian courts, for example, are, in my opinion, based upon Mr. Greenwald’s high esteem for American principles of justice. He has pointed out repeatedly that it is not American or ethical to choose in advance which kind of trial you’re going to give a prisoner depending on which one you think can successfully convict him — or just to leave some people locked up without trials because we don’t have any evidence at all. The Soviet Union declared prisoners guilty before the trial even started. That’s not how America is supposed to work.
And anyone who says that we need to violate American principles to keep our bodies safe — well, there are a hell of a lot of other ways we could ruin America in the name of being safer. How far do we go? Having an intelligent conversation about that is a lot more profitable than insulting one another.
I find Glenn Greenwald more credible than you on this subject. You are entitled to your opinion but I am entitled to say your opinion is wrong and your characterization of Greenwald as a “blowhard” is offensive to me. If you don’t want criticism then shut off comments.
What are you an expert in?
Most Mafia soldiers and gang members are good guys too! They just risk their lives to sustain an immoral and unjust enterprise which makes higher-ups wealthy and supports the status quo hierarchy. They do it for a bit of money, security and the personal belief system with which they were raised.
Not that different than the Iraq war. I don’t see how this makes any of them noble.
It was established at Nuremberg that “just following orders” is no excuse.
Not all soldiers are bad people. Some go AWOL when they figure out that they are being used for evil. Others just keep killing so they can get free college.
Go ahead a dispute Greenwald’s facts if you can. His articles are loaded with links to supporting evidence. You just make assertions.
I love playing Modern Warfare too but let’s not get carried away and try to apply game rules to the real world.
There are only between 5,000-10,000 terrorists, world-wide. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t all be gone by now if we were really trying.
The odds of an American being killed by a terrorist is about 1/30th that of dying from a slip or fall in your own home. Less than being killed by lighting. Nat Silver had some wonderful stats on fivethirtyeight.com
But Anti-terrorism is a BIG, BIG business. For the military industrial complex and the media. They needed something to replace the cold war.
The problem is that fighting terrorism with our military isn’t effective. Which isn’t a problem for those who depend on continual war to stay in business, but it’s a big problem for the people who go without to pay the war bills. And those who die to keep the Cheney’s wealthy.
We’d be much better off with a multi-national, Interpol run, SWAT team. Fighting guys who live in caves with an expensive, modern military force is about as effective as rescuing a sinking rowboat with a 747. Overkill that misses the mark.
Just a thought — a sidebar, if you will — but have any of you (other than those who have already stated they have miltiary service) ever thought about joining the military? Because if there were more people like you — with families back home with similar beliefs as yours — in the military AND all of you and your families voted in each election, then you might be able to change the culture. But you’re doing nothing to fix the culture of the military, or our country’s cavalier and detached attitude towards the military, by ripping up Oliver for his response to Greenwald. When less than a single-digit percentage of the country is actively serving in the military, no wonder an insular, protective and detached culture has developed. And no wonder all you armchair quarterbacks are so shocked by it! Barely anyone serves, but everyone wants to bitch. If you could do better, GET IN THERE AND DO IT.
Huh?
The invasion of Iraq was an illegal (and of course immoral) war of aggression. Thus it was a war crime, and all American actions there are war crimes.
It’s reasonable—and I would agree—that only the top brass and civilian leadership should actually be tried for these crimes, but that doesn’t mean that others involved aren’t actually undertaking criminal actions. This is especially so because we don’t have conscription.
Wow, full metal truth. “Check out your headgear newguy. If I’m gonna die for a word, that word is POONTANG.” – Animal Mother
“Greenwald insists that things like killing of Iraqi civilians in the Wikileaks video and Abu Ghraib are just standard operating procedure for American soldiers, and not aberrations from the norm.”
Greenwald is demonstrably correct on both counts. Regarding the incident on the Wikileaks video, the military has already certified that everyone involved, both the soldiers in the helicopter and the higher ups giving the authorizations to engage, did indeed follow standard operating procedure and did nothing wrong. If you still think this wasn’t standard operating procedure, you need to argue with the military bureaucracy not with Greenwald.
As for Abu Graib, authorizations for “enhanced interrogation” techniques came from the vice president’s office and the secretary of defense’s office – not aberrations wrought by a few bad apples at the bottom of the heirarchy acting on their own.
I’ve never read your blog here. If this is the level of analysis you are offering, I highly doubt that I will be coming back in the future.
Regarding your original post:
1. n the case of the Wikileaks video, Greenwald characterizes it as “the plainly unjustified killing of a group of unarmed men (with their children) carrying away an unarmed, seriously wounded man to safety”. Except in the mindset of the soldiers shown, this wasn’t just some guy, but part of a group of insurgents.”
So what? This is like saying “some people see the holocaust as the massacre of innocent people,” but in the mindset of the guards these were dangerous social elements that needed to be eradicated in order for the German people to live freely.
2. “This incident should be completely probed by an independent body, but to indict the entire U.S. military over a video like this is stupid.”
What “independent body” should probe this incident? If that group declared this an act of murder, wouldn’t that just be more “monday morning quarterbacking?” The military has apparently investigated the incident, and they appear to be of the opinion that the troops behaved acceptably (or at least in accordance with their policies and regulations).
3. “Furthermore, it isn’t as if Wikileaks just released the video. Every element that Wikileaks put out alongside the video was designed to indict the soldiers and the military coverup in the worst light possible. It was nearly as dishonest as the post-incident bullshit spin the Pentagon put out.”
I happen to agree that wikileaks should have released the video unedited. But how could you possibly claim that any of the material that was added to the video “was nearly as dishonest as the post-incident bullshit spin the Pentagon put out”? The Orwell quote was hardly a statement of fact (and, if it was, it seems fairly accurate), so how did it resemble the lying Pentagon description of the event? Or do you object to wikileaks pointing out that the people who were killed had names and loved ones? Is that a bald-faced lie? If it isn’t, how does it warrant comparison to the Pentagon’s cover-up? I really don’t understand how anyone can make this claim.
4. The entire reason there is an outcry when a member of the U.S. military engages in some form of atrocity or deviant behavior is because it is such an aberration from the norm…I’m not the kind of person who believes in “my country right or wrong” by a longshot. When we do wrong, we need to investigate, correct, and punish if necessary. But if you add it up, the right way outweighs the wrong. By a lot.”
This seems to be the crux of your argument, so it would be nice if you provided any support whatsoever for your contentions. You don’t have facts. You don’t have an argument. You have your certainty, and I guess that is enough for you. In fact, the way the Pentagon has handled this indicates that they themselves did not see this incident as an aberration. For years we have read press releases about the deaths of “suspected insurgents.” Now we know what the threshold is for identifying someone as a “suspected insurgent” and marking them for death: if you see that person holding something that might possibly resemble a weapon, that person is a “suspected insurgent” and can be exterminated. If another person tries to provide medical aide to a person who was holding something that might possibly resemble a weapon, well then he’s a “suspected insurgent” and can also be killed. But please, if you have actual evidence to the contrary, by all means, share it. Otherwise, I see no reason to follow you in your blind faith.
5.” I’m not the kind of person who believes in “my country right or wrong” by a longshot.”
No, your position is “my countrymen are inherently more moral than any group they are possibly fighting, and I know this because…” But, please, you finish the sentence– exactly what is the source of your knowledge on this matter?
6. Re: your responses to the comments here. I have yet to read your actual response to what Greenwald or his supporters are actually claiming. Instead, you seem content to sarcastically dismiss “St. Glen” and the “lemmings” who follow him. Y’know, I’ve seen a lot of people re-state or cite Greenwald’s articles (on a number of issues, not just this one), but I don’t think I’ve never seen someone say “Well, Greenwald came to this conclusion, so, as a matter of faith, I agree.” If I happen to point out that today is Wednesday, those who agree are not “lemmings.”
Update on my previous comment: I assumed I knew what “noblesse oblige” meant. I just looked it up (honorable behavior from those of high rank). I mistakenly assumed it simply meant honorable best intentions. You completely ignored my previous comment.
Leaving behind a “safe, sane and grateful Iraqi population” is not a matter of “noblesse oblige”, but pragmatism, regardless of how anti-war one is. Are you also into allowing Gaza to fester or ignoring conditions in the ‘hood, for the sake of peace?
Crap. And now the wingnuts are mounting a defense attacking the incompleteness of the anti-war side’s argument. I suggest you Google “Wikileaks” + “RPG” and take your “noblesse oblige” to those places and defend Greenwald.
International law prohibits the killing of people who do not currently present an imminent danger.
This specifically includes people who have been shot and are not armed. You can’t defend this except by calling it an aberration.
And I suppose it is, in the sense that our troops don’t do this every single minute of the day. But once is too much, and I’d like you tell us how many times you think something like this has happened.
10? 100? 1000?
And yes, I’m ex-military and this disgusts me. But it doesn’t surprise me.
Timmy,
It was once said of Margaret Thatcher that she wwas not ‘noblesse’ and disinclined to ‘oblige’.
Pretty much summed up Maggie while at the same time putting the phrase in a nice context.
Apparently, he’s an expert in filing things in circular bins.
Although his bio says that he is:
I’m assuming that’s the libertarian Matt Welch.
And a Democratic concern troll.
and THIS is exactly why the parallel with the Catholic Church is spot on!
except they “only” systematically rape, and not kill, innocent children.
Well, the training we give the troops is for the most part independent of who exactly gets killed. They may get some training in figuring out who is innocent, and who isn’t. But that’s not what happened in this case.
–
But more importantly, what Greenwald said is that “This kind of thing” happens all the time over there. That seems pretty obvious given the fact that no one in the military found this exceptional until it got leaked.
Also, most of the blog posts I’ve read from actual military people have said that shooting at the van was NOT justified. Where the hell do you get off saying that it was?
That’s a pretty fucked up attitude. Just because someone “thinks” they might be bad guys doesn’t give them the right to shoot, they have to actually be threatened.
And more importantly, how exactly does doing all this shit “win over hearts and minds”? It might be more acceptable if there was a real risk to the U.S. like in WWII, but here we have a situation where the only reason our troops are getting shot at is because they are there.
You can say stuff like, well, if we left Iran would take over (also due to our own mistake of going in in the first place) but that hardly makes the troops the “good guys”.
In fact, do you seriously think someone who’s dad or brother or kids get shot from a helicopter are going to view U.S. Troops as “Good guys”?
I followed a link called “vile ‘He-Hates-The-Troops!’ smears from a Glen Greenwald post at Salon to get here, expecting to see an example of somebody smearing Greenwald by claiming he hates the troops.
I’ve read the blog closely, and I can’t see where Willis says anything about Greenwald or anybody else hating the troops. He says some liberals hate the fact that our troops are the good guys. That’s an altogether different thing.
I’m not trained to interpret gun camera videos, but, as I said over at Salon, my impression of the video is that it does show at least two armed men, one holding an RPG. They’re standing by some kind of telephone or light pole on the left side of the frame, just before the group moves behind a building. It also looks to me as if someone is aiming a camera with a long lens at one of the helicopters from a position of cover down low at the corner of the building, and someone in the helicopter mistakes the camera for the RPG they’d seen earlier. RPGs were the only weapons the insurgents had that could bring down a helicopter. It also appears that, if the men were insurgents on their way to join in a fight or to set up an ambush, the two Reuters stringers had chosen to “embed” with them that day. Interestingly, I don’t see the man with the RPG in the group the helicopters gun down.
I’m sure many readers here see something different when they study the video. And we’re not trying to decide what we see or don’t see while we think someone is pointing an RPG at us.
I’ve been thinking the same thing reading through this thread. I also followed a link to get here for the first time. Probably won’t return. It’s uncommon to have a comment section that reads so much smarter than the blogger himself. Particularly with the petulance Mr. Willis has displayed with his own comments. He obviously committed to his position, and apparently feels the best strategy is ad hominems and snark.
Evidence US Military not “overall good guys”.
I. Overall effects of US Military Operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan
a) Deaths:
1. Iraq- Various estimates from several hundred thousand to over 1 million
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
2. Afghanistan- Tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_of_the_War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%93present)
3.Pakistan- perhaps hundreds per month, especially since the onset of the Obama administration in January, 2009
-http://news.antiwar.com/2010/01/02/us-killed-700-civilians-in-pakistan-drone-strikes-in-2009/
4. Other military operations around the world – unknown
b)systematic, not aberrational, use of torture
-http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/report-2005-may.html
-http://www.aclu.org/accountability/released.html
c) systematic, not aberrational, sexual violence and rape across Iraq
-http://www.zcommunications.org/systematic-pattern-of-rape-by-us-forces-by-chris-shumway
d) evidence of war crimes from Haditha
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haditha_killing
and Falluja
-http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8340
onward
e) the use of unethical, if not illegal, weapons, especially White Phosphorus
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_phosphorus_use_in_Iraq
and Depleted Uranium munitions
-http://www.seattlepi.com/national/95178_du12.shtml )
II. The attitudes of some (not all, but way more than one or two) of the troops towards the local civilian population
A) in their own words [interviews, not statistical data, which also corroborates these interviews to follow in (b)]
rom the New York Times :
“We had a great day,” Sergeant Schrumpf said. “We killed a lot of people.” …
But more than once, Sergeant Schrumpf said, he faced a different choice: one Iraqi soldier standing among two or three civilians. He recalled one such incident, in which he and other men in his unit opened fire. He recalled watching one of the women standing near the Iraqi soldier go down.
“I’m sorry,” the sergeant said. “But the chick was in the way.”
From Reuters:
Two soldiers picked out two figures on a rooftop and quickly lined up their shot. Thankfully, First Sgt. Eric Engram saw them and also saw their target. “No man, that’s a kid and a woman. It’s a KID and a WOMAN,” he bellowed, and his soldiers lowered their rifles.
“These guys are young and most just want to get their first confirmed kill, so they’re too anxious to get off shots. I hate to say ‘bragging rights’ but they want that kill,” Engram said an hour later.
Can you imagine what kind of mindset makes a person not just happy, not just proud, but eager to brag about killing another human being? And can you imagine the (military) culture in which bragging about killing another human being is considered a badge of honor? I can’t either.
From the Scotsman (or see also the London Times):
US marine, Corporal Ryan Dupre, surveying the scene by the bridge at An Nasiriyah, said: “The Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy. I am starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin’ Iraqi. No I won’t get hold of one – I’ll kill him.”
From Reuters:
A tracked armored vehicle has crushed two men up the road.
“Killed one, ripped the legs off another,” Monty said briskly, a cigarette dangling from his lip.
From Newsday:
“It’s like you’re fighting a faceless enemy,” said Cpl. Jeb Moser, 21, of Ruston, La. “They’re all just ragheads to me, the same way they used to call the enemy ‘gooks’ in Vietnam.”
“Raghead, raghead, can’t you see? This old war ain’t — to me,” sang Lance Cpl. Christopher Akins, 21, of Louisville, Ky., sweat running down his face in rivulets as he dug a fighting trench one recent afternoon under a blazing sun.
Asked whom he considered a raghead, Akins said: “Anybody who actively opposes the United States of America’s way … If a little kid actively opposes my way of life, I’d call him a raghead, too.”
From Editor and Publisher:
“We splashed that bastard,” a Western eyewitness quoted one Marine as saying to another after they’d shot an Iraqi dead.
From the Las Vegas Review-Journal:
The 20-year veteran of the Marine Corps said he found the soldier after dark inside a nearby home with the grenade launcher next to him. Covarrubias said he ordered the man to stop and turn around.
“I went behind him and shot him in the back of the head,” Covarrubias said. “Twice.”
Did he feel any remorse for executing a man who’d surrendered to him? No; in fact, he’d taken the man’s ID card off of his dead body to keep as a souvenir.
From the Daily Mirror:
“There was no dilemma when it came to shooting people who were not in uniform, I just pulled the trigger.
“It was up close and personal the whole time, there wasn’t a big distance. If they were there, they were enemy, whether in uniform or not. Some were, some weren’t.”
Describing the scene during combat Richardson admitted shooting injured soldiers and leaving them to die. He said: “S***, I didn’t help any of them. I wouldn’t help the f******. There were some you let die. And there were some you double-tapped.” Making a shooting sign with his hand he went on: “Once you’d reached the objective, and once you’d shot them and you’re moving through, anything there, you shoot again. You didn’t want any prisoners of war. You hate them so bad while you’re fighting, and you’re so terrified, you can’t really convey the feeling, but you don’t want them to live.” And despite there being no link between Iraq and the September 11 attacks Richardson admitted that it gave him his motivation to fight Iraqis.
“There’s a picture of the World Trade Centre hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my flak jacket. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think, ‘They hit us at home and, now, it’s our turn.’ I don’t want to say payback but, you know, it’s pretty much payback.”
Perhaps if someone in Richardson’s family is ever killed, he can go pick someone at random off the street and torture them to death; that would really give the killers their “payback,” wouldn’t it?
Note also the phrasing: “I don’t want to say payback.” Just like “I hate to say ‘bragging rights’.” The reticence is telling. These are the dirty little truths that lie behind all the elevated rhetoric and noble words. These are the things you’re not supposed to admit are lurking in the shadows, so that you won’t disrupt the elevated fantasies of the cheerleaders for war.
From the Los Angeles Times:
“I enjoy killing Iraqis,” says Staff Sgt. William Deaton, 30, who killed a hostile fighter the night before. Deaton has lost a good friend in Iraq. “I just feel rage, hate when I’m out there. I feel like I carry it all the time. We talk about it. We all feel the same way.”
“I enjoy killing Iraqis.” Does that sound horrific to you? Think it would to any normal human being? Unfortunately, you’re wrong; some people liked it so much they made a sticker out of it. Then again, maybe you’re right, since anyone who would celebrate such viciousness isn’t a normal human being–or at least that’s how I like to think of the world.
From the Seattle Times:
“I want to know if I killed that guy yesterday,” Hall says. “I saw blood spurt from his leg, but I want to be sure I killed him.”
No, it wasn’t enough for Hall to watch the blood spurt from his victim’s leg; he wants to know the man was dead, and that he was the cause of it. After all, he wants those bragging rights.
This article does at least contain some notes of humanity. One man struggles to reconcile what he’s become with what he used to be, and what he hopes to be again:
The vehicle goes silent as the driver, Spc. Joshua Dubois, swerves around asphalt previously uprooted by a blast.
“I’m confused about how I should feel about killing,” says Dubois, who has a toddler back home. “The first time I shot someone, it was the most exhilarating thing I’d ever felt.”
Dubois turns back to the road. “We talk about killing all the time,” he says. “I never used to talk this way. I’m not proud of it, but it’s like I can’t stop. I’m worried what I will be like when I get home.”
That’s what the culture does: it turns normal, sane people into people who are obsessed with killing other people (“we talk about killing all the time…it’s like I can’t stop”). Roll that fact around in your mind for a few moments. All of us should be worried what it will like when they get home, and bring with them these lessons they learned in Iraq.
But I’ve saved the worst for last. This is from the East Bay Express, in an article about a web site on which American soldiers can get free access to online pornography by posting their trophy photos of dead and mutilated Iraqis:
Six men in beige fatigues, identified as US Marines, laugh and smile for the camera while pointing at a burned, charcoal-black corpse lying at their feet.
The captions that accompany these images, which were apparently written by soldiers who posted them, laugh and gloat over the bodies. The person who posted a picture of a corpse lying in a pool of his own brains and entrails wrote, “What every Iraqi should look like.” The photograph of a corpse whose jaw has apparently rotted away, leaving a gaping set of upper teeth, bears the caption “bad day for this dude.” One person posted three photographs of corpses lying in the street and titled his collection “DIE HAJI DIE.”
B. Statistical Data about troop attitudes towards civilians in war zones
-U.S. Marines unlikely to report civilian abuse: study
(Reuters) – Only 40 percent of Marines and 55 percent of U.S. Army soldiers deployed in Iraq say they would report a fellow serviceman for killing or injuring an innocent Iraqi, a Pentagon report released on Friday shows.
-http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN0434582820070504
No. But most likely they are release 2.0 sockpuppets, created by Greenwald through operant conditioning. They don’t even know they’re sockpuppets. Big improvement over earlier versions of sockpuppets that you had to keep track of and manage yourself. It’s been interesting to see so many of them here today.
canadian bacon,
Something is lost in translation between us. That was not a smug comment. That was a comment by a person who has a few trips across the pond into the middle of those contingency operations. The point being that the fact that this is a discussion and servicemen have been prosecuted and sent to jail for things like this during the last 8 years means that the country knows that it is not perfect and attempts to correct things that come to light. Smug….indeed.
To be fair, Mr. Willis never states what kind of Kryptonite he is applying to what he has determined to be stupid. Silver Kryptonite causes schizophrenia, which seems to be the case here.
Syllogism:
The troops aren’t bad
The video shows troops doing stuff that looks bad
Greenwald mentions that the troops are following orders from the president and that war is bad
Oliver Willis blames Greenwald for the bad feelings he gets from step 2 conflicting with step 1
Blog war!
Well, but does the big picture make them “good guys” or not??
And if the truth is not, shouldn’t not just liberals but all decent people hate this untruth that justifies so much death and destruction among the innocent??
From Greenwald:
Aside from the mountains of evidence making it undeniably clear how common such events are — (a) the enormous number of dead civilians in Iraq; (b) the countless incidents where the U.S. military killed large numbers of civilians, lied about it, and then was forced by investigations to admit the truth; (c) the definitive statements from war correspondents and even our own soldiers about how common such incidents are — just consider what Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the war in Afghanistan, said not more than a month ago:
In a stark assessment of shootings of locals by US troops at checkpoints in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said in little-noticed comments last month that during his time as commander there, “We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force . . . . [T]o my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it.”
-http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/07/iraq_video/index.html
“expecting to see an example of somebody smearing Greenwald by claiming he hates the troops… He says some liberals hate the fact that our troops are the good guys. That’s an altogether different thing” — Billy
Oh god.
“The second group without a clue are liberals who buy into the caricature of America’s soldiers as bloodthirsty savages who kill for the heck of it. Glenn Greenwald is in this camp.” — Willis (original post)
If you want to get all pedantic and stuff, get pedantic on Willis. Nowhere does Greenwald say anything approaching “America’s soldiers are bloodthirsty savages who kill for the heck of it”.
Willis’s strawman is ridiculous. And it certainly doesn’t accuse Greenwald of loving the troops. Unless you want to argue the various possible connotations of what “bloodthirsty” and “savages” could potentially mean, I think it’s safe to say that in that sentence, Willis is accusing Greenwald of hating the troops.
But, it seems that you’re beign pedantic about “hating” nuances and not pedantic about “bloodthirst savages” nonsense because you agree with Willis and disagree with Greenwald, so maybe logic isn’t your first priority.
I think the charge that someone is accusing you of “hating the troops” is serious enough that it should be backed up by a real quote, not your spin on what the blogger actually said. If the situation were reversed, Greenwald would probably be screaming “liar!” Seems to me, he uses that word or words like it a lot when he thinks someone has interpreted something he’s said in a way he doesn’t like. Willis’s point is simple. He believes the incident isn’t the norm and he believes Greenwald thinks it is. Infer what you want to, he doesn’t accuse Greenwald of hating the troops. Greenwald mislabeled the link and he should apologize. Maybe he was busy preparing one of his countless updates and didn’t have time to read Willis’ blog closely.
OLIVER YOU NEED TO CLOSE THIS THREAD…because the horse has been beaten, and at this point the issue is not Hawk vs. Dove, Conservative vs. Liberal, Veteran vs. lifelong civilian or even Democrat vs. Republican. The crux of this issue seems to have shifted to whether or not the actions in this video are an “aberration” or if they are the SOP for the American military and its members. I have to say that it is truly a case of Optimists vs. Pessimists in regard to this thread. I’m an Optimist, despite the actions that I don’t agree with on the video, I am confident in the knowledge that most of the people I serve with would say that within the confines of the video that is provided the actions are highly questionable. Of course the comments on this thread and the others that you started that are similar in nature have people quoting statistics as to the number of Soldiers who are “decent” being less than 50%. Additionally, “villains”, “thugs”, “killing for college money”, “FPS”, “bloodthirsty”, “racist”, “Systematic”, “Cold-blooded killers”, and other words and phrases that specifically give an indication that our troops have no honor. I have no issue with questioning the air crew or the ground team about this. But even though the majority of commenters here seem to be stating that they think the military is “fucked up” for lack of a better phrase I am still optimistic. Given the number of people that have said, “thanks for what you do”, or the number of people that have helped my wife with yardwork, running kids back and forth to sports practices, and just providing moral support when I have been gone far outnumber the numerous commenters on here who are turned off by the military. I would say those that are not simply outraged about the video, or questioning the handling of the case but are labeling Soldiers as less than human are “aberrant”.
I have had three instances where an “anti-war” person insulted or offended me, and those I remember with clarity. Unfortunately the nice strangers who said encouraging things to me over the years tend to merge, melt, and fade away in memory. Kind of the nature of the beast, so I am not surprised that so much attention is given to these situations where civilians are killed even though situations where our troops have aided, assisted, protected, sacrificed, and defended vastly outnumber these instances. It’s common sense so I won’t enlist that as a defense.
I have no problem with people that never served having an opinion, but what I do have issue with is the prescriptive manner in which they criticize. Much like a lady I saw on the news that was angry with the police because her son was killed in a shootout with police because he was caught robbing a bank. “They could have shot him in the leg!”, she said.
Most people who have never been to Iraq wiki the Geneva convention, and the rules of engagement, and don’t understand how it is applied. Nor do they understand the escalation of force. They are entitled to their opinion, but until you are in a situation of being fired at, IED’d, RPG’d, or receive IDF while you are trying to sleep you may not understand the frustration. Strap on 60 pounds of IBA, Sapi Plates, gear, and a weapon and jog/walk/ride in 100 plus degree heat for 6 to 8 hours at a time you will understand frustration. Trade shots with, attempt to encircle, and run about 6 city blocks in the dark with all of that crap trying to catch someone who you saw with thermals trying to set an IED, and when he gets away and you have to ask yourself, “Damn, is someone gonna die cause I couldn’t get that fu**”?
You also don’t understand that troops are generally where an Iraqi policeman cannot be. There is a difference between a Soldier and a policeman. A vast difference, and many times the mission focus is not on capturing. I’m not sure about what happened in the hours of days before this event, nor the hours and days afterward. I do know that some troops have behaved dishonorably and many of them are serving time. Some events are not crystal clear and “fog of war” is so cliche it almost hints at cover up. In my last unit I was a Platoon Leader and my Platoon Sergeant said, “Sir, sometimes you have to make a quick decision and hope it’s right. I think I would rather ‘ere on the side of living’ and explain myself later.” Not to say that this fits the bill, but even those of you that think that we are cold-blooded and heartless, and dishonorable have to admit that more than likely we want to live to see home again.
For you that feel we are nothing, and are outraged that someone would call into question your lack of firsthand experience I don’t purport to know the right answer that will get us out of this God awful mess, nor do I think I am smarter, or beyond reproach for my actions just because I wear a uniform. But I do know that at the given time in many situations the Soldier is the one with a whole lot more than the upper or lower hand in an internet debate on the line. You are entitled to critique him after the fact, but understand through your vote or your non-vote, the fact that you are a citizen of the United States you have put him in the place where he has to either pull the trigger and live with it(right or wrong), or perhaps not pull the trigger and die. And you, who are within your rights, yet so righteous, can only “imagine” what that is like…..but I’m optimistic enough to believe that you are an aberration.
Wrong. Willis accuses Greenwald of being buying into the idea (he labels it a “false” idea, a caricature) that “America’s soldiers” are “bloodthirsty savages” [a clearly negative connotation about the subject "America's **soldiers**"]
The original Greenwald post, instead attaches the negative connotation [in Willis' paraphrase "bloodthirsty" and "savage" words that do not literally appear in the post] to the POLICY and POLICY MAKERS (leadership) and primarily EXEMPTS from main responsibility the subject “America’s soldiers”
It is this transferral of subjects of main responsibility for negative connotation from “our government and military” and “the U.S.” and “the administration” and “we” to “America’s soldiers”
Willis was aware of this (intentional) change when he wrote his original post because he wants to defend the status of the former (we, administration, US, government and military) being “good guys” but chooses to dishonestly conflate them with the latter (“America’s soldiers”) because he thinks that it will make the argument easier because of the emotional manipulation attached with invoking “America’s soldiers”.
As such, his characterization of Greenwald’s original post is intentionally dishonest and he owes Greenwald an apology.
Furthermore, on the core substantive issue ["Willis’s point is simple. He believes the incident isn’t the norm and he believes Greenwald thinks it is."] all objective evidence points to the fact that Greenwald is right and Willis is wrong. Not as an opinion, but as a verifiable, empirical fact. For this reason Willis should issue a retraction of the entire column.
What about the Iraqi and Afghani people that have suffered so much?
Can you “imagine” what its like for them??
Why is this not more central to you??
Its not that the troops “aren’t human” its that the Iraqis and Afghanis ARE !!!
And too many have died and suffered because of us, not just the troops, but all of us
Though you are right. I am highly aware that as an American considering the Iraqi and Afghani lives as equal to our own, I am certainly an “aberration”.
Sad…
“I think the charge that someone is accusing you of “hating the troops” is serious enough that it should be backed up by a real quote, not your spin on what the blogger actually said.”–Billy
You have to quote? Fine. Willis violates that rule far more than Greenwald does. And yet you attack Greenwald.
“Willis’s point is simple. He believes the incident isn’t the norm and he believes Greenwald thinks it is.”
Ah, so now Willis only has to say what he BELIEVES Greenwald THINKS. So once again, Greenwald takes Willis’s “bloodthirsty savages” and takes that as you, Greenwald, hate the troops. Seems fair enough, does anyone really like bloodthirsty savages? I don’t think so.
But Willis takes Greenwald saying “This happens a lot” and turns it into Greenwald saying “American troops are all bloodthirsty savages”, and you give Willis a “pass” because Willis was simply reporting what he believed Greenwald thought.
So, once again, you’re saying Greenwald must quote Willis exactly. Willis can report what he believes Greenwald is thinking.
It’s a nice double standard, you’ve got there. I’m sure it’s got *absolutely nothing* to do with the fact that you support Willis and disagree with Greenwald.
“The crux of this issue seems to have shifted to whether or not the actions in this video are an “aberration” or if they are the SOP for the American military and its members.” -Dkelsmith
There is a group of folks who have a third position on this event. And that third position is that the *intent* of the pilot is irrelvant to a more important point. It doesn’t matter if the pilot was a “good” guy making teh best of a lousy situation or whether the pilot was a “bad” guy on the hunt for civilians to kill. What these people (including myself and I’m pretty sure Greenwald, among others) are saying is that the American public has been sold a war with no negative consequences and this video shows how much of a lie that is.
Reporters are embedded with the troops, controlling what they report, hiding the real costs. Pictures of dead Americans were outlawed from the news media for some time, hiding the real costs. The pentagon has a consistent track record of denying any incident involving US troops killing civilians, delaying any investigation, burying the facts, and denying the truth. When this Apache attack happened, the initial pentagon position was that the helicopter engaged a hostile force. This video shows there was absolutely no hostility. Pictures of torture from Abu Graihb have been suppressed by the whitehouse, burying the truth of that horrendous evil. Abu Graib was sold as a “few bad apples” but years later teh truth came out that the orders to torture came directly from Dick Cheney all teh way down teh chain of command.
The American public was sold a war that was promised to be in and out in six weeks and would be executed without any casualties and definitely without harming any civilians. And the pentagon and white house have done everything in its power to control the media to maintain that illusion, to keep selling that magical snake oil of a perfect and good war to the American public.
War is evil. Innocent people die in war, and that makes it evil. It doesn’t mean the people who pulled the trigger and killed those innocent people must be evil. But *WAR* is evil.
Willis is trying to twist that fact and is trying to turn the conversation into whether or not the apache pilot was evil.
INDIVIDUAL INTENT IS SECONDARY TO THE POINT THAT WAR IS EVIL.
This war is evil and this video shows just one example of why this war is evil. And the *fact* that this war is evil is in direct contrast to the propaganda Americans have been fed by their own government about this war.
And THAT is the point that a lot of people tryign to make, that this event, troops killing civilians, is not an abberation, that it is a regular part of war, any war. Whether they were good or bad individuals is irrelevant to the bigger point that this stuff happens ON A REGULAR BASIS in contrast to a pentagon and white house (and war-hawk) position that civilians are never killed in a war by American troops, that America always wages a guilt-free war without consequences.
We will be welcomed as liberators.
James L,
Never in anything you see me write do you see me say that I know what it is like for them. But if you have not been there I am betting that I know MORE what it is like to walk around in a combat zone every day than you.
I realize that Iraqi and Afghani citizens whether combative or non-combative are people. If you have not served in Iraq, I am willing to assert that I know that more than you do.
And considering any human beings life to be equal to mine is not an issue even though I was just a low-life Infantry Platoon Leader. But if you have not served, and your expertise on what “life” is like in Iraq is relegated to wikileak, NPR, FOX, MSNBC, and MSN and whatever blog you happen to be trolling, I am willing to bet that despite the concentration on killings and atrocities and cover ups that people talk about, if you have not served I bet I have:
1. PROTECTED more Iraqi citizens than you.
2. Hand delivered more medicine to local hospitals.
3. Protected more convoys that deliver food.
4. Set more perimeters around schools so kids could get in and out without being kidnapped.
5. STAYED when the damn Iraqi police and Army ran from militia.
6. Delivered more bottled water, cooking oil, and generator fuel.
7. Set up more outer cordons for impromptu wellness clinics that give kids and elderly routine medical treatment and shots.
8. Cleared more IED’s than you.
9. Walked through more Muhallas than you.
10. Made the decision to commit my Soldiers…men that I loved to situations because I KNEW innocent Iraqis needed protection or assistance from Sunni or Shia militia.
I anxiously await your smarmy retort……..
hello,
I can see that dissent is so very welcome here. Oliver you do good work and on the whole most reasonable leftist folk should be able to see that. If one strongly held disagreement is enough to have you set adrift on an ice floe then there be problems with viewers not the writer.
good luck
w/r
robert
to Dkelsmith
hey sir, when you over there?
w/r
robert
” if you have not served I bet I have: 1. PROTECTED more Iraqi citizens than you.”
Iraqis civilian deaths from the US invasion are estimated to be *at least* one-hundred-thousand dead, with the upper end being half a million, or even maybe close to one million CIVILIANS dead.
Because we invaded.
You personally may have protected more Iraqi civilians than you have killed (I’ll assume you haven’t killed any), but that isn’t as important as the cumulative effect of, say, a quarter million Iraqi civilians killed because we invaded.
Cumulatively speaking, did you and all others sent to Iraq, did you *help* enough Iraqi civilians enough to justify *killing* a quarter million of them?
What evil was so great that justified that we invade and continue to occupy years and years later, and justified the deaths of a quarter million innocent Iraqis as a result of our invasion?
If there is no greater evil to justify this lesser evil of a quarter-million dead innocents, then the *invasion* and the *occupation* is the greater evil.
If you want an analogy, the cause for war is like gangrene in your foot, and the evil of war is the negative consequences of amputating your own foot. If you don’t amputate, you die. If you amputate, you lose your foot but live. Amputation is the lesser evil compared to dying fo gangrene.
The cost of amputating Iraq is a quarter million dead civilians. And if we hadn’t invaded? Well, it turns out there was no gangrene in Iraq. No WMD’s, no anthrax, no Al queda (until after we invaded). Basically, we amputated a perfectly good foot. And every day we remain in occupation of Iraq, is like we’re cutting that perfectly good, non-gangrene leg a little bit higher.
This video just highlights that there is a cost to war. civilians are killed by americans. Whether intentional or not. Whether bloodthirsty or humanitarian, is irrelevant to the cumulative effect. War is evil, despite what the pentagon, white house, and hawks would have you believe about it being clean and pristine and guilt-free.
War is evil and the only way to justify was is if there is a greater evil if you don’t wage war.
@ Greg London,
The facts you stated are irrefutable to most people. And you are right, there are no WMD’s in Iraq. A lot of people thought that, and we KNEW that after a while. Believe it or not, I didn’t agree with the decision, but I honored my oath. Had I been pumping a threat to America and all of that stuff in my posts you would have owned me. Not saying at all, that I own you. But you ignored the fact that I was addressing people that classify the military as bloodthirsty heathens that have no regard for life. And that insinuate genocide, and racist behavior is our standard operating procedure. I mean really, you show me when a bunch of military guys looked at each other and said, “Man, I’m bored, let’s go blow something up in Iraq”. We were sent somewhere to do a job, and right, wrong, or indifferent we are the knuckle draggers that give up most of our civil rights when we swear an oath. Some commenters on this thread don’t realize that I am not defending the actions on the video, I am just saying this is not every day activity, and that Oliver was RIGHT to call into question someone characterizing us as freaking psychopaths.
I said most of what I have to say about the incident and about Greenwald at my Today’s Salon post over there. I agree with you that war is the real evil, and, because the technology we’re using now dehumanizes the “targets” so completely, it may be getting more evil all the time.
How does the good outweigh the bad??
Aparently I DO know more about the value of Iraqi life than you do, even if you were there!
I know that no matter what you did, saw or believe (need to believe) it does not, cannot possibly, outweigh all of the suffering and death the Iraqis have had to face.
-http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq
I know this because I value their lives more than you. And I know NOTHING that has happened or will happen is worth or outweighs with more good than bad all of the deaths and injuries and torture and suffering the Iraqis and Afghanis and Pakistanis and others have had to face.
Nothing.
I know this truth and nothing can remove it.
Who owns who??
Ummm….
1. I didn’t say what good outweighed any bad.
2. When did I say that what “I” (singularly) did outweighed all of the “bad” that has happened in Iraq?
3. How do you know that you value their lives more than I? I certainly didn’t say I valued their lives more than you. I did, however, work in an environment more dangerous than you that dealt with the Iraqi populace.
“I know this truth and nothing can remove it.
YOU know what you BELIEVE to be the truth just like I believe what to be the truth. If there was a clear cut right or wrong, there would be no controversy or discussion about this.
“I know this because I value their lives more than you. And I know NOTHING that has happened or will happen is worth or outweighs with more good than bad all of the deaths and injuries and torture and suffering the Iraqis and Afghanis and Pakistanis and others have had to face.”
Interesting. How do you know that? Do you know it in the sense that it seems impossible to you right now, or do you know it in the sense that you can see into the future and know with certainty how this particular phase of world history will end up. There is strategy and there are tactics. I’m not sure what the strategy is that our often flawed and failed tactics are designed to support. Not knowing everything about the past and not being able to see into the future, I’m not sure I’d say nothing could ever justify the suffering others have had to face since 9/11.
Stand by for more bad news. The Obama administration seems to be taking the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists even more seriously than the Bush administration did.
well, i just think after a certain amount of death and destruction and suffering, it is too wrong to be balanced or to have two sides about it…
what they have had to face is just too much. take any historical example you like. for me, this has just been too far.
well, i just think after a certain amount of death and destruction and suffering, it is too wrong to be balanced or to have two sides about it…
what they have had to face is just too much. take any historical example you like. for me, this has just been too far.
Translation: “Hey Dkelsmith, I will continue to ignore the fact that you don’t disagree that the video displayed behavior and actions that need to be investigated. Additionally I will also continue to ignore the fact that you are saying that you have spent over two years of your life in the “hell” that I have googled. Finally, because I have not been corrupted by military indoctrination I KNOW more about what is going on than you, because hell, you are just a grunt. Only I know that Iraqi life and Afghani life is equal to yours, because frankly, in an Orwellian aspect their life is MORE equal than yours because this is where I bother to make a comment. When they die and you don’t.”
Of course that is putting words in your mouth. I just wanted you to see what it was like…….
You people are all missing the point. This is the point. My Dad was a B-17 gunner. He shot at Nazis who were shooting at him. This Iraq shit isn’t war, it’s slaughter. More than anything, it shows that the American military is a cadre of pussies and bullies from stem to stern, rack to final resting place. It’s one solid mass of bullshitters who can’t defeat armies that wear pajamas into battle because they waste so much time shooting at reporters and villagers. My Dad wouldn’t have wasted his ammo, he had to preserve his rounds for an actual enemy.
I feel sorry for these losers, and God help them when they finally have to engage a real enemy. I can see those ‘copter cunts fiddling with the dials while hell comes over the horizon. That’s going to be a lot harder than wasting a few fat reporters.
-drl
Let’s concede, for the point of argument, that the men depicted in the video were insurgents. What’s your take on the two most objectionable aspects, the firing on the ambulance and the apparent disregard for the value of human life?
Great insight from a guy who has never been in a war, but your DAD has been in one. Therefore, you have the right to compare and call those of us that have been a war “Pussies”. Nice…. I bet you use a computer dating service too….
Loser….
I’m betting if your Dad was a B-17 bomber “Nazis” didn’t shoot at him. Probably German regulars.
Additionally, I am betting that you wouldn’t call any Soldier a pussy to himself…..continue to enjoy the anonymity of the internet.
I don’t know what I wrote “himself” that was supposed to be “his face”. I got pissed and rattled off a response and hit submit in about 10 seconds.
Look at those guys at the top of the page, all pimped out to fight – what? A few sorry ass insurgents in a few buildings? They remind me of the Nazis terrorizing the defenseless Poles. They even look like Nazis now. It’s embarrassing. My Dad’s Army would kick the living shit out of these posers. You know, we failed in Vietnam, we failed in Iraq, and now we’re failing in Afghanistan. Once we’d never lost a war and never started one – now we make up wars that we can’t win. We’re losers. Well, we did defeat Granada and Panama. I guess that counts.
-drl
Thank you.
D R Lunsford,
You are so outrageous that I am inclined to believe that your posts are simply gamesmanship to prove a point. Whether your opinion is assenting or dissenting, you need to grow up.
I’m heartily sick of “intellectual banter” that misses the main point, which is that our military has degenerated into a mission-less mob of hired killers, whose purpose is not the defense of our country, but the imposition of our will on defenseless people. We were entirely justified in taking out Saddam in Kuwait, and in going after Bin Laden in Afghanistan (another colossal failure by the way). We seized defeat from the jaws of just victory in Iraq – soon we will leave, all hell will erupt, we’ll either have to go back or just let it rot – an all the while there’s Iran working up their nukes and just waiting to spread their influence in Iraq. And here we are with our thumbs up our ass, all these high-tech toys manned by brutal killers with no mission but to follow the orders of people following orders of a shitload of neocons and other DC morons on both sides of the aisle.
I know a great deal of military history – I’m actually pretty damn militaristic myself. To see my country debase and abuse its military strength this way, destroying not only their equipment, but their moral edge and their ability to fight when the time comes to deal with China say, makes me sick to my stomach. This ain’t my Army. I want my Army back.
When the time comes to really fight, you are not going get far with a bunch of video-game jockeys twisting the dials on some dudes in the street. We need a coherent force with simple equipment and more importantly, a moral center that gives them the ability to persevere. For every reporter, pregnant woman, child we waste in these hellholes of our own making, we weaken our fighting men 10 times over. One day we are going to need these people, and they will not be there to answer the call, because just like the overconfident Nazis in Russia, they equate winning with ruthlessness against the weak.
-drl
@ D R Lunsford,
Well, you said we were pussies and we didn’t know about war. I have only been in uniform since August 14th 1990 so I am sure that there is a lot you can teach me before I deploy again. And I have only been in an Infantry unit on two deployments so I am going to defer to your superior experience and knowledge of Southwest Asian culture, language, customs, asymmetrical warfare in Baghdad and the current situation on the ground.
You stated:
I know a great deal of military history – I’m actually pretty damn militaristic myself.
Webster’s dictionary says that “militaristic” means that you are:
“A person skilled in the conduct of war and military affairs.”
This is absolutely the most correct grouping of statements written here.
“The second group without a clue are liberals who buy into the caricature of America’s soldiers as bloodthirsty savages who kill for the heck of it. Glenn Greenwald is in this camp.”
How very easy for you to condemn “the Bush/Cheney authorization and implementation of torture”. So you’ll also condemn those in the Obama regime who have failed to carry out their legal and moral duty to prosecute those crimes (and they were crimes)? And the warrantless wiretapping? (Though the Obama regime seems to have topped Bush by going straight to execution of US citizens without trial).
Yes, you Yanks are the good guys all right. A shining city on the hill.
What’s especially amusing with you Yank jingoists is imagining how hysterical you’d be getting if some foreign government were slaughtering Americans as casually as you like your military to butcher foreign men, women and children for their own safety, “just in case”.
Non-Americans killing Americans – evil, horrible, terrorist murderers. Americans killing non-Americans – either good guys killing bad guys or unfortunate but necessary collateral damage. Just hypocrites, is all. Like we’re supposed to believe some fat, heavily armed and armoured Americans swanning around a third world country with total air superiority and massive high-tech firepower on call, killing women and children just because they get a bit too close and they might be a threat, are “courageous warriors”, whereas some hapless peasant lads going up against all that firepower with a couple of rusty old AKs and an old artilery shell in a hopeless fight against foreign invaders of their country are “cowardly terrorists”.
Pah! Greenwald is an intelligent and observant man, but he remains an American and cannot help apologising for the acts of Americans in the service of the US regime. I’ll give you the views of a real anti-American if you want something genuine to get all girly and hysterical about, rather than having to make up stuff. Like many around the world, I was broadly well-disposed towards America and Americans before I watched what you regime has done over the last couple of decades, and the oceans of innocent blood that have been carelessly and even contemptuously spilled by the servants of Washington. I have been forced to recognise that the truth is anti-American. Keep on hiding from it all you want, it remains the truth.
Even speaking as a card-carrying anti-American I have to admit the wisdom of your comment, Mr Stark. US soldiers are admittedly not (mostly) evil men, merely ordinary men (some very ordinary) in circumstances in which they have little choice but to do evil things, and have many opportunities to do so.
However, the follow-on should be to look also at the ordinary guys on the other side (the ones American jingoists pretend are “evil murdering terrorists”), and to recognise that they are much the same as the American soldiers – namely mostly ordinary men in hard circumstances. It’s not just the innocent civilians and the women and children killed by the US military who are worthy of sympathy and respect.
The real moral difference is that the Americans are volunteers, in fights started by their own government, in foreign countries, whereas those who fight against the US military are either conscripts (in the case of the Iraqi military men slaughtered during the US invasion of their country) or volunteers fighting to defend their own countries or those of their fellows against US invasion and occupation and against the Quisling governments of collaborators installed and maintained by US money and military force.
The other main difference is that it must require an awful lot more guts, courage and toughness to fight for the Afghan or Iraqi resistance than for the US military, considering the odds.
“I am just saying this is not every day activity,’
Prove it.
At least a hundred thousand innocent civlians have been killed as a result of our invasion and occupation. Not all of them were killed at the direct hands of US troops, but many were. We killed about 8,000 Iraqi civilians in the first month during the invasion in 2003. That’s 250 dead civilians *every day*.
For roughly the month of April 2005, US forces killed 29 Iraqi civilians through direct action (US troops pulled the trigger).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Systematic_underreporting_by_U.S.
That would make an average of 1 Iraqi civilian killed by direct US action about every day or every other day.
This video may not be an every day activity, but that may only be because the pilot killed a dozen civilians in one day, meaning that statistically it might another week or two before something like it happens again. But the statistical average may very well be 1 Iraqi civilian killed by direct US action every day.
Also, from that same link, it talks about how the US government systemically *underreports* the civilian death toll. For one day in July 2006, U.S. officials reported 93 attacks when there were more like a thousand. Underreporting of Iraqi casualties has led to a widespread belief among the United States public that very few Iraqis have been killed, with an average “estimate” of under 10,000.
*This video* flies directly in the face of that underreporting and that “all is well” attitude that the US government is trying to forward. While apologists keep chanting the mantra “this doesn’t happen every day” or “this is an abberation” and so on all to downplay the civilian deaths, the statistics say exactly the opposite: this happens on a regular basis. civilians are either misidentified and killed by US troop or civilians are caught in the crossfire and killed by US troop on a *regular basis*.
It doesn’t require evil men for this to happen. Evil individuals isn’t the poitn. The poitn is that while the apologists keep chanting “this isn’t an every day occurrence”, the facts say otherwise, and this video is just one xample of those facts. There are several sources of civilian death tolls here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Overview._Iraqi_death_estimates_by_source
THe average seems to be about 100k civilians. All it would take for “1 Iraqi civlian killed a day by US troops” would be 365 days a year times 7 years, or about 2,600 deaths. That’s only 2 percent of the 100k death toll. It doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility that of all those dead civilans that we caused 2 percent of them by our own direct action.
If you have some statistics that say this is NOT a regular occurence, please provide a link. Unfortunately, the pentagon doesn’t do body counts any more, and they have shown their willingness to underreport bad information, so finding hard, hard evidence with hard numbers and dates will be difficult. But you simply *asserting* that this doesn’t happen regularly, in the face of all the evidence that points to the contrary, doesn’t hold.
The actual facts suggest that this sort of thing, US troops killing Iraqi civilians, does happen on a regular basis. It doesn’t require that the troops be *looking* for civilians to kill. It doesn’t require that the troops be “bloodthirsty savages”. The intent of the individuals is irrevevent to teh overal statistics.
This happens on a regular basis. This happens a lot more than teh pentagon wants to admit.
“and that Oliver was RIGHT to call into question someone characterizing us as freaking psychopaths.”
Just as a reminder, Willis attacked Greenwald for something Greenwald didn’t say.
I’ve yet to see Willis or any of his defenders acknowledge this simple fact. And the inability to acknowledge basic facts like that bring in to question Willis’s ability to speak to the facts and suggests that he’s speaking more towards his own personal worldview that “all is well in Iraq” and that “this doesn’t happen regularly” when the facts suggest otherwise.
Without troops you can’t have wars.
What’s not to love?
PaddyK:
“If you could do better, GET IN THERE AND DO IT”
Somewhat missing the point, I think.
What the US military are doing in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and around the world generally, is inherently wrongful, because it’s non-defensive warfare. In other words, killing people in furtherance of your government’s policy objectives, many of whom are entirely innocent victims (even those attacking US forces in defence of their countries, families, communities and ways of life). It’s not a case of doing it well or doing it badly.
It’s some time since anybody who is not profoundly stupid or wilfully ignorant could honestly claim they joined the US or UK military to defend their country, rather than to kill foreigners for pay and promotion.
” It doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility that of all those dead civilans that we caused 2 percent of them by our own direct action.”
Who caused the other 98%? I wonder what their rules of engagement are. Don’t blow yourself up unless at least 100 women and children are in close proximity? And please. No more wiki stats. But I’d be curious to know if you can get past your no war ever thoughts long enough to recommend some rules of engagement you think would have prevented these killings. Or is that too practical an exercise?
“Who caused the other 98%? I wonder what their rules of engagement are.”–Billy
You’re playing the “our invasion is less evil than their resistance” shell game.
I’m talking about the “Our invasion was MORE evil than our NOT invading” issue.
Those 100k civilian deaths are deaths that are directly related in one way or another to OUR INVASION. That 100k doesn’t include people dying in car accidents. It’s only people who died as a result of our invasion.
So, you can play the “Our ROE’s are bettern than their ROE’s” game, but if we didn’t invade in the first place, tehre would be no ROE’s. You’re trying to completely avoid the responsibility America has for invading in teh first place. We caused the situation that killed 100k innocent civilians.
And the question to you and Willis and all the other war apologists is simple, yet you all do everythign in your power to avoid it: If invading Iraq is the lesser evil, what was the *greater* evil that would have resulted from NOT invading?
That is where you war apologists have no legitimate answer. And that is why you keep avoiding an answer and that is why you keep twisting the question into “You HATE THE TROOPS!” or “We ahve beter ROE’s than they do!” nonsense.
100k iraqi civilians and several thousand American troops died because we invaded Iraq.
How many would have died if we did NOT invade?
The death toll for NOT invading is far less than the death toll FOR invading, therefore this war is morally indefensible.
I figured I’d get the usual Greenwaldian we’re only responsible for our own actions bullshit from you. Greenwald reminds me of a guy who had trouble holding onto his lunch money at school. Mentally, I end every one of his long-winded columns with “so there.” I don’t know what your problem is, but it looks to me like you just gave up the privilege of shooting your mouth off until we’re debating the next occupation. If you don’t have any realistic thoughts about how this one can avoid unnecessary killings, you should go back to Greenwald’s echo chamber. We’ll let you know when the next occupation starts.
The Marines in Marjeh operate under some of the strictest rules imaginable. If an insurgent tosses his weapon and walks away, he can leave the field. The Marines also gave up the advantage of night vision. The insurgents are smart. When we add a restriction to protect non-combatants, they take advantage of it.
How many would have died if we did not invade? Who knows? Do you think you do? Died where? Died how? As I said. Get ready to gnash your teeth even harder. Obama is even more serious about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists than Bush was. I’d love to hear you’re one of the weenies who didn’t realize Obama was an American when you voted for him. Now you know.
“How many would have died if we did not invade? Who knows?”
Oh, you know the answer. It’s zero. But to admit it means to admit that America’s invasion of Iraq was a moral failign on America’s part.
So, you’ll write paragraphs griping about anything but to change teh topic
Iraq had no WMD’s, no anthrax, no al queda, no connection to 9/11.
No one would have died if we didn’t invade Iraq.
You saying “who knows?” is the biggest lie that the hawks have to keep telling themselves to justify this war.
“” It doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility that of all those dead civilans that we caused 2 percent of them by our own direct action.” –Greg
“Who caused the other 98%?” –Billy
Wait, so, you are going along with my point that American troops directly killed the 2%? That statistically speaking American troops kill at leaast 1 Iraqi civilian every day? That this is not an abberation?
Well, at least we agree on something.
So who are the bad guys?
The Reuters reporter? The guy that got run over by the Bradley? The guy that got killed with the two kids?
Hmmm, I guess you did eliminate my posts. Lame. Lame and weak. No wonder we can’t win any of these wars. You guys can’t even handle a blog entry. Pathetic.
Good luck with the self righteousness. It’s a winning combination with moral bankruptcy.
Given that my last replies to you were stricken by the moderator, I’ll try to be gentle and spare your fragile sensibilities. Must be tough to deal with a conflict you can’t shoot your way out of.
You wouldn’t have had to protect any Iraqis if we didn’t invade illegally and on the basis of lies in the first place. You are like a bank robber who blames the guard for forcing you to shoot him. You volunteered to travel thousands of miles to someone else’s country, uninvited and unwelcome, and blow the living shit out of everything. No power plants, no water treatment, no hospitals, no schools, no museums. You put an entire country in the position of having to crawl with hands up everywhere or risk being shot, blown up or incinerated. And you wonder why you are in the position of having to kill or be killed. So spare me the excuses.
Oh har dee har har har. That’s fucking rich. Here’s a clue: just because some asshole politician says “go there and kill” doesn’t make it right. We’ve been through that after WWII. The entire war and occupation is an atrocity. Just being there, armed and controlling people you don’t even know, is an atrocity.And as long as people keep signing up and taking those fucking oaths, these atrocities will go on and on and on.
Nice hat. When people compoain about “long winded” articles, I assume the problem is their attention span. Which probably also explains your “reasoning.”
You avoid unnecessary killings by eschewing wars of aggression. Pretty simple formula, that’s ensconced both in international and US law. It’s also a good idea from a pragmatic standpoint– kinda hard to end an insurgency when the inherent nature of fighting the insurgency ensures that it gets local support and an unending supply of recruits. It’s called “beating your own head in with a stick” and that might also explain why you wear a hat. If you can’t guess, beating your own head in with a stick is a bad thing. Don’t do it.
Two other quick points (I know, your attention span…) First, whatever the rules of engagement (and I think you’re full of it when you describe them, but no matter), we’re sending the most expensive army, with the best trained and equipped soldiers in world history, to fight a bunch of sandal wearing goat herders who pretty much cost nothing to stay in the field. And they are fighing us to a standstill. That’s a losing proposition no matter what. We can “win” all goddamn day and still lose.
Second, what the fuck is it for? What have we gained by defeating an enemy that didn’t evenexist until we created it? Apart from contractors and generals, that is.
Wrong. The majority of soldiers are good people who want to do the right thing but who routinely do not do the right thing. This is not really their fault. Humans, thank God, by and large absolutely do not want to kill people. That is a problem for military operations. From the beginning of time, armies have actively dehumanized the enemy and desensitized the soldiers so that they can get over their natural goodness and kill people whether or not they have personally done anything to harm the soldier. They expressly do not want these guys to wait until they get shot at before taking people out. At the same time, the soldiers have to become hypervigilant being in a war zone or they end up dead. They see RPG’s where they would at one point have seen cameras because their lives depend on it. They also naturally develop a gallows humor about the whole thing because otherwise how could you live with yourself after you realize that you gunned down innocent people, including small children?
I have no doubt these men were not monsters when they signed up. But their training and circumstance conspires to create monstrous acts. Support our troops? Get them out of that hell hole before the only way they can live with the memories of what they have done is stoned.
Dkelsmith says:
James L,
Never in anything you see me write do you see me say that I know what it is like for them. But if you have not been there I am betting that I know MORE what it is like to walk around in a combat zone every day than you.
I realize that Iraqi and Afghani citizens whether combative or non-combative are people. If you have not served in Iraq, I am willing to assert that I know that more than you do.
And considering any human beings life to be equal to mine is not an issue even though I was just a low-life Infantry Platoon Leader. But if you have not served, and your expertise on what “life” is like in Iraq is relegated to wikileak, NPR, FOX, MSNBC, and MSN and whatever blog you happen to be trolling, I am willing to bet that despite the concentration on killings and atrocities and cover ups that people talk about, if you have not served I bet I have:
1. PROTECTED more Iraqi citizens than you.
2. Hand delivered more medicine to local hospitals.
3. Protected more convoys that deliver food.
4. Set more perimeters around schools so kids could get in and out without being kidnapped.
5. STAYED when the damn Iraqi police and Army ran from militia.
6. Delivered more bottled water, cooking oil, and generator fuel.
7. Set up more outer cordons for impromptu wellness clinics that give kids and elderly routine medical treatment and shots.
8. Cleared more IED’s than you.
9. Walked through more Muhallas than you.
10. Made the decision to commit my Soldiers…men that I loved to situations because I KNEW innocent Iraqis needed protection or assistance from Sunni or Shia militia.
Response: I have read this thread with a certain fascination. I have spent some time trying to figure out why. Later on you suggest that the owner of the blog suspend the comments because they are not leading anywhere. I agreed with your point, and now I know why. Legitimacy in American culture comes from having a regeneration through regression, too often a regeneration through violence, narrative. In essence, having a been there, done that story. I am extremely disheartened by what you write. I am willing to accept your bet that everything in your list does accurately reflect what you have done, in essence, been through. I also deeply resent that you are able to accurately recite such a list. As someone who adamantly and vehemently opposed the decision that led to your experiences I find our narrative incommensurable, there is no middle ground where we can meet. As someone who pays a lot in income taxes, the major percentage of which goes to support the US military, I see your list of “I haves” as experiences that lend you greater legitimacy in our culture that are paid for by someone who opposed the decision the led you to have those experiences. Every war the US has fought since WW II has been a war of choice against other people that did nothing to the US and posed no direct threat to the country or its people. And every one of these “wars” has provided Americans with been there done that stories that legitimize the violence done in the name of American citizens. As someone who “served” his country in the peace corps (a service that does not elicit the knee jerk “thank you for your service”) I learned up close that people in other countries are more than targets or pixels with a + sign on them. Much more. Further that they can never be. Consequently the narrative you express and those who disagree have no middle ground. As someone who opposes what you have done and come to know as a result of your “being there” and equally opposes the helicopter pilots and gunners being there in my name with the support of my money constitute two incommensurate narratives. I do not support you as a representative (in my name as an American) of what you have come to do and know in Iraq, period. There is no middle ground between you and I as you have expressed in your list of what you know as support for your opinion of what is revealed in the wikileaks video. There is no way I can see what the audio reveals about the helicopter personnel that allows any morality since I can see no way that their very presence in Iraq is in any way moral. Consequently I do not have to accept the various rationalizations that supposedly explain and excuse their actions. The counter narrative that you have supplied and thus lends support to the explanations and excuses of their actions is that “you weren’t there and can not know.” There is no way that you can respond to the further narrative that if they were not there, which is what I as an American, would have, then they would not be making the choices they made. You have no response to that. You went there and you have your been there done that story. Further, you have no understanding of the alienation of those who opposed this decision but remain Americans paying taxes to support those who tell us we do not know because we have not been there and done that. You were right, this discussion should have been shut down, there is no middle ground.
My definition of eviscerated is quite precise, actually, and that’s a fair description of Greenwald’s response to you. What’s loose is your ignoring the main points so that you can throw out those childish comments like “st Glenn” and the like, that you’ve been engaging in all along this thread. It makes it doubtful that you actually believe what you’re saying, or are able to defend it if you do.
I would easily agree that you are intelligent, but you are not acting intelligently here, nor have you made a cogent argument.
And my main point about this bullshit you’ve stirred up is that you’re feeding a right-wing meme that is false, the idea that liberals “hate the troops.” That has never been the case to any degree justifying the accusation. Just because there can be occasional anecdotal evidence that has been used against liberals in this charge, doesn’t mean it’s true. After all, “Rev.” Phelps is not a liberal, and he has picketed funerals of the military in really vile ways that are far more extreme than anything that anecdotally could be used against liberals, and no one would credibly state that right-wing conservatives “hate the troops” by citing him as an example of a conservative.
You fucked up, and you’re digging your hole deeper. I don’t know why, but I’d speculate that you probably aren’t good at admitting when you’ve made an error. It’s never easy, but it’s necessary to learn to admit your mistakes if you’re to earn thoughtful respect and justify any notion that you’re “like kryptonite to stupid.”
“I am just saying this is not every day activity,’ — Dkelsmith
“Prove it.” — Greg
Dkelsmith, if you have actual numbers somewhere that suggest this is the first time US troops killed an innocent Iraqi civilian, or the first time this year, or whatever, then I’d really like to hear it.
But all the numbers we *do* have suggest that this sort of thing, US troops killing Iraqi cilvians, has been happening on a regular basis for the seven years we’ve been occupying Iraq.
You either accept the facts at hand or provide facts that dispute it. Simply saying “this is not every day activity” because that’s what you want to believe is wishful thinking.
And once you accept the facts, the next question that immediately follows is what greater evil would there be if we did NOT invade to justify all these deaths? And as far as anyone has ever been able to show, there is none.
The moral failing isn’t this pilot or that gunner or that infantryman. It isn’t a tactical failure or a tactical issue. The moral failure is at a strategic level. We shouldn’t have invaded in teh first place. And our occupation 7 years later continues to inflict casualties on innocent Iraqi civlians and there is no moral justification for it.
The only way one can NOT reach this conclusion is if they have facts that show that the US invasion didn’t cause all those civilian deaths OR if they have facts that show some greater evil that would have occurred if we did NOT invade and some greater evil that would occur if we do NOT continue this occupation 7 years later.
If you have such facts somewhere, let’s see them. Otherwise you’re left with this war being a continuing moral strategic failure on America’s part.
um. remember that time when a bunch of Arabic speaking people killed a bunch of innocent people- EVERY DAY, AROUND THE WORLD? They kill & have killed more innocents than we ever will. Not saying it’s right but man… if you’re gonna blast OUR guys, make sure you don’t absolve these “innocent civilians” for their actions. If we take out a group of people over there, chances are, we took out a future terrorist/insurgent/suicide bomber. Why isn’t it wrong for THEM to kill innocents? This makes about as much sense as calling out the Christians for the Crusades & killing in the name of God, when Islam has drowned itself 10,000 times over with WORSE ATROCITIES, from time immemorial til the present. Your diatribe makes YOU sound like a sympathizer. Stupid pacifist attitudes aren’t gonna change the Iraqis’ minds! They’d ALL kill you, me, our children, ALL OF US, for NO REASON! @ least we keep the fight where the trouble actually comes from. They hate us. Don’t you get it? They hate EVERYONE. They delight in Death & MURDER more than our CIVILIZED SOLDIERS EVER WILL. Those fuckers always have caused the problems in that region of the world, & until we make all of those problematic areas but Israel a glass parking lot with a nuke, they will NOT LEARN TO STOP FUCKING WITH the countries who try to keep the peace. As far as our soldiers go & that Wikileak vid, i’m not excusing the act of killing innocent people. JUST PROVE THEY WERE INNOCENT FIRST. I saw the vid, & that “camera” looked like an RPG to me! no such thing as a 3-ft long camera… sorry.
I’m sort of mystified that you’ve received no responses to your post; perhaps you’re purposely being ignored. I’ll take a run at it though–
Dude, you’ve got issues. So you’re saying every Arabic-speaking person, every Iraqi is a future terrorist and would kill every American if they’re given the chance. Is that about right?
Quick!! Turn around! There’s someone behind you, and they’re different from you! Run, run!
Before you go, I have a question– So, you’ve never seen a camera with a tripod and a large lens, but you’ve seen a grenade launcher?
As far as whether this was an “abberation” or not, Glenn Greenwald just posted a 15 minute interview with a soldier who was in the same unit depicted in the video and apparently he didn’t think the video was at all unusual compared to the normal behaviour troops exhibit. Video is here:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/radio/2010/04/09/stieber/index.html
[...] entirely consistent with the investigation. One blogger condemns the video’s editing for its “disonest[y]”; another called the release, and The New York Times article describing it, “one of the worst [...]
Oliver, it is time to apologize to Greenwald. You accused him, wrongly, of arguing that US soldiers are bloodthirsty savages who kill for the heck of it. Be a man about it, please. Gracefully admit error and move on.
If you can’t bring yourself to apologize to the man whom you have unjustly and publically misrepresented, then at the very least, delete this blog post.
Veteran of “Collateral Murder” Company Speaks Out
WASHINGTON – April 9 – Josh Stieber, who is a former soldier of the “Collateral Murder” Company, says that the acts of brutality caught on film and recently released via Wikileaks are not isolated instances, but were commonplace during his tour of duty
-http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/04/09
Hey DRL:
As a former Marine, *surprise,* I completely agree with you. Pussies. Look like Nazis. Act like Nazis. You did good.
US troops fire on a civilian bus, killing 5 civilans and wounding 18.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/world/asia/13afghan.html?src=twt&twt=nytimes
I think it would be a conservative estimate to say that US troops kill 1 civilian a day on average.
I can see that dissent is so very welcome here. Oliver you do good work and on the whole most reasonable leftist folk should be able to see that. If one strongly held disagreement is enough to have you set adrift on an ice floe then there be problems with viewers not the writer.
good luck