Slothrop
Tight but Polite
I don't know... I obviously wouldn't defend what they're doing, but it seems that this sort of stuff is part and parcel of what will happen when an army that's been recruited and trained in the way that the allied one has gets put into a position like they're currently in. If I tried to land a jumbo jet, my training and preparation wouldn't be up to the situation and I'd probably crash it, but the fault would lie with whoever let some yahoo off the street try to land the thing. Likewise, when you grab (in a lot of cases) stupid people, give them guns, train them to kill, and send them out to a place where everyone's trying to kill them then they probably aren't going to respond well. But IMO the fault lies with the people whose idea the whole thing was.foret said:think i was being a bit of a cunt when i posted that
however some of the stories of american war crimes ('little' war crimes rather than the ur-war crime of the war/occupation itself) sicken me, and i'm sure they are many more that happen out of sight; on newsnight a couple of months ago a former soldier spoke of how they could get away with killing pretty much anybody
some of those deserve everything they get
It's disgusting to see Bush and Blair expressing their profound shock that soldiers would behave in this way, and that the war would have been so nice if they'd just behaved themselves. The responsibility for these crimes has to lie with the people who caused them to happen.