Iraq's My Lai
http://www.lies.com/wp/2003/10/20/us-deaths-in-vietnam-and-iraq-by-month/
http://slate.msn.com/id/2111432/
The above pages have some graphs and information that will help clear up some of the claims I am making.
For a couple of years I have been drawing comparisons between the Iraq and Vietnam "wars". As we are able to look back on the early days of the war now, we are given a better perspective than we've ever had on this highly flawed war. Like with Vietnam, we began this war under the pretenses of stoping a global threat (WMDs and connections to Terrorism), the Vietnam war was started under the idea that we were stepping to stop the "red tide" of Communism encompassing the globe. But as the war progressed it became clear that there were a lot of other hidden reasons for why we sent so many of our youth to die in a nation that most of them wouldn't be able to find on a globe. Recently the news broke that some American Marines were responsible for the massacre of 24 innocent Iraqis including women and children. Unfortunately that news broke about 6 months after the event took place, and there has been a coverup undertaken to keep another scandal from surfacing.
My Lai is synonymous with the American sadism in Vietnam. The Marines didn't think of the Vietnamese civilians as people and hunted them like ducks. Now I know for a fact that there are officers in Iraq serving for the marines who look at the trip to Iraq as a hunting trip. There were these two marines (who were of Jewish heritage, I might add) that I was in Navy with in college and they always acted as if I was friends with them. Because of our "friendship" they used to say things to me that would just drop my jaw. Right after 9-11, we (those of us in NROTC at Tulane) all knew that we would be sent out to the Middle East at some point. But these two kids were hardly worried about it, they actually were excited for the chance that they might get to go. As one of them said to me "I can't wait to get out to Iraq so I can kill me some fucking ragheads"...never mind the fact that "ragheads" are actually more common in India and Pakistan than in Iraq. But that clearly showed that he, as a Marine officer to be, had views that could easily lead to an event such as the one in Haditha.
The thing I noticed in my time in the military was that being psychotic is actually a virtue in the Marines. Of the guys who were the craziest in ROTC, all of them were Marines or ended up getting kicked out of the military altogether because they couldn't follow orders. Marines in general are aggressive, domineering and shoot-first, which goes hand-in-hand with the kinds of massacres they've been responsible for in Vietnam and Iraq. Think that My Lai was the only one of those incidents in Vietnam? Think Haditha is the only one in Iraq? Unfortunately they will always happen as long as we allow our military to have the attitude it has. Marines are "killing machines", not "peace machines"...so why does it surprise us when a bunch of testosterone-laden, violent men (most of whom are also sexually frustrated thanks to being stuck at war in a country without the kind of sex trade that was in Asia or Europe) are committing these atrocities? I was actually surprised that this was the first story to break with such an incident. I figured after Abu-Ghraib there would be a story like Haditha coming out within weeks, but it took years.
Maybe the problem is that we give the kids the guns and stick the men behind a desk. I certainly don't trust a college freshman with a bottle of Jack, let alone a .50 caliber assault rifle. And keep in mind that MOST of these kids with the guns over there weren't college material or else they'd be on scholarship to a ROTC program somewhere. So we're placing our reputation in the hands of violent, testosterone-laden, horny, uneducated young men. Maybe we should make it a rule that only those who pass psychological exams and two years of combat duty can carry live rounds.
So this war is becoming more and more similar to Vietnam, yet we continue to make the same mistakes. Watch our next move to see what the future holds. If we increase troop levels any time soon, we will be seeing this war become a decade-long struggle between two rival factions. No matter what, we will see this prolonged struggle produce more and more incidents like Haditha. After all, as long as we're fighting a hidden enemy in a nation full of people different from us, we will continue to see Marines taking out aggression with trigger-happy fingers. But at least Saddam isn't killing Americans anymore...oh wait...he never really did.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2111432/
The above pages have some graphs and information that will help clear up some of the claims I am making.
For a couple of years I have been drawing comparisons between the Iraq and Vietnam "wars". As we are able to look back on the early days of the war now, we are given a better perspective than we've ever had on this highly flawed war. Like with Vietnam, we began this war under the pretenses of stoping a global threat (WMDs and connections to Terrorism), the Vietnam war was started under the idea that we were stepping to stop the "red tide" of Communism encompassing the globe. But as the war progressed it became clear that there were a lot of other hidden reasons for why we sent so many of our youth to die in a nation that most of them wouldn't be able to find on a globe. Recently the news broke that some American Marines were responsible for the massacre of 24 innocent Iraqis including women and children. Unfortunately that news broke about 6 months after the event took place, and there has been a coverup undertaken to keep another scandal from surfacing.
My Lai is synonymous with the American sadism in Vietnam. The Marines didn't think of the Vietnamese civilians as people and hunted them like ducks. Now I know for a fact that there are officers in Iraq serving for the marines who look at the trip to Iraq as a hunting trip. There were these two marines (who were of Jewish heritage, I might add) that I was in Navy with in college and they always acted as if I was friends with them. Because of our "friendship" they used to say things to me that would just drop my jaw. Right after 9-11, we (those of us in NROTC at Tulane) all knew that we would be sent out to the Middle East at some point. But these two kids were hardly worried about it, they actually were excited for the chance that they might get to go. As one of them said to me "I can't wait to get out to Iraq so I can kill me some fucking ragheads"...never mind the fact that "ragheads" are actually more common in India and Pakistan than in Iraq. But that clearly showed that he, as a Marine officer to be, had views that could easily lead to an event such as the one in Haditha.
The thing I noticed in my time in the military was that being psychotic is actually a virtue in the Marines. Of the guys who were the craziest in ROTC, all of them were Marines or ended up getting kicked out of the military altogether because they couldn't follow orders. Marines in general are aggressive, domineering and shoot-first, which goes hand-in-hand with the kinds of massacres they've been responsible for in Vietnam and Iraq. Think that My Lai was the only one of those incidents in Vietnam? Think Haditha is the only one in Iraq? Unfortunately they will always happen as long as we allow our military to have the attitude it has. Marines are "killing machines", not "peace machines"...so why does it surprise us when a bunch of testosterone-laden, violent men (most of whom are also sexually frustrated thanks to being stuck at war in a country without the kind of sex trade that was in Asia or Europe) are committing these atrocities? I was actually surprised that this was the first story to break with such an incident. I figured after Abu-Ghraib there would be a story like Haditha coming out within weeks, but it took years.
Maybe the problem is that we give the kids the guns and stick the men behind a desk. I certainly don't trust a college freshman with a bottle of Jack, let alone a .50 caliber assault rifle. And keep in mind that MOST of these kids with the guns over there weren't college material or else they'd be on scholarship to a ROTC program somewhere. So we're placing our reputation in the hands of violent, testosterone-laden, horny, uneducated young men. Maybe we should make it a rule that only those who pass psychological exams and two years of combat duty can carry live rounds.
So this war is becoming more and more similar to Vietnam, yet we continue to make the same mistakes. Watch our next move to see what the future holds. If we increase troop levels any time soon, we will be seeing this war become a decade-long struggle between two rival factions. No matter what, we will see this prolonged struggle produce more and more incidents like Haditha. After all, as long as we're fighting a hidden enemy in a nation full of people different from us, we will continue to see Marines taking out aggression with trigger-happy fingers. But at least Saddam isn't killing Americans anymore...oh wait...he never really did.
posted by Dan Pasternack at 3:35 PM
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