Picture this: you’re an Iraqi civilian, perhaps one of the ever growing number of internally displaced persons, roaming the streets of Baghdad. You come upon a piece of seemingly abandoned US military equipment. Desperate for money, you approach the item, intending to sell it to one of the many vendors dealing in lost, abandoned, and stolen military surplus.
Bang
You just fell victim to the newly uncovered US military practice of “baiting”, and are now officially part of the “insurgents killed” count that is being touted as proof of how swimmingly the surge is going.
This practice has apparently been going on for quite some time, and while we may never know for sure how many innocent lives were taken in the name of inflating the military’s kill count to sell the war to the American public, we do know that the practice was so widespread and acceptable that, according to court documents, soldiers were planting “baits” on the bodies of people they’d killed illegally and, like magic, the problem would just go away.
This gruesome new trend of padding body counts with actual bodies almost makes one long for the days when they were just flat out lying to us about their numbers.
We have truely lost any moral high ground we once had.
Bush and company have metamorphed our proud American Eagle into a pathetic zionist pigeon defecating across the Middle East. Being a Viet Nam war veterean, I can say I am ashamed of our current military.
Correct me if I’m wrong but during vietnam I’m sure the U.S. military policy was to focus purely on bodycount, am I right?
Yet another demonstration of how the US military – from top to bottom – is comprised of war criminals – and not just war criminals, but INCOMPETENT war criminals.
The entire US military has to be rebuilt and retrained from the ground up to be a defensive US force that relies on highly trained troops and competent commanders, rather than the promotion-seeking ass-kissers and stupids we have now.
We could defend this country from just about any nation on the planet – or any combination of nations – with a defensive force one tenth the size of what we have now – and at one tenth the cost.
Of course, this will never happen.
Which is why over the next ten years, the Middle East – specifically Iraq and Iran – are going to hand the US public the worst military defeat in US history.
Iran and Iraq are going to bleed the United States dry militarily, economically, and geopolitically, over the next ten years once Bush starts the war in Iran.
Iran and Iraq will hand the US a defeat that makes Vietnam look like VJ Day.
It will cost Iraq and Iran millions of their citizens lives. It will destroy their economies and their infrastructures. It will nearly send them back to the “Stone Age.”
But they will win.
Because what the US seeks to do in the Middle East with its military is not physically possible to achieve. Certainly not with the morons we have in charge of it at this time.
But in the process, the United States will be responsible – in history’s eyes – of the worst devastation, the worst mass murders, and the most incompetent military actions in human history.
The United States has truly become one of the most pathetic nations on the Earth.
Are you doubting the Science of Man?
This is another inhuman tactic that we learned from the Israelis who, in response to the Intifada, are accused of taunting Arab teenagers into throwing rocks in order to shoot them. Like Jefferson, we should fear that there really is a just God. At the minimum, these tactics are self-defiling – -someday all of these sociopaths, that we and Blackwater are developing, will walk the streets of America.
Like most, I find this behavior disgusting, bordering on psychopathic. (And the border is narrow!) But like someone said already, anyone who thinks Iraq marks the first time such behavior has occurred might also believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny. There is no doubt that such actions will take away any “moral high ground” the US had with regard to the Iraq war, but that’s no great accomplishment for one reason. When you invade a country with your army for no valid reason, you don’t have much, if any, moral high ground to begin with.
Secondly, I sense, both in myself, and in the piece and the comments, a nascent belief that there exists a way to conduct oneself properly during war, that the fighting men in Iraq should be following some rules, now that they’ve invaded and killed a whole bunch of people who wouldn’t otherwise be dead. This is a fallacy. It strikes me that invasions, imperialism, military conquest, hegemonic desires, etc. — all things that fuel the creation of a standing army — also necessarily require that one be ready to “break a few eggs” to win. (I’m not sure anyone has ever accurately defined what “win” means though.)
Further, I’m willing to bet that the type of behavior noted in the piece is not universally decried within the military, much less the administration, or even within pockets of the US public. (Let’s just say some of the losers at Faux News wouldn’t be anywhere near as disgusted as we are, and leave it at that.)
The agents of the State, ostensibly acting on behalf of the US, decided that the Iraqis were less than people when they decided to invade and remove the leader that the agents of the State had installed! At this point, everything else done there is almost equally immoral.
Thank you for bringing this hideous information, Jason Ditz. All commentators, please keep putting this s**t our imperial wizardry is doing, in our face. The deceased Hoosier, Kurt Vonnegut was right, we have lost our MINDS. And certainly, our conscience.