Fri 23 Jun 2006
For some reason (don’t ask me why (I can’t explain it)) I wound up on Michelle Malkin’s site. On it she links to the websites for several of what are being called the “Camp Pendleton 8″:
I read their stories and it’s like a knife. How would I have reacted if placed in their situation? From my far away lens they are heroes until proven otherwise, and I can’t imagine how that difficult a case could be made. Instead they are being treated like serial killers, already tried and convicted before the cruelest of courts.
Personally, I expect marines to be killers. Establish the target. Take out the enemy. Go home. I don’t expect them to be trained to manage cluserf___s like occupying foreign hellholes. They’re sitting ducks in the worlds largest shooting gallery. Innocents played for patsies by the minions of big oil. It’s insanity, and when surrounded by insanity insane actions become perfectly reasonable.
How can it be seen as anything but surreal when you contrast how we treat the lying architects of this so called war to a marine placed in the middle of an eternal fire fight whose decided to resolve the madness of an unachievable objective once and for all? We train them for results. The world’s best killers. America’s centurions. The enforcers of the bottommost bottom line. How little we understand or respect the price of their mission.
As an empire America sucks. At least Rome was honest with themselves. They were rulers. When you messed with them you died. PERIOD. We live in a dream world. Idealistic obese hypocrites happy as long as our cable works. We wave the flag and jump up and down not noticing as neighbor after neighbor is ground into dust… collateral damage thrown into the world’s largest meat grinder.
As time goes by the great machine that is Washington D.C. will need more grist for the mill of public opinion looking for answers to the unanswerable. Hero’s scapegoated because they had the courage to say yes and liberals branded as traitors because we had the courage to say NO.
When does the madness end? When do we truly take responsibility for the burden of freedom that we all like to sing about? When do we send the real criminals to trial? And who would we send? Bush? Congress? The Courts? Ourselves?
Oh, heavy burden.
6 Responses to “Heavy Burden”
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June 23rd, 2006 at 6:20 pm
Thanks for sharing that. As the mother of a sailor, it breaks my heart to see these kids put into psychotic situations then get blamed when things go, well…psychotic. No doubt, horrible things have happened in Iraq! But, it makes my blood boil that our soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen are being scape-goated for this adminstration’s cold-hearted and criminal actions.
June 23rd, 2006 at 9:34 pm
Thought-provoking post, Editor.
When I first read it, I disagreed with your suggestion that war-crimes (specifically in reference to murders of civilians) should not be judged nor punished as severely as ordinary murders. Regardless of the immorality of the mission and the leaders conducting the mission, our military, even the lowest-ranking troops, still has a responsiblity to abide by laws during warfare…Fighting in a quagmire is not a blank check to intentionally kill civilians.
BUT, upon further evaluation, the structure of the military and its emphasis on blind allegiance to authority and groupthink distorts the moral plane on which the troops operate. The individual conscience is crushed under the weight of “the mission” and the group mentality that is charged with carrying it out. Additionally, when civilian casualties occur so rampantly as a result of unintentional negligence or a genuinely unavoidable component of the mission, how can the troops differentiate between when murder is part of the mission and when it is just murder? Chief responsibility for such massacres, as you imply, must reside up the chain of command. How high is not subject for debate. Obviously, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld should be impeached and/or tried in criminal court for war-crimes. But the question is, how low on the chain of command do we charge with responsibility? And how severe must the punishment be?
June 24th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
Marines and all service members that I’m aware are taught more than just killing. They are taught the honorable way to engage in warfare. Ripping shit up in a firefight is one thing. Pulling an unarmed Iraqi (civilian, insurgent, uniformed, whatever) and killing them without provocation is murder. Plain and simple.
If any of these guys are found to have done that or even so much as cheered about it, I want them locked up and punished. I’m going to assume they are indeed heroes as well, just as I would consider someone innocent until proven guilty. What I won’t do is give them a pass…nor turn and look the other way on such activity just because these kids have more guts than all of us put together (they do).
What this boils down to - the reports of killing innocent civilians - is leadership. These kids lack it from top down. This much is obvious. But they are singular in battle and are trained to make the right decisions, no matter how hard that is to do sometimes. I won’t pretend to know that that’s like, but I won’t excuse war crimes either .
June 24th, 2006 at 8:05 pm
I’ll tell you what I’m sick and tired of: this whole attitude of how these actions are the aberrations of a few “bad apples” whose training didn’t stick or who had personal problems or whatever. It’s an attempt to isolate and blame the lowest and most powerless man on the totem poll, the one who does not create the climate that led to these actions taking place. These investigations and trials need to start climbing the ladder of command, and climbing and climbing, and not stop up they land squarely in D.C. How Rumsfeld still has a job and the whole country isn’t screaming bloody murder is beyond me. Can you think of any way this guy could have botched this Iraqi adventure more? I can’t.
June 24th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
Right, Editor. It is a failure of leadership. Yes, the marines are well trained. But those in the street to street fighting are on the lowest rung and young. Even if they were involved in criminal activity, their commanders are responsible for them and the commanders of the commanders are ultimately responsible. That is the worst failing of this administration - no responsibility for all the disasters and scapegoating the powerless.
I truly believe that this nation suffers now because we did not hold Nixon accountable for all the criminal activity in his administration, Reagan and Bush I accountable for Iran-gate and whatever other illegalities in their administrations. It’s like cancer and now we have the mother of all matasticised tumors in this administration.
June 25th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
Reading Ron Suskind’s One Percent Doctrine the man who comes off as the worst to me is Rumsfeld. Allowing Osama bin Laden to escape because he let his political jealousies override his reason. Not having the courage to stand up for his convictions by allowing the military to get dragged into an invasion that he was against and the type of action that he had spent his career working against. A truly flawed man. When the Bush Presidency began he was my favorite cabinet member because of his apparent candor and his willingness to rethink the way Washington works. But now I realize that that was all a mask for a petty apparatchik plagued by self doubt