US Soldiers admit raping and killing 14yr old Iraqi
Two US soldiers have admitted raping a 14yr old while her family was shot dead in adjacent rooms. She was then shot in the head three times.
This is an illustration of what war is. It’s not about statistics or about politics. Those are the causes and measurements of war. War is about bringing out the very worst in all participants, and it drags everyone down to the level of animals. Actually, worse than animals, as animals don’t have a comprehension of their actions and the effects of those actions. People do, so people have no excuses. There are no reasons to rape. There are no reasons for indiscriminate killing. There are no reasons for barbarity to innocents. Unfortunately war means all good reason is thrown out of the window, because that is what war is: Coordinated from afar inhumanity to man. There are no ‘good guys’ in war, there never are. Atrocities are committed by every side, and it’s something that ought to be understood by everyone, but usually isn’t. Americans are not the hero’s in Iraq. The British are not the hero’s in Iraqi. They are aggressors with an extremely flimsy cause. They are the destroyers of innocent life, not the liberators of a people, nor the guardians of our freedom. Not in Iraq.
So, isn’t it about time that the ‘allies’ get the hell out of a country that they have no right or reason to be in, and stop adding their own misery on an already troubled people? Isn’t it time we took our unwanted noses out of someone else’s agenda, and let them sort it out themselves - rather than providing an external force to blame their troubles on, and to make those troubles worse?
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- Thu, 22nd Feb 2007 at 19:02 UTC
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skip to comment formHi Matt..
I love your website, and your thoughts.
My impression of war is that it is just plain out and out ENVY. If I rape and pillage it's simply because I lack enough respect for my victims to permit them the right to co-exist peacefully.
However, what comes around goes around … we have no idea of the karmic situation of those involved, could be she was once the perpretator in some other incarnation, in which case she has just passed on that karma to her agressors. As a species we are a wretced mess … good to see a young fella like yourself standing up for the cause of a world without envy.
t3rrence (tarunkrsnadas)
You might like my view on war
http://www.sevamrta.com/wasp/blogs/pages/war.html
Thanks Terrence.
While I'm a believer in the idea of "treating others as you'd like to be treated", which is a kind of karma - I'm not spiritual at all. I don't think past lives need to come into it for the karma principle to work. To my mind, if you're a good person, good things tend to happen to you, and visa versa. Some of that may be perceptual, but a lot of it isn't.
I have a similar opinion about God / Gods. The concept seems to complicate matters without adding any useful answers. By which I mean, pointing to any book as being an authority on right and wrong is a solution to precisely nothing. Too many people have a different book, and those that have the same one are too often on different pages.
I'm also very aware that soldiers in a war are under a very different psychological condition than those of us sitting at home. We're not the ones being expected to kill on command with emotional detachment. They are. We've not been trained for that, they have. We're not the ones seeing friends getting shot up in front of us. They are. It's an environment and a job that's prone to breaking the mental norms, and breaking people. None of that is an excuse for wanton barbarism, but it needs to be taken into account.
My take is that the responsibility doesn't lie with just the soldiers. Yes, they were the perpetrators, and the final decision was entirely their own - but no one has factored in whether they should have even been there. Should their superiors have noticed their mental states? Had they been in a war zone too long? No one can take constant dealing out life and death without eventually breaking down mentally in some way. Heck, even the ability to deal out death based on someone else's say-so is a kind of mental breakdown when you think about it. I feel it's the responsibility of superiors to notice when that point is getting close, and to bail them out - so that exactly this sort of atrocity doesn't happen. In the mean time those soldiers are in for a painful mental ride back to normality, if they can ever return.
All of which leads me to a single conclusion - war does nothing good for anyone. Except the guys getting oil rights at the end…