Marines cover up massacre in Iraq

Originally Posted by Watts

Time to sound off with an opinion nobody here will like. Least of all me.

I don't think for a second that this was an instance where the Marines lost discipline. If it was, it was easily within the Marine's power to wipe a significant portion of the town off the map.

I'm not entirely sure about that. Even assuming that these people had not lost discipline, it seems to me that in order to destroy most of the town, they would have had to call in outside aid. Indeed, I feel that if they HAD kept discipline, then the destruction could have been even greater. Granted, if they had kept discipline, then it's very likely that it wouldn't have happened in the first place. Interesting paradox, no?

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(or the whole thing) This looks like selective targeting of people whom they thought were collaborators. My guess is the collaborators are not entirely willing and the insurgency has a gun to their heads figuratively speaking. But it hardly matters. It doesn't even matter if the collaborators were unarmed.

Care to provide any reasoning on why you feel this way?

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They chose a side, supported that side, and then found themselves at the mercy of the opposition. A particularly pissed off opposition whom their actions shared some responsibility for the death of one of their buddies/comrades. Kinda too late to make amends! Does anybody here think that the insurgents care about killing collaborators on the American side? They do it all the time. Whether they be police officers or civilians. It's okay for them, but not for us?

No, it's not okay for us. First off is that we are not in a conventional war. The enemy wears no uniform, and has no government. How can we expect to defeat them when we lower ourselves to their standards, especially when doing so just accelerates recruitment for the opposition? In a case like this (Hell, with pretty much any action that requires the military acting as a police force), I feel that Theodore Roosevelt's words are the best advice: "Speak softly, and carry a big stick."

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Due process of the law in a war-zone is reduced to "You want to stop me? Try it.". Iraq certainly qualifies as a war-zone. Fighting a insurgency is particularly brutal for all parties involved. Invasions spark insurgencies. So incidents such as these should not come as a surprise to anybody. I can't muster that much outrage over it, not because I don't find this repulsing but because it was only a matter of time that revalations such as these would start to come out in the press.

I'm not outraged at this either, truth be told. I KNOW that shit like this is inevitable, and I can understand why they did it. However, understanding does not require forgiveness.

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It looks like nobody here absorbed any lessons from Vietnam though. So I'll stop and let everybody wallow in their collective ignorance and watch the politicians and military feign their surprise and shame over this alleged incident. Remember, it's just a few bad apples!

Which completely excuses them from being punished.

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That's the very nature of warfare. Kill more people on the other side, so the other side gives up. Maybe if more people truly understood this there would be less wars. I somehow doubt it though.

This is getting dangerously close to the line of thinking which pervaded World War II, which (not counting the Jewish casualties) had body counts in the millions. Compare that to the casualty amounts in wars since then. It's rare to see casualties go over the 100,000 mark. While this is in part due to better equipment and training for the soldiers, it's also a result of abandoning this line of thinking, which led to both sides (Axis Powers and Allied) attacking civilian installations to weaken the enemy.

Jam it back in, in the dark.