30 May 2008
Iraq and stuff
Posted by Dirk under: musings .
My niece, Evangeline. She’s 2.75 years old. I’d pretty much do anything for her.
I’ve been reading a book called Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill and it’s got me pissed off. I’m not sure if I’ll finish the book though, cause it does make me so angry.
There are many, many things in this book that piss me off but one of the things is how these Blackwater operatives (and other mercenaries in Iraq) behave. There is no oversight on their behavior, they claim to not be in the military so they are not subject to the UCMJ but they also claim they are immune to civilian litigation because they are part of the “U.S. Total Force”. So, they can do whatever they want.
The Blackwater operatives in Iraq have been described as looking like action heroes from a Rambo movie. They drive around in multi-vehicle convoys, forcing other cars off the road and pointing their guns at anybody they see. And they often don’t just point and threaten, they shoot a lot too.
Some civilian casualties are accepted by military types. They say things like ‘you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs’. ‘War isn’t pretty.’ Other shit like that. But it isn’t people they love getting hit by stray fire, inaccurate high explosives (I mean, cmon. How surgical can a huge bomb be? There is a reason why people say “close only counts with horseshoes and hand grenades”. Those things have huge area of effects) and just plain old twitchy trigger fingers.
The war in Iraq is a 4th generation war. It isn’t going to be won by shooting more of their guys than they shoot of ours. Their whole army surrendered! (and then we fired them all. Some 450,000 of them. We could have just kept paying their 50 dollar a day salary and they would probably have been happy. Instead we made 450,000 trained soldiers unemployed and pissed off. ) The war will be won by winning hearts and minds. We are losing this war. Both in Iraq, where more and more people hate us and here in America where more and more people think that this is a waste of money and lives and we should get the hell out of Iraq.
Every time Blackwater forces some people off the road or points their guns at some Iraqi or shoots an Iraqi, we lose a little more.
The reason why I posted that picture of my niece up there (besides the fact that I think it’s a really great picture of her) is because if some organization harmed her and then wrote it off as acceptable loss, they would have made at least one, but more than likely 5 or more, enemies for life. I’d be going totally Red Dawn on em and setting up ambushes to kill as many of them as I could. (I’m surprised nobody has made a remake of Red Dawn yet. The original is over 20 years old now. They could totally remake it with Iran attacking us this time instead of Cuba. It would be great propaganda for all the ‘bomb Iran’ types out there)
And really, anybody with any humanity and empathy should realize that killing civilians and treating people the way we have in Iraq is not the way to go about winning this. It just seems so obvious. What we are doing is creating more ‘terrorists’.
Edit: Ugh. I can’t figure out how to get that text to not do what it’s doing around that picture.