Out Of Control

George Bush is troubled.

The rest of the country, the citizens who are not sociopaths, are feeling something a little more like horror. For highly trained and disciplined soldiers to have allegedly committed not one, but several atrocities against un-armed civilians seems unthinkable to us, we are spared the grisly details of the bloodshed, instead our media coverage brings us pictures of the aftermath of an explosion, the cameras don't actually get there until the body parts have been removed and sanitized for American consumption. We read accounts of roadside bombs, of explosions that kill maybe 40, or 30, or 60, and we become immune to the killing, the war for us is fictional, it is happening somewhere else, it is sad, but it is what it is, and there is no one speaking seriously of a solution, because there isn't one. When our own elite soldiers flip out completely, we are horrified and outraged, but this is war, and some of those soldiers have been there way too long, and are fighting a battle that has no end in sight, and no clear benchmarks for victory. How can you ask soldiers to fight a war when they don't speak the language, and the combatants don't wear a uniform?

The Marines don't know Shiite from Shinola.

I'm not making excuses for the Marines, I think in this case, it sounds as if they were just in the wrong, that they knowingly committed war crimes. We'll wait for the facts to come out, and most likely, some low-level officer will take the fall as they did in Vietnam, when these sorts of things were widespread. We will have a tiny piece of due process, but the larger problem will go unresolved.

The larger problem of the breakdown of military discipline, and a war that's spiraled out of control will continue to show it's ugly face in these sorts of incidents, until we tackle the larger problem, and admit that we are losing the war.

| +Save/Share | |