Edmund Sanders has a brilliant story in Friday's L.A. Times titled,
Mercy and Murder at Issue in Iraq Death. Raheem Salman contributed to the story.
It describes the trial, which is ongoing, of two American G.I.'s whose unit attacked a dump truck filled with insurgents.
The insurgents turned out to be starving teenagers who were making $5 a day picking up trash, hence the dump trucks.
More below, and a call to arms.
As soon as we're finished gnashing our teeth and tearing out clumps of hair (or is that just me?) we reality-based Americans have a very ugly war to stop.
Okay, honor and admiration for all our glorious troops over there defending our culture, but I can't figure out how any of the actions described in this article amount to anything more than a war atrocity.
They opened fire on a truck. They'd been tipped that people driving dump trucks were planting roadside bombs. They saw a dump truck. They attacked it.
It's reasonable to imagine that they were duped. A smart insurgent might easily have alerted them to these "dump truck bombers." I would if I were the enemy.
One can second-guess whether the platoon should have approached them before opening fire. They didn't, and they weren't charged for anything. I wonder whether the Dept. of Defense listed the starving teenagers in their "dead insurgents" numbers.
Regardless, our troops opened fire.
When they found out they'd killed a bunch of starving teenagers, they were overcome with remorse. Not: one of their victims was lying on the ground screaming in agony. They shot him. To put him out of his misery. The way John Wayne always shot his horse with the broken leg.
Yeah, okay, war is hell. But we're paying for it. Our tax dollars, as it were. I was raised Catholic, which is almost as absolutist an illusion as Islam, and applying my old school Catholic absolutism, every one of us is almost as guilty as those soldiers.
I'd be interested in your comments.