My point, and I'd hoped it would be plain, is that you can't possibly put over a hundred thousand troops into a war/warlike situation and give them enough autonomy to get the job done efficiently without finding that some number of them have gone wrong for whatever reason and committed war crimes. On the scope of war crimes this is a one on a scale of ten. If the expanded New Yorker bits are true it's a two on a scale of ten. If they had taken the prisoners out back and summarily executed them it would be a six on a scale of ten. Comprende?
In war, people do some really fucked up shit.
Meanwhile
Belmont Club points out,
Quote:
My first thoughts at the news of the Abu Ghraib abuses, the Taguba Report and the Presidential mea culpa which followed was whether posterity would recall the incident in the same way the Christmas Truce in the first year of the Great War is remembered today. The last grasp at enforcing civilized standards of conduct before the brutality of the trenches coarsened men completely. The fraternization of that first December so alarmed the generals that "special precautions were taken during the Christmases of 1915, 1916 and 1917, even to the extent of actually stepping up artillery bombardments" to prevent its recurrence.
The brass didn't have to worry: it was never to be repeated. After the Somme in the following year, infantrymen on both sides filed saw-teeth into their bayonets to make the thrusts more painful. The history which remembers the Second World War as 'the Good War' forgets how four years of fighting transformed Allies that refused to bomb German cities in 1940 into those that planned thousand plane raids on Hamburg and Dresden in 1945 to rain incendiaries on tens of thousands of Western Europeans as policy. There were no reprimands, only medals, for the B-29 crews that incinerated 100,000 civilians in Tokyo in the raid of March 9, 1945. And the sad balance of probability is that Abu Ghraib will be displaced from the front pages by the next terrorist outrage, the next Bali, the next Madrid, the next 9/11 until we find ourselves wondering why it upset us at all.
While it is important to punish everyone responsible for the outrages at Abu Ghraib, the only effective way to stop the corrupting influences of war is to achieve victory.
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We are at war, and the men in those hoods are the enemy. If we are at the end of this war, these events will seem like a long-run outrage. If we are at the beginning of this war, these events will seem like a drop in the bucket. I really have no way to know where we are in history but it doesn't exactly seem like victory is close at hand, does it?