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wayloopy wrote:
This just makes me sad because it shows that this man really doesn't see the Iraqis as human any more, and I don't think we can assume it's just a song. He's been desensitized to their humanity, and he actually might be capable of putting a child in front of himself in a combat situation - he's clearly thought about it.
That's what today's military training has done to our soldiers. By design. I know I'm vastly oversimplifying this but here goes anyway:
A recent Rolling Stone article (and excerpted in The Week) discussed the training our soldiers receive. To my best recollection: In WWI, our soldiers complied with an order to fire on the enemy about 25% of the time. As a result, the US military refined its combat training, and has now achieved a near 100% compliance.
It achieved this goal by doing two things: 1) Bonding our servicemen and women together in ways that rival and exceed familial bonds, and 2) by dehumanizing any threat to that bond. Any perceived threat to the unit will be met with maximum allowable force.
This paradigm works fabulously on the battlefield, I'm sure. But plop these incredibly strained soldiers into the middle of a protracted (and seemingly unending) occupation, where anyone resembling an Iraqi could be considered a potential threat? Well, that training's in there pretty deep, and the results will be ugly.
I point this out not to criticize the troops, nor to excuse such dispicible and grossly insensitive behavior as we've heard about. Rather, I mention this because it appears to be a natural result of the design of our modern military, one that I'm sure our military brass was well aware of as an all-too-real possibility when this adminstration got us into this mess. And I fear it will only get worse unless something changes here at home.
