News today that the US has drafted a new army manual, with emphasis on winning hearts and minds. It’s entitled, “How to Make Your Enemy Love You Once You’ve Bombed The Fuck Out Of Them.”
They just don’t get it, do they?
There is a faction of American society so arrogant, so self-obsessed, that they actually believe its possible the Iraqi people will love them, despite 5,000,000 orphans, God-only-knows how many slaughtered individuals, 7,000,000 displaced, the massacre of Fallujah, the abominations of Abu Ghraib – now known to have been sanctioned at the highest level of the Pentagon – the disgusting antics of Blackwater and other so-called “US contractors”, and the final degradation of Baghdad societies walled off by twelve-foot high concrete barriers.
Only today, the BBC reports a family gunned down by US troops. A 55 year old man and his 40 year old wife were killed in their home, together with their son who was a member of the US-backed anti-al Qaeda militia. Two daughters were also hit, one of whom died in hospital. The other is seriously injured.
Rest assured, America, if she survives she’ll love you all for the rest of her life.
It’s not what any American wants to hear, but the plain, ungarnished, truth – verified over and over by any and every nation’s military who’ve ever served with them – is that the US military are a bunch of badly trained, undisciplined, arrogant, trigger-happy louts who consider themselves cock-of-the-roost wherever they are stationed.
Of course, that is a generalization. There are certainly some soldiers who are a credit to the uniform they wear, but they are in the minority. Hardly a day goes by that innocent civilians are not killed, either in Iraq or Afghanistan, by the antics of US forces only trained in bully-boy tactics and “Terminator” movies.
A new documentary highlights the disgrace that is the American military, at all levels of command.
“Taxi to the Dark Side” lays bare to the world atrocities that in any nation less powerful than the United States, would have seen its Commander-in-Chief and associates locked away for a very long time.
An Afghan taxi driver, known only as Dilowar, was brutally murdered in the notorious Bagram Airbase, Afghanistan, in 2002. He had committed no crime. The film documents his fate, and that of others throughout Afghanistan and Iraq.
The New York Times edition, May 22, 2005, reported:
” On the day of his death, Dilawar had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.
“A guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.
“Leave him up,” one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying. Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen.
It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.”
It is a documentary worthy of compulsive viewing for every American citizen. The reason: because many in this nation refuse to accept the behavior of a military heavy on shortcomings and encouraged to mindless violence by its topmost officials.
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A sketch showing how Dilawar |
The atrocities of Bagram airbase, the heinous crimes committed at Abu Ghraib, were not only tolerated, but sanctioned right through the military command structure. And yet, it doesn’t stop there.
Every day, in Afghanistan and Iraq, innocent victims fall prey to the callous indifference of a nation requiring military victory for political gain. While the people of America entertain themselves with immature pseudo-democratic games – caucuses and primaries – that will make little or no difference to the militaristic course this country is steadily carving for itself, their fellow human beings suffer degradation, torture, and death at the hands of their own countrymen, who are hailed as “Heroes”.
And for what purpose? No more than to satisfy the great American ego, so badly bruised by the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11.
Those in charge of the American military machine probably consider themselves Christian. They fail in one of the basic tenets of Christianity: the charge to love thine enemy.
Yet they have the gall and audacity to expect their enemies to love them.
Filed under: One way street