More of the random

[trinityvixen]

-So, in my dream, my being was represented by a girl with dirty-blonde hair who looked like my younger sister crossed with a girl I went to elementary, middle, and high school with. The entire group of Lost-a-ways was seated in an auditorium and the Man Formerly Known As Henry Gale was in front of them. He wasn't on a stage, dais or at a podium. He was just standing there, still bearing the scars from his torture. The "me" character was in the back, watching the scene go down.

Basically, TMFKA Henry Gale was saying they all had to go back. That they weren't finished yet with what his little group had in mind for them. And this was the craziest thing: they were all listening and agreeing. They didn't nod or vote or anything but that was the concensus. I jumped up and started shrieking to anyone who would listen--Locke! The hatches nearly got you killed! Charlie, Ethan hung you! Rousseau, they have your kid!!--and they looked at me like I was the crazy person (but not as though I were a stranger, so apparently the me-that-resembles-my-sister is one of the other forty castaways we never meet).

To a man or woman, they got up and headed for this door that TMFKA Henry Gale held open. The door led from this dark auditorium out directly onto Lost Beach. I kept yelling at them, to no avail. Sawyer turned around and smirked at me and walked right through the door, proving that even my subconscious thinks he's a cheeky bastard.

Finally, I sat down, dejected, alone except this one other chick. I turned to her and tried to salvage my sanity by going "Can you believe those guys?" She brushed this off, seeming to be uninterested--whatever had drawn her to this meeting, the Lost-a-ways weren't it. I tried again, "After what happened to that British guy, they want to go back to the Island?"

That got her attention. Suddenly, my stupid brain let me realize this girl was Penelope, Desmond's girlfriend. She's even more beautiful in dreams, let me tell you. She looked really intently at me and said, "Tell me more."

Then...nothing. Cliffhanger. My brain apparently whole-heartedly embraces ABC's stupid keep-you-hanging-and-never-answer-any-questions policy. Damn it. I hope I scored with Pen.

-Lizzy Lobster isn't dead! I couldn't get her on the phone all weekend, and now I did, and I am much relieved. Not least of which because this means that I won't have to get a new roommate come the end of our current lease. Kidding! I love you dude!

-I registered for a class through the Continuing Education school today. Now all I have to do is see what the department requires for approval for that registration and then get it for them. Oh, and the tuition exemption forms. Must get those. I also got a new student ID. Same picture, new ID and new sticker! That means many a museum is free for me again, so maybe I'll go over to the Met some weekend while we still have convenient access from our apartment.

-Having just finished Sex in History (there's another post entire to be made about that book), I read my Newsweek cover story over lunch and nearly tossed my Wendy's. The cover story is about the possible crimes of war perpetrated by American soldiers in Haditha. I'd heard rumblings about this, and was loath to pick up and learn more, but it's a train wreck of a story. I couldn't put the magazine down even as parts of it made me gag. The part that nearly made me cry was not the story of the twelve-year-old girl who was the sole survivor when the soldiers broke into her house but the fact that these same soldiers ordered four students out of a taxi along with the driver and allegedly shot all of them dead. Can you imagine if they did that in absolutely any other country in the world, what the response would be?

Newsweek seems to have indicted them, and I'm trying to remain impartial myself, but the truth is I expect there's a lot of this kind of thing going on. When I read Jarhead, the tone of the first Iraq war was so different from this one, I almost wished the first one had never ended and could have co-opted this one. The writer, Swofford, he wrote about how utterly boring the war was--being fought primarily with airstrikes and the like--which seems a blessing in comparison to the training of "Kill, hate, kill--oh, but when you're done, make friends?" that's being doled out today. "Fire the Generals," indeed.

Comments

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I should have clarified that one. I'm not so out of touch that I'm not aware of the numerous civil and human rights violations in nations such as you've mentioned. What I meant was that if it were any other nation than Iraq, would American soldiers have gotten away with this? We didn't get away with this in Vietnam--we did some, to be sure, but we still had a lot to answer for. With Iraq, all we get is prosecution of the people conditioned to this knee-jerk shoot 'em and let Allah sort 'em out. The people actively encouraging this policy? Still in charge.

The examples you site are not relevant to the argument I was making, and you're diverting the issue away by trying to show Americans as not worse than other people who murder for insignficant reasons. Whether it makes a difference to you or not, there is still a difference there. For one, that's their country. Some countries find us meting out the death penalty to convicted felons as barbaric, too, you know. Little as we may like the punishment relative to the crime in Iran or China--and don't mistake me, I find it extremely abhorent--they have laws in place that made it that way. If you want to make them stop making those laws, be an activist.

That's entirely different from our situation in Iraq, though. I don't deny we did stop Saddam from torturing and murdering his own people, but we didn't do it so we could do for him. By stepping into his shoes and attacking seemingly at random people we "felt" were responsible for attacks on us, we've become worse than he was because we not only don't know that that was the case, we just assumed one Iraqi is interchangeable for the one actually responsible for an attack on an American.

In short, your "people are bad everywhere" argument doesn't fly. Sure, people are evil. But we're going over there with the stated purpose that we wish to improve the lives of the Iraqis, that we, as a peace-loving, friendly nation, are above retaliations like the one purported to have taken place in Haditha.

And your "it's the insurgents dressed like civilians who are to blame" theory is the "accepted" one militarily. Try explaining that to the people who bury loved ones with American bullets in them. You think "We're sorry, but it's not our fault, according to the rules of military engagements" will make everything all right? That it will sour the civilian Iraqis against the insurgents rather than drive them into their arms or hiding until such time as we leave them to a country that is almost certain to be ravished by civil war?

Wise up, friend. If you kill a person wrongly, even by accident, they are not going to just accept that it was the person you meant to kill's fault. You have to work with them to make them hate that person before you squeeze the trigger. We need counter-insurgency before insurgency can even begin, and we're still making that a second priority. Which is why not a whole lot's changed in three years of war.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Wait, I'm not seeing your argument that this is different than Vietnam. That stuff took a little while to leak out, and then did, and then there was a media uproar and some lower guys got prosecuted and the upper ones never did. Here, it took a little while to leak out, and then did, and there's starting to be an media uproar and some lower guys will get prosecuted and the upper ones never will. What's different?

I agree that it's terrible and barbaric and I would have liked to have thought we'd grown up since then. But I think that A) acting like this is something new that's never happened before and B) declaring that it's being ignored is kind of silly. Obviously if it were being ignored, you wouldn't have known it had happened.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I think I got misled despite crying "this is a misleading analogy!" As I know little about the consequences faced by any soldiers in Vietnam, I should just keep my mouth shut about it. Stupid love of argument.

Really, the fact that all this has happened before and will happen again cannot be denied, given the disturbing parallels. What I meant by the "being ignored" bit is that we're not learning from our mistakes, either thirty-forty years ago or two. Our glaring errors, possibly and demonstrably deliberately heinous acts, and overwhelming arrogance are not being punished. We've lost thousands, but we've killed tens more without making ground. And, with each new Fallujah or al-Sadr, we keep saying "Just after this, we'll be able to stop and figure things out."

And things like this Haditha incident get to outrage the non-soldiers and disappear under the blanket homophobia absorbing the nation right now. What I find most unsettling of all is that blogs and some legit media outlets were starting not only from the point of view of "innocent until proven guilty" (which I'm not even sure is true of a military trial), but that they were denying a) that Haditha had even had an incident at all, and b) that Iraqi eye witnesses are reliable or that survivor testimony has any merit at all when the word of this unit is all that stands as their defense (forensics is in the works, and is currently rumored to be looking supportive of the Iraqi testimonials).

Gah. This whole thing is a mess, basically, and I'm outraged, especially after the scandal of Abu Gharib, that this wasn't immediately processed with an overdue amount of respect extended to the Iraqi side first as part of a counter-insurgency measure to prove that the US does not approve of its soldiers taking revenge like this.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I thought you were criticizing the media for not trumpeting more loudly about the story.

But there's two problems here. First, American soldiers aren't getting away with crimes like Haditha. Lynndie England and her cohorts are going to spend years in prison for that crime, and these soldiers will be in far worse shape if convicted over Haditha. There will be a court-martial very soon, after they finish investigatng.

Second, American soldiers actually got away with worse in every other significant war. Japanese and German civilians were often shot on sight or even tortured by Allied soldiers against military policy. Sherman wasn't just walking when he marched through Georgia. My Lai was prosecuted in Vietnam, but there were other horrors that went relatively unnoticed. Because this sort of thing is a tragic and horrible consequence of war, not a particular example of Bush/Rumsfeld-related perfidy.

But our military policy is to harshly punish retaliation against obvious civilians, and that's exactly what'll happen if an investigation finds that that's what happened at Haditha.

If, however, it was an honest mistake--well, it doesn't make the families of the dead hurt less. But it would also be wrong to punish American soldiers for it. The rules of engagement aren't just there to placate lawyers, they serve a real purpose. In war, the only restraints on a power's behavior are the power's own morality, and the fear of retaliation. Since the beginning of human civilization, soldiers have been expected to wear uniforms not because they look pretty, but because they distinguish soldiers from civilians. Because no one wants their own civilians to be fair game.

America fortunately is a morally upright power that doesn't believe in strict retaliation; we don't kill civilians just because they do. However, the rules of war aren't a suicide pact, and they don't give insurgents free rein to hide and shoot from among civilians. If civilians are collaterally killed, it's a sad effect of a war being fought repulsively on the other side, and there's little we can do about it. You don't get to hide in the church, claim sanctuary, and then fire from the windows.

Meanwhile, we finally have made some real progress today, with Zarqawi's termination.

In short (and yes, "innocent until proven guilty" still applies under military law,) if U.S. soldiers are found to have retaliated, then they'll be punished severely, possibly even with the death penalty. If they made an honest mistake, then they shouldn't be punished to placate Iraqi civilians--that would be unfair retaliation.

As to investigative testimony, people always lie. Forensics lie much less often. Remember the Jenin "massacre", where Palestinian eyewitnesses told us about hundreds of Palestinian civilians killed. Later investigation found that about ten Palestinian terrorists, and no civilians, were killed. When someone reports facts, I don't take those facts on face value without some independent corroboration.