[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by Splitter

ROFL, more anti-American hatred? I've seen that video several times. It certainly looked like the camera man was armed, that camera looked like a weapon. Then he crouches and looks around the corner with what looks like the front of an RPG.

Mistake? Maybe. Hanging around with other armed people, possibly insurgents, to get a story is bound to be dangerous. That was a good shoot.

Notice that the helicopter kept moving the entire time. Why? RPG's, anti aircraft missiles, and small arms fire. They were obviously in a potentially "hot" situation.

Hind sight is always 20/20.

Did you know that Navy Seals were brought up on charges because a terrorist, Ahmed Hashim Abed, claimed they punched him when capturing him? Thankfully, they beat the charges and Abed walked away (ok, into custody) with a bloody lip.

Now, compare a country bringing soldiers up on charges for maybe punching a terrorist against...oh...I dunno...beheading someone on camera.

Who are the bad guys again?

Sorry, I am tired of the "warmongering, hateful, murderous Americans" stuff. If the US wanted to kill civilians, there would be few left at this point. Mistakes happen. Individuals may commit crimes. But the US military goes out of its' way to minimize collateral damage, often putting its' own troops in harm's way to do so.

Splitter

Mate, i say this in the most sincere manner and with no ill will at all. If what you say is true, then it's not really effective. According to reports from the coalition troops themselves that were leaked on the internet, around 60000 of the total 110000 casualties in Iraq are civilians.

I discuss these things a lot in another forum and people tell me it's standard operating procedure to throw grenades into a house before going in, even if that means not checking for civilians inside.

I can understand the troops fearing for their own safety, but when one's stated mission is to supposedly liberate someone and elevate their standard of living and then they do this, well, people are goint to talk in a negative manner.

Frankly, i have no reason to hate America more than any other country, including my own. But when i am part of an occupying force on a foreign land that makes me a legitimate target at all times and it's the duty of every able bodied person in the land to shoot me. Why? Because nobody among the people suffering from this inside their own homes asked me to be there.

I can understand the reasons your people might be detached from war and always view it as a noble undertaking, but i don't have to agree with them. You've never really had a war on your own territory since maybe the inception of your nation and with the lack of conscription it's even easier for the general public to detach themselves from it all.

That doesn't mean being right however, it just means lacking the collective memory and knowledge of what it means to have your entire way of life turned upside down and your prospects ruined for the rest of your life, because of a foreign intruder. And since people don't know this, they can't understand the ways it motivates other people to do horrible things in return.

Originally Posted by julian265

You might be tired of the sentiment, but there sure are a lot of civilians tired of the conditions (loss of infrastructure) and death brought by an occupying force.

That's pretty much the bottom line. To tell you the truth, if i was invaded this way by an army that's impossible to face in direct combat due to their overwhelming manpower and material advantage and yet their usual mottos consist of "being in a fair fight means you planned it wrong" among other things, i certainly wouldn't be looking for a fair fight myself. I would be looking to inflict the maximum amount of casualties with the cheapest tools and the less cost of life for my side.

As for the Iraqis wanting the coalition to stay because they fear the ensuing chaos of a withdrawal, well, the conditions for that chaos were actually set up by the action of invading the place. In fact, there were more christian churches in Iraq and there are still in Syria than all the Arab nations allied to the western powers combined (like Saudi Arabia for example).
What happened was actually a PR spin campaign to paint them not with their own negative traits but with the negative traits of other neighboring countries (who are much worse in their behaviours but nobody as much as gives them a slap on the wrist because they are considered allies), so that access to cheap oil could be secured.

Iraq had neither a real terrorist problem nor any influences from Iran before the invasion, because under Saddam both of these meant a short trip to an unmarked grave. I still don't agree with it, but it's results seems to agree more with the stated mission of the coalition than the chaos the same coalition ushered in. Toppling this power structure made it possible for both terrorist groups and Iranian agencies to infiltrate the place. As for the Iraqis fearing Iran, that's not entirely true since the majority of them share a common religion with Iran. In short, the coalition invaded to supossedly correct a bunch of thigns Saddam had perfectly under control, only to end up losing control of all of them in the process. No matter my personal feelings on the matter, from a purely objective point of view that's certainly not a definition of success.

All that is equivalent to me pretending i'm saving the local baker from the debt incurered by his flour suppliers, while what i'm really after is giving him a solid beating so that he can sell bread cheaper to me. After a while he has no debt to his flour suppliers because they simply won't do business with him anymore due to fear of having to deal with me, his shop is all busted up and when the guy is missing half his teeth and agrees to my terms i offer him some money to remodel the place, placing a nice fat loan tax on it and gradually ending up appropriating his business so that he does most of the work and i get most of the earnings. First of all, it doesn't make sense if my stated goal is to help someone improve his life. Second, it's not outright slavery or theft, but it's definitely a "protection" racket of the kind mafia organizations usually run.

What i'm trying to say is Iraq surely was no democracy under Saddam, but it was a secular, stable state. As it turns out, after the end of the occupation it will still not be a democracy, but it will also be unstable and minus 60000 civilian lives. I really fail to see anything positive in the whole affair. I'm not talking about Afghanistan, where a group that attacked your homeland was based, i'm talking about a country that's been finally proven beyond all doubt to have absolutely nothing to do with it and yet, there's nobody in an official position that will come out and say "you know what world, we really screwed up on this one as a leadership and as a state", it even usually goes the other way with certain people still trying to justify it.
Afghanistan is a different story, but once again instead of targetting the terrorist organization responsible for the attacks, the coalition managed once again to target the local's way of life.

This is the biggest mistake of the western powers since maybe the end of WWI. We all hear how people fight for a religion, a country, an ideal, even a ragged piece of colored cloth they call their flag and it might not even be a national flag but the flag of a military unit, a political party or even a sports team.
However, what people really fight for is the preservation of their way of life, their sense of identity, the ability to have some stability in life and the right to improve it on their own terms and not under terms imposed arbitrarily by outsiders who know next to nothing about the prevailing mentality in the place. Attack this and you get suicide bombers and other nasty stuff, which by the way is not exclusive to islam no matter how keen some high profile people are to tell you so.
I come from a predominantly christian country (discounting immigrants from other countries, the citizens here are 98% christian orthodox) and many times during our history there have been cases when people preferred group suicide instead of capture, especially if it involved giving the aggressor a bloody nose or blowing up the gunpowder magazine as a fortified position was getting overrun in order to inflict massive casualties to the invading force.

The thing is, apart from terrorists there used to be guerillas and resistance movements too before the televised reality-TV wars of our age. If someone in Iraq kills coalition combatants that doesn't make him a terrorist outright. If he videotapes and circulates footage of torture and/or ritual killings of prisoners then he is a terrorist.If a roadside bomb deliberately targets civilians that's terrorism. If it targets a military convoy and happens to kill civilians, then it's no different than what happens when a gunship chopper fires stray rounds at a crowd. See, i didn't even mention specific nationalities because, wether we like it or not, there are examples on each side of doing what is considered the accepted norm in war and what is considered over the top even for war.

The distinction between terrorist and combatant is not who they target by nationality, but who they target based on the target's actions.

A suicide bomber targetting civilians is a terrorist. It's not the method that makes him one, it's his target choice or even his disregard for civilian life if it's guaranteed that a hit in a certain location with a certain weapon will cause loss of it.
A person who kills people on camera in order to circulate this around is also one. It's his aim of demoralizing through terror that makes him one. A guy wearing an official uniform of a state is also a terrorist if he poses in front of prisoners that he tortures or deliberately targets civilians.

I think this is the core of the issue, until the same set of standards start applying to everyone you can't expect much support from the rest of the globe in these wars. We had this discussion again and someone linked various papers on the matter, some written by active US officers. The one and only golden constant in these papers, gleaned from studying the counter-insurgency methods of the British, was that "whatever you decide to do, make sure it applies equally to everyone, including your own guys...this shows the locals that even if they don't like you they can depend on you to be reasoned with within certain limits, making them less likely to revolt and take arms against you."

This is the reason the US can't win these wars, the double standards that serve to provide the justification for them.
Britain enslaved half the globe and didn't get that much flak, because the law was law for everyone involved. Again, that has nothing to do with my personal feelings towards any nation (i know better than to judge individual people by the actions of their governments).
It's just the facts on why the Brits, Romans, Byzantines and others all the way back in history were infinitely better at imperial conquest than the US is today...because first and foremost they used to admit it's an imperial conquest and then gave the locals back something sufficient under the standards of the time so that they would tolerate it.
What the guys in charge of today's wars usually try to do is draw inexistent parallels to the noble fight against the armed to the teeth Axis during WWII, when they are actually fighting starving people with no access to basic amenities like running water, or even a future for that matter, giving very few in return for the pain they cause and then talk it off with pretty words. Well, dogs bite the worst when they are backed in a corner with nothing to lose, even the small dogs...actually, especially the small ones!

Once again, you can see i'm not saying "the X people" or "the X troops", but "the decision makers".
Anyway, people will take offense to that, enough so that they will picket embassies even if they are not directly affected, or place IEDs if they actually live there...because the feeble construct of a justification for what's happening to them daily, simply adds insult to injury.

As for the argument of protecting the western way of life, if that was the goal then my country wouldn't be requested to send more troops to Afghanistan in the midst of a near-bankruptcy to force more people from that place into emigrating to more developed countries , but would probably be requested to concentrate all its means on its border and be assisted in controling the immigration wave into Europe, as it sits right on the proverbial crossroads between Europe and Asia.
As we speak, there's 500 Afghan refugees crossing the border DAILY. Where do you think these guys will go if Greece finally goes bankrupt? Where will they go if the whole of Europe does? That's right, they'll be coming to the last place left standing behind the buffer zone, good old US of A, with whatever means possible, in a constant imperceprible trickle and yet and in numbers that are too big to be effectively controlled without resorting to blatant genocide.

The local nationalist party here (these guys are fully anti-immigration, even in cases wher political asylum should be granted) went as far as to say "let's give them all some kind of limited citizenship so they can travel wherever they want, since we can't feed or absorb them, nobody is helping us do so and nobody is creating any motive for them to stay in their own country, but usually motives to the contrary".

And just to lighten up a little as i'm closing this, this is the way a lot of people in Europe perceive these wars...imagine i'm beating a guy senseless and at the same time screaming to him he's an idiot for not liking it, because he can't understand i'm doing him a favor, since the subsequent ride in the ambulance with the cool sirens, the buzz from strong painkillers and pretty nurses and everything is so awesome...all this, despite the fact that i have not been in his place since time immemorial to really know about what the experience really entails.

I think this is enough from me, with adequate pre-emptive argumentation to cover various possible counter-points. I do this all the time, preempting as much as i can so that i can avoid coming back to answer and gradually getting obsessed with stuff, as it's not healthy and it usually leads to flamewars. Much better to have one say, maintain some civility and leave it at that, in my humble opinion at least. In other words, i'll try my absolute best not to post on this subject again in the current thread

Respectully and no hard feelings as always. I don't hate anybody, i just think that disagreeing with what is widely accepted (or presented as being so by by certain people high up for certain gains to the expense of other people down low) can be healthy and promote some thought in all of us. Heck, it's how science came to be, by people refusing to do and believe as they were told by their higher-ups. Well meaning doubt and questioning of everything is the real essence of freedom and honestly, no human is ever free until he can start questioning his own self and what's supposed to be happening by others on his behalf.