Military Rape & Murder in Iraq.

The claims of barbarity being part & parcel of the policies carried out by the American military is the common fodder of the liberal media, watchdog groups like Amnesty International & Doctors without borders, terrorist movements like Hamas, Hezballah, & AlQueda, and even governments of the second and third world. Not to mention depending upon political season even other governments of the first world decry American actions as being ones based upon barbarity and needless force.

The screaming of our barbarism is commonplace enough to have even effected Ornery. For example look up Murdock and his replete series of threads where he proposed and advocated that the American military is simply killing a million Iraqis without even a moment's thought. And many of you here who still contribute joined the argument behind such claims. Charges of rape, murder, thievery, extortion, and common battery were all just part of how the vast majority of our military conducted itself day to day.

The fact is that our military was exceptional in that we didn't have the issues either the British or Australians had in terms of charges of abuse and brutality towards civilians to the degree and initiation they did. And it was their own domestic media that pushed for and demanded their withdrawals partly because there were rapes, murders, thievery, battery, and extortion being committed multiple times by their own forces. Whereas the American forces were not guilty of such things. Of course we were guilty of far worse by taking pictures of naked piles of men who were being humiliated in an attempt to stop the perception by the insurgents that being a member of jihad was without penalty.

Knowing that if you were caught you would be paraded in front of female Americans naked & forced to wear women's thong underwear had a massive crippling effect upon insurgents wanting to continue the fight. Even the issue of the trumped up and ultimately revealed to be a hoax example of what truly would have been violence towards a prisoner just barely would have crossed the lines of battery. Yet we tried, convicted, and imprisoned nearly 50 soildiers/sailors/& CIA agents for things that even our allies don't bat an eye at.

Fact is our military is an anomaly amongst the standing armies of the world, with the plausible exception of Israel, in that we do the least harm to civilians during engagements and deployments. It really is a record that has no equal compared to what has gone before in history. You want to know what our military holds dear and important about the issue, mission, and policies?

Try reading some of the stuff Stray wrote about how they treated civilians. He could easily have been a shoot first ask questions later kind of person. But he was surrounded by people who also thought the only way to be successful was to conduct engagements with the civilians in as peaceful a manner as possible even if it ultimately meant that that generosity and civility would be taken advantage of by an enemy which saw no problem killing civilians as long as some Americans died as well.

The School of the Americas taught soildiers from nearly every country in the world that the military should be a tool of last resort controlled by civilian laws. People come to us to learn how to have a civilian controlled military which doesn't routinely brutalize civilians.

Unfortunately, what we have tried to teach and routinely practice as a military has yet to catch on in the majority of the world. You want to talk rape & murder? Try looking into Sri Lanka, the Philippines, North Korea, Congo, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Zambia, Nigeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India- hell just about any other military currently engaged in the world to see REAL RAPE & MURDER as policy.

You know who conflates the almost incident free performance of the American military when dealing with civilians? People without perspective who find that the half dozen improper policy executions in regard to civilians comitted by Americans must be morally equivelent to the thousands of deaths and rapes daily commited by other militaries as policy goals.

I found a total of 8 American soilders who have been implicated in three rapes in Iraq since the war began. Two of the soildiers convicted were not even aware of the rape being done by people under their command but are still in jail because they did not control their men.

That speaks volumes as to our performance and destroys any argument that rape is a policy of the American military.

Of course finding concrete evidence of Americans murdering civilians is almost impossible due to the fact that googling "American Military murdering Iraqis" brings up so much left wing drivel that we have systematically "murdered" at least 1 million civilians that you can hardly find the three examples that were investigated and the one that was prosecuted but ultimately found to be baseless in Haditha.

I guess if you BELIEVE RAPE IS POLICY then the objective facts that rape is not policy don't matter. Nor does it matter that our behavior in not Raping and Murdering is seen as a concrete example of our weakness as far as our enemies are concerned, while also being an example of our uncontrolled imperialism when judged by our liberal media and politicians at home and amongst our allies.

http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/168/37155.html

Read this and then tell me how anyone can fairly claim Rape & murder are policy.