[Kobuchi]

Originally Posted by superart

WTF does growing opium have anything to do with selling DVDs of beheadings?

BillA's transactional analysis could explain it better. I see a big demand in America for evil abroad. I was trying to illustrate how packagers , distributors, and pushers are essential to the trade, and most essential of all are end consumers who use the product to feel superior or victimised or to focus aggression or even trick congress - like the heroin junkie this is id appeal, reason in tow. This assumes people naturally need these feelings and unwittingly find safe objects (e.g. foreign) to dwell them in. This is a weird perspective, I know, and only one.

On the other side we have Iraqis feeling righteous, in precisely the same way, because they're looking at an Abu Ghraib pic of a man with electric wires clipped to his figs. They can make this to mean all American soldiers are bad guys, so they themselves must be the good guys. A "pusher" would call such material a hard dose of reality, say I won't feel right for days after seeing it, but then learn to appreciate the fighters protecting me from, or avenging, such a fate. Hey, maybe it'll stir me up enough to go fight those devils.

The currency, hate, just recycles and escalates between the "sides". To an outsider this exchange looks cooperative. A joint venture.

Originally Posted by Lothar5150

Did the school look like this, I'm sure it did. Saddam piled weapons at all the elementary schools. The locals wanted us to occupy this school if for no other reason to keep the children out of it...There where three kids at the local hospital who had blown off their hands playing with mortar rounds.

Wow. Over half of Iraq's citizens are under 15. So then just the ratio of weapons piled up at elementary schools to Iraqi soldiers must have been enormous. And that would be just a fraction of all the Army's weapons. Why did the Iraqi army have so many more weapons than they could possibly use?

Anyway, that's great you helped keep the kids from playing with weapons.

Did you get to destroy any?

Originally Posted by Lothar5150

That’s normal clearing procedure for urban warfare. Thanks for pointing out the obvious. You don't know the square root of jack.

Try cajoling a toddler off the road while balancing a sleeping baby in one hand and collapsing a stroller with the other. On second thought, better stay in your "real world".

Originally Posted by Lothar5150

The Marines and the Iraqis attempting to secure the town right now are all heroes.

Good job. Rescuing those people does make them heroes. Spread it all around. But how does that not make their methods essentially cowardly, just the same? A soldier putting his own safety ahead of civilians is cowardly, right?

I checked what you said about clearing buildings, and it appears the procedure in Fallujah is to pump the house full of metal, then blast an alternate entry though the wall, because there might be a fighter hiding in there. My apologies if that's just normal, common knowledge. Every house gets this treatment, and since fighters are now popping up in previously cleared neighbourhoods, I guess a lot of buildings will be cleared repeatedly.

This is for the safety of American soldiers. At some point, considering one's own safety at the expense of others becomes cowardice, whether it's one soldier betraying his platoon or one nation betraying the human race. Crossed the line there, don't you think?

Note I'm not suggesting organised cowardice is a poor way to win battles.