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Originally Posted by superart
umm, its not common practice for US soldiers to vaporize Iraqi "figs" with a car battery.
It is common practice for insurgents to brutally behead civilian hostages.
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Neither is
common practice, really. How many rebels are there in Iraq, and how many beheadings have there been? A dozen? You have far more gruesome murders committed by Americans upon each other, back home, but in the western style we're accustomed to: strangulation, rape/murder *yawn*, gun in the mouth and so on. This is an expression of American culture, and sharply characterises it to outsiders (I can speak for the Japanese perception, at least), though it's not "common practice" at all. I'm talking about perceptions.
Apparently some rebels believe American soldiers are torturers. Listen to this:
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In areas controlled by U.S. forces, loudspeakers mounted on Humvees urged that "all fighters in Fallujah should surrender, and we guarantee they will not be killed or insulted."
From a loudspeaker on a mosque still controlled by insurgents, the fighters replied: "We ask the American soldiers to surrender and we guarantee that we will kill and torture them."
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Detect cynicism in that reply? So of course
we know those people won't be brutalised and their homes pillaged, if they surrender, but they're stuck fighting under the perception American soldiers mean to do evil.
And guess what? Americans are fighting too, and trashing the lives of countless civilians, for their own equally self-serving perceptions.