do people actually believe that this sort of stuff hasnt occured in every other war in not only american history but all of time?

some americans probably do bad things, but jeez, these people might as well be suckin on osama bin ladens dick for crying out loud

SUPPORT OUR TROOPS

Let's say China decides to roll in here and "secure" some of our assets. After all, we owe them a lot of money, and we can be considered a threat to them.

To take out our military, they need to take down our infrastructure. Pretty soon no one in our cities has running water or electricity. Hunger becomes rampant. Crime becomes rampant. Maybe some of your loved ones die due to hunger, or getting bombed in the initial campaign, or get run over by a tank when it runs a red light.

How soon do you think that those preaching retaliation against the invaders will get followers?

What ingrates! The nice Chinese even gave us a new "progressive" constitution (with lots of benefits for their business interests) and let us have a vote on who would be president.

So, give Americans the above scenario and ask them if they'd be pissed - make sure to explain that any relatives that were blown up was "collateral damage." It's not like bombs discriminate.

If they're still all hoorah then congratulations - they're a zealot. They may be wholly misguided but at least they're not hypocrites.

It's not like being pissed in this situation is rocket science.

1.

Humans biologically form an in group / out group mentality. The invaders speak a different language and have a different culture. It's easy to dehumanize them.
2.

Getting relatives blown up means that now it's personal.
3.

Lack of productive employment (either for yourself or others) means that being a roadside bomb planter isn't that bad of a bad career choice.

"Pffft, we slaughtered barely as many civilians as our enemy did, so who cares? "

Numbers seem to indicate we slaughtered about 20 times as much.

So why classify these reports as secret?

Hey guys, it's WAR.

We're not playing cricket here. We're fighting an enemy who will do anything and everything in their power to harm us and our way of life.

I think most of these are actually a result of insurgent activity. I mean, the fact that we are there sorta makes us indirectly responsible even for those incidents, but you have to be fair.

This sort of violence would probably be going on even if we hadn't invaded to some degree or another, because of the degree of fundamentalism protestant in the region. The thing is, this is a cultural issue that they have to work out for themselves. We can't really help even though we want to, and at best we only prolong it.



Presumably because they felt that there was sensitive information about procedures that might be exploited by enemies, and they didn't want to dedicate the resources to censoring all of it. Realistically, the real reason is probably bureaucracy. It's highly probable that the usual bureaucratic forces that create enormous amount of mundane "secrets" were probably far outweighed all other factors. In large companies and the government, there's very little for any individual to gain by trying to declassify stuff, and plenty to loose if he or she makes mistake. Procedure makes it extremely difficult as well. On top of that I think useless bureaucrats feel more important if they can sit on stuff that is classified.

Hey guys, it's WAR.

We're not playing cricket here. We're fighting an enemy who will do anything and everything in their power to harm us and our way of life.

This is pretty crazy.

Not that we should be fighting fire with fire, and not saying we shouldn't ride the moral high horse, take the better road, etc etc BUT

I certainly don't see as much hubub generated surrounding the far worse atrocities that terrorist segments have committed over the past 5+ years.

Thus this gets a genuine eye roll from me.

Indeed spook.

I wonder if many people realise that one of the major problems with vietnam, both in the country and the view of the war in the US (and its allies), was that the troops did not respect the innocent civilians, which meant that more south veitnamese decided to join the north vietnamese (and seeing as the war started as an internal civil war, it shows that they felt they would be better off with the north vietnamese leaders).

This is a similar thing in Iraq. If you constantly target civilians, they are not going to see how a democratic government will be any better than the previous circumstances (I mean, how do you think they feel about democracy if the country that likes to call itself the embodiment of democracy treats them like crap), and possibly even better off. While the previously oppressed minorities may still stick with you, it wont help because by definition, you will still have more people that will be willing to oppose you if you push them too far.

What Cool Matty is trying to say, is that there are non-white folks out there who need killin' and they're not gonna make it easy and do it for us!

Does Wall Street get profits when we kill non-whites?