Fiona wrote:

Galen Hekhuis wrote in message . ..

On Thu, 06 May 2004 23:44:30 GMT, Brian Nystrom
wrote:


That depends on how you define "isolated". I'm assuming that this has
happened more than once, but that hardly makes it systemic.
...

Wait a minute. We are expected to believe that these reservists came up
with things that Muslims specifically would see as humiliating? All by
themselves with no help? Do you think they took Arab

Humiliation courses

at their local community college?


Galen I think anyone would be humiliated at this stuff. I did not see
anything that would not fill a Christian or a pagan with absolute
disgust .

Agreed.

brian : i was being sarcastic. the world knows that iraq had nothing
to do with the trade tower bombings . WMD's are sort of in doubt
right now too.

Sure.

in an earier post I mentioned what happened to a friend .
i am pretty angry about that.
soldiers are not policing themselves in a mannor appropriate for the
circomstance.
US soldiers (and brits) are finding themselves in the same
circomstance that i would imagine the germans did with the jews.
dehuminize the foe and they can be mistreated or even exterminated.
the germans are not an ignorant barbaric race, as a nation quite the
oposite : but they did what they did and now we are getting a lesson
on how this can happen.

Point well taken. War definitely brings out the dark side of the human
psyche in many people. It's an ugly business.

i saw a night vision video of three men being shot by machine gun a
couple of nights ago. they were unarmed.

When did it happen? What was the context? We're they just hanging around
on the street having a cigarette? Were they approaching a checkpoint and
refusing to stop when ordered? Without more information, it's impossible
to say whether the actions were justified and unfortunate, or crimial
and punishable.

the humiliation the men in that iraqi prison were put through was not
just stuff that would play on the Islamic mind , it would be a crime
against anyone.

Agreed.

what you are looking at is an attitude. young men have absolute power
over a people that can't speak the language to complain and if they
can they are afraid to.
this has hapened before; and will again.

Sadly, I'm sure you're right.

the truly sad thing is there is now way out.
we had a program played here in Canada , A W5 CBC production . It was
about the bush , bin laden ties and soudi arabia. It was most
interesting.
going to war seams easy. how george gets you out of it is going to be
a task.

That was known beforehand. The people crying about it are the ADD, short
attention span crowd who want everything RIGHT NOW. That was never going
to happen and anyone with any sense knows that.

Yes, there have been unexpected twists and turns and attendant changes
in strategy and tactics, but that's the nature of war. War is untidy.
War is unpredictable. People forget that for every person here who
was/is strategizing, there's a counterpart on the other side who's
trying to undermine that strategy. It's huge, deadly chess match. The
outcome is never certain until it happens.

though i dissagree with your view you are quite eliquent. i an sure
you don't carry a natural hatred for arabs at large, right now though
the coalition of the willing seams to.

I don't agree with that at all, neither from the military of civilian
perspectives. The overwhelming majority of those involve have no hatred
of Arabs at all and would rather be helping to build schools and
hospitals and other infrastructure than fighting insurgents. I
absolutely refuse to believe that we are the bad guys in this situation,
the actions of a few miscreants notwithstanding.

the news not allowed out of
iraq is frightening . your own media is not allowed to show coffins,
body bags or the bodies of dead US soldiers.

Think what you will, but that's out of respect for the dead and their
families. There is no shortage of news about casualties. PBS has a roll
call of them every night on the news. Information about them is
published on several government web sites and updated in a timely
manner. Hell, Nightline did a program where they read off names for the
entire show! No one is hiding information regarding those who've made
the ultimate sacrifice.

i think you will change your mind, eventually ( 10 years or so ) but
only if i am wrong....

I doubt it, but you never know. The problem now is that everyone is
emotionally involved. Years from now when the final outcome is known and
we can look at the war dispassionately, it will be easier to determine
whether it was the right thing to do or not. I thought that Vietnam was
wrong at the time and I still do now, though perhaps not for the same
reasons that you might feel that way (if you do).