Understanding culture key to war

“what would Americans think if we discovered that the insurgents had been using Bibles as target practice?”

I already assumed they do.

I wouldnt care if arabs were shooting bibles. (I also assumed they did).
Why would that upset me I am not a religious fundamentalist.

Its not like we ran commercial airplanes into their largest buildings killing thousands of innocent civilians.

“Perhaps a better question to ask is what would Americans think if we discovered that the insurgents had been using Bibles as target practice?”, seriously? The SN uses the Bible as target practice all the time we call him Bice. So what you are saying James is that if Christians dropped death threats and beheaded people every time Christ, the Bible, or their religion was attacked or desecrated you would see a need for people to stop expressing themselves in a manner that is deemed offensive to Christians? What a crock of shit, the Quran just like the Bible is a religious document and just because someone believes in what is written within, does not give ANYONE the right to kill or bully others that do not believe, no matter what your culture.

This is why we are failing in Iraq. We expect our soldiers to act like saints while fighting people who would sacrifice women and children to hurt us. We treat captured enemy combatants better than our own homeless while our captive soldiers are tortured and beheaded on Arab television. We take a single soldier letting go of stress and frustration on a book – and it is just a book, not the whole of Islam itself – and translate it into the entire weight of the US firing upon Islam.

The American public screams to know exactly what is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, about how we are treating prisoners, and about how many poor Iraqis are killed – but only enough to temporarily pull their heads out of the Ipods and XBoxes, cry foul, and go back to their quiet, peaceful world.

Leave the fight to the military where it belongs. Pull the journalists out. Let the hellraisers and helljumpers do their jobs and get out. Quit wringing hands over what has already been done. The fact is that we’re fighting a war, regardless of how it started. The sooner that people focus less on re-writing its beginning and accept that loss of life is required to get the job done – and that the enemy we’re fighting doesn’t play by the same rules – the sooner we can get out.

To me, it seems that this column places inordinate blame for the failures of the war on individual soldiers rather than where it belongs—on the war planners. In any military of hundreds of thousands, there will always be people who will do bad things, regardless of training.

One Marine I know said, on leaving for his second tour, that now (after the successful invasion) his job would be to be a policeman, and that his training (to attack without holding anything back) ran counter to that. He was right, both then and now. The Iraqi war, like the Viet Nam war, is fundamentally different from wars that feature easily identifiable armies trying to push each other back across easily identifiable boundaries. This is why McCain’s analogies to Korea and Germany, etc., don’t work. Iraq, after the initial invasion, has become a long-term police action, where the bad guys hide within the populace and only emerge for cowardly sneak attacks. Effective counter-measures can only be local in nature, using local personnel. Here in the U.S., we wouldn’t expect police from Iraq, however well trained, to effectively control Detroit. The language barrier alone would make it impossible. This is the single conceptual and logical error which undermined and probably doomed the Iraqi war from the start. If it had been possible to invade, remove Saddam, and quickly leave behind a free and democratic Iraq—then the war would have been a sound idea. But the inevitable aftermath, given the history and geography of the country, involving hundreds of thousands of our troops engaged in a task compromised by their own superior firepower, meant that the Iraqis would eventually turn against us and use their newfound democracy to elect leaders which, at best, lie to our faces while simultaneously undermining our interests.

I didn’t experience Viet Nam myself, but bbwhine’s comment seems to be dead on: if the people you are trying to help don’t want your help, or only want it for reasons that work against your own reasons, then you are in serious trouble. The real problem in Iraq is that our current leaders didn’t learn the lessons of Viet Nam, and overestimated what superior military might could accomplish. They didn’t consider what would occur on the ground, at the tactical level, and that led to strategic mistakes.

If we are to avoid a disaster in Iraq that would compromise both our honor and power in the world, we have to understand the mistakes made at the beginning of this war in order to devise some way of going forward.