The sons of Martha

Imagine a group of young men, many still in their teens. They are far, far from home. They are fighting a war the purpose of which they -and indeed their betters- cannot understand. Their old friends, safe back home, are only too likely to regard them with distaste, just as American soldiers in Vietnam were once regarded. What they obviously need is to be told how wonderful their alleged enemies are:

Iraq troops to get ethics training. US soldiers in Iraq to undergo ‘values’ training in wake of massacre claims.

A MEMBER of the US Marines unit accused of murdering 24 unarmed Iraqis said yesterday that his colleagues “were blinded by hate” and lost control before the massacre.

Interesting. I wonder when and if the leaders of the Iraqi Muslim communities will conduct an investigation into the atrocities perpetrated on Coalition soldiers -or indeed the torture inflicted on Western Aid workers. I’m not holding my breath.

I agree that the Coalition’s conduct in invading and destabilising a non-aggressing country is appalling. But surely, it’s the politicians who ordered this who should be reviled as haters and racists, not the ordinary soldiers on the ground, many of whom only joined because other career were denied to them by the flight of American jobs. After all, we blame the filthy rich pimp, not the impoverished prostitute.

Truly, it’s a thankless task to be a son of Martha -as Kipling once wrote.

In entirely unrelated news, one soldier claims that his service in the American army has made him unable to bear legal responsibility for rape. In other words, he has regressed to the level of a child. Poor lad.

Posted by Alex Zeka on Thursday, June 1, 2006 at 01:44 PM in Military Matters, War on Terror, World Affairs
Comments (3) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by elida_pamea on June 01, 2006, 03:28 PM | #

The swan song at the forum, onlineopinion, what?
Were you only there to advertise this sight?

Posted by Guessedworker on June 02, 2006, 05:14 AM | #

A possible second actrocity has come to light. I am dismayed but not surprised. All the raisons d’etre given for the invasion have turned out to be lies. There seems to be a fond belief in the coalition that no moral declension attaches thereto, that lies have no consequences. Now we are all asked to believe that the coalition’s purpose is not the pursuit of American geopolitical objectives but that of the interests of the Iraqi people. That way it was/is a just war, after all. Of course, if the Iraqis themselves don’t see it that way absolutely no implications attach to the moral health and public standing of the coalition forces. Heavens, what a thought!

But one has only to look back at military atrocities committed against civilians in the past - say, those at Oradour-sur-Glane, Lidice or My Lai, - to see that because steel always can rend flesh the circumstances will certainly arise when it does. Man is easily capable of the requisite polarisation and moral corruption.

I can see how the Americans might think, sticking-plaster style, that “educating” their troops in “values” will counter this awful product of war. But, really, that is already proof that they didn’t reflect upon the gravity of the undertaking in the first place. Only popular consent or the total, self-acknowledged defeat of the people themselves, lit by a powerful longing for peace, provide the basis for stable occupation. A political adventure with bombs and shells in someone else’s homeland is certainly neither.

Posted by Amalek on June 02, 2006, 08:56 AM | #

The controlled media’s fondness for uncovering atrocities can be a last-ditch way of avoiding the greater truth. For when the evidence is unburkable, it allows weaselly politicians to deplore unauthorised actions, to condemn the rogue miscreants for betraying our wunnerful humane values and honorable intentions, and so to segue effortlessly into another dithyramb of self-praise of our superior liberty, modernity, civilisation etc etc… which is why we must ‘stay the course’.

How much harder it would be for the MSM to confront its own atrocities of omission: how they swallowed all the crap they were fed about a unified ‘Terror’ enemy under a sinister organisation with worldwide tentacles like something out of a Bond movie. How eagerly the MSM conjured up a fiendish cavehopping mastermind, whose malignant omnipresence somehow made it necessary to invade, illegally, a country which posed no threat to the legitimate interests of Britain or America, and whose agents lurking within our walls supposedly force our leaders to tear up Magna Carta and the US Constitution.

Uncovering the odd war-bestiality—the like of which occurs everywhere an inadequate and ignorant occupying army tries to hold down a sullen alien population—salves the MSM’s conscience retrospectively. But it’s like slapping ointment on a cancer.

We know now who the big war criminals of the turn between millennia are. And we know that they probably won’t even experience the indignity of four years confinement to barracks like Lt William Calley, who by all accounts still manages a jeweller’s shop in Georgia. Does he watch all those TV shows about his era which focus, not on the ravaging of a small country in SE Asia, but on MIAs and the terrible psychological scars carried by Charlie Company and its ilk?

Do Calley’s thoughts turn sometimes to the 500 Vietnamese whose deaths he directed? And when Tony Blair is shuttling from conference to boardroom to speaking fee, will he sometimes wonder what a freshly bombed wedding party looked like?

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