After a while you get numb to the daily enormities on TV news: houses bulldozed, buses blown up, etc. However, last night's report on US 'peacekeeping' in the Sunni Triangle was something else. It wasn't so much the behaviour of the troops (ill-disciplined) was a surprise, more that the 'movie-ness' of their actions, very much for the camera, was so clearly derived from Vietnam movies. The man in charge proudly claimed to have shot '2 or 3' Iraqis for firing their guns in the air. I think this was bravado, and untrue, but what's interesting is that he thought that that's what we want to hear. It was very strange. That they were brutal and stupid goes without saying -- that's soldiery.
mark s has said elsewhere that you have to discern Washington policy from frontline decision-making. This is true up to a point. But keeping these troops out there for so long (9 months and counting) is policy -- and having them completely untrained in peacekeeping is policy. The idea that experience in N Ireland makes British troops any better is cold comfort at best. It's hard to know whether the US sector is more hostile because of the US aggression, or whether that aggression is a reaction to the native hostility. Probably both.
― Enrique (Enrique), Friday, 19 December 2003 10:22 (twenty-one years ago)