The Moral Of The Story

Moral waivers or is that morality wavering? Either way, we no longer have the moral high ground, as if we ever did, and the body count of innocents (military and civilians) continues to increase. And no, I don't think this was the reason they hid this report. They didn't want the public to have the information, it might have made the election results worse than they already were for the warmongers.

Though Bargewell completed his secret report in June 2006, it has not been publicly released because of ongoing criminal investigations of three Marines on murder allegations and four Marine officers who allegedly failed to look into the case. Bargewell's report, now unclassified, focuses on the reporting of the incident and the training and command climate within the Marine Corps leadership; it does not address the actual incident in detail.

The officer in charge, Lt. Kallop is getting immunity to testify against his troops. Exactly when are the so-called superiors going to take responsibility for any of the tragedies in this debacle? From Abu Ghraib to Pat Tillman to Abeer Hamza to Haditha, the only ones who pay are the troops and the civilians. What's up with that?

When we were stationed in Germany, we lived on the economy (off base) and most of the troops referred to the German citizens as Herbies (after the original Love Bug, not the Lindsey Lohan remake!). It wasn't nice, it wasn't polite, but we were generally respectful of the people and obeyed their laws and customs, of which the beer drinking was very popular for some reason and speeding along the autobahn just rocked, usually when a BMW or Mercedes blew past my Gremlin.

Things are different now, we treat the Iraqis like they are interlopers in their own country. We force them to identify themselves, to stop their cars on a dime or be shot, we burst into their homes unannounced, shoot first and ask questions later. Maybe. Meanwhile, back here in the States, we have no empathy for those who are injured or killed. As people rush to help the Virgina Tech survivors, we act like this is the biggest tragedy in the world. A tragedy that is suffered daily by the Iraqi and Afghanis (remember them?) and we expect them to pick up their lives and go on as if nothing has happened. Until the next time, which can be in just a few minutes, hours or days.

There is a whole generation of children who are growing up knowing nothing but war and suicide bombers, not unlike the Palestinians and the Lebanese, except that we are the perpetrators of the Iraq war. We started it and we are incapable of finishing it. We are responsible for every innocent man, woman and child who have been, and will continue to be, maimed and killed by our actions. And our inactions.

It is no longer possible to convince the world that we are right, because we aren't. We can drop all the Number Twos we want, the smell of this debacle will never improve. Nobody believes us anymore, we don't even believe our own government and we certainly don't believe their reports.

The only moral to this story seems to be to do unto others what you think they are going to do to you, but do it first and leave no survivors. And people are wondering why our kids feel so disenfranchised and react with violence.

Crossposted at If I Ran The Zoo.