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Is it dishonest.........
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
.........for the army to advertise themselves as helping people out, distributing aid, building things (all of which are good and true) when the fundamental job remains to kill enemies?
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I was just wondering if soldiers are really truly aware of their primw duty to kill people.
This is partly to do with the Jessica Lynch thing about her joining the army to help her educationnnnnnnnnn
Killing enemies isnt their fundamental job either, its the enforcement of law or orders..The killing is merely a side effect of conflicting ideas.
Lynch shouldnt have used the army to get an education if she wasnt willing to fight. If she wasnt aware that the army may involve killing, i think she needs to go to another 'special' school to educate her.
Killing enemies isnt their fundamental job either, its the enforcement of law or orders.
I thought that was the job of the civil police?
Much the same way, i thought the soldiers job is (more or less) to do whatever the MOD (by way of the hierachy) orders them to do.
It is to protect and defend it's citizens.
The war in Iraq is supposedly to defend our nations as was Afghanistan as was every other war.
There are numerous ways to defend a nation and it's citizens, the armed froces do the violent bit.....
The purpose of the armed forces is to defend the sovereignty of the nation. Killing people is simply a sideffect of that.
yes the army is here to defend us but they do that through war, death killing etc.....
So surely it is against the Armys principles to be involved in Iraq?
They do that through physical activity, yes. But is it worth less than the diplomat, who sits and analyses diplomacy talks?
One scary 'bi-product' of the army is the raping of women, it happens in every war and its just disgusting but it is obviously a very male way of overpowering the womenfolk in a war situation.
The Military was created to kill people and break things. It is an extension of a nations political will pure and simple. The American military will complete a humanitarian mission if ordered to do so!
byny,
I did a paper at university on the subject of rape during war. The following might prove interesting reading on the subject. Rape is now considered a war crime. Up until the war in Bosnia it was not seen as such!
1) Brook, Timothy Documents on the Rape of Nanking Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1999*
2) Brownmiller, Susan Against Our Will:Men,Women and Rape
New York: Simon and Shuster 1975*
3) Chang, Iris The Rape of Nanking ,New York: Basic Books 1997*
4) Folgelnovic-Smalc,Vera "Psychiatric Aspects of the Rapes in the War against the Republics of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzogovina", in Mass Rape, ed. Susan Stiglmayer, trans. Marion Faber, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1994
I don't think it's hypocritical of them to be killing people because their job is to take over Iraq so that the above 2 points can happen - they ARE operating on a policy of not targeting civilians, and in ANY war a few civilians will be killed but I don't agree that their primary aim is to kill and destroy.
I guess it depends whether you are thinking of the simple fact that they are fighting, or the cause that they are fighting for.
That this has always been about unilateral domination of a strategic base of operations in the heart of the ME as well as control of the oil reserves became increasingly clear to the international community when the Bush admin began giving ultimatums to the UN in the first place.
Is this the fault of the troops themselves, by no means! However, they should recognise (regardless of whatever political views they might hold) that they are being used as mercenaries for international corporate hegemony and not as defenders of national security (since Iraq is no threat even to its neighbours, let alone the more powerful Western nations).
Ultimately, there is little which underlies this action beyond the removal of Saddam (which was not even the principal argument for the necessity of this invasion in the first place) that can be attributed to magnanimity.
This is my first war and some of it was horrible. But when I saw those Shiite people who suffered so much hugging the Marines and giving them flowers...I realized that the peace movement and left lie about things too.
Ok, so there's propaganda flying around on all sides so it may be difficult to see exactly what's going on, but you can't deny that Saddam's regime was evil...
1. he's mass-murdered thousands of Iraqi kurds in the North
2. he's put hundreds of children in prison for not joining state-based youth groups (more like brainwashing centres)
3. he has 18 palaces, overdone shows of wealth, while starving his people and telling him it's the fault of the West
4. he uses his own civilians as shields from Allied soldiers
...I could go on but that's not what this thread is about. The point I'm trying to make is that the Allied forces are not fighting for oil, they're fighting to destroy the regime which is making the Iraqis suffer. Of course that involves some death and destruction on the way but I think the end justifies the means - and the forces are not being hypocritical or dishonest in what they do. They're fighting, yes, killing, yes, but for a good cause.
But I do think that in terms of this war, if a few civilians and some of our soldiers and the Iraqi soldiers die, it will still be worth it if in the end Iraq is ridden of Saddam Hussein and becomes a free country with basic human rights - which it doesn't have at the moment.
Anyway, I didn't mean this to turn into an argument about the end justifying the means, I just wanted to say that I think that going to war with Saddam will be worth it in the end if we ensure a free state for the Iraqi people - it's quite clear they're been suffering for years and pnj has pointed out that they seem very happy that something is finally being done about it.
The argument against the oil angle is that when Kuwait was liberated...no one grabbed their oil. It was left to the people of Kuwait to decide who should develop it.
To quote a Shitte Muslim child in Baghdad: "We're safe now. The Marines won't let them hurt us."
I'm celebrating that my country is part of a coalition that freed these people.
Secondly, your argument against the Iraqi oil issue falls flat on the basis of the Kuwaiti liberation given that the Kuwaiti regime was not overthrown by our forces but supported. There never was an intent to go after those reserves which are already largely exploited by Western firms anyways. It is the Iraqi oil reserves which have long been denied to US/UK producers and thus the argument of their strategic importance to US interests remains valid.
Moreover, the Kuwait liberation was not a unilateral act, but rather a true global coalition effort with a clearly defined and limited objective of driving out the Iraqi forces. The current invasion is merely Washington's long planned sequel to restore control for US corporate iterests (which necessitates overthrowing the regime).
From the CIA world factbook:
Only 10% of Kuwaiti citizens can vote, all male over 21 (this is somewhat accounted for by the high proportion of foreign national)
The executive branch is entirely unelected, the hereditary monarch who is the head of state chooses the PM and deputy PMs, the council of ministers is then appointed by the PM.
Political parties are illegal.