As Reuters
reports on the videotape from alleged al-Qaeda members in Iraq showing the corpses of two U.S. soldiers perportedly killed in June, in retaliation for the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and her family by G.I.s, one finds fewer and fewer arguments against likening this clusterfuck in Iraq to the one in Vietnam.
U.S. commanders can decry the video as barbaric all they want, but that denunciation is meaningless in the face of charges that more than five American soldiers brutally raped and murdered a teenaged girl in Iraq, burned her corpse and murdered her family to cover it up.
The crimes, which are reported to have taken place in March, are the stated reason in the video for the killings of American soldiers Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker--who were from the same unit as the five who have been charged with the rape and murders.
The frightening parallels between Iraq and Vietnam grow with each passing day: lies told to get us mired in a war of choice; soldiers sent into conditions with insufficient training and equipment; an enemy of our own making that has blended into and become indistinguishable from the civilian populace; our troops, barraged daily with surprise attacks and boobytraps designed to maim and kill, snapping from the stress and taking it out on people who had nothing to do with what happened to their buddies; politicians who despite never having seen actual combat themselves overriding the advice and decisions of military commanders to prolong the conflict; war profiteering by those same politicians.
The list goes on, seemingly without end.
The only differences are the time and the location, and the lack of a draft causing your average American to share in the burden of sending a child off to die in a pointless war. These are minor details, the last made significant only in its implications; as long as average Americans don't have to face the possibility of losing a loved one to this farce, with only the families of an all-volunteer military suffering the losses, public outcry against the war in Iraq will remain muted.
Our soldiers have been sent into a clusterfuck from which they cannot escape, and in which they are forced to stay even after the trauma of war has caused many to become unstable and prone to the sort of crimes that can only really be gotten away with in a time of war. The troops
accused of the rape and murder of Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi, aged fourteen, and her family (which included a six-year old sister), have plead not guilty and if history repeats itself as it tends to do, they'll likely get off with a slap on the wrist or convicted while the politicians who sent them into that hell go free and unpunished for their own crimes.
And let's face it, the Bush regime--George W. and Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolten, etc. killed that girl and her family as surely as if they had physically done it themselves. It was their lies that got our soldiers stuck in Iraq, and that led to the atrocities of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Haditha and now this. It was their greed and their dishonesty that are responsible for the nightmare scenario being replayed in front of an outraged national community.
The Bush regime got our soldiers into this mess, it is their fault and their responsibility for every evil thing that happens in Iraq from beginning to sad, sick end. The question is, when will America grow outraged enough at these traitors to do something about it?
