It’s unfortunate that our troops are in Iraq. The fact that there are deaths is doubly so. The death of civilians simply heightens, egregiously, the tragedy and futility of warfare. But the waging of warfare with limitations on one group of combatants while the opponents are without so-called “rules of engagement� leaves me wondering whether I would not refuse to engage an enemy under such lose-lose conditions.
It seems to me our troops are being asked to fight with one hand behind their backs while their enemies have free access and no accountability to the rampant slaughter of their own lineage.
Anyone who has been in or near battle knows how bewilderingly fearsome it can be, how viscerally they are affected and how mindlessly and spontaneously one can engage any moving target, especially an enemy hiding in the garments of a “friendly� or the uniform of your ally or, for that matter, one’s own troops.
Why, in the name of all common sense, do we expect so much of our troops while placing so little expectations on their foes? Is it that we hold ourselves in such high esteem that we cannot imagine we are subject to committing an error in judgment in the midst of life-threatening confusion? Yet our enemies perform their atrocities mindlessly while glorying, it appears, in the concept of death for the cause.
We are simply not cut from such cloth. Cut us a bit of slack. This is war, not a sporting match.
I think I’d go to the stockade or the brig before I’d be ordered into combat hobbled by rules that threaten to incarcerate me for serving my country.
— Monroe Karl Deutsch, Thousand Oaks
Nobody serves their country by slaughtering innocents.
While having an inkling of understanding about the horrors of war, it is foolish to think that a professionally trained army should have no discipline in regard to the engagement of the "enemy". We have already liberated the Iraqis from their brutal master, why are they still shooting at us? There has to be a different set of rules for fighting a standing army and a different set of rules in seeking to pacify a conquered nation. If you truly seek peace in Iraq then you cannot continue
to wage war on the population that you seek to help. This of course calls into question the wisdom of our actions in the first place but that is another issue.
We cannot continue to be led by the same sort of mentality that bogged us down in Vietnam best expressed by the serviceman who quipped "We had to destroy the village in order to save it".