Startling, not simply because of the raw details themselves – cars indiscriminately fired upon, a Japanese camera crew roughed up, threatened by a US soldier with a 9 mm and detained for an hour, hysteria, anger, chaos – but because this completely unflattering view of the behavior of American military personnel (the reportedly elite Task Force 20) was stated without spin or embellishment.
The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, unsurprisingly, decided to place this story in a less prominent viewing position than the obituary for Bob Hope.
Corroboration of the NPR reporter’s on-scene version of events has appeared in Reuters, Britain’s The Independent and The Scotsman.
It is, I think, elementary to say that if you give a person a weapon and they feel threatened, they’re likely to use it. The Task Force 20 personnel, hyped on the belief that they were hot on Saddam’s tail, and probably convinced that he would be surrounded by hardened, skilled troops, decided out of a gung-ho manifestation of fear (if ‘decided’ is the right word for actions taken in the heat of such a moment), to fire without discrimination.
We must add to our understanding, if we’re honest, the disdain that many of these young men and women probably feel for the Iraqis around them, who seem ungrateful, difficult and dangerous. Our armed fellow Americans came to Iraq knowing nothing and filled with stereotypes. They don’t speak the language; they don’t understand the politics or the religious complexities. They don’t even know the history of the man they’re relentlessly and lethally pursuing.
Even those of us who believe that US forces, in some form, should stay in Iraq to provide security must concede that these are limiting factors that dramatically diminish the odds Americans can participate in any sort of large-scale Iraq reconstruction program.
So long as Americans with guns are involved, the prognosis looks exceptionally grim.
Scotsman version of events:
http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=813222003
Reuters version:
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=3166429
DRM
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