A friend just sent a report from a friend who's just been in Fallujah. Horrible stuff. Aside from the usual killing, the Marines made a point of wrecking every house they searched, blowing holes in every bare wall they could find, and leaving bloody footprints on the floor of a mosque (where shoes aren't allowed) and shitting there. It's not enough to kill people in great quantities, they want to humiliate the survivors too.
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Yes, I've received the same sorts of terrible reports.
The house wrecking, according to the Marines, was part of a strategy to avoid being vulnerable to sniper and other sorts of fire in the narrow streets by creating routes through homes instead of moving around them.
Reportedly, this method is a favorite of the Israeli military during its "incursions".
This is their explanation and although, from a purely tactical point of view this makes sense to them (we all agree, I trust, that the whole enterprise is evil so no need to qualify further) the effect is de-humanizing for both the destroyer and the destroyed. Or, as a former Marine put it to me just the other day: "you start by doing a thing for whatever militarily sanctioned reason they come up with but before long it's just some shit you're doing to fuck people up."
The mosque desecrations don't even have the benefit of a thin veneer of tactical justification. Islam has now been unofficially declared the enemy belief, the faith of terrorists so any actions taken against its adherents and its symbols are warranted.
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We don't really see it yet because we're both too close and too far away but the destruction of Fallujah by the United States military is an event of immense historical significance. The full flowering of this karma will take years and will be all the more dreadful to behold because of this slow burn.
.d.