> Well, first of all, you're forgetting about the female soldiers.
I can only laugh picturing you running up to a woman in uniform, noticing "that she is young and beautiful with big breasts" (<http:// mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of- Mon-20051114/024890.html>), ogling at the soldier, and getting slapped).
Seriously, it is doubtful that soldiers, male or female, feel happy that men like you -- unless you are much older than your online behaviors suggest -- thank them for doing "hard, shitty things that most people are unwilling to do" (at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/ pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20051121/025564.html>), most people including yourself. What are soldiers to think? "Fuck, why do I need to do the shit detail, separated from my family, so that guys like _this one_ can go ogle pretty waitresses at home _and_ feel 'patriotic' just because they say 'thank you' [talk is cheap] to me?"
> Second, you are forgetting about a little something called the
> presumption of innocence. It's basic legal/ethical thinking.
>
> Your argument actually presumes that these soldiers doing the
> equivalent of following illegal orders
To begin with, a war of aggression is illegal. Giving and following orders not thinking about their consequences or legal and ethical implications, like the example below, is all too common in any war: "Bogert is a mortar team leader who directed his men to fire round after round of high explosives and white phosphorus charges into the city Friday and Saturday, never knowing what the targets were or what damage the resulting explosions caused" (Darrin Mortensen, "Violence Subsides for Marines in Fallujah," <http://www.nctimes.com/articles/ 2004/04/11/military/iraq/19_30_504_10_04.txt>, 10 April 2004).
> Finally, you have not put forward any rational concept of
> international law at all.
Speak for yourself: "treaties are not sovereign over elected legislatures" <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of- Mon-20051128/025827.html>. The way you talk about law and orders, there is no such thing as illegal orders, whether they violate the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, or any and all of laws of warfare or humanitarian laws, on top of them being based on a foundation of BAREFACED LIES in the case of Bush's, so long as Congress or the Supreme Court doesn't put a stop to them. You might as well say that international law doesn't exist at all as far as Americans are concerned -- a notion convenient to the US power elite.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>