So now, a month or more after going it totally alone (apart from gutless
wonders like the current Australian government) the penny has finally
dropped. I hope it doesn't happen, but I can't see Iraq or Somalia or some
Colombian warlord going too kindly on your guys in the near future.
Brett
You mean, after a legal debate in which we decided to give the terrorists
_more_ protections than they actually deserved under the laws of war, you
think that our soldiers will be retaliated against because we had that
debate? Well, the people we've fought in the past have not exactly been
paragons of civilization. Let's see - starting with WW2 we have: tortured
by the Germans, used as subjects for biological warfare experiments and
vivisected by the Japanese, tortured and brainwashed by the North Koreans,
tortured by the North Vietnamese. The one woman captured by the Iraqis was
raped, the men beaten and (this seems familiar) tortured. The Somalis just
dragged the bodies of our soldiers through the streets. The one guy they
captured they beat and held for ransom. So you think that if we had
publicly stated that people who _weren't_ covered by the Geneva conventions
would be at the outset all of a sudden Saddam Hussein's government (you
know, the one that used poison gas on its own civilians) would decide to
act civilized? Why do you think that? And why is so much of the world so
happy to condemn us when we give more protections to these people than they
do deserve under law, but so obviously doesn't give a damn when it's our
people who are denied the protections that they do deserve? The lot of the
American soldier for pretty much the entire history of our nation is to
fight people who treat him barbarously if he is captured. Banastre
Tarleton in the Revolutionary War started the tradition - Tarleton's
Quarter was what it was called when he executed Americans who surrendered
to him. According to Robert Leckie something in the range of _half_ the
American soldiers held in British prison ships died of maltreatment. It
does not seem likely to me that our enemies - who are, after all, our
enemies precisely because they have placed themselves outside the bounds of
civilization - are likely to come to Jesus because we decided, right off
the bat, that captured members of Al'Qaeda should get Geneve Convention
protections that the Conventions themselves do not grant.
Gautam
