IRAQ

Counterpunch: Bad Guy/Good Guy
You help me find the bad guy or we come back with our tanks and run over
your fields and break down your house." -- US soldier to a northern Iraqi
villager, July 17, 2003, CNN news

The soldiers face sniping resistance and are attempting to root out the
fighters who blend into the Iraqi village population. So they're coercing
information from the neighbors through the threat of ravage. This tactic is
not exactly the same as the Israeli practice of destroying the land and
homes of Palestinian suicide bombers' families. That is deliberately
punitive revenge and it's also rationalized as deterrence. Our soldiers'
tactic is simply brutal coercion, guerilla warfare, extortion.

Should 'good guys' get 'bad guys' by coercing and ravaging neutral guys?
Didn't we disparage Saddam's inhumanity by pointing out that he terrorized
his own people in a reign of fear and retribution? Or does war suppress
humanitarian questions and radicalize everyone into good guys who are with
us and bad guys who are against us? The soldiers who mistakenly kill
civilians they think are hostile are excused because fear is seen as a
reasonable excuse. Alan Dershowitz, sometime defender of civil rights,
thinks even torture is allowable. Everybody knows people do these things.
Warrior types sneer at liberal squeamishness. Ann Coulter swashbuckles that
we should ravage and kill and convert the Muslims. As Yeats puts it: "The
best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate
intensity."