Reply #15: How is Iraq a special case? [View All]

[noamnety]

How are German soldiers different from Americans?

Personally I think it's a load of nationalistic crap to argue that Nazis committing war crimes did it only because of their chain of command, whereas our guys did it because they were traumatized. I don't know where you got the idea that the average German soldier wasn't traumatized by what he'd seen, or that he wasn't living in fear that if he didn't do what he was ordered, he'd be the next one tossed into the camps.

People commit crimes against humanity because they've been dehumanized and/or they've dehumanized the enemy for some reason, and that crosses nationalities. Americans are not inherently better or worse than Germans in that regard, and I find your train of thought - that "Americans in Iraq are in a unique circimstance, not like those OTHER people who commit war crimes" - to be distasteful at best, and somewhere between white supremacist and xenophobic at worst. I can't quite find the right phrase for that, but reading your post it sounds like you are making excuses for Americans because you believe deep down they are - they must be - good people at heart, unlike people of those other nations.

I imagine from an Iraqi's point of view, you know, Americans are exactly there "for the express purpose of committing those crimes."

As for your statement that I seem to be "fixated" on the crime of rape, I can't help noticing you seem to be dismissive of it. You seem to take the holocaust personally, because of your personal history. Maybe it would take your mom being a victim of rape by the Germans for you to get it, I don't know. Me, I'm a female veteran. Roughly a third of female veterans have been the victims of a successful or attempted rape by another soldier while they were in the military. I take it very personally when I bring that up, and a man responds by suggesting we shouldn't prosecute rapes, because a man might be falsely imprisoned if we do, or a soldier who raped a woman must have been dealing with personal issues. To be blunt, I think this shows a stunning ability on your part to empathize with Men, and an equally stunning INability to empathize with women who are victims of violence against women - not unlike your ability to empathize with American men, but not German ones. The fact that you defend not prosecuting rapists on the grounds that they might be victims of prison brutality if we did - is jaw droppingly appalling to me. Better to let women be brutalized en masse without accountability than (God Forbid) risk having a Man be brutalized.

Can you see why, as a woman, I might find that offensive?

(I am NOT condoning prison violence here, just to be clear.)