Atheist Meditations

Listening to Major General John Batiste on Democracy Now! got me thinking about something.

AMY GOODMAN: Recently, Sergeant Sanick Dela Cruz testified he urinated on the dead body of an Iraqi killed by his fellow Marines. Sgt. Cruz also said he saw his squad leader shoot down five Iraqi civilians who were trying to surrender. The testimony came in a pretrial hearing for a Marine charged for the massacre and the ensuing cover-up.

MAJ. GEN. JOHN BATISTE: There is a fine line between an armed mob and a disciplined military force, and it’s up to military leaders to hold that line with rigid discipline. What you just relayed are examples where we lose it. There is no reason in the world why that kind of behavior should be condoned or, for that matter, happen in combat.

I don't think we can put too fine a line on it.

Our Military, particularly the branches that work on the ground, are dangerously past the crossing of it. Around a third polled are pro-torture, about half would hold to a 'code of silence' for a fellow who executed an unarmed civilian, about one in ten openly admit to war crimes. All this in an institution where 25% of females leaving report having been raped, a number that is surely far higher, where in civilian life where we often hear that the number of rapes that gets reported is something like 1 of 5.

These numbers are just fucking crazy. Jump off the mother-fucking page crazy. The picture they paint of our Men and Women in Uniform is dark. These troops come off sounding like soldier/gangsters - guys' who take what they want and don't respect women. They bond with the fellas in their squad like a ganger 'bout his brothers - always got his back, never rat him out. You want that kinda guy on the street with a Machine Gun near where your toddler is playing?

imagine why The Insurgency keeps growing.

Which half of Germany do you want to create? The half where a sophisticated, wounded people were won over by a professional, disciplined army? Germany soldiers and families sought desperately to be captured by Americans in the last days of the War. Or the half of Deutschland that was overrun by invading Russians, who murdered and raped hysterically?

Which was the better invading force? Which was the better Germany?

I can understand why General Batiste is so upset. Our Military had been tracking forward since the dark days of Vietnam. Gulf War I, Balken States, I have never heard of a single Human Rights complaint. The casus belli of each engagement seemed reasonable. In the Balkans, all we seemed to be trying to do was stop a genocide, in GW I, Kuwait had been invaded and they were an ally of the U.S. - I mean, it is 1991, you just can't let a country invade another on bullshit pretense.

Yet this war had none of that. The justifications for war were a matter of propaganda, not policy defining fact. Such levels of factual analysis seem to have been avoid for sake of 'selling the war.' The standards of the Geneva Convention were purposefully re-defined, despite the fact that they had worked for fifty years. This opened sundry Dark Doors. The realistic troop levels that would be needed to provided security (one of those quaint Geneva Convention obligations of the invading force) were not going to be met by a multiple of four. This was not a dare to stick your dick in a hornet's nest. This was penetrate hornet nest with hands tied behind back and a cubic yard of bee's wax shoved up your ass.

I think General Batiste's opinion jives with mine since day one. Putting a relatively small amount of Christian troops in the middle of the Muslim Holy Land will never generate positive results. It is just stupid. We allowed an administration to get/seize election that cared about nothing more than getting/seizing election. . .

I'm going to quit, I'm just overwhelmed. George W. Bush is such an incompetent President , I just can't believe how much we have lost. We're not even a Superpower anymore thanks to him, we're just another Asshole at the Table.

Look at Putin. He's currently terrorizing Europe with radiation murders and threats of cutting of energy supplies. Can we call this former KGB and bully out? No Way! He knows we just went all in on the last two hands. We can no longer bluff with the former Soviet Union.

That sucks, considering we fucking 'won the Cold War.'

I think we need to consider how each of us, as Americans, takes responsibility for the Bush Presidency. The infantile motherfucker has ruled this country for seven years. The damage inflicted upon every corner of our society cannot be underestimated. Failure to recover in just one area could be societal death.

Even if you embrace the conspiracies of voter manipulation and DeBolt machine fraud, it still happened. Nobody stood up within the national press and challenged the legitimacy of this President. We didn't stop traffic and halt commerce, we let it happen.

We protested, but not loud or often enough. We were outraged, but it wasn't something to disrupt the family Easter over. We sent a few dozen emails, knowing how easily they are filtered out.

"You ain't seen bad yet, but it's come'n."