Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, Ramadi, Haditha, etc., -these incidents typify the cancer that is known as the US military culture. The recent revelations of US Army soldiers raping and burning a 15-year-old Iraqi and exterminating her family typify a military mindset endemic to US military culture yet foreign to American society, -and indeed, humanity.
Since a concerted campaign targetting independant reporters in Iraq has severely limited reliable information from the front, what has inadvertantly leaked out suggests the tip of an iceberg, forcing us to assume that there have been a hundred Hadithas, thousands of gratuitous murders, -a suppressed and untold litany of slaughter and mayhem. They paint a bleak picture of the moral character and integrity of this insular, priveleged, secretive and politically powerful sect.
Worse than welfare, the US military has generated an inter-generational system of entitlement in which families actually boast of a long line of dependence upon Pentagon largesse for their sustenance. Like the very poor, their pain and poverty have alienated them from themselves and their humanity, and isolated them from society at large. In public they stick out as caricatures, human aberrations, -all marked out with their haircuts, odd dress, foolish pretensions for God and Country, and weird mannerisms. All Napoleons in rags.
Between wars, they are occupied with nothing to do but the real drill: wrap yourself in the flag and wave a Bible to agitate for yet another. And when the inevitable war does come and the coffins of these fake patriots come home, only then do we hear of the horrid trajedy of war, the abject waste of their life, and how their bloodshed can only be honored by yet more war. As with longterm welfare reliance, the system breeds morally corrupt and lazy people whose idleness breeds evil, inherited generation by generation, culminating in such stereotypical matters as Haditha and this rape and burning of a 15-year-old.
This military culture brought us the "Cold War", Vietnam, a "War on Terrorism", and now Iraq. These gross blunders of outrageous waste have left abroad whole nations of people devastated and bled white, and at home, a disinherited society of sick, uneducated masses who pay for generations for the empowerment and enrichment of this militarist faction, -with its corporate dependants and beneficiaries worldwide.
For the love of life itself, it is time to boycott US military culture.