• We would not allow men to flee Fallujah, even though tests indicated that they were likely not insurgents.  The Geneva Convetion stipulates that people must be allowed to flee a battlezone.


• Troops are being instructed to kill insurgents with .50-caliber machine guns.  That is specifically prohibited by the Geneva Convention.


• Clinics have been bombed.


• Buildings that have shooters in them are being "pancaked" without consideration of whether or not there are civilians in them, as well.

And are stopped by American troops.  Your wife and children are allowed to leave but you are kept behind.  They test you to see if you've handled explosives recently but you test negative.  Yet they send you back into the city anyway.  During the offensive, you are killed.

What does your family do now?  What do they think of American troops, who held you back so that you could be murdered.  What do they tell their friends, their neighbors, anyone who will listen?  How great the American troops are or how they murdered their husband, their father?

What if you stay behind and aren't killed?  Do you still support the invasion?  Perhaps you do.  But what if you watched a clinic down the street get bombed?  What if a nearby building is destroyed by U.S. troops and you knew a couple civilians that were in there?  What if you watch an insurgent get ripped apart by a .50-caliber machine gun?  He was an insurgent, yes, and you never supported his actions, but it still brings you to a stop to watch U.S. troops literally rip apart a man who looks like you.  What if you watch U.S. troops shoot every car that is moving in the streets, regardless of its inhabitants?  What if you see fellow citizens killed in the warfare?  What if some of them are other men who were sent back into this hellhole by American troops?

What do you think of the invasion then?

By occupying Iraq, we were already fighting an uphill battle.  The realities of ethnocentrism show that there will be resistance to the occupation, even if it could lead to the displacement of a dictator and the introduction of democracy.  Ethnocentrism dictates that occupiers are always going to face resistance, no matter how great their intentions.

Yet what have we done to make the situation better?  We've tortured Iraqi citizens; forced innocent men to return to battle zones, possibly to be murdered; bombed hospitals; indiscriminately flattened buildings and destroyed moving cars without first making sure they held insurgents; and we've killed thousands upon thousands--some say as many as 100,000--innocent Iraqis.  Women and children.  People who had nothing to do with the insurgency.

Tell me how this will end well.  Tell me how if we just stick it out, Iraq will become better.  Tell me when the turning point is.  Tell me when this constant rise in violence and constant rise in hatred toward us is going to suddenly reverse itself.

I would really like to know.

(From my blog, Nightmares For Sale)