OT - US Soldier kills 16 Civilians in Afghanistan

[Targan]

Originally Posted by 95th Rifleman

Any fellow Brit who has had to sit through an arrogant, often ignorant, lecture from an American about how "they saved our arse in two world wars" can sympathise with this point.

Ah, then I'm sure you can appreciate how sick I and other Australians are of being told "you'd be speaking Japanese if we hadn't come and saved you". As I recall I've even had to put up with that patronising crap on this very forum, a few years ago.

[Webstral]

Given that it’s an election year, I would put the odds that an American soldier would be sent to the Hague for a war crimes trial somewhere south of zero. I’m not defending the practice. I’m being realistic about outcomes.

As for whether “we” (I wasn’t involved) saved the UK, Australia, France, or anyone else during WW1 or WW2, it would be interesting to see what would have happened in an alternate reality in which the Japanese did not bomb Pearl Harbor or in which Hitler did not take leave of his senses and declare war on the US. Would the UK and the USSR have been able to defeat Nazi Germany without American aid? This is open question, not a question meant to imply that the answer is no. Nor is the question meant to imply that y’all ought to sit and listen to speeches about how we saved you, because most Americans alive today had nothing to do with it, regardless of the relative importance of American involvement.

I’m less concerned with the self-righteousness than the willingness to act under that assumption. The self-righteous who sit on their hands are annoying but innocuous. The self-righteous who have the power and motivation to act are a problem. The combination of self-righteousness, perceived national interest, and perceived might is a very dangerous combination.

The latest horror perpetrated by Americans in uniform will inspire a new round of CYA from brigade downward; but the problem isn’t a brigade or division or even corps problem. Iraq and Afghanistan reflect poor strategy. Our poor strategy is an outgrowth of our hubris, the parochialism of much of our leadership, and frankly our failure to develop good human intelligence or pay much heed to the HUMINT we have. I remain convinced that the plan for victory in Afghanistan should have come out of the Special Forces community and that had our leadership been willing to pay the monetary and political price for a sufficient effort for victory we would be much further along. We weren’t willing to take steps that matched the realities on the ground in Afghanistan, though; and we weren’t willing to make any genuine commitments or sacrifices as a nation or in terms of political costs to get the job done as it needed to be done. So here we are more than a decade later still trying to wedge our square peg into a round hole.