by James Glaser
December 8, 2003

President Bush and most of the people in our Congress tell us we are going to be in Iraq and Afghanistan, "as long as it takes." Well, on Saturday we killed nine little kids in Afghanistan and said that was a mistake. Meanwhile in Iraq, we are surrounding towns with barbed wire, destroying the homes of any one we think is related to those attacking us, and as terrible as this sounds, we are taking the wives and little children of suspected enemies, holding them in forced detention in hopes of those people turning themselves in. These acts are called "collective punishment" and were perfected by Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party.

How can I say this? What about supporting our Troops? Think about this for a while, the German troops in World War II did not think they were committing war crimes because their leaders told them what to do. In Vietnam we killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, but can any of you remember any talk of war crimes? If Adolph Hitler would have won his war, there would not have been any War Crime Trials after the war. Powerful countries and those that win, don't commit war crimes, even though they do the same things "Evil Regimes" have done.

It took me a while to figure out what we were doing in Vietnam and after a while it made me sick every time I saw another little kid blown to bits. The North Vietnam Army would go to some village at night and fire rounds at the nearest American landing zone and pretty soon US artillery rounds would be dropping in on the houses of those people living there. Our officers would tell us that the villagers were helping the NVA. Maybe they were the first time or the second, but I doubt it. Having your town hit with 155s, helicopter gun ships, and jets with napalm tends to get your attention. If those villagers said no to the NVA, they were dead and if they let the NVA use their village, they were dead.

Those poor people couldn't win and neither can the innocent people in Iraq. It took several years for the Vietnamese people to realize that the only way to end the killing of innocent people, was to drive the United States out of their country, because the NVA could not leave, they lived there too. Soon the Iraqi people are going to figure out, the only way to end the killing in their country is to drive us out, because the people attacking us are Iraqi citizens too.

It is so sad that I must ask this question, "Have we become Nazis?" In occupied Europe in World War II, the Germans used collective punishment to get their way. They held the family members of suspects hostage and they surrounded towns with barbed wire, holding whole communities hostage. Is this the road that the United States is willing to go down? Almost sixty years after the fall of Germany and the word Nazi still will conjure up visions of cruelty and terror. Is that the image that George Bush wants the world to think of when the United States is mentioned sixty years from now?

Is our country now creating our own Warsaw Ghettos in any Iraqi town that attacks us. Are we now willing to keep troops occupying these two countries for decades like Japan, Germany, and South Korea?

Thousands and thousands of innocent Iraqi and Afghan civilians have been killed by American Troops in the last two years. How long can we keep killing innocent people with the excuse that it is "unfortunate" or a "cost of war?"

In Iraq, we just this week started counting the number of people we kill, over in Afghanistan we call any killing of civilians a "Mistake" Here are a few of our Mistakes. 12/01, 65 killed in bombing of convoy of tribal elders, 04/02, four Canadians soldiers killed, 07/02, 48 killed when bomb hits wedding party, 04/03, 11 killed by bomb in village of Shkin, 12/03 nine children killed by bomb near Ghazni. All of these "mistakes took place in Afghanistan and could not be explained away, even though thousands of other civilians were killed, these few incidents are the only ones we will claim. So far, no "mistakes" in Iraq, but thousands and thousands of innocent civilians have been killed there too.

Dexter Filkins writes in the Sunday New York Times, "As the Guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed wire." He goes on with, "In selective cases, American soldiers are demolishing buildings thought to be used by Iraqi attackers. They have begun imprisoning the relatives of suspected guerrillas, in hopes of pressing the insurgents to turn themselves in."

The town of Abu Hishma is now encased with a Razor wire fence. Citizens can only enter or exit by presenting an American issued Identification Card, that is printed in English only. Remember we are supposed to be bringing FREEDOM to these people.

These tactics did not work for Nazi Germany as every country they were employed in still had resistance movements until the end of the war. These same tactics will not work for us either. The more Iraqi and Afghan civilians we kill, the more cruel we get, the greater the resistance will get. Did we learn nothing from our loss in Vietnam?

There were many Iraqi citizens that felt just great, when we pushed Saddam Hussein out of power. Saddam did every evil thing you can think of to some of his people. Now those same people are seeing that we have taken over Saddam's palaces, (our troops live in them now) we are telling them how they must live, just like Saddam did, and we are killing the Iraqi people, just like Saddam did.

We kick in doors in the middle of the night and take people away, both a Nazi and Saddam tactic. We take hostages, yes, again a Nazi and Saddam tactic. We talk about Freedom and Democracy, at the same time we are making prisons out of whole communities. Saddam did this with whole tribes and ethnic groups and so did Adolph Hitler, with the Jews and others.

I guess I answered my own question. We are already heading down that same road the Nazis did.