by James Glaser
November 9, 2004

I think it was back when I was in Vietnam and I can still remember officers telling us that the Vietnamese were so much different than we were. Vietnamese I was told, did not value life like we did and killing was nothing to them. Today there are Marines in Iraq who are hearing the same thing as they attack the Iraqi city of Fallujah.

In Vietnam we were told these things so that it didn't seem so bad when civilians were killed, after all, they weren't really like us at all. We were told that we were the "Good Guys" and we were bringing freedom and elections to this backward Asian country.

The same thing is going on again in Iraq. Heck, those Iraqis aren't even Christians, so we know they are bad, at least that is what we are trying to instill in our troops. It is always easier to kill people who have a different value system than you do, after all we are only trying to help "them," again.

Like Vietnam we have set up our own puppet government and like Vietnam we will even have an election. You want to bet on who wins? You ever notice that "our guy" always wins no matter where we go to "help" other people?

Right now the United State's Marine Corps is attacking the City of Fallujah. This is a city with a civilian population of over 300,000 and over a 100,000 of them are still there. We have been saying that we were going to attack for weeks, so any leaders of the terrorist group there have had plenty of time to leave.

Seems that is the same thing we did in Afghanistan with Osama. We gave him weeks to get away before we made our move. No, I have no idea of why we do things like this.

Here is something else we have done that is pretty strange. The first target we picked to take in Fallujah was a big hospital. It seems that last time we attacked that city, reports out of that hospital told the rest of Iraq and the world how many civilians we were killing and maiming. Well this time we are going to keep a lid on reports like that. Those kinds of reports make us look bad.

CBS News reports, "About 200 artillery rounds have been lobbed into Fallujah by 1st Cavalry Division batteries in the past 24 hours." A city with a civilian population of over 100,000 and we are "lobbing" in artillery rounds. They go on with, "Throughout the morning, artillery and mortars pounded targets in Fallujah and on its outskirts, and a U.S. jet swooped low to fire rockets at insurgent positions. An AC-130 gunship raked the city all night long with cannon fire, and before dawn, four 500-pound bombs were dropped, raising orange fireballs over the rooftops."

If you "rake" a city with Cannon fire, lob in artillery shells, and drop 500 pound bombs on a city filled with civilians, you are going to kill a lot of those people. That is why we tell the troops that those people we are killing are different than we are. Their deaths are not like if we were killing Americans, but like we were killing sub-humans. Iraqis are almost OK to kill because we are their to help them and if some get in the way, well that is a shame, but we really didn't want to kill them. That is why we took that hospital, so the number of deaths could be controlled. At least the reporting could be controlled.

This is going to be Americans (Christians) killing Iraqis (Muslims).A National Public Radio correspondent embedded with the Marines outside Fallujah reported desertions among the Iraqis. These are the troops we claim are going to take over the country from us. These are the troops we have been training. One Iraqi battalion shrunk from over 500 men down to 170 over the past two weeks, with 255 members quitting over this past weekend. These were the "best" Iraqi troops we had to help us so that this battle wouldn't look like a religious war.

Clerics in Fallujah have denounced Iraqi troops who are helping us and you have to know that when we do finally leave this country, the Blood Feuds will start up.

Soon our American troops will take over Fallujah. There is no doubt that we have the troops and we have the fire power. It was reported today, that for each shot the defenders of the city fire, the American troops return 500. We will take this city, but at what price?

No matter how often the officers tell the men that killing Iraqis is necessary to win this war, the troops are going to be sickened by all the death they see. They will know in their minds of all the little children killed, all the mothers holding infants in their arms, and all the aged and infirmed who are blown to bits. Our troops will be finding body parts where ever they go and they will try and tell themselves that these parts are from terrorists, but they will see too many "little" parts and they will know what they have done.