You won’t read any of this in the US:
Robert Fisk: Madness is not the reason for this massacre
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-madness-is-not-the-reason-for-this-massacre-7575737.html
Even if we accept that the accused legitimately doesn’t remember killing those people, that doesn’t change the act or what surely motivated the act. As the author states:
Surely, if he was entirely deranged, our staff sergeant would have killed 16 of his fellow Americans. He would have slaughtered his mates and then set fire to their bodies. But, no, he didn’t kill Americans. He chose to kill Afghans. There was a choice involved. So why did he kill Afghans?
The act is a product of the scenario, just like My Lai. When you ask people to engage in pointless violet acts (i.e., repeatedly invade the same territory to kick out the Taliban/VC, only to fall back and allow the Taliban/VC to reassert its influence) it is inevitable that they start to treat the local population they were intended to ‘liberate’ as the enemy. The troops can’t conceive that the locals see the troops as invaders and are emotionally more sympathetic to the Taliban/VC and in any case, the locals know with absolute certainty that if they assist the troops in any way, when the troops leave they will be immediately set upon by the returning Taliban/VC (it is rather eery how similar the two wars are). As such, when the troops come back time after time after time again (because their leaders are too stupid (or don’t care, but that implies the intelligence for a conspiracy to evolve) to realize what is happening) each time they have less and less regard for the locals until the magical point when the locals they are sent to ‘liberate’ become the enemy and such massacres become inevitable.
My aunt (well, my wife’s mother’s best friend, but we all call her our aunt) was a nurse/spy for the US in Vietnam. Her job was to become associated closely with the local community so they would provide her with intel she could then direct back to the planners. She had some very narrow calls and had a lot of friends who wound up on the wrong side of that razor sharp line between the lucky and the dead, but she credits much of her success with forming close personal relationships with the locals (or at least that is how I interpret her stories). She was allowed, because of her ‘cover’ as a humanitarian, to continue engaging with the locals even as the tides of the war planners had the dividing line wash back and forth over the region. It was that, I believe, that enabled her relationship with the locals to be close enough that the locals would, at great personal risk (I can’t imagine them doing so if she wasn’t actually engaged in humanitarian work), warn her when it was time to get out of Dodge. Contrast that with the actions of the military. First and foremost, because they have no humanitarian ‘cover’ there is no doubt on the Taliban/VC part that warnings from the locals should result in reprisals. Second, the troops just show up (generally with a great deal of violence leading to so-called ‘collateral damage’), and then just disappear, they don’t establish deep personal involvement with the locals (if they did, they would be accused of ‘going native’ and no longer trusted by their own command and control). Each time the troops wash in and wash out they create increased bitterness on the local’s part because they know the Taliban/VC will enact reprisals even if they didn’t do a damn thing to help. Ordinary troopers really can’t be expected to react any other way, so these sorts of ‘unexpected, unpredictable’ events are actually the inescapable outcome from the moronic way our military works (as directed by our even more moronic politicians with absolutely no skin in the game whatsoever (driven, of course, by the military-industrial complex that stands to profit (and profit immensely) with the stagnation)).
So, like so many other ‘black swan events’ that are so unpredictable to the idiots who refuse to engage in even rudimentary historical analysis, the 9/11 attacks were completely unpredictable, so was the looting after invading Iraq and now the massacres by soldiers in Afghanistan. It must be great to live in such ignorance, yet be positioned to make such consequential decisions! So much easier to sleep at night not willing to be aware of the horrible things your decisions are going to cause. So much easier on the psyche to shout ‘no one could have known’ when the inevitable happens.
