It's unfortuntate when the strike came, if it WAS a wedding (in the middle of the desert, at 3 AM), but if the group were terrorists, then you have to give a little ground.
The problem is, of course, that nobody wants to pick the middle ground of 'bad guys have celebrations' except that general. One side says "anyone shooting guns into the air at night are bad" which denies middle eastern celebration custom, and the other side says "any gathering of people must be okay regardless of motive" which denies the problem of training insurgents.
It's an ugly game, and I wish we weren't in it, but now that we are, we have to work to help Iraq bring peace to itself. Sometimes that means being the police, and sometimes police make mistakes. Why is it that nobody ever goes up to a cop and says "good job! I didn't get assaulted, beaten, stabbed, robbed, or killed today!" but we're more than willing to slam them for their errors? Because we expect perfection, and that's a hard standard to live up to for anyone.
A statistic you might not know -- 75% of all active duty police officer deaths are by suicide. We're also getting high numbers among the active duty military, and our reserves are drawn rather strongly from our police forces. These people are under significant stress to do the right thing the right way every time all the time. Even when they catch their own (like with the torture and humiliation problem, which was NOT broken by the press but discovered and addressed by military police as early as January) they catch hell for not being perfect.
Perfection is the goal, though, because every failure is not a failure of one soldier, but of America, and the Coalition Forces. I'm very glad I am not there, because I'm just a man and wouldn't survive that stress.
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It's unfortuntate when the strike came, if it WAS a wedding (in the middle of the desert, at 3 AM), but if the group were terrorists, then you have to give a little ground.
The problem is, of course, that nobody wants to pick the middle ground of 'bad guys have celebrations' except that general. One side says "anyone shooting guns into the air at night are bad" which denies middle eastern celebration custom, and the other side says "any gathering of people must be okay regardless of motive" which denies the problem of training insurgents.
It's an ugly game, and I wish we weren't in it, but now that we are, we have to work to help Iraq bring peace to itself. Sometimes that means being the police, and sometimes police make mistakes. Why is it that nobody ever goes up to a cop and says "good job! I didn't get assaulted, beaten, stabbed, robbed, or killed today!" but we're more than willing to slam them for their errors? Because we expect perfection, and that's a hard standard to live up to for anyone.
A statistic you might not know -- 75% of all active duty police officer deaths are by suicide. We're also getting high numbers among the active duty military, and our reserves are drawn rather strongly from our police forces. These people are under significant stress to do the right thing the right way every time all the time. Even when they catch their own (like with the torture and humiliation problem, which was NOT broken by the press but discovered and addressed by military police as early as January) they catch hell for not being perfect.
Perfection is the goal, though, because every failure is not a failure of one soldier, but of America, and the Coalition Forces. I'm very glad I am not there, because I'm just a man and wouldn't survive that stress.