In my last post I quoted leftist scholar, Mahmood Mamdani, as saying that the problem with the War on Terror was that the united states viewed Iraqi’s as little more than “collateral damage.” Well, reading a news story from the Telegraph I’d bookmarked last week, I found out that British officers agree with Mamdani’s assessment. In fact, the Senior British commanders interviewed were even harsher in their assessment of how the U.S. treats the Iraqis:
Speaking from his base in southern Iraq, the officer said: “My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans’ use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don’t see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, it’s awful.
“The US troops view things in very simplistic terms. It seems hard for them to reconcile subtleties between who supports what and who doesn’t in Iraq. It’s easier for their soldiers to group all Iraqis as the bad guys. As far as they are concerned Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them.”
The phrase untermenschen — literally “under-people” — was brought to prominence by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf, published in 1925. He used the term to describe those he regarded as racially inferior: Jews, Slaves and gipsies.
Jeanne at Body and Soul has more on the “tactics” of the Marines, and the vicious circle they create:
The Marines say they’ll change their tactics when people start cooperating; no one has any reason to cooperate…
