General David Petreus has resigned after evidence of an extramarital affair surfaced. A highly regarded, efficient military officer has been brought low by behavior that is as old as time.
This reinforces The Empire's narrative that their soldiers are honorable me. To be sure, most of them do not piss on dead civilians, torture live ones, or rape women and children, as has been documented. But the army itself is an army of invasion and occupation, and General Petreus was part of its leadership. The civilians who commanded him are as guilty of war crimes as Adolf Hitler. Like Rommel, Petreus may be a good soldier and a good man. I would bet hard currency that he deeply regrets his affair with Ms. Broadwell, not only because it was wrong, hurting his family and his career, but also because she seems to have been somewhat unhinged. Certainly, he did the honorable thing, which unfortunately puts him in a distinct minority. Colin Powell should have resigned when it was shown that he had lied to the whole world about Iraq. (And BTW, that lie led directly to the army and Petreus being sent there, of course.) Other people in the military should be resigning when it is shown that there men have engaged in the lower level war crimes I mentioned at the beginning of this article. That General Petreus was an officer in an army that invaded a sovereign nation that had NOT attacked the U.S. is clear. At the time he received his orders to carry out actions in Iraq, he certainly must have believed the propaganda about Saddam Huseein, but later when his army found no WMD, what did he do? Did he resign? And that army of which he was part also used weapons like Depleted Uranium, which is arguably prohibited by international law, and white phosphorus, which is clearly prohibited, also make everyone who used it vulnerable to charges of war crimes. The dreadful and brutal occupation of Fallujah, which has been pretty much hushed up by the U.S. media, was also carried out by the U.S. military. Are we to suppose that Petreus didn't know anything about it? At the time (2003), he was engaged in fighting south of Baghdad (Fallujah is west of the capital.) In 2009, he was quoted as saying that what turned Fallujah around was the local populace rejecting al-Qaeda. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-502243_162-3232352.html That Petreus resigned, whether voluntarily or under some sort of duress which we as yet know nothing about, was sad for him and his family. It was entirely a mess of his own doing, though, and for that, our sympathy should be somewhat limited. That he was an officer of an army of occupation, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, stretches my sympathy to the breaking point. The people who deserve our sympathy are the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who died in that war, and the thousands of veterans who committed no war crimes voluntarily, yet languish in military hospitals or whose bones rot in graveyards. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:laamn-unsubscr...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:laamn-subscr...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:laamn-dig...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:laamn-ow...@egroups.com?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:la...@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/laamn@egroups.com> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: laamn-dig...@yahoogroups.com laamn-fullfeatu...@yahoogroups.com <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: laamn-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
