Soldiers of misfortune
Some successful court-martials of torturing, murdering and child-raping soldiers in Iraq have been held up as a shining example of the superior US political and social system. On the contrary, such justice has nothing to do with democracy, American or otherwise, but is merely the difference between competent and incompetent military command. Throughout history, any generals worth their salt have simply taken any soldier who was raping the women of a ‘friendly’ civilian population and hanged him; looting, massacre and rapine have been reserved as a punishment for particularly defiant enemies, ordered by the commander alone.
It would be interesting to compare the conduct of the American Army in Iraq with that of the Wehrmacht in occupied Western Europe. In Norway, for example, which the Germans considered a woefully-misled but quintessentially Aryan nation, they punished a fishing village for aiding the Resistance by deporting the adult males to Germany and razing the settlement; this the Norwegians consider the greatest atrocity they suffered, although no women or children were harmed. The American equivalent is Falluja, where the killing of four mercenaries (‘civilian contractors’ in Pentagon-speak) was avenged by the flattening of the city. We have never been told what these mercenaries had done to the civilian population to deserve their lynching, but we may hazard a guess. What the Iraqis saw from the American Army is not the justice meted out by a superior democracy, but weak officers who could not control even their own men, let alone the soldiers of fortune.
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