YouTube: US troops taunting Iraqi children with bottled water
international |
anti-war / imperialism |
other press 
Friday December 01, 2006 21:28
by R. Isible
Winning hearts and minds. The Good Soldier.
We've all had the spectre of the simple, honest US soldier forced into fighting a war he doesn't want to be part of, doing his duty despite hostility all around him, invoked at one stage or another during discussions of the Iraqi Occupation. Often this figure is mistily conflated with other mythic figures: candybar dispensing US troops in the rubble of post-war Berlin, or US airplanes dropping crates of canned spam in the Phillipines.
Like other popularly held generalisations it's a lie. This video on youtube is a trivial example of the bestial inhumanity of some soldiers.
To put the whole thing in context, western reporters (e.g. people from Voices in the Wilderness) reported that pre-invasion Iraq (which was quite literally bombed to crap with ruptured sewerage mains) suffered from a serious shortage of clean drinking water. This contributed in no small way to the estimates of 500,000 dead Iraqi children (which Madeleine Albright thought was worthwhile) We can only imagine how bad the situation is now. So, the little boy running for the bottled war and the young men that take it from him in the end are desperate for a vital resource.
It's trivial compared to the savage rapes, beatings and electrocutions meted out in US detention centers, the killing of at least 600,000 people by 9 years of sanctions, bombings and then more bombings and shootings. But it's worth remembering as an example of the day to day voluntary brutality of the uniformed morons fomenting civil war.
Comments (5 of 5)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5What I saw was a bunch of American kids playing with a few Iraqi kids.
Is that the best example of American "crimes against humanity" you can come up with?
No Rick it's not the Rape of Nanking, but it inadvertently shows the supremacist attitude of American gunmen in Iraq.
It's their way of showing the folk back home how shit the lives of Iraqis are. "America rocks!" and all that.
One of the first acts of the U.S in Iraq was to cease the Social Welfare system set up by Baathists. No Work no food.
Americans are basically saying to Iraqis in their own country, "If you want food, you gotta work. If you want work, you work for us. If you want water, start running."
That American gunman may have felt like a Roman Emperor for a few minutes, but i hope he reflects. Imagine a foreign Muslim soldier taunting American kids like this in America, and you'll get an idea of the humiliation this causes to peoples sense of nationalism. Hope they hit an IED further down the road.
The US troops are using the children as human shields same as the Brits in the North during the troubles.
Lucky for the kids they were US soldiers and not mercenaries who would just open fire.
I've watched this clip, I just see someone riding in the back of a vehicle drinking some water from a bottle with some kids running along. Cannot see any reason to read all of this into it.
How thirsty does a kid have to be to run like that for - a bottle of water? How desperate? He may have wanted it for himself, or for someone sick. Look at the kids' faces: they are not having fun. this is not play, this is devastatingly sad reality created by the bombing of water processing plants and the pollution of water supplies through war. How thoughtlessly cruel does a young soldier have to be to make a game of a child's need- and then toss the bottle in such a careless way that the child has no hope of getting it? Put yourself in that child's place- and you will see that this is no game, this is a cruel reality created by the war and occupation.
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