Blackwater Guards Found Guilty in 2007 Iraq Killings

[Saz]

[Saz]

[exploited]

[Dylan]

[Tejada]

[exploited]

It was available to everyone in the leadup to the war. I guess I was writing fan fiction in 2002-2003 when I said the war was wrong and disastrous for the same reasons it is now universally recognized as wrong and disastrous.

I don't know the motivations of each soldier, and I certainly can't speak for why they volunteered. I also don't care. Just like I don't care that the military gets to imprison some killers after unleashing thousands of them upon Iraq. There is no justice here, just an empty gesture at best, and the needless destruction of more lives at worse.

[Libertarian602]

There was folks who bought into the 9/11-Iraq connection. They can be judged for being ignorant, and buying into the fear monggering, but to generalize motives comes off as rather naive and holier than thou.

Men flocking to a flag is nothing new, and has been repeated more than anyone can count. The illusions of glory fade pretty damn fast once one is emerged in the carnage and horror that is war. It's beyond tragic that we never seem to learn from our mistakes.

[Tejada]

[Dylan]

That anecdote about Cheney is absurd. He's like a cartoon villain. Eagerly awaiting his death.

[exploited]

On the contrary, I want the correct mass murderers convicted. I don't care to go after the grunts. At least not outside a comprehensive judicial effort to hold decision-makers accountable. In the same way, I wouldn't have supported the Nuremberg trials if they simply persecuted dumbass camp guards and let the leadership go. It would have been a pointless gesture aimed at making people feel better while allowing the true evil to go unpunished. Much like this situation, where some guys who killed 0.0013% of Iraqi war dead are being persecuted, while Dick Cheney has his freedom and actually continues to defend his outrageous bullshit.

It was a pure expression of US policy. You invaded a country for no reason, knocked over its government, tried to dictate their political system, and finally abandoned the country to a government as corrupt as Saddam Hussein's, culminating in ISIS taking a significant chunk of the country. All of this was easily predictable, and trust me, I wasn't alone - although to be fair I would have spoke about "the potential for sectarian civil war," not ISIS specifically. Or did you forget about the twenty million people who protested the war globally, before it even started? Or the simply massive amount of evidence that came out before the war that the entire thing was bullshit? Shit, this is just a recounting of the historical facts - I don't care about why Congressman Joe Moron voted for it, the outcome was the same.

I'm sure the majority of US troops in Iraq wouldn't open fire on unarmed civilians. But they would open fire on armed civilians, who were fighting off a foreign invader that leveled a significant chunk of their infrastructure and then destroyed their political and national sovereignty forever. Which in my mind isn't much of a difference. Either way you've got civilians fighting off an aggressor, and the aggressor killing them by the thousands. In this case the aggressor was just a little too aggressive and so must be sacrificed to the gods of "too much? Too much?"

I know I'm supposed to fall down on my knees and thank the brave soldiers, but that's a bunch of nationalist bullshit. They volunteered to be soldiers, and then obeyed orders to fight people who didn't attack them. Everybody who participated in this is a war criminal - but rather than go after the grunts, I'd rather go after the leadership.

To conclude:

Yay! Some American contractors got told! WHOOP WHOOP!

*world's biggest eye roll*