Monday, April 20, 2015
Terrorism
There are fewer uniformed enemies now. Terrorists use civilians as shields. They hide among the population, strike, and retreat into the ether. I heard one story where a Marine patrol marched through a marketplace in Iraq, and a civilian walked behind a Marine, shot him point blank in the back of the head, and then disappeared into the crowd. It's so much different from World War II, where we knew what our enemy looked like. (As Lt. Aldo Rain says in Inglorious Basterds, "We like our Nazis in uniform. That way we can spot 'em real quick.") What armaments they had. Where the front line was. Now there is no front line.
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I agree that war is more difficult in the current guerrilla tactics used by unidentified enemies. War is also not fought between nations anymore but by violent factions hidden within a nation. This is the problem with identifying all Muslim men and women as the enemy because that is not true. It is important to recognize that the enemy in war is not just one nationality, and treating a whole group of people as the enemy based on that nationality creates more enemies.
ReplyDeleteI think you are perfectly right in that terrorist use civilians as shields. U.S. troops have no way to surely tell if a civilian is a threat. They can only be cautious of everyone however, it's hard to expect that only a young child could be waiting to set off a bomb putting you in a situation that might force you to take a child's life causing hesitation and then possibly death.
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