Nope, not just a few bad apples.
And it never was.
War-criminal scumbags in the British Army are noted in a new public inquiry to not simply be "a few bad apples", but instead there is something "rotten in the whole barrel", i.e. the entire British military in Iraq. Certainly, that attitude could not be much different than the war-criminal-scumbag behavior the British and their American allies have displayed in Afghanistan either.
Most people are of course busy worrying over their depleting piles of money and possessions, and don't give a crap that the United States is still fighting insane, criminal wars against a long list of poor people all over the world. In Iraq, we are told that some kind of "victory" has been won or anyway an escape plan has been put into effect to finally get US troops out of that hellhole (of their own creation).
But the dying is still going on.
You know how many US troops are still in Iraq today? 130,000.
How many US troops were in Iraq when Obama took office? 145,000.
This despite Robert Gates' hope that the number in January 2009 would be about 100,000. In October, 2006, before the "Surge" (which recall was supposed to enable a faster withdrawal of US troops), the Pentagon had already declared they were going to keep troop levels, at that point about 140,000, stable into 2010.
In any case, the alleged benefit to US troops and their mission of the Surge, never materialized. And while troops have been reduced a bit in Iraq, in the new phase of the endless Afghanistan war, few if any US troops will be coming home. Indeed, the 15,000-troop reduction in Iraq was erased by the 20,000-troop Surge (part I) in Afghanistan.
Unlike in the Iraq Surge, which was largely based upon bribing the Iraqi insurgents and ethnically cleansing and partitioning vast portions of Iraq to keep people from killing each other, the Afghan Surge (part I) has met with unexpectedly stiff resistance from the Taliban, who are not much interested in being bribed it seems, but are interested in killing as many NATO invaders as they can.
And of course the American generals, as Bob Woodward has recently informed us, want many more troops than they presently have, and are warning that without them, the US will be defeated in Afghanistan. What we will likely see, if the Afghan-Pakistan component of the Terror War should continue, is the bulk of the Iraq-based US force being moved east to fight the Taliban and Qaeda—and those dastardly Afghan babies US troops keep blowing up.
War is now a permanent export of the USA. So are the attendant war crimes.
And anyone who thinks US security interests are being improved by those ghastly facts on the ground is a damned fool.
Update: US orders wholesale retreat back to Afghan cities. The Afghan government is protesting this move, since it amounts to a military defeat of NATO by the Taliban, and thus "will make the weak Afghan government appear even more powerless in the eyes of its people."
The US government doesn't look so powerful or competent either.
(jk)
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