You show me someone who *knows* what the afterlife holds and I'll show you someone who is full of shit. Where exactly would this information come from?

Wow... nah, forget it... I'm not going to bite on that bait.

I hope there's still some virgins left. :D :D

Which person will not have to 'answer foor it in this world' and will 'have to live with this'?

The man who picked up a small child, ran into the middle of a street with a rocket propelled gernade launcher, and took aim at a convoy of soldiers?

Or the man who shot the RPG user through the child?

In my opinion, the moment you are taken hostage, your life is the reponsability of the person who took you hostage. Not the people you place demands on. (for example, the RPG user communicated 'do not shoot me, or you will kill this child'. This demand was ignored, and this was the RPG user's fault, not the person who ignored it.)

I think you just about described every war.

Back to my earlier point, it's even harder to fight in cities.
The US, or any other country that is answerable to the media never did well in one.
In Vietnam you guys were doing great out there in the boonies where the rule was - if it moves in area x, you shoot it.
When the VC infiltrated the major cities during Tet, then it turned against you. It's a very hard war to fight when there's civillians in the way.

It wasn't that long ago that the civilised nations of the world thought it was ok to bomb the everlasting shit out of oneanother's civilian population centres. I say we've come quite far and your (and our) boys are doing a great job with the crap hand they've been dealt.

Bad example since the VC got PLASTERED during Tet.

No. the soldiers are not supermen. They are there for country - some for God too, as much as many out there can not stand the thought. I often wonder why no one mentions civilians killed by soldiers of other countries. We Americans are not the only ones in Iraq. I am sure we are not the only ones shooting.

For the love of monkey! Get over the U.S. Most likely more than half of us dont care what the restof the world thinks and we just go about our business. Two hundered years ago it was the flipside - the rest of the world couldn't give a rats ass what the "colonies" were doing or saying.

so...Ha.

:) I am in a silly mood tonight

Its interesting to see. Political and War Protest only go so far. Minute you bring the soldiers into it, your just asking for it. And rightfully so. Who the fuck ever said War was civilized or pretty. Just because you get to watch it on TV doesn't mean Tom Cruse is there to make sure everybody is honorable in their violence. War is War is War. I don't care how modern we are. That means woman and children are going to die. That means women and children are going to be slaughtered. That means schools are going to be blown up, houses destroyed. Whatever distasteful image you can think of. Its GOING to happen. Our troops were called upon to fight this war, right or wrong. And I'll be damned if some punk ass is going to dare talk about anything our soldiers are doing. Their judgement is all we have to go by, no video camera can ever do this justice. Hell, if we believe everything we see than we should be giving Mr. Moore a medal for showing us the heartless criminals our soldiers are :crazy:

Get it right...it's 71 Virginians ;)

it really does appear that what i wrote earlier obtains: your view of what the troops in iraq are capable of doing is a straight function of your position on the war in general. and i think this is exactly how the right media appratus would prefer it: it is of a piece with their approach to any number of other issues--generate enough mutually exclusive information as to make factually based debate nearly impossible, force positions back onto disposition and then try to relativize the whole affair into a matters of "opinion"

personally, i do not care about folks' general aesthetic disposition relative to a vague idea of "our boys" in the context of this ridiculous colonial war.

what does interest me is the question of what--if any--correlation there might be between assumptions concerning american troops that operate at the level of the administration itself and its opposition to the international war crimes tribunal. maybe by linking these matters you can get behind the marketing of war to the kind of issues that animate bushworld's collective sense of realpolitik....

Along the same lines as this conversation:

Soldier admits his story of Iraqi boy's death a lie

The sad part of this is that throws similar testimony into doubt until it is corroborated. Now, rather than take a soldier's statements as fact, they must be dissected to see if they are truthful or politically motivated.

Edit: The errors in the quote are from the source, poor editing.

It is Friday and all and maybe I'm somewhat confused. (beer time in 3 hours, 45 minutes to straighten me out)

What was the lie? They didn't shoot the kid? Did the kid have a gun and explosives? If so did they let the kid live? Or was there no kid in the first place, and he made up the whole story?

Again my apologies for not understanding. 3 hours, 43 minutes to go.

I can only go off of the article and it states his story was a lie.

I take it to mean that he made the event up in order to elicit anti-war/anti-Bush sentiment.