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.