I know that one of the “It’s a war crime!” thangs going on lately has involved Iraqi military dropping their uniforms and, amongst the civilian population, taking pot shots at Coalition forces.<\/p>\n
It’s a despicable act, of course, essentially the same as using human shields (with the more despicable inference that they really want <\/i>Coalition troops to incur civilian casualties).<\/p>\n
But it makes me think of “resistance” movements in past conflicts. Take WWII, for example. A number of military forces (and others), in Nazi-occupied nations, blended in with the population and continued to wage war on the occupiers — sabotage, ambush, assassination, etc. Were they war criminals, too?<\/p>\n
Heck, by that token, were the lovable guys in Hogan’s Heroes <\/i>war criminals?<\/p>\n
Of course, when found, they were summarily executed. But it was the Nazis doing it, of course, so that’s hardly an argument. The Nazis practiced “Kill one of us, we’ll execute ten civilian” style reprisals, too.<\/p>\n
I’m sure there’s a legal difference, and I suspect there’s a difference in tactics used, too. But it still bugs me a bit. If this country were invaded, I’d expect non-uniformed resistance “behind enemy lines,” too (cf. Red Dawn<\/i>). Would that be a war crime? <\/p>\n
Another disturbing item I caught just at the end of on BBC news last night. It was an NGO aid worker basically saying that unless the UN got to administer relief programs in Iraq, her organization was not going to provide any aid. It wasn’t out of fear that association with US or British troops might be dangerous. It was simply that working with US or British forces would somehow “legitimize” the Iraqi war, and therefore, on principle, her group would rather stand by and do nothing until the UN got involved.<\/p>\n
Talk about war crimes …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I know that one of the “It’s a war crime!” thangs going on lately has involved Iraqi military dropping their uniforms and, amongst the civilian population, taking pot shots at…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitical-brouhaha"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":495,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/04\/07\/cloud_cuckoo.html","url_meta":{"origin":3815,"position":0},"title":"Cloud Cuckoo","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 7-Apr-03 8:37pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Andrea opines that Side-Show Mohammed, Minister of Information in Iraq, is \"showing all the signs of sleep-deprivation-induced dementia.\" \"They are lying every day. 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