This will play well in certain quarters.
Disregard this so-called revelation.
In an effort to help our troops who are surviving combat, when in past wars they would have died (thus making recovering from combat stress rather irrelevant), we have studied our troops in combat. One result is that incidents that are inherent in combat and war will seem new to some--and reason to condemn our troops.
This press conference sheds some light on a few points I want to make about the study results reported. One:
This is the first time that questions of this nature have ever been asked soldiers or Marines in combat. So this -- when I spoke earlier about it being a groundbreaking look at the health of our soldiers, we were very sincere. It has never been done. There is no research out there that has gone out and asked these questions to the soldiers and Marines that are really on the line.
Our troops are not cold-hearted killers. In our "good" war of the Greatest Generation, our troops killed prisoners rather than be bothered with escorting them to the rear, stole civilian property, shot civilians for sport, and abused civilians. And our troops were well-behaved compared to the troops of other countries. War is ugly, people. This study revealed something that is true about war in general and not specific to Iraq.
Second, and more importantly:
If all of you thought about the people that you care the most about, if someone hurt them or killed them, would you have a response? Would you be displeased?
These men and women have been seeing their friends injured, and I think that having that thought is normal. But what it speaks to is the leadership that the military is providing, because they're not acting on those thoughts. They're not torturing the people. And I think it speaks very well to the level of training that we have in the military today.
Got that? Despite the very normal anger, our troops are not in fact killing civilians and torturing. They are not. Our troops are a credit to our nation's ideals as they fight a difficult war against enemies who blend in with the population and violate all the rules of war while seeking shelter behind civilians.
The third thing to keep in mind is that the focus of any training to prevent abuse must be on the leaders of our soldiers and Marines. They have the responsibility for containing the understandable anger at seeing buddies killed and mangled. Our troop leaders must focus the training on fighting lawfully.
This study is part of a more general trend that will put our troops under a microscope in battle. My impression is that our troops fight cleaner than any army in our history or in anybody's history for that matter. But we scrutinize their actions far more than any other army in history.
Let's not make our troops afraid to fight even as we ensure that they uphold the standards we expect of them.
