Armed Honour: How to Stop Rape in Iraq

Richard Marsden, The Business of Emotions

...The USA thinks it is entitled to invade and plunder an innocent country, rape and murder its people, and get away with it. The rape of Abeer, the rape of Iraq. The part contains the whole. An American soldier imposes his will on an Iraqi girl. The American military imposes its will on Iraq society. Both acts are motivated by the same wretched morality which bestows the same feeling of entitlement. Steven Green is no "bad apple". He's typical fruit of a bad society, one morally indifferent to what is being done in its name in Iraq. Nor should he be made a scapegoat. War brutalises both sides to a conflict, albeit in different ways. Every man knows that he is capable of rape—in certain circumstances. When armed young men know they can both die tomorrow and act with impunity they are liable to rape. This excuses them not at all. It extends responsibility to those who placed them in that hellish situation in Iraq. If the five soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division are guilty of this crime, so too is the entire chain of command, all the way up to Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice and Bush...

continua / continued