Oh heavens, what a stupid question. It’s the social breakdown, stupid! I’m not saying that the “frustration” is an excuse; merely that if you’re the sort of horrible idiot that thinks this type of crime is a good idea, you’re more likely to try to commit it in a place where you think you can get away with it, than you are back in Scanton or whereever.

How do you know it isn’t?

It doesn’t excuse the way the Times wrote the piece, but it may explain how it got there.

Not to mention that the military as always used rape as a method of discipline and control, to exercise authority and instill fear. Sadly, in every war, women are the nameless victims of horrible atrocities and most often, the degradation that comes with rape is meant to harm the males in these counties, not the actual female victims.

“rape in post-WWII Germany is likely to have occurred than rape against Japanese (war brides) and Vietnamese women.

I am in no way comparing the U.S. military use of rape as a tool of war as the Japanese Military did, however, the US military was very aware of the incidences of rape by the Japanese but actively stifled the evidence (some suggest because it would have also highlighted similar crimes by Allied personnel). The reality is that rape is far more rampant in war zones than not, given that the broken infrastructure and likelihood that rapes (like war-related deaths) are less likely to be reported in a religious heavily male dominated war zone. I think it is entirely naive, given historical evidence and a military culture has structural issues of racism and sexism adopted from larger US society, to assume that race and mysogyny has nothing to do with this case.

Then why isn’t being done by soldiers in the US or Germany as often as it is in Iraq?

As someone who upholds the concept of individual repsonsibility, I call “bullshit” on this. The problem isn’t the frustrations of war and it’s not fallout of the fighting. Nor is it due to no way was this a problem of a culture of entitlement, racism and misogyny. The overwhelming majority of soldiers in this war have never done anything close to this, yet they are subject to the same frustrations and are operating in the same culture as these guys.

These acts are due to the people involved deciding to commit a criminal act due to deviant thinking. It’s their fault, not the war and not the “culture”.

But to be fair, anyone familiar with atrocities during Vietnam cannot pin these sort of actions on the -shall we say - unorthodox legal analyses of the Bush Administration. All Bush did was get us into a pointless and incredibly avoidable war with longstanding dire consequences.

Well, that’s certainly putting it nicely. Everything that I’ve heard about this other case indicates that the soldiers planned to kill a “known insurgent who had been released from prison.” When they couldn’t find the guy they wanted, they grabbed another guy and murdered him and tried to make it look like he’d been planting an IED.

{sarcasm}In either case, it’s just blowing off some steam, no?{end sarcasm}