An anonymous reader of Juan Cole's Informed Comment contributes a well-reasoned examination of the kind of decisions faced daily by American troops in Iraq:

"One of the ways we train our Marines is by going over scenarios with them. In one, I propose that they are traveling down the highway in a convoy. As they approach an overpass, they see a MAM (military age male) standing on the middle of the overpass with something about the size of a baseball (grenade-sized) in his hands. When he sees the convoy, he freezes. What should you do? Most of the Marines will say, 'He's demonstrated hostile intent, you need to waste him. He could be holding a hand grenade and be intending to drop it into one of the trucks as you pass under.' (This is an actual tactic used by the insurgents).

I change the scenario and say that when he sees you, he drops to the ground on the overpass. Some Marine will invariably answer, to the acclaim of his fellow Marines, 'That's a hostile act. He's taking cover because he's about to detonate an IED on you. You need to take him out.' (Also something they've actually seen.)

Finally, I change the scenario to say that, when he sees you, he turns around in the direction from which he came and starts running off the overpass (you can see where this is going). The answer is usually that that too is a hostile act or hostile intent because he is clearly trying to get off that overpass before the IED goes off.

Apparently, the only safe action for the MAM to take is to have Scotty beam him up. As far as some Marines are concerned, the presence of an Arab male in proximity to an American convoy may be all you need to find hostile act/hostile intent. This is, of course, highly reminiscent of that quip in Michael Herr's Dispatches, 'The ones who run are VC. The ones who don't run are well-disciplined VC.'

It would be easy for anyone who doesn't have to drive those highways in a US convoy to castigate our young troops over there for their trigger-happy mentality, but it's just not that simple. Those young Marines are doing the hardest thing the Corps has ever done. At least in Viet Nam there were places where anybody in front of you was definitely a bad guy. Oh, for the simple (though not easy) days of Tarawa and Iwo Jima. They're not a bunch of amoral killers. They're just a bunch of well intentioned, highly trained, and highly armed young men and women stuck in a Serbonian bog with minimal clarity of purpose."
- posted by cjb @ 9:14 AM