[FreedomPoster]

"All the people here are fed up and angry," he said. They want the Americans out of town ... They [the Americans] have to respect our feelings and traditions and customs, but we see the opposite. There is something here that is hidden from the American public. They call it 'Tha'ar' - revenge. That means that if anyone kills your friend, or your brother, you have to avenge it by killing an American soldier."

Have we become too humane and respectful of civilians in how we wage war? These people don't know they've been beaten. At the end of WWII, the Germans and Japanese weren't taking pot shots at Americans because they had to avenge killings. They'd had enough of dying for doing that.

[Gumption]

Rather than being really really mean we should do something really really nice for the Iraqi people. Like say ... send all the women, children and old people on paid vacations to Europe for a few weeks.

[glorgau]

They [the Americans] have to respect our feelings and traditions and customs,

Says who? The Americans do it because they are nice, not because they must.

[templar]

Have we become too humane and respectful of civilians in how we wage war? These people don't know they've been beaten.

IMO, The problem is that we can't do too much that turns the citizens against us. It's not so much that they'll take up arms against us en masse (although a certain percentage of them will) if we hurt 'em too much: It's more that they will become sympathetic to the resistance (or whatever you want to call them) and both provide them varying degrees of aid and fail to warn us of impending attacks. Why didn't any of the locals warn us about this attack? With as many people involved as we are being told, it would be hard for them to go unnoticed. With warning we could have ambushed them first.