Enough said. We should be ashamed.
So9
Our soldiers, as soon as circumstances allowed, regarded the local population with rough sympathy, helping them and generally treating them as fellow members of the human race. They stripped off their body armour and helmets as quickly as they could to make themselves less threatening.
The Americans still bristle with weapons and look like martial Teletubbies, swaddled in layers of kit. They seem frightened of everything and everyone and their overwhelming concern is staying alive. To them, every Iraqi is a potential enemy, an attitude that is reinforced by the endlessly instilled doctrine of the primacy of Force Protection.
This mindset has produced a catalogue of deadly blunders. American troops have shot and killed civilians who failed to understand the confusing signals operated by soldiers at checkpoints, fired recklessly into crowds of demonstrators and used batons to beat back crowds of old people trying to claim their pensions.
If military investigators are keen to comb over the conduct of the Allied forces during the Iraqi war there is no shortage of incidents involving American soldiers that demand examination. The alleged activities of Col Collins come a very long way down the list, and seem a peculiar place to start.
This goes far beyond any issue with some flaky major. Frankly this writer pisses me off. Could it be that several American soldiers were blown up by a car bomb at one of these checkpoints? Had this happened at a British checkpoint things would have been different for them. Also the British took towns in southern Iraq that were no friend of Saddam's. We had tougher areas to deal with like his hometown. This crap spewing from this guy's writing makes me question the honesty of all the British reporting regarding the Col Collins incident. Who knows what the truth really is.