re: #89 William Lewis

Exactly.

Anyone who has been in any military ever knows how things get. FUBAR and SNAFU (fucked up beyond all recognition & situation normal, all fucked up) have existed as acronyms in English (IIRC) since before WWII for a reason.

Now, there is a culture in the highest elements of the current government in Israel that has cultivated a denigration and depreciation of the value of anyone in Gaza and the West Bank. That is well understood by the troops and it influences their actions but it is not directing their actions. They still control - still choose - their own actions.

They did not explicitly set out to murder. But they didn’t really care who was in that convoy either. That also can be construed as a war crime and that is also what needs to change.

I think that we lived through it here 2016-2020. And I like to think that the high level corruption did not influence too many of us into a life of crime. Of course I have been wrong before.

I have a question for you. You were in Germany during the Cold War. Did anyone ever talk with your unit, or even did you talk about it among yourselves. About what you would do if a Warsaw Pact tank or anti-tank missile team was shooting at you while they were hiding in a German building known to be occupied by civilians?

My experience was the expectation that the environment would be permissive.