US troops looted and vandalized Baghdad airport

[donsu]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030714-463062,00.html



Much has been written about how Iraqis complicated the task of rebuilding their country by looting it after Saddam Hussein's regime fell. In the case of the international airport outside Baghdad, however, the theft and vandalism were conducted largely by victorious American troops, according to U.S. officials, Iraqi Airways staff members and other airport workers. The troops, they say, stole duty-free items, needlessly shot up the airport and trashed five serviceable Boeing airplanes. "I don't want to detract from all the great work that's going into getting the airport running again," says Lieut. John Welsh, the Army civil-affairs officer charged with bringing the airport back into operation. "But you've got to ask, If this could have been avoided, did we shoot ourselves in the foot here?"

-snip-

Coalition soldiers also vandalized the airport, American sources say. A boardroom table that Welsh and Iraqi civil-aviation authority officials sat around in early May was, a week later, a pile of glass and splintered wood. Terminal windows were smashed, and almost every door in the building was broken, says Welsh. A TIME photographer who flew out of the airport on April 12 saw wrecked furniture and English-language graffiti throughout the airport office building as well as a sign warning that soldiers caught vandalizing or looting would be court-martialed. "There was no chance this was done by Iraqis" before the airport fell, says a senior Pentagon official. "The airport was secure when this was done." Iraqi airport staff concede that some of the damage was inflicted by Iraqi exiles attached to the Army, but these Iraqis too were under American control.

-snip-

U.S. estimates of the cost of the damage and theft begin at a few million dollars and go as high as $100 million. Airport workers say even now air conditioners and other equipment are regularly stolen. "Soldiers do this stuff all the time, everywhere. It's warfare," says a U.S. military official. "But the conflict was over when this was done. These are just bored soldiers." Says Welsh: "If we're here to rebuild the country, then anything we break we have to fix. We need to train these guys to go from shoot-it-up to securing infrastructure. Otherwise we're just making more work for ourselves. And we have to pay for it."
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isn't this the military way?
join the military and murder people for the US and you get the spoils of war: looting, pillage and rape. After all, the bushgang is busy looting, pillaging and raping the resources of Iraq.

we've heard about the looting and pillage - guess they are keeping the raping in a locked box out of sight

[IndianaGreen]

1. Ahhh, back to Imperial Rome

where looting and pillaging was considered part of a soldier's pay.

[oldcoot]

2. This is very bad news for the United States and Iraq

While it would be nice to dismiss this behavior as the actions of a few "bad apples," we may have to consider the possibility that the looting and vandalism are symptoms of a much larger problem. The fact that American soldiers are behaving in such a fashion indicates that either their superior officers do not care how their soldiers behave or there has been a breakdown in discipline. We also should ask ourselves if this behavior is a result of bored soldiers acting out, what happens when these same soldiers have been in Iraq for a year or more?

[donsu]

3. it's like they are saying that if the troops are bored

it's ok to vandalize. Or like, a shrug of the shoulders and saying 'what can we do? the men were bored.


and what a slap in the face to Iraqis when the troops swim in that huge palace pool and the citizens have trouble just finding clean water to drink.

[oldcoot]

4. You are absolutely correct

Even if we find out that only a few soldiers are responsible for such poor behavior, we should think about the impact of such behavior on the Iraqi people. We should not forget that word-of-mouth can be a very effective form of communication and rumors of the troops committing criminal acts (even if these rumors turn out to be false) could increase Iraqi hostility toward the troops.

[Superfly]

5. You know, I've been wondering about this...

I was watching "Mail Call" on the history channel last night and they did a piece on the postal system out in the Gulf. They showed a picture of a line of soldiers mailing back MRE-sized boxes of something. What, do they have to ship back?

I've been deployed around the world and I usually come back with less stuff than I went over with. Thes troops are shipping back large quantities of something. Sand? Artifacts?