GIs in Iraq Kill Aide to Italian Envoy

[NNN0LHI]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030919/ap_on_re_mi_ea/italy_iraq_adviser&cid=540&ncid=1473

ROME - American soldiers in northern Iraq fired on a car carrying the Italian official heading up U.S. efforts to recover Iraq's looted antiquities, killing the man's Iraqi interpreter, an official said Friday in Rome. The Italian, Pietro Cordone, was unhurt.

Cordone, who is the senior adviser for cultural affairs of the U.S. provisional authority and the top Italian diplomat in the country, was traveling on the road between Mosul and Tikrit on Thursday when his car was fired on at a U.S. roadblock, said a Foreign Ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The official said American troops fired at the car, and that Cordone's Iraqi interpreter was killed. Cordone was unharmed.

The official said it appeared the car's driver did not understand the signals that the American troops were giving, and that the American's didn't understand what the car was trying to do.

more

[Brucey]

1. No end!

First, aren't the Italians part of the so-called coalition? Second, is it just coincidence, or is there some reason Americans don't want to save the antiquities? I read an Arab journalist who suggested that the antiquities have a Muslim meaning and that is why US wants them lost or destroyed. Didn't some wacko US soldiers destroy a Muslim flag with their helicopter recently? What ever came of that?

[Judi Lynn]

2. So?

After all:

(snip) The Foreign Ministry said U.S. officials had expressed regret over the incident. (snip)

Really big of our U.S. officials. Damned decent of them.

Funny how this line is supposed to explain everything to everyone:

The official said it appeared the car's driver did not understand the signals that the American troops were giving, and that the American's didn't understand what the car was trying to do.

That explanation might work for chickenhawks back in the States, but it doesn't seem worthwhile for human beings, does it?

On edit:

To Brucey:

I just saw your post concerning the flag and the helicopter.

At first, they denied grabbing the flag, which enraged the crowd watching, and eventually the Americans fired into the crowd, killing someone.

Then actual film appeared showing a hand coming out of the helicopter, trying to snatch the flag.

Then, someone in Washington gave an "official apology."

That's the last I ever heard of this. Hope someone has an update.

[Brucey]

8. Thanks JudiLyn.

Anyone else know more?

[prolesunited]

3. If we keep killing

our friends and allies, we're not going to have any left. Every day this mess just keeps getting worse and worse.

[Guaranteed]

4. Someone's just an idiot.

I guess you can chalk up a lot of this to the situation the troops are in, but, you know that can only account for so much.

[saigon68]

5. KILL THE RAG HEADS--- d. Rumdumb---April 2003

Newtons law--- an object set in motion, tends to remain in motion.

[markses]

6. Or, some folks just dig killing

Also a possibility.

[IndianaGreen]

7. How many GIs in country have bothered to learn a little Arabic?

Or are they too busy staring at their posters of the burning WTC to convinced themselves that their mission is a noble one?

Do these guys fire at will? There seems to be a lack of discipline.

[damnraddem]

18. Where was the training, and language lessons?

Someone already sitting in horrible heat in a desert, with inadequate supplies and equipment, can hardly be expected to brush up on 'a little Arabic.' Where was the planning for an occupation? Where are the interpreters that should have been sent in the months since Dubya claimed the war was over -- why hasn't Dubya brought them on?

[Karenina]

19. Didn't you hear?

They found out some of their best translators were GAY and fired 'em.

[havocmom]

9. Do the Italian gentlemen in the car have dark hair

and/or dusky coloring? Are our troops so skitish (or brainwashed) that they fire on anyone who might look middle eastern at all?

This is one of my worries about years of hate radio in the US. We have a lot of citizens who are xenaphopics. Putting some of them in uniform and dropping them into a hostile evnvironment is a recipe for diaster.

[Tansy_Gold]

10. Criticising the troops

There was a thread here yesterday -- a long one -- from a returning soldier who complained that people on DU were bashing the troops. Although most on that long thread categorically denied that there was any such bashing -- or that it only came from a tiny portion of DUers -- I suspect that this is the kind of post he was referring to.

And I think it is very difficult for anyone with a functioning intellect to believe that the troops are TOTALLY innocent any more than they are totally to blame for the horrors that happen in war.

The point regarding hate radio is well taken. Early in the invasion, there was someone interviewed on a radio show -- probably on NPR because that's all that's ever on in our vehicle -- who said he didn't care if there was any link between Saddam and bin laden, only that he was there in Iraq to kill in revenge for 9/11 and then go home.

At the time, too, we here on DU debated with a poster I'm sure many of us will remember (and not miss at all) who insisted U.S. troops would NEVER, EVER, EVER under any circumstances do anything "bad." Yet we have seen too many times that under suitable circumstances, people will behave badly. If they are stressed out enough, pressured enough, are told inaccurate information, or have no information at all, they will do things they would not do under "normal" circumstances. I have personally seen this kind of mob psychology in action on two separate occasions. Fortunately, the results were not tragic; the participants afterward were nothing more than embarrassed and a little bemused at what silliness they'd been induced to commit, and they had learned a valuable lesson (I hope they did, anyway) in how to keep themselves under control when all around them is becoming chaos.

I think we have chaos in Iraq right now, not necessarily on a large scale but on a whole bunch of small scales. And I think we're going to see more and more and more of this kind of easily avoidable small catastrophe. And I think we, on the home front and the peace front, need to keep our wits about us and not fall into either trap -- that of blaming the troops for everything bad -or- exonerating them completely.

And at the same time, I think we have to look beyond the individual events, as one poster above has said, and look to see what other motives, opportunities, and benefits may be intertwined in these actiobns. is it so inconceivable that parties known or unknown might indeed want to protect looted antiquities? Is it so inconceivable that parties known or unknown might want to make Iraq so unattractive to "foreign" diplomats that they put their troops in place but ask for no responsibility?

I'm not usually a tinfoil hatter, but I think policy is its own kind of conspiracy, and I think -- gee, I'm doin' an awful lotta thinkin' this early in the morning! :smile: -- we need to keep that notion very clearly in sight.

Tansy Gold

[Boomer]

12. I can't help but wonder....

Imagine if the U.S. were occupied by foreign troops -- let's say China decided we were in need of a regime change before Bush unleashed his WMD on the world -- and the Chinese soldiers stationed in our urban areas were the target of American resistance.

How would we feel if the jittery Chinese soldiers kept blowing away American women and children every time they approached a checkpoint?

If they accidentally bombed civilian residences because they suspected an American "terrorist" was living there, but got the addresses wrong because they didn't understand the difference between street numbers and zip codes?

If they killed a local group of policemen when they were chasing some burglars?

If they fired on a wedding party because they mistook the festivities for a political rally?

If our hospitals were filled, every day, with mutilated children who had been caught in cross-fire?

Somehow I suspect we wouldn't be quite so generous in our compassion for the poor Chinese soldiers and their emotional strains as we expect Iraqis to be in contemplating their situation. It's all a matter of perspective, isn't it? I'm not saying either the hypothetical Chinese soldiers, or our all-too-real American ones, are not deserving of sympathy for the no-win situation -- but their emotional traumas tend to pale in comparison to the harm they are wreaking -- intentional or not -- on innocent Iraqi civilians.

--Boomer

[newyawker99]

13. Hi Boomer!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[havocmom]

14. Not attacking the troops

but the climate of xenaphobia that is too rampant in America as a whole. It breeds all sorts of bigotry and that is not a grand thing.

And I am quite pro-troop, but old eoungh to remember some bad days from other wars.

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

11. We are only hearing the high profile killings...

How many other innocents are falling in obscurity...

If an Iraqi is killed by U.S. forces and there's no one to report it, did the Iraqi really die?

[Whoa_Nelly]

15. This news bodes well

in representation of US Foreign Diplomacy to the global community.

</sarcasm>

[sspiderjohn]

16. This really is sad fodder for the political satirists, isn't it?

I wonder who'll run with it: Bill Mahr, SNL, South Park? If the interpretor had not died, the story would actually be funny in and of itself.

[damnraddem]

17. U.S. Rules of Engagement in Iraq:

don't kill friendly diplomats ... just shoot up their cars and kill their interpreters.