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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Drifter Bob" data-source="post: 1771070" data-attributes="member: 17723">You have to be careful here though.  While I emphatically agree that since say the turn of the Century, U.S. troops have not committed as many acts of evil as their equivalents in the Nazi German or Soviet armies, you are actually treading dangerously close to another kind of moral relativism here.  As Adam was pointing out, people tend to assume they are in the right, their side is 'different' from all others.  Americans are one of the worst practitioners of this kind of thinking for a variety of reasons.We may not have had Auschwitz, and we may not have had on the books policies of wholesale rape, mutilation and massacres of civilians and P.O.W.'s as the Nazis or the Soviets did, but the idea that Mai Lai was a unique occurance during the Vietnam war, or that U.S. troops didn't commit vast numbers of atrocities, kill civilians, burn homes, kill P.O.W.'s, etc., simply doesn't hold up to historical analysis.    For that matter, you should probably read a little more about WW II, it was hardly the cheerfully patrotic fight against evil it has been painted as in retrospect, certainly many of the troops on the front line had much more mixed feelings about it.The only thing different about our troops is that they are governed by a democracy and their chain of command is influenced by democratic ideals to some extent, and the military code they live under is influenced by U.S. civil law which is based in democratic values.  Other than that there is no inherent moral superiority.  Maintaining anytthing close to moraly defensible behavior during combat is an immense struggle.  The difference between the US and say, the Nazis or the Japanese Army of WW II, is that we attempted this struggle, and they did not.DB</blockquote>

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